Combatting the Tentacle-like Structures of Neoliberal Reforms: Creating Space for Student Identities and Voice in the High School Curriculum

Combatting the Tentacle-like Structures of Neoliberal Reforms: Creating Space for Student Identities and Voice in the High School Curriculum

I have always taught with the tentacle. It is just something that I have been forced to adjust to. It lays on the floor of our classroom like an unwanted houseguest. It winds its way through the groups of students, perversely sticking suction cups to student test scores, data, student work, and classroom practices. I first saw the tentacle during the educative teacher performance assessment (EdTPA), a final barrier to my licensing in Georgia. While this barrier has since been removed (Will, 2020), this was just one access point for this unholy presence. It (the tentacles of neoliberalism in education) was born out of fear: first, fear of providing education in an equal capacity in all parts of the country to those privileged enough to attend public institutions (National Education Association of the United States, 1893); next it was a fear of adequately preparing students to integrate into society’s machines with the doctrine of social efficiency (Bobbit, 1918/2017; Department of the Interior Bureau of Education, 1918); then it was a fear of measurement (Popham, 1972/2017); finally it was a fear of competition and how our education system compares to other countries (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The standardization and efficiency movement, which focused on mechanization with Bobbit (1918/2017), laid the groundwork for neoliberal forces to later adopt as their own. While all these measures have directly affected the curriculum, the result is the erasure of the child. Ultimately, this is who the curriculum most directly affects, and ironically, is the person education seems to render invisible. The child is where Dewey (1902) started, advocating for both the child’s connection to the curriculum and the teacher’s connection to the child. His was a curriculum not grounded in fear but interest: the child's interests (Dewey, 1938/2017). Through intentional choices in cultural relevancy in the curriculum, and by making space for student identities, students have a greater opportunity to explore their identities. Teacher identities are also of vital importance for the development of both children and the curriculum.

Teacher Identities Matter Too

I am a middle-class, white male educator working in a Title I school with historically underrepresented students. In most of my classes, I am the only white person in the room. I must signal to my students that relevant, meaningful, and culturally relevant conversations are valued in our space (Beers, 2013; Beers & Probst, 2021; Beers & Probst, 1998). I must be intentional about the “tough talk” and conversations that we have together, but we (students and myself) must co-construct that space together (O'Donnell-Allen, 2011). Valuing students and courageous conversations begin with an “ethic of care” and listening to students to learn who they are so care can be given to their identities (Noddings, 2012).  I am deeply invested in “The Work,” which is “an intentional and intense effort to unpack our biases and identify ideologies that have shaped our thinking” (Germán, 2021, p. 4). Listening is dynamic and requires thinking before action, which could also be interpreted as another way of saying that curriculum should be built only after the listening and thinking has begun—it is never finished. Noddings (2012) supports the idea that the environment or “climate” must be established for caring. Once teachers and students have co-authored this space, culturally relevant and sustaining work can occur through the curriculum (Freire et al., 2014; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris, 2012). In many states in the USA, public school teachers are required to teach state standards. Teachers make intentional and unintentional choices in both how to teach the standards, but also how they structure their learning environment and build relationships with students.

The curriculum is about more than subject matter – the curriculum is a society’s values, expectations, access, and representation. The curriculum exists to transmit the values of the dominant culture (Love, 2019), but also has the possibility to liberate (Freire, 1970), respond (Escamilla & Nathenson-Mejia, 2003; Gay, 2002; Hammond & Jackson, 2015; Messiou & Ainscow, 2015), and sustain the culture and traditions of children in our schools (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Marciano et al., 2020; Paris, 2012). The curriculum has the potential to grow and develop student and cultural identities. As the United States has struggled to build equity for all children in public education, neoliberal forces have consolidated through movements like high-stakes testing and the common core state standards (CCSS) (Au, 2011; Beers, 2013; Behrent, 2016; Croft et al., 2015; Fisher-Ari et al., 2017; Perisic, 2021; Shanahan & Duffett, 2013). These forces, as I have termed the tentacle, work to standardize learners and assert that all students are equally valuable and standard. Each student can be substituted for any other student in any classroom: they are pawns. A neoliberal curriculum is not sustainable; one cannot live with this tentacle.

As I have struggled against these new reforms, I have witnessed a genocide of teachers who have left the profession over these reforms and policies (Dunn, 2018; Dunn et al., 2017; Dunn & Garcia, 2020). Beers (2013) bemoans the new teacher “who came into [teaching] thinking their purpose was to nurture curiosity, inspire genius, value risk-taking, and share their passion for their subject have discovered that their job is to make sure the whiteboard holds the day’s objective and that particular standards are met” (p. 266). The tentacle is muscular and invasive, but I have fought against it through student choice. While student choice can exist in classrooms in various ways, in my tenth grade Language Arts classroom, young adult literature (YAL) has proven a powerful weapon to use against curriculum that has been weaponized against students. To fight for our students, teachers first must see and value students as the most significant resource in the classroom and the starting and ending place with the curriculum. Student choice in YAL reading groups combats neoliberal control measures while providing space for students to develop their identities in the classroom.

