ADFL Projects

The MLA's Articulation Initiative:
High School to College in Foreign Language Programs

Articulation: Reflections of a High School Teacher
John B. Webb, Hunter College High School, City University of New York

At a recent national meeting of grant project directors, I chose to attend a session on secondary-postsecondary collaboration because such collaboration is at the very foundation of my own grant project. After the introductions, it was evident that I was the only high school teacher in the room, a high school teacher who teaches classes five days per week, a rarity at virtually any conference at the national level.

In describing their collaborative projects, the college professors indicated that they had all been released from one or more teaching assignments and provided with various other forms of support to work on their grants. They spoke enthusiastically about the data they had collected from high school students and teachers and how they had been able to analyze and disseminate the results of their research or to use them as part of other research projects in which they or their institutions were engaged. Still others spoke proudly of the workshops in methods and curriculum writing that they had designed and offered to high school teachers and of tutoring programs that they had set up for high school students.

As I listened to the descriptions of these, admittedly, excellent projects, I could not help but be struck by their totally top-down nature. None of the speakers mentioned anything about in-depth consultation with high school teachers before the speakers developed their projects. Nor did they mention anything about the high school teachers' sharing any of the benefits of the projects, such as release time, compensation, or coauthorship. The efforts at articulation being described were college conceived, planned, and driven, and the high school teachers and their students seemed to be little more than conduits for data, variables for statistical calculations, or recipients of information given out by the colleges.

For me, this was an all-too-familiar version of collaboration, and I was compelled to ask the session participants what I considered to be three fundamental questions:

What did you offer to the high school teachers in return for having taken their professional time and availed yourself of their professional setting and know-how?
To what extent did you consult the high school teachers before planning the details of your projects?
Is there anything about your subject matter that you might learn from high school teachers?

Eyes in the room turned to look at me as if I were some kind of creature from another galaxy. The silence and subsequent confusion in the attempt to respond made it evident that the answers to my questions were: (1) Nothing, (2) None, and (3) No. In addition, it was even more evident that the professors had never considered these questions about the worth of high school teachers or of the need or desirability to make them real partners in these endeavors.

At that point, I was reminded of the grant proposals for the MLA articulation project that I had just finished reviewing. Virtually none of those proposals had been initiated by high schools; in many proposals, the high schools were simply being used as research settings for the gathering of data that would be useful for the colleges and the college professors involved. In some cases, there was no evidence that the high schools named in the proposals had even been consulted.

What all this tells me, essentially, is that the age-old hierarchy is still very much in operation and, in fact, still dominates most efforts to bring secondary and postsecondary together. The fact that the college professors at the national conference did not know what I was really talking about demonstrated how ingrained this hierarchy is. Teachers at the secondary level have lived with the existing assumption that college professors are better prepared and far more knowledgeable than high school teachers (who, in turn, are better prepared and more knowledgeable than middle school teachers, and so on). The colleges seem to rule the day when it comes to research in pedagogy and publication of materials on teaching, although the professors may not have seen the inside of a high school classroom in more than twenty years. The vast majority of research articles on foreign language teaching are written by college professors about college students, and it is simply expected that high school teachers can apply the findings to young learners, if they understand the way in which the research is presented. In spite of the changes in the content of foreign language courses at the high school level during the past decade, we are still expected to prepare our students for the college foreign language class. It seems to be automatically assumed that high school teachers will adjust, not that college professors will find out what students have learned in high school and adjust their curricula accordingly. Whether there is any change in the character of the curricula remains to be seen.

Has any progress been made? Maybe. But the evidence seems to indicate that not very much has been made in the last twenty-five years. Until the profession addresses the issues of hierarchy and the attitudes and assumptions about the worth of those who happen to teach at the lower levels, we will never make progress in achieving that desperately needed seamless continuum in language study from level K through level 16 and beyond. I sincerely hope that more progress will be made and soon, before teachers at the secondary level get sick of talking about articulation and give up trying to achieve it.

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