Who Has the Floor? Curriculum, Teaching, and the English Student Teacher's Struggle for Voice

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic inquiry into the problems of theorizing about teaching and learning within a social context organized to suppress the subjective experiences and meanings of classroom actors. Three questions are explored: 1) What is the nature of curriculum practice in secondary education, and how does it shape the voices of students and teachers?; 2) What meanings do classroom actors construct about teaching and learning, and how do these meanings affect voice?; 3) How can a critical reading of curriculum practice enable preservice teachers and their students to make their own voices? Stories from one preservice English teacher's classroom experience illustrate the “struggle for voice” and the concurrent power struggles arising when curriculum practice mirrors school organization and its institutional values. I argue that conventional notions of curriculum can neither account for the classroom actors' struggles for their voices nor enable preservice teachers to explore social experience as a source of their pedagogy. Utilizing the tripartite distinction of curriculum as constituting the explicit, the implicit, and the null, this article demonstrates how these dimensions coalesce during the teaching and learning encounter to infiltrate the intentions and discourse of the classroom actors. If unaccounted, curriculum works to dissipate both the actors' meanings and its potential to be a means to illuminating student and teacher experience. Finally, this article continues the tradition of advocating the use of ethnography as a means for enabling preservice teachers to become critics of their teaching experience—a necessary stage in developing challenging forms of pedagogy.