Two Reading Theorists Provide a Path to Resistance (Throwing Gasoline on the Freires of Resistance)

Neoliberals as objectivists believe that there is a single truth that can be found in a text; the meaning and value were put in the writing by the author (Crotty, 1998). According to the CCSS, the reader is tasked with finding that singular meaning and becoming a skilled test-taker in order to show a type of learning that demonstrates the student’s ability to select the correct truth statement on a high-stakes test. Ultimately, these test-taking abilities and singular expression of knowledge are what is valued most in our current curriculum. Contrary to this perspective are scholars who believe that the meaning, value, and truth of a text exists in the reader. Through reading, a transaction takes place between the two (reader and text). Louise Rosenblatt (1938) introduced transactional theory as a way of understanding this complex interaction. For Rosenblatt, this transaction was individual. Peter Smagorinsky (2001) further develops this theory by considering both the environment for the transaction (the zone) and the cultural identity of the reader. Both zone and culture help to shape the transaction that occurs between the reader and the text.

Louise Rosenblatt (1938) and her transactional theory advocate for students' relationship with the texts they read. Transactional theory values the student’s identity and interpretation of the text which is dependent on the student: their experiences, culture, value, and beliefs. Meaning is specific to the reader and is created in this transaction between the text and the reader. Beers (2021), invoking Rosenblatt, writes: “the text isn’t a blueprint from which different readers will construct…identical edifices” and continues, “a text might strike a chord that resonates within many of us…giving us the chance to learn more about ourselves” (p. 15). Peter Smagorinsky (2001) makes developments on Rosenblatt’s (1938) transactional theory and argues that the reader constructs a new text altogether in what he terms the “transactional zone of meaning construction” (p. 140).

Smagorinsky (2001) expands on transactional theory by developing the idea of texts as signs that are interpreted based on context and reading as “a constructive act done in conjunction with mediating texts and the cultural-historical context in which reading takes place” (p. 137). Interestingly, this idea of context extends into the conventions of classrooms, making classroom space a co-author of the newly constructed text that students produce through reading. With this understanding, books are more easily understood as tools for student choice and identity construction when the teacher has first signaled to the classroom that this space is available for students. Smagorinsky (2001) argues that “the reader’s situation within networks of power and experiences therein—how different forms of capital are brought to bear on a text—produces a reading…even if that reading might suggest meanings unanticipated and unintended by the author” (p. 143). Transactional theory flies in the face of standardized testing because it assumes that the text itself has a meaning that the reader must discover. Which multiple choice answer holds the meaning of a text, the theme, character motivations? Whole worlds of meaning are reduced to a series of choices assigned A, B, C, or D. Transactional zone theory also extends beyond transactional theory in that the latter is purely constructivist and only considers the reader's mind as to where the construction of meaning occurs. For Smagorinsky (2001), meaning within texts is co-authored with context and “emerges through participation in cultural practices” (p. 143). With transactional zones, reading groups become places of rebellion against neoliberalism and become zones of empowerment for student voice and identity. Reading is a social act (Hebb & Axiotis, 2000). Texts become transactional zones that develop “world views of members of a culture” (Smagorinsky, 2001, p. 143). The development of the individual also affects the development of the culture – more than sustaining but helping to grow that culture. Reading groups become centers for liberation. Freire (2017) discussed how adult literacy practices should liberate and that true liberation can only occur when the oppressed work to liberate themselves. Students, especially those facing intersectional oppression, can find liberation through reading groups and literacy practices where they can see themselves represented in texts and sustain their culture and develop it.

Forging the Future

The past three school years (2019-2022) have been incredibly challenging for a number of reasons outside of teaching through a global pandemic. The racial uprising, which has persisted for over a decade, now reached new levels of intensity with multiple murders of Black Americans in a brief period, and political and social movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) once again receiving a spotlight and trending hashtag on social media platforms. America has seen a rise in hate groups such as The Proud Boys and a resurgence of Neo Nazis. January 6, 2021, even saw an attempted insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Nevertheless, teachers have attempted to continue teaching, and students have attempted to continue learning. Student reading groups have the potential not only to be a space where students can make sense out of these events through literature, but these groups can also be a place of change, growth, and development for student identities (Beers & Probst, 2021).

