New Urban Teachers Transcending Neoliberal Educational Reforms

Neoliberalism

The term neoliberal describes the discourse of educational reform that has achieved supremacy since NCLB and that continues with the Race to the Top (RTTT) grant initiative. This term is used to describe how current educational reforms are guided by the values of the corporate marketplace. This paradigm of corporatocracy (Saltman & Gabbard, 2003; Sleeter, 2008) values concepts such as performance objectives over authentic engagement with learning, and it values competition for resources among individuals and institutions over education for democratic practices (Gabbard, 2008; Taubman, 2009). In this paradigm, education is not focused on shaping critical and original thinkers in the service of democracy, as Dewey and others have advocated (Ross, 2008, p. 370; Shor, 1992, p. 136). Rather, it focuses on generating workers who have acquired the standardized skills and the sanctioned types of information necessary to compete in the global economy (Friedman, 2009; Hursh, 2008b).

The term neoliberal is used for the political and economic worldview or paradigm that is allied with, but essentially different from, the more socially reactive neoconservatism. Neoconservatism can best be understood as both an ethical and social movement engendered as a reaction to the perceived social chaos and moral relativism of the 1960s and 1970s (Berliner & Biddle, 1995, pp. 132-137). Neoliberalism, however, is primarily an economic discourse whose stance holds no moral values except those of an enhanced marketplace. As Harvey explains, neoliberalism,

[I]s in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an instructional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to . . . guaranteed the proper functions of the markets [and] if markets do not exist (in areas such as education, health care, social security, and environmental pollution) then they must be created by the state if necessary . . . [It ] seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. (Harvey, 2005, p. 2)

To the Classical Liberalism propounded originally by Adam Smith (1723-1790) and many other European thinkers, neoliberalism adds the active intervention of the state to enhance and sustain market competition. The neoliberal movement in educational reform can be seen as being born, and reaching childhood during the President Reagan years with the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE], 1983), to have moved through its adolescence in the President G. W. Bush years, to have began adult life with the implementation of NCLB, and to have reached its adulthood in President Obama administration’s RTTT grant initiative.

Similar to the original presentation in A Nation at Risk (NCEE, 1983), neoliberalism maintains that schools are in a crisis, that the teachers and students in them are engaging in self-destructive and delusional practices, and that the nation’s educational system is essentially failing. In this way of thinking, students are intellectually unchallenged and their future is economically disadvantaged by a weak curriculum taught by teachers who are at best misguided, and at worst, deficient. The true significance of this so-called crisis is that it jeopardizes the economic ascendency of the United States. That these conclusions may rest on absent or misinterpreted data in no way diminishes the rhetorical power of this view in public discourses of educational reforms (Taubman, 2009). Even the recent so-called Great Recession can be linked to an inadequate and uncompetitive workforce that has been hindered because of bad schools (Friedman, 2009). Objectives and standards from the corporate world are seen as the best models for school reform. The rewards for students, and the goal of becoming educated, are promises for them to become entrepreneurs of themselves so that they can reap maximally the economic rewards of the global economy (Foucault, 1979, in Hursh, 2008b, p. 65; Friedman, 2005).

Aesthetic Education

The term aesthetic education (AE) is used in the ELA context and is strongly identified with conceptions of learning grounded in the works of Dewey (1938/1977), which emphasizes that the learner is an active construer of knowledge. AE is related to constructivist, student-centered, or inquiry-based conceptions of learning found in other subject areas and advocated in many schools of education (Bruner, 1997). In the ELA curriculum, the term aesthetic is defined by Rosenblatt (1983) as a paradigm that emphasizes the learner’s transaction with the text of literature, and, by extension, to in the subject matter of the content area. It is distinguished from an efferent (from the Latin effere, or to take away) approach to texts of literature, and, by extension to the texts of information in various content areas (Rosenblatt, 1978). The efferent approach encounters the text of a content area primarily for information or facts and is the type of knowledge found on standardized tests promoted by neoliberal educational reformers (Grey, 2011). The aesthetic/transactional approach, however, focuses on qualities and kinds of transactions a learner has when encountering the text of the content area. As used in this research, AE is the approach that is most similar to reader response criticism in the literature curriculum (Dickson & Costigan, 2011), and it is related to other constructivist understandings of learning in that it maintains that the learner is an active construer or meaning-maker of the content area (Bruner, 1997).

Divergence of Frameworks

Neoliberal reforms seek to have students and teachers conceptualize learning as gaining facts and information that are presented and framed by the political and economic elite though textbooks, curricular materials, scripted lessons, and standardized tests largely created by for-profit multinational corporations and with the support of well-funded neoconservative foundations (Grey, 2011). This educational paradigm takes no interest in the thoughts, feelings, and cultural discourses of teachers, students, or the local community. In fact, the educational community is viewed by those with economic and political power as at best misguided, and at worst deficient, or even defective (NCEE, 1983). Nor do neoliberal reforms take into the consideration any student engagement with the content area. Rather, learning exists primarily to enhance individual readiness to compete in the global economy (Friedman, 2005). In contrast, aesthetic approaches focus directly on the transactions students have with the academic content, and AE seeks to enhance their engagement with it (Greene, 1995). This engagement leads to critical awareness of the issues embedded within the content areas. Greene states, “The enterprise of schooling too often emphasizes the need to accede to the world as ‘given’, as officially and expertly described” (Greene, 2001, p. 30). The purpose of neoliberal reforms, on the contrary, is precisely to accede to the rules of the global marketplace (Friedman, 2009).

Moving From the Anesthetic to the Aesthetic

Janine’s narrative illustrates the transition from an anesthetic, commonsense, unengaging poetry curriculum centering on literary devices, and a summative theme, one that is common and commonsense in the majority of ELA classrooms (Costigan, 2008). Janine was trying to teach William Carolos Williams’ poem, This is just to say (Williams, 1985 ² ) to a class of tenth graders who came from African American, and immigrant East Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American backgrounds. At first, Janine tried a test preparation curriculum by focusing on the so-called literary devices that were likely to be used on tests, such as implication, inference, image, tone, and speaker of the poem (Costigan, 2008b). Janine found that she had trouble engaging the students with a poem where nothing seems to happen and which elicited comments of “So what?” from her students. Concerned about focusing on these technical aspects, Janine wrote in a reflection paper, “This was just a purposeless exercise. The students just wouldn’t or couldn’t apply these literary tools to how the poem worked . . . they just didn’t ‘get’ the poem.” She further explains:

What I realized that this efferent, or fact-based, reading of the text was just work. So I asked the students to focus on the key words, “This is just to say, I have eaten the plums in the icebox,” by asking them not to think abstractly, but to physically write a note explaining a personal behavior to someone who deserved an explanation. I dropped all the notions that the students had to somehow summarize the meaning of the poem. On reflection, I couldn’t summarize the poem myself, nor could I analyze it in any way. Why would I want to?

Here Janine is arriving at an understanding that is not readily apparent to teachers. Only a very limited type of poetry is applicable to testing, those that tell some kind of a story, have some kind of definable character as a speaker, and can be reduced to a one line theme or summative message (Costigan, 2008b). As this was not such a type of poem, Janine decided to take a different and transactional/aesthetic approach and have her students write their own This is just to say notes or messages to someone who had an impact on their life. She then had the students convert these texts to an original poem patterned on the rhetoric used in William’s poem (Koch, 1973). Janine stated that she found the results “amazing.” “One student wrote a poem to a friend who got shot in his crime-ridden neighborhood”:

This is just to say

I am sorry you are no longer here.

I have visited that corner

Many times.

Forgive me,

If I am selfish.

The streets and buildings here

Are shouting bullets at us.

