I see my teaching beliefs as necessarily dynamic. Yet, though they are continually changed by my reading, thinking, experience, and especially by my research, I have found that there are certain beliefs that I have held onto for some years:

First, I believe that humans learn best when they actively construct their own learning on the basis of that which is presented or presents itself to their consciousness. Learners come to new meanings/ new knowledge by revising prior structures of knowledge to include the new. I actively engage my students both with new materials and new experience, and I strive to create an environment in which they may be open to discovering from them. So much in learning involves "re-seeing" what is already in front of us, examining our own learning to find out what is universal in the learning process and what is unique to our own set of abilities, ways of learning, and experience with the world. Students are most open to new learning when they observe a tension between what they thought they knew and what they observe or sense they must know; the teacher's job is often to introduce that productive tension. This dissonance serves better to generate intrinsic motivation for learning than the extrinsic motivators of grades, praise, or fear of failure.

Second, I believe that all human beings can expand their knowledge and improve their skills given the right circumstances. Therefore, my job as a teacher is to take students a step further in what they want to attain and to nudge them into endeavors that, from my perspective, seem important to their chosen futures. However, some students may have more difficulty with school than others because of the discontinuity between the culture of their home and the culture of the academy. Working class and minority learners or learners whose confidence has been lowered for some reason have more difficulty as undergraduates, and if they are to learn in academic arenas, they may need extra time and assistance, and they certainly need to understand the reasons why learning has been difficult for them. When I left graduate school, I thought I knew what it took to prepare mainstream, Ojibwe, and other minority undergraduates to teach reading, writing, and literature to diverse students, but five years ago I had to admit to myself that I needed to know more, especially in order to prepare teachers to teach our largest regional minority, American Indian youth. I have taken a sabbatical to improve in that aspect of my work. I am using that recent learning with my classes. Recently I told my students about meeting an elderly Aboriginal man who told me that he wanted the children in his community to know "the secret English," the one that would work for them outside of their homelands. My students and I explored what he might have meant in relation to the difficulty that marginalized groups have in developing the discourse structures of mainstream culture. We constructed knowledge together.

Finally, I believe that expression--in my field, oral and written language--helps us to mediate between existing knowledge structures and new knowledge. When students put emerging thoughts into words, they are actively accessing and integrating new information and forming a base for further learning. Thus, in preparing undergraduates to teach, I encourage them to be continually processing what they are exposed to through written and oral language: through observation journals, response journals, learning logs, tutoring and practicum journals, informal and formal papers, letters to the editors, case studies, profiles of learners, whole class and small group discussion, oral presentations, taped group narratives about group practicum experiences, even dramas presented before the class. Furthermore, I believe that expression of thought occurs best when there are real audiences available for this articulated thought: peer audiences, web pages, wikkis, blogs, simulated search committees of area teachers interviewing for English teaching positions, newspaper audiences, teaching journals. I am proud of four students who had articles published recently in the Minnesota English Journal.

At first my students think that I know a great deal about teaching English and that they know nothing. They slowly realize as we are investigating our subject matter together, that I am continually extending my knowledge and that they have knowledge already in their heads that simply needs to be uncovered and re-seen. I try to let them know that teaching and learning are inextricably mixed and that, as teachers, they will still have to be reflective and attentive learners. While I am teaching, I often stop class and say, "Look what is happening here." Often I point out my own teaching process--good or bad--or my own teaching dilemmas, and as a class we look them over together. I try to model for my students my own metacognition, my own thinking about thinking, as research tells us that thinking about our processes in acquiring skills actually improves those skills. Furthermore, as an educator of educators, I feel I must open my own teaching to scrutiny more than is necessary for my colleagues. If I do not practice what I preach, I am truly hypocritical because my realm of research is that theory and practice itself. I try.

I begin my classes with students examining what they know and what they have experienced about the course topic. For instance, when my students study the act of reading, they examine both their own process and experience as well as that of diverse learners (the students they tutor who, unlike themselves, have not been successful in the academy). Beyond this "re-seeing," I then need to provide material and experience that takes them beyond what they know to what it is possible for them to know. As they read about eye movement, perception, comprehension, the phonics/ whole language debate, dyslexia, instructional strategies, and interventions, they respond in writing, discