English Education - Volume 49, Issue 1, 2016

Fifty years ago, in 1966, the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English, later known as the Dartmouth Conference, brought together English educators from three nations—the United States, England, and Canada—to discuss the future of the school subject of English. The Dartmouth Conference is now considered to be a watershed moment in the teaching of English. In this article, three English educators, from three generations, reflect on the meaning and significance of the Dartmouth Conference.

This article draws on a longitudinal study generated by a school and university-based partnership and funded by an Improving Teacher Quality grant. This study uses Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Cole, 1996; Engeström & Miettinen, 1999; Wertsch, 1991) and social semiotic theories of multimodality (Jewitt, 2006; Kress, 2010) to examine how a group of secondary English teachers conceptualized writing process pedagogy and digital tool use after a week-long professional development program. Teachers used the online software program Prezi to create concept maps that showed their understanding of the concept of Writing 2.0. A CHAT and multimodal analysis indicated a number of contradictions. Examining such contradictions in teacher thinking is essential for understanding teachers’ agency in using new tools within multiple activity systems that often have competing values and goals.

Tracking and other practices of homogeneously grouping students by so-called ability level remain a norm in American classrooms, despite decades of research highlighting how they disserve and even harm student learning. Heterogeneous grouping, by contrast, benefits struggling learners, a conclusion supported by a substantial body of research. Some of that research cautions, however, that these benefits may be perceived as coming at the expense of higher-performing classmates’ learning. This article reviews the literature, contemporary case studies, and the author’s personal experience to argue for, and provide specific models of, a heterogeneous English language arts (ELA) classroom. These models use deliberate practices of differentiated instruction to serve learners at all ability levels, and furthermore do so in a manner that integrates the possibility for students to earn “honors” credit. The article argues that ELA is perhaps the ideal discipline in which to enact such structural shifts, creating heterogeneous classrooms that work to the advantage of all learners.

This provocation is a personal essay of creative nonfiction. Playing with form, the piece offers three scenes separated by a series of multiple-choice questions; readers must use this standardized-test format to create meaning and understand the text itself, the nature of today’s high-stakes tests, the story’s characters, and the essence of teaching. While the names of the students and one staff member have been changed to protect their privacy, the events are true to the author’s experience.