Janine came to discover that this type of student transaction with the ELA curriculum was the antithesis of the type of knowledge demanded on standardized ELA tests that reduce a poem to literary devices and depersonalized summative statements (Costigan, 2008). However, the importance of Janine’s narrative is that she realized that her poetry lesson was not just a good type of ELA teaching in that it enhanced her students’ transactions with the text. She found that the poem engendered discussions to take the poem to a further step of politicizing the text of their own experience, as grounded in the rhetoric of the poem, to the social and political realities of the students’ own lives. Janine discovered that the poem opened a conversation into why this specific neighborhood was so violent, and what that implied about social inequities.

Janine, however, found that she had to negotiate her aesthetic/transactional practice in the content of the school culture of testing and accountability:

I’m a bit hard pressed how to present these amazing results to the AP [Assistant Principal], but they were so engaged in the poem by recreating the poem. We had never talked about creative writing, and I don’t have experience in that area, but they were sharing their poems with each other as if they were their best kept secrets and it was hard to move on to the next topic in my class. Many students wanted to keep writing these types of poems, and several kept writing them on their own.

Once Janine established that aesthetic/transactional approaches engaged her students, she then had to negotiate this practice in the context of testing mandates in her schools, as well as to build on her realization that the ELA curriculum is not necessarily implementing decontextualized material for authorized tests, but that it is a source of opportunity for critical awareness of social issues.

Stages of Engagement

As Janine’s narrative suggests, there were four broad stages in appropriating AE theories and practices. These stages were present in all the participants to a degree, and the narratives presented here are from participants who best articulate these stages. However, there was no shortage of representative narratives in the overall data set and the researchers had difficulty choosing among the many articulations of the stages of appropriating aesthetic conceptions about education. The stages are progressive, but they also are gained through layered and recursive processes. The stages identified over time in the participants are (1) transitioning from the information-based curriculum to one enhancing aesthetic engagement; (2) dealing with the external prohibitions against AE practices; (3) addressing personal and professional resistances; and (4) coming to see AE as a theory and practice that creates possibilities for a critical awareness of issues of social justice, particularly in contrast to neoliberal-based conceptions of the curriculum. Janine’s narrative, above, represents the full scope of four stages in which the participants appropriated AE practices. Most participants were able to present the first three stages, but only about 20% of participants over time were able to fully apprehend the fourth stage.

Transitioning From the Getting It Curriculum

The participants at first had to try on the practices in their own classrooms, reflect on these practices, and come to believe that these practices were more effective at enhancing deeper learning. The participants stated that they themselves came from a traditional curricular backgrounds, ones in which the teacher has a predetermined meaning for a work of literature, based on a fixed, predetermined, reductive, and summative meaning of a work of literature. One participant called this the getting it curriculum. The first implication of AE practices was for the teacher to let go of predetermined meanings and allow the students to explore their transactions with literature. Chris explains,

I am going to stop asking questions in am guilty as charged of setting up questions that I know the answer to. I read all the text before the students this manner. I learned that it’s best to ask as many open ended questions as possible, take the information from the students and build my lesson around their prior knowledge. In the process I can even learn from them.

Another participant, Marissa, calls this “dislocating myself from efferent reading.” The primary importance for engaging students with the ELA curriculum was that it simply was better engaged learning. Enhancing student engagement ranged from the simple to complex. Different participants enhanced this engagement in different but related ways. For example, one participant had her students keep literature logs where they jotted their reactions to the text by first labeling their transaction with an electronic message emoticon, a different participant had her student write text messages to reflect their transactions with the material at hand, and another one had students write letters to a character, and one additional one had students write their own endings to stories. Several had students generate their own poems, narratives, or stories based on the content and rhetoric of the work of literature under consideration (Anderson & Rubano, 1991; Koch, 1973). What is more important than the simple or complex pedagogical techniques used was their growing realization that they could enhance students’ aesthetic transactions with the texts. Chris, who early on appropriated transactional practices in his teaching relates:

As a teacher I drilled my students with reading skills because I thought that was the way that people learned to read. Now that I have something to compare my strategies to, I really think that what I was doing was fake teaching. After trying aesthetic reading I can see the difference in my students. They seem more excited and confident about what they are doing. Students with poor work habits surprised me because they were into the lesson more than students that participate on a regular basis . . . I believe it works so well because the students are able to make connections to the lesson before even tackling the text.