What happens in my student reading groups can change the future of whole communities. Teachers must construct spaces in classrooms where transactional zones can exist – they are not constructed in vacuums, and even with teachers’ purposeful intention, students can still resist readings that help sustain and develop identities (Smagorinsky 2001). The curriculum is a series of codes, and the CCSS are “codes of power as manifestation curriculum” (Sleeter & Stillman, 2017, p. 283). Often, students and teachers are in the same classroom space together; however, the choices that teachers make must be intentional regarding the curriculum and what is communicated through these codes. Teachers show students what is essential in our curriculum through what we choose to focus on (Beers, 2013). As a white male teaching 90% students of color, it is vitally essential for me to recognize my whiteness and how it affects the spaces I am in and create space for identities of color (DiAngelo, 2018). By working to communicate that I care more about a student’s identity and culture than I do the CCSS, I am taking steps towards creating a transactional zone with my students. Inside of neoliberal structures, teachers must remind themselves that they teach students, not standards. Classrooms cannot be artificial vacuums for this work to occur; teachers must show with actions that they are invested in the lives, identities, and cultures of the students they teach.

Following Breonna Taylor’s murder, I posted her picture from the September issue O magazine, where Oprah gave up her cover image for the first time in the magazine’s history (Winfrey, 2020). Teachers must teach with the possibility of change in mind (Beers & Probst, 2020). I want my students to understand that anti-racism matters in our classroom. Black lives matter in our classroom. George Floyd and the civil uprising matter in our classroom. I want to show my students, who are 91% Black, brown, and Asian, that their identities, narratives, and cultures matter. Dewey (1938/2017) advocates for a curriculum that “must represent present life” and is not about “preparation for future living” (p.35). The curriculum is about the learner today, who they are, and what they are interested in. While Dewey did not take a socially critical stance as we see today with critical race theory (CRT) advocates for a school that “grows out of the home life” (Dewey, 1938/2017, p. 35). Teachers can create space for transactional zones where identities can develop through making space for the home life of every student (Smagorinsky, 2001). How teachers choose to make sense of the events outside the classroom can determine how students make sense of what happens in the literature they read and the connections they make between their books, their lives, and their identities (Beers & Probst, 2020, p. 13). It is through reading and reading groups that students can change the world. Beers and Probst write:

in reading and writing we have the power to reshape not only ourselves, but also the conceptual world in which we live, the world of values, race, culture, guiding principles, social status, visions of good and evil or right and wrong—that, too, might worry some of us. (p. 29)

Beers and Probst (2020) discuss how fiction is the fire that started civilization (pp. 37-38). Myths are texts that carry cultural values. Fiction contains cultural values that are communicated, but also “imagined creations and visions that shape our lives” (Beers & Probst, 2020, p. 38). Teacher preparation and education programs have not been instructing teachers how to provide a transactional space for the cultural component necessary to interact with texts in a meaningful truly, sustaining, and building capacity for both a student’s individual and cultural identities (Smagorinsky, 2001). Skills-based instruction is a primary and essential piece of reading – it provides concrete, measurable objectives. However, by itself, it misses the child in the curriculum. It leaves learners feeling bored and restless (Beers, 2013). With a sole focus on skills-based instruction, reading ceases to be mythic; it becomes the CCSS that are being taught and not the students.

Skills and Culture: Curriculum Can Do Both

In the quest for measurability, we have sacrificed the child, what Bettina Love has termed spirit murdering (Love, 2019). Neoliberal reform is a tentacle that is choking our students with the CCSS, standardized testing, and the quest for teacher accountability. There is a connection between high-stakes testing and the fragmentation of knowledge (Au, 2007/2017). Deconstructing skills into chunks specifically for tests has become the status-quo in standards-based classrooms where “high-stakes testing exerts significant formal” and “pedagogic control over the curriculum” (Au, 2007/2017, p. 304). Sleeter and Stillman (2005/2017) pointed out that, “Raising standards has become synonymous with standardizing curriculum” (p.277). Research is available that states that a significant problem in the Language Arts classroom is the “decline of classical literature” in favor of students reading books that are interesting (Shanahan & Duffett, 2013). Shanahan and Duffett (2013) declare the CCSS superior, that teachers should be sages, not facilitators, and state their belief that the texts hold all the meaning (not the student). For those that see reading as an act of interpreting symbols that already contain all the meaning, and for those that believe that the Truth (capital “T”) exists in texts, then those controlling the curriculum control the interpretation of society and are the “ruler and distributor of consciousness, identity, and desire (Bernstein & Solomon, 1999, p. 268). Shanahan and Duffett (2013) offer an extreme perspective that shows the damaging possibility of focusing entirely on skills and not students. Reading is no longer fun, engaging, or interesting (both entertaining and containing the interest of the learner). Even Dewey (1938/2017), nearly one-hundred years ago, spoke of the purpose of education being the “power of the child” and that we [teachers] “violate the child’s nature” when we focus on content over interest (pp. 36-37). Reading should be more than discrete skills – it should be a “complex interaction between an individual and the text, taking into account interests, responses, personal history, the unique stories of the reader, the values, language and culture and much more” (Beers & Probst, 2020, p. 52). By following Shanahan and Duffett’s (2013) roadmap for improving my classroom, I should erase the culture of my students and feature classical (Eurocentric) authors and undermine their identities and experiences by making it clear that the text holds the value truth—not the student. The CCSS are useful tools, but teachers teach students, not standards. Standards can be used to build equity for students if they are not being weaponized against culture and identity.

