Collaborative moments: An account of research at the Dewey Center for Urban Education, James Couzens (Community) School.

Abstract

During the 1990-91 school year, I undertook an educational research project at the Dewey Center for Urban Education. My project was an experiment in collaboration. I wanted to plan with an upper elementary school teacher a whole language approach to reading and writing; through a dialogue about curriculum and teaching methods, I hoped to help a traditional teacher to evolve her approach to the teaching of reading and writing. My dissertation consists of four essays which examine the experiences I had as a researcher in Room 200. Using a theory of oppositionality developed by Ross Chambers, I describe how my assumptions about the nature of my research project changed as a result of my encounters with oppositional discourse. In my first essay, I show how I altered my approach to my project as a result of my recognition of the different expectations that my cooperating teacher, Mrs. Jeanetta Cotman, had for our project. In my second and third essays, I illustrate how two different groups of students were able to use words to shift the privileged assumptions about teaching and learning that I brought with me to the Dewey Center. In my last essay, I write a history of the James Couzens (Community) School, the site of my research project. I situate my actions in Room 200 within a larger historical context and reflect upon the relationship between collaboration and oppositional behavior. The argument I make in each of my essays is that collaboration ought to be conceived as "difficult" in nature. Contemporary literacy researchers, I suggest, often present their collaborative experiences in such a way that the difficulty of cross-cultural communication is underexamined. I take the position that collaboration ought to be disconnected from the idea of consensus and instead connected to the ability to read incommensureability. While the identification with and understanding of discourses different from one's own can produce anxiety, I contend that it is in the best interest of educators to explore with students and each other alternative perspectives.