“But They Won’t Let Me!”

Even when the participants began to implement AE paradigms in their classes, they still had to face external prohibitions from administrators, and, to a lesser extent colleagues, because aesthetic practices varied radically from a test preparation curriculum that seemed to be the only acceptable option in their schools. These prohibitions were of two types, specific and anticipatory. Specific prohibitions could be being forced to use parts of scripted or preprogrammed lessons. The first phase of this study finds that scripted lessons are implemented idiosyncratically in urban schools in the study, with different teachers at the same school struggling with different elements of a scripted program, having to use unauthorized photocopies, or having to implement only certain elements of a scripted lesson such as mini lessons on grammar, or 10 min of direct instruction on the presupposed meaning of a work of literature (Costigan, 2008).

Nevertheless, the data presented here reveal a clear ongoing chorus of the refrain, “But They won’t let me!” As sanctions and withholding of tenure was a possibility, this fear was very real. However, as with most fears, the most powerful fear was predictive or anticipatory. The participants were mostly worried about the sanctions and punishments that would happen if they implemented AE practices, rather than relating specific incidents of what happened when they actually did implement transactional/aesthetic approaches in their classes. As one participant stated, “Could aesthetic education help kids on tests? Sure. Probably. But if I’m not allowed to do this, then what’s the point?”

The participants, however, did find that AE implementation was also a process of negotiation in conversations with authorities and their peers. Stephanie explains:

I have experienced an ever increasing pressure to conform my lessons to a dry and rigid structure that is purported to increase standardized test scores . . . I do not feel that those who support these curriculums truly understand what it means to teach English. I feel that if the administration had its way I would be a test preparation teacher, rather than a teacher of reading and writing. Through our readings and class discussions, I have made significant headway in convincing my principal and department chair that aesthetic education is not only more interesting and valuable to teachers and students, but actually increases test scores more rapidly than so-called drill programs.

The participants did, however, find a source of empowerment in conversations with authorities. They discovered that their suspicions were confirmed, namely that the school administrators themselves do not particularly like test-driven lessons and curricular mandates. Practitioners could also articulate to others that AE practices were a better preparation for student-test preparation than direct instruction for success on tests. Stephanie explains:

During a department meeting in September, I brought up a quote from Anderson and Rubano, “The misconception persists that one cannot read aesthetically until one can read analytically for comprehension of the text” (Anderson & Rubano, 1991, p. 4). Many of my colleagues supported me when I argued that reading for comprehension is not necessarily the most basic of reading skills . . . Once the department meeting took place, I found myself in a position of relative freedom within my school. My administrators were willing to permit me to deviate from the strict test preparation curriculum that had been designed for eighth grade English teachers.

This study indicates that, contrary to a strand in some published research, teachers are not simply and automatically resistant to educational reforms, but that the reforms they are asked to implement are simply unsustainable and ineffective (Kennedy, 2005; Ravitch & Maris, 1995). These new teachers found that AE was an acceptable new way to approach teaching because it worked by engaging students in a way that direct test-focused instruction could not. Stephanie describes addressing a colleague’s resistances by explaining two positive effects of AE, increased student engagement and better results on tests:

I have also encountered some resistance from other English teachers in my department . . . One woman in particular told me that I was spending too much time on “what those kids feel rather than what they know.” When I explained that this was my goal, and a starting point from which to delve further into reading, she told me that I should be careful, and to test my students frequently to make sure they maintained their high reading comprehension grades. She was quite surprised when I told her that my students’ reading comprehension grades had not only been maintained, but improved.

It is essential to note, however, that the appropriation of AE theories and practices was always situational and in almost all schools a juggling act. Chris, a participant introduced above in this article, was mandated to teach a scripted curriculum. He explains this tension:

My floor assistant principal [sic] hates the curriculum and only pushes us to do it because he is forced by the [District] to continue the program. However, after I explained what I am learning about aesthetic reading, he quickly jumped on board. He said the curriculum is failing the students and something must be done. What little I know about aesthetic approaches, I explained to him and he wants me to practice it in my class. However, to save my skin he asked that I practice it two or three times a week and do the mandated model the rest of the week. When visitors are expected I will be on notice to go back to the mandated model.

