Restructuring instruction in an urban high school: An inquiry into texts, identities, and power

The study conceptualizes teaching and learning as a process of co-constructing knowledge, particularly along axes of difference such as race, gender, and class. It examines pedagogy in a critical, feminist high school English classroom. By investigating the program within which the classroom is nested as itself a site of teaching and learning that informs and is informed by the classroom, the study challenges the splitting off of structure from instruction. By looking at pedagogy in the nested spheres of program and classroom inside a restructuring school, this study seeks to contribute to a national picture of what is possible and what is problematic at the juncture of structure and instruction in public schools. The study is based on two years of interpretive, critical, feminist research conducted in an urban high school. By interpretive I refer to a paradigm that seeks to know local meanings from the perspectives of participants through participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and document review (Erickson, 1986). By critical and feminist, I refer to research that recognizes the researcher\u27s own positioning, treats as significant the daily living of participants, and takes an activist stance toward promoting social justice (Weiler, 1988). In conducting this study, I worked with student researchers to collect and analyze data on the program, and with the classroom teacher on the analysis emerging from her classroom. The call for basic skills instruction accepts a functionalist view of public education and holds out a bleak vision of what is possible for our youths. This study looks instead to a classroom and program where the effort is to educate all students to think critically about themselves and their world, to access prior knowledge and co-construct new meanings, and to negotiate across differences to create a multicultural learning community. This study addresses what can happen in such a classroom --defined not as a place enclosed by four walls and forty-three minutes, but as a site of critical teaching and learning