Student Identity and Standing with the Child

            The curriculum should be built to serve the student sitting in our classrooms (Dewey, 1938/2017). With a legal war on Critical Race Theory, which attempts to ensnare Social Emotional Learning (SEL), each piece of state legislation across the United States only proves that the targets are students and families of color. Counties in my state, Georgia, are passing legislation outlawing the teaching of race and acknowledging our country being built through enslaved peoples (Cobb County School District, 2021). Legislation that prevents acknowledging systems that support white supremacy prevent their dismantling. It is quickly becoming illegal to identify and stop white supremacy in our schools, further codifying the curriculum as a weaponized force against students of color (Germán, 2021; Love, 2019). More than ever, the curriculum needs to be built based on student interest, culture, and identity. The United States needs educators who are deeply rooted in social justice and the Work.

In her book, Textured Teaching, Lorena Escoto Germán (2021) provides 4 “traits” that are the groundwork for “social justice teaching” (pp. 5-7). “Student driven and community centered, interdisciplinary, experiential, and flexible” are traits she provides strategies to support throughout her book which finally moves past the theory of culturally relevant teaching, and culturally sustaining teaching to actual practice (Germán, 2021). Teachers need more than theory to help develop their classroom spaces beyond the theory they read in graduate programs if they are to transform classrooms into centers of advocacy and change. More than one-shot professional developments, which can be little more than checkbox approaches to anti-racism, teachers need to transform their classroom culture to be student-centered and focus on the identities of their learners (Germán, 2021; Minor, 2019). Learner-centered teaching takes learning your learners. Culturally responsive and sustaining teaching and identity work can only happen in classrooms where teachers have taken the time to develop relationships and trust (Germán, 2021; Paris, 2012). Engaging students in unpacking their identities offers assurances of freedom and the potential for actualization (Germán, 2021, p. 22). One tool that teachers have available to do this culturally sustaining identity work in English Language Arts classrooms is reading groups.

Successful student reading groups begin with the culture in the classroom: an ethic of care and a commitment to culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Noddings, 2012; Paris, 2012). The reading groups themselves should be organized around books that students have selected that allow them to see themselves and the lives of other students and communities (Donnell, 2019; Germán, 2021). YAL offers characters, settings, and challenges that are relatable to student readers. In the transactional zones created through student reading groups, students can identify challenges that they see in their own communities and want to research and focus on. Authentic challenges cannot be objectives; student-generated learning opportunities cannot be objectified, as Popham (1972/2017) suggested,  as learning is truly messy and in flux (Eisner, 1967/2017). Students can learn about and experiment with solutions to problems through reading and research, even if it is just the seeds of ideas that can lead toward pushing back against and eventually overcoming systemic oppression. Students can use democratic literacy as a tool to change their communities and lives (Freire et al., 2014; Freire et al., 2018; Mirra & Garcia, 2020).

While teachers and students are forced to kowtow to neoliberal structures and systems of measurement, battles for meaningful growth and change can still occur at the classroom level. The curriculum, shifted by teachers who fight alongside student communities for change and growth, can value and sustain student culture. This shifting takes time and means continuing to teach with the tentacle until the tentacle can be unwound from the curriculum and eventually expelled systemically. However, in the meantime, student culture should be respected and valued. Students must be seen as more than empty vessels, incapable of questioning and challenging their worlds (Beers & Probst, 2020; Freire, 2017; Germán, 2021). Neoliberalism reduces student expression of knowledge to standardized multiple-choice responses with answer choices. Student reading groups, democratic literacy practices, and advocacy work create an authentic and valuable curriculum for the communities that faithfully send their children to receive an education.

When students read, they bring their whole identities to the text: experiences, culture, and dreams. This transaction creates a new text where student identity can further develop and grow, and new texts are created in these transactional zones (Smagorinsky, 2001). Out of these zones, a new person is created. Reading transforms the reader; in this transformation, energy is raised. This energy has the potential to transform communities through advocacy work and build entirely new futures. Reading groups are centers for this change and advocacy work; reading is a social act. CCSS exist for speaking and listening but only hint at what is possible when youth are empowered in classroom spaces where teachers have actively and intentionally made space for student identity and voice. In these spaces, I believe teachers should stand in their curriculum: removing systemic barriers and engaging students in the work of truly understanding and developing their individual and cultural identities. This is a curriculum that teaches students.

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