Research, however, indicates that there are problems with this type of dual curriculum, one test-focused and one which the teacher finds meaningful. While new teachers tend to think a dual curriculum is a reasonable solution to curricular issues, the situation may lead to less effective student learning and to more confusion about teaching effectiveness (Applebee, 1993).

Personal Resistance and Professional Engagement

The participants had to address their own internal, personal, and professional resistances to AE. The efferent or fact-based curriculum has a long history in the United States and has existed long before the current testing and accountability movement, so much so that it is accepted as the Commonsense model of education (Mayher, 1990). However, it is this curriculum that stands at the ready for neoliberal conceptions of educational reform, and this is the only educational paradigm either known or acknowledged by educational reformers, or valued by corporate models of reform (Gabbard, 2008; Grey, 2011; Sleeter, 2008).

There is also a fairly long history of research indicating that teachers, long before current test and accountability reforms, tend to replicate their educational autobiographies and tend to recreate their largely traditional educational backgrounds with their own students (Britzman, 1986; Lortie, 1975). There has also been a long debate among educational researchers about the extent to which constructivist, student-centered, inquiry-based, or in this case aesthetic, practices get washed out by the quotidian nature of teaching (Calderhead & Robson, 1991; Zeichner & Tabachnik, 1981; Zeichner, Tabachnik, & Densmore, 1987). In this study, the participants spent much of the time in their reflective writing assignments, pondering the types of personal and professional transformation they were engaging in appropriating AE practices and theories. Charlene explains:

I wanted to use what I was learning in my own classroom. But I was still unsure of what aesthetic approaches to reading and works of art were or how effective it would be. In order to understand aesthetic approaches, it was important for me to first learn what it is not. It is not critical analysis, judgments and interpretations. It is not homework assignments, response sheets, and skill-focused activities. This is mostly the way most English teachers and I have been teaching. (In fairness it was the way we were taught!) However, it is this traditional style that has been least successful and that has turned many students off to English. Yet, it was difficult for me to surrender my habits. It was a risk to start teaching in a way I was not entirely confident I had a firm grasp on understanding. Therefore, I started with what I did know. I knew that I could no longer be the knowing other. Meaning, I could no longer stand in front of the classroom and provide the answers and all of the information. I understood that if my students were really going to learn that they have to make discoveries on their own. My new role was as a facilitator.

An early misunderstanding was seeing AE as bringing art as a form of aesthetics into the classroom. In a graduate curriculum course specifically entitled AE, Deidre works through an initial conception to a more accurate understanding:

When I signed up for this course, I thought that I would be learning how to incorporate Art in the form of paintings, sculptures, and photographs, into my eighth grade English Language Arts curriculum . . . However, as I have read about aesthetics [sic], studied the concepts and developed my own aesthetic sense, I have come to believe that aesthetic education is more of a state of mind, or a perspective, than it is a certain type of lesson.

In her final self-assessment, Adriana explains how she evolved into seeing that AE was not just teaching gimmicks, but grounded in theory:

I realize that I was just merely trying to mimic the ideas in our class and trying to incorporate them into my classroom. I didn’t understand what aesthetic education meant and certainly did not understand how it was tied with reading . . . I was missing the larger picture of how the philosophy and practices are supposed to be used in the classroom. I do, though, realize that there is a lot more that goes into the philosophy and practice . . . But there are still certain concepts that remain a mystery and I do not understand how these ideas can be practiced in a classroom, not to mention a . . . city classroom.

