Panel: Vision for CEE in….5 Years?
This panel is a prelude to a brainstorming/visioning activity that we are going to be involved in next.
- Don Zancanella, University of New Mexico
- In five years, CEE should and will be further along in the process of using technology to support English Educators; right now our work is done in an ad hoc way and it is inevitable that we will be further along with technology and we need to do it strategically. We need to figure out how to do it well.
- In five years, CEE will be further along in figuring out its role in educational policy. How do we respond at the federal and state level or help others live within that context? We have been caught up in federal policy and we also need to get involved at the state level, too.
- In five years, CEE should or will have created better ways in supporting new English Education faculty. They can see the benefit of membership. Track faculty job openings and then follow up with people who get hired. Set up opportunities for new and adjunct faculty to meet at conferences.
- Probing questions
- Should the web editor have a grounding in technology, digital/visual rhetoric and other understandings of how technology changes writing?
- State affiliates?
- Policy action?
- Suzanne Miller, University at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York
- In the next five years, we need to become the “keeper of the guild” and creating research agenda and organizational identity.
- We need to maintain our own individuality, but we also need to talk about consensus and what voice the organization will put forward. We have the wisdom, voice, and action.
- Individually, we need to step up to contribute, get doctoral students involved, and if we don’t do it, no one else will. We will cede the vision of the profession to others who have political and economic interests that may run counter to what we value.
- We need a vibrant online community. We are looking for a CEE web editor who will help develop content and provide daily change of information. There will be a great deal of information on there, including lesson ideas, video clips, and other resources for methods courses.
- Get grad students involved.
- Get a research agenda and ideas out there. Conduct a national study that collects data from multiple contexts from many CEE members. Create policy documents from that.
- What counts as literacy — we need to promote multimodal literacy as the major focus in the 21st century. What can these literacies help us to do?
- Set policy at the state level. Could we have 50 CEE Affiliates in 5 years?
- Create sets of documents that are readable by parents, administrators, and policy makers.
- If we are to be the keepers of the guild, and we need to be the one developing standards for teachers of ELA.
- We need more retreats/conferences/working meetings where CEE members can all work collaboratively together.
- Probing questions
- NCTE funding research; how can CEE partner with other research entities to co-sponsor research (foundations, organizations, etc)? Do not look at CEE as a stand alone organization.
- Who gets included in our conversations in terms of diversity of viewpoints? There are people who have more conservative positions that might share some goals with us and we need to understand their positions.
- Should we remain an almost exclusively secondary group, or include others from the elementary level? We don’t all talk the same language all the time, but we can be allies as teacher educators.
- Kent Williamson, NCTE
- I think that we are talking about the CEE experience as being a part of a social network that make this a community of practice that is sharing questions, ideas, and other thoughts at an informal level. Then, things move to a more formal level such as a monograph or article.
- We need a web editor who is a great teacher and we need to encourage people to comment and post. People need to see themselves in the questions that are asked. The nuts and bolts of everyday life need to be present in the site. If there was extended weekly participation, that would be good.
- CEE’s involvement with teacher education. NCATE isn’t the only thing that we can do to support program development. We can be assistive in helping build programs and support new faculty and curriculum adoption.
- Licensure is not an end of the road goal, but a continuing process.
- Data from authoritative research will being you more notability. Begin the research now for five years now.
- More participation at both ends of the career scale: grad student and retirees. We need to tap the knowledge base of the past.
- More collaboration with similar organizations. Groups need to find common ground at the level of program and project development while creating interdisciplinary expertise.
- Probing Questions
- How are we going to reach the 6 out of 7 teachers who are not members? Parents? Administrators? Open source publishing? How do we go beyond serving our members to serving the larger world.
- The CEE website is looking more and more ambitious, even daunting. Who is the audience that will view the website?
- English educators who are not active members of CEE.
- Joyce Stallworth, University of Alabama
- Chair of NCTE’s Advisory Committee for People of Color
- CEE must be more inclusive. We have to have inclusions of teacher educators from a variety of institutions.
- If we are to think critically and creatively about teacher education, more diverse voices must be a part of the conversation and the group must be have full participation.
- Classroom teachers do not see CEE as important to their work; how can CEE work with teachers to create useful solutions to problems?
- CEE can be more involved in forming policy.
- Taking small steps to become more politically active.
- CEE and NCTE must be more responsive to the efforts of subcommittees and recommendations and we need to be more careful about the ways in which we act.
- Probing questions
- The language we use to talk to legislators.
- Who is CEE for? Teachers? Teacher educators?
- Recruiting doctoral students from personal connections and bringing them to CEE.
- Sheridan Blau, University of California, Santa Barbara
- From Peter – Why is it that “doing progressivism” is seen as not being rigorous?
- From Ernest – Schools are problematic for learning as racists, classist, and anti-intellectual.
- From Cathy – States messing up what teacher educators have done.
- When have schools not been like this? When we think that we win, we lose…
- The world isn’t ready for what we propose — what does that mean for us?
- We don’t give up on working with public schools. The best teachers feel, right now, that they are totally demoralized and we need to work with them.
- We can do a few things in the next five years:
- We need to become a critic of standards of ELA that we don’t agree with
- We can offer other forms of guidance for beginning teachers
- We need to take it as our role that we harness the research engine and provide scathing evidence-based data that show the ways in which policies and standards are not working.
- Include both elementary and college teacher preparation.
- Probing questions
- The conversation hasn’t changed, some would say. I would challenge us to contextualize our problems and values here in 2007. What are we doing for the classroom English teacher in public schools? Our conversations need to be in the “now.”
- We are also thinking about huge changes that are happening in our country and how do we deal with things in the long term? Who might be opposition to us that we have to have a relationship with here and now and in the future.
- There are some things that are substantive and some that are more political (how do we act on what we believe). I wonder how we have a conversation about how we engage politically about what we now and believe.
More small group discussion will follow…