Mirra, N. & Morrell, E.  (2011).  Teachers as Civic Agents: Toward a Critical Democratic Theory of Urban Teacher Development.  Journal of Teacher Education, 62(4): 408-420.

Mitra, D., & Serriere, S. (2012). Student voice in elementary-school reform: Examining youth development in fifth graders. American Educational Research Journal, (49): 743-774.

Serriere, S.C., Kawai, R., Mitra, D. (draft). Contested Spaces of a “Failing” Elementary School.  The Pennsylvania State University.  Manuscript to be submitted to Theory & Research in Social Education.

Serriere, S.C., Mitra, D., & Reed, K. (2011). Student voice in the elementary years: Fostering Youth-Adult Partnerships in Elementary Service-Learning. Theory & Research in Social Education, 39(4): 541-575.

“…the bill (referring to No Child Left Behind Act 2001) has been met with strong political opposition at the state, academic and the grassroots level.” (p.3)

“Everything about what I know about education and children is in direct conflict with these high stakes tests.” (p.7)

            I will start to write my first impressions about the “Contested Spaces” article.  The introduction of the article captures the reader right away. The authors present the problem from a perspective that introduces the voices of opposition to policies like the ones presented in the article.  Organizations like United Opt Out National, the National Center For Fair and Open Testing, Parents and Kids Against Standardized Testing, National League of Democratic Schools paint a different picture from the one where parents, students, teachers, school leaders and entire schools are “yielding to the rhetoric of accountability” (p.4).

            The piece reminded me of Mirra’s and Morrell’s article and their concept of teacher as civic agent and communities of practice.  In this article the concept of civic agent was described as teachers engaged in learning: “Teachers, in this model, do not teach students; instead, teachers and students educate each other in a dialogic relationship…” (p.413).  This attitude towards teaching applies within the climate of a community of practice that in the words of Lave and Wenger as described in the article define this term: “as a group of people mutually engaged in a common enterprise through a shared repertoire of tools and stories.” (p.413). 

Schooling communities manifestly felt pressure where top-down policies are based on the belief that increasing accountability in schools is the best way to improve student performance.  Underneath this belief there is a philosophy of education: What is education for? The idea that education is transmission of knowledge that will end up in improving the competence of students when they enter the market as workers seems to be behind these measures. The activism of the organizations above cited protest against a neoliberal view of citizenship best explained by Mirra and Morrell: “...Within this model [neoliberal model], public schools are charged with providing individual students with the knowledge and skills that they will need to pursue personal gain in college and the workplace” (p. 410).  

Mirra’s and Morrell’s article provide with theoretical frames and guidelines where to move to.  The question remaining though is how to work this out; this is the answer I felt this week’s articles were providing, without avoiding the problems that we can encounter along the process of preparing ourselves as civic agents and building communities of practice. One of the main questions on Contested Spaces, for example, was about the context and conditions that support youth development.  How to create contested spaces, what they are and how can they be supported and how they take place?  Part of the answer is about showing spaces where opposition can be expressed and where disagreement exists.  Contested spaces is defined “…as an educational context where ideas are shared and actin is taken to challenge dominant social, political, or cultural ideologies that implicate learning and teaching in schools.” (p.4) The article reveals the multiple structures created for contested spaces involving the local community: school leaders, teachers, parents and students were involved in different ways.  In the case of the Chicago strike in 2012, the Seattle high schools boycott and “Dewey Elementary” this pushing ended up, at least in the first two cases, in opening a space where their voice would be taken into account and would sit with the government to arrange agreements.  This article also calls on scholars to support and amplify the impact of the risks taken by local actors advocating for an education that does not see in high stakes exams the North Star of education.

From this piece I will also take with me the Interactive Quality Analisis (IQA), which I think is a very powerful methodology because not only the voice of the researcher is manifested but also participant views and understandings of the findings enter the discussion giving a more complete and fair analysis of research. This sounded like based on grounded theory. 

I had doubts on what was meant by discursive spaces but this was clarified in the Student Voice in Elementary School Reform, but I still think it would be useful to clarify in this piece. 

Youth development has been mostly addressed for middle and high school; the second article is concerned with the way in which leader role of the adult would best perform in service-learning programs in elementary schools.  I think it was very useful to see the three case studies to have a better picture of how different leaderships would look like and how these could take place with the very young kids in elementary classrooms.  I also think that just as the article says, sometimes teachers do not know how to do their work differently; more importantly the cases reflected how teachers’ beliefs create a curriculum of programs even if they are meant to have a structure: “Ms. Clark went on to say that that a program like SSGs ‘would work in a city like Brooklyn, Texarkana or in Zimbabwe with at-risk kids’” (p. 559).  Unfortunately it is inevitable to compare oneself with each of the teachers and see where you could fit in as a teacher; well, in my case even though my mind, my ideas, my aspirations look more like “the Synthesizer” to be realistic I think I was more like “the Catalyst” sometimes but mainly like “the Commander” even though I do not identify with her ideas.

Finally, I think the concept of discourse was very interesting in the piece on Student voice in Elementary School Reform: “Principal S. specifically used this term discourse to describe the outcomes of the Salad Girls.”(p. 760), “We defined his concept of discourse as the exchange of diverse ideas and opinions to work toward a common goal.  This asset includes leaning how to engage with a difference of opinions as well as differences in backgrounds, working styles and cultures.” (p. 747).  The concept describes the winnings of scaffolding processes fostering student voice that can mean to students to build on the belief that they can make a change vs. claiming on a contemporary apathy from students.  The outcomes are described through the concepts of agency, belonging, competence, discourse and civic efficacy as part of a personal experience that expands into a broader concept that becomes political in the influence and impact it produces. I would like to ask if the article begins with an argument on developmental growth because it is a topic that has to be addressed. I think the arguments in the article are not behavioristic so I wondered if it is necessary to bring a biological element to dialogue with the discussions in the field.