However, the trying on of these practices as modeled by their professor in their education courses did lead them to working out, not without some effort, how AE was grounded. A clear stage of development for the participants was trusting the work of literature to enhance student engagement precisely because it was a work of literature and not a means of delivering so-called literary devices. Furthermore, many participants also realized that they could trust that the urban students, many with scant history of traditional academic success, to engage meaningfully with works of literature, particularly without the apparatuses of workbooks, tests, an emphasis on summative predetermined meanings. In commonsensical, traditional approaches to the curriculum, and the neoliberal reforms that have appropriated them, mistrust of students and teachers is taken for granted (NCEE, 1983; Phelps, 2005; Ravitch, 2000), as is a mistrust of the power of literature itself to authentically engage readers (Applebee, 1993; Mayher, 1990). Once the participants began to trust themselves and their own abilities to craft a curriculum, and to trust their students to become authentically engaged with reading and writing, this understanding opened up possibilities for a conversation about the political and critical implications of the curriculum.

Critical Learning and Social Justice

A significant minority of participants in two AE classes, roughly 20%, came to understand that this AE was not simply about creating a better curricular technique to enhance student engagement and learning, but had political and social justice implications for themselves, their students, and ultimately what the curriculum of schooling is supposed to do. Keri’s final paper indicates that she realizes that AE articulates for her why the problematic traditional information-based curriculum she experienced as a student is found wanting:

[This class] has opened up a discussion I was already having with myself about how I learn, how my students learn, and what exactly my relationships are with [literature and] the arts. I have returned to my pre-teaching ideal that the most important thing to teach my students is how to learn to learn, how to have faith in themselves, and from there, enjoy reading and learning for its own sake more as an artist would who will not only take from reading, but also put something back that will enrich the work and the world in ways that it wouldn’t had he or she never read, gestured, drawn, acted, written, sung, or spoken.

It is important to note that neoliberal reforms not only do not want to hear the thoughts, feelings, and critically informed opinions of teachers, students, and local communities, they positively prohibit such discussion. These are seen as touchy-feely and nonrigorous things which should be avoided in schools (Phelps, 2005).

Geoff, whose statement begins this article, was found by the researchers to be one of the most articulate and pro-AE participants. In his final paper for the course, he articulates the potential AE holds for him for empowering himself and his students for political action toward social justice:

Where am I now as a result of your [second] course? I am made more certain that not only must we as teachers take on active roles as educators in the fight to truly educate the children of our country, but that we as citizens must fight for a society where real education can take place. Today we find ourselves existing in a country where critical thinking is becoming rarer and rarer by the day, and as a direct result of this lack of critical thought, we find ourselves fighting in a war which has more to do with oil, money, water, and power than it has to do with freedom and democracy. What do such things have to do with the role of aesthetic education in the classroom? In my opinion it has everything to do with its role. If aesthetic education allows educators to not only validate the thoughts and perspectives of students, but it also allows us to develop the critical thinking skills of our students . . . I am made more certain in the belief that we must make every moment we have with our students count for more than just a time to prepare for more and more tests.

Geoff is a particularly articulate spokesperson for other participants who came to understand that AE has two aspects that fly in the face of neoliberal reforms: First it validates that students should have their own thoughts and perspectives about the curriculum and the world. Second, as Dewey was careful to point out, this is just the beginning; these thoughts and perspectives must not be simply indulged on the part of teachers, but be developed carefully into critical thinking skills (Dewey, 1900/2001). Ultimately, this critical thinking can be applied to the structures of war, poverty, sexuality, religion, and the inequities present in contemporary society (Gaughan, 2001). Neoliberalism, however, only offers to create the type of uncritical workers whose ultimate meaning in life, we are continuously told, is to be productive members of the global economy, and whose reward is only the means to acquire and consume the rewards of the market (Friedman, 2009). In this paradigm, well-being is equated with well-having (Foucault, 1979, in Lemke, 2002).

It is important to note that the stages in accessing AE theories and practices are progressive, while still being layered and recursive. The final stage of developing AE in which the political theoretical implications of curricular choices become conscious still contain within itself previous stages of engagement with (1) the continued struggle to find ways to enhance transactions with the content area, (2) negotiating a curriculum with authorities which is seen as personally rewarding and beneficial for students, and (3) dealing with the strong personal history of experiencing an overwhelming traditional information-based curriculum. However, with some exceptions noted below, once the understanding of the political and theoretical aspects of the divergent frameworks of neoliberalism and AE were embedded in the participants’ thinking, it seems that these thinking patterns were steadfast after five years of teaching.

During the writing of this article, one of the last participants in this study gave the PI a business card from his principal who was one of the first participants. The note said, “John Dewey and student centered transactions—the beat goes on!” At the writing of this article, the concept of differentiated instruction has become the watchword in most schools in the area. What is important to note here is that the way the participants encounter differentiated instruction in their schools varies from how differentiated instruction is conceptualized in educational research literature (Tomlinson & Imbeau, 2010). The approach in the participants’ schools reduces this educational concept to writing correct lesson plans that providing alternative exercises or supplemental materials for variously labeled students to understand the predetermined material of the lesson. In the local schools this limited understanding of differentiated instruction has come to assume that teaching is essentially about the passing on of facts and the exercising of discreet skills, all for the goal of increasing test scores. If the beat of AE goes on for these participants, so too does the beat of neoliberal educational reforms.

Engagement With AE Theories and Practices

The initial question this study asks is to what degree educational coursework is washed out by the realities of day to day teaching (Zeichner & Tabachnik, 1981). This longstanding strand of educational research implies that the efforts of educational programs to instruct, or even to indoctrinate, education students into constructivist, student-centered, or aesthetic strands of curricular thinking are weakened or even eliminated by the strong tradition of commonsense or information-based schooling in the United States (Calderhead & Robson, 1991; Lortie, 1975; Mayher, 1990). As neoliberal reforms exclusively emphasize this traditional fact- and information-based conception of schooling, this study was originally designed to investigate how contemporary educational reforms intensify these longstanding curricular issues. However, this study reveals that washing out, when it occurs, is neither a simple nor inevitable process. Overall, the participants did find that AE practices were both an appealing and a better way to engage students with the ELA curriculum. The participants did want to implement AE, and they began experimenting with it in their teaching. Neither their internal prohibitions caused by their years of being traditional students experiencing what traditional teachers do (Britzman, 1986), nor their experience of the imposed mandates of neoliberal reforms, prohibited their consideration of, and appropriation of, aesthetic understandings and practices. Most participants relatively easily situated their understanding of curricular possibilities in the context of the terms and mental constructs of neoliberalism and AE. They then sought ways to implement this understanding.

This study is clear that there were coherent and progressive stages in understanding, appropriating, and implementing aesthetic theories and practices, particularly as they conflicted with the information-based curriculum as intensified by neoliberal reforms. However, there are several difficulties in presenting these processes in a summative or quantitative way. One reason for this difficulty is simply that it is the nature of qualitative data to be process-oriented, multilayered and situational, which in turn appears to its detractors to be soft (Ely, Anzul, Friedman, Garner, & Steinmetz, 1991). A second difficulty is the chaotic nature of teaching in poor urban districts where the imposition of test- and accountability mandates are implemented idiosyncratically from teacher to teacher in the same school, or from semester to semester for the same teacher, or even from class to class in context of the same teacher’s daily schedule—where, for instance, one class period may be implementing a minute-by-minute scripted lesson for low-testing high school freshmen under high levels of supervision, and the next class period an almost completely unsupervised advanced placement creative writing elective for seniors (Costigan, 2008). A third difficulty in summarizing data in any quantitative way is that, as Kelly (1963) indicated, it is not only possible, but probable, that any given human being at any given time holds two or more conflicting mental constructs about any important human phenomenon. Humans literally are of two minds about complex human issues such as friendship, jobs, politics, diversity—a situation that also holds true for conceptions of teaching and learning. A fourth difficulty for a summative presentation of the data in this study is the shifting nature of the research instruments of reflective writings and personal interviews. For instance, a participant may state in one reflective writing paragraph, or in the context of an interview, that she will never try AE practices, and in the next paragraph, or in the next moment in the conversation, reconsider her thinking and admit that she is at least tentatively open to it.

Through the duration of the study, and represented in the data gathered, the following best summarizes the overall appropriation of AE practices by the participants: (1) Twenty percent find AE practices appealing but feel they are generally prohibited in practicing it by authorities; they state they will seek to implement it as one of many elements in their teaching if and when allowed. (2) Sixty-percent find AE practices appealing and are able to understand and implement it to some significant degree in the context of prohibitions by authorities; they state they will find a way to continue these practices as a significant part of their practice, despite these prohibitions. (3) Twenty percent find AE practices appealing and are able to understand it not only as enhancing better student engagement, but as a curriculum with implications for practices of democracy and social justice; they state that they will implement it in opposition to, or to overcome, neoliberal educational mandates. Again, these statistics are fluid in that participants continue to reflect on AE in active mental processes, but they do present a representational view of where any cohorts of participants are likely to stand at any time.

As the signing of the consent forms was voluntary, data necessarily came from participants who were to some degree able to articulate engagement with AE practices. Based on the overwhelming number of participants who were engaged to some degree with AE theories and practices, it may be that some small percentage—perhaps 10%—of the participants initially rejected AE, or only complied with the use of this terminology for success in class writing assignments. These participants probably did not volunteer for interviews and cannot be presented in the data. This resistance could be a source of further research.

Engagement With Political and Theoretical Issues

The second initial question of this study was to ask to what extent do new teachers personally and professionally engage with the larger political and theoretical issues grounded in both aesthetic and neoliberal conceptions of teaching and learning. It seems clear that the almost all of the participants understood that the testing regimes and accountability systems they encounter are not just neutral pedagogical mandates, but are ideologically based. For the participants, this was a new understanding. The use of the two terms aesthetic and neoliberal gave the participants a name for the very real phenomenon they were experiencing in their professional lives. Simply finding a name for new teachers’ experiences is, in and of itself, a powerful means of comprehending, and thus taking ownership, of the confusing ebb and flow of the phenomena of schools and schooling, and teaching and learning (Costigan, 2004)

The participants understood that there were political realities at play behind the curricular mandates imposed on them, as well as behind the choices they made. They came to realize that both the testing- and accountability-based reforms, as well as their longstanding understanding of the ELA curriculum, were not entities that were neutral, apolitical, or devoid of values. They came to understand that the choices they made, or were allowed to make, had political implications about the role of the teachers, how the processes of learning are perceived and defined, how students are best engaged by the ELA reading and writing curriculum, and ultimately about the purpose of schooling for teachers and students in a country where virtually all discussions of educational reform have been subsumed under the hegemony of neoliberal ideologies (Gabbard, 2008; Hursh, 2007).

Not only do neoliberal reforms interfere with teacher–student relationships, they interfere with the relationships students and teachers have with the ELA curriculum of reading and writing. Virtually all the participants saw that good teaching enhanced student engagement, or their aesthetic transactions with the material (Rosenblatt, 1978, 1983), and that neoliberal educational reforms interfered with those transactions. However, a significant finding of this study is that many participants realized that the information-driven educational reforms forced themselves and their students into an impoverished understanding of the ELA curriculum itself. For a significant minority of participants, the concepts presented in the two courses they took allowed them to realize that there were issues of empowerment, democracy, and social justice embedded in aesthetic conceptions of teaching and learning, and that consideration of these issues were prohibited by the agenda of neoliberal educational reforms.

This is not to say that the participants considered these social and political implications a strong practical motivation to do so. What first engaged them was the fact that AE practices simply were better at engaging their students with literature and writing. It was because this was much more effective than test preparation curricula that the new teachers were led to consider the political implications of the contrasting AE and neoliberal conceptions of teaching and learning. During the study, many participants in the initial certification stage of their studies asked for a course to continue this investigation on the graduate level for professional certification, and a course, Contemporary Issues in the ELA Classroom, was designed in the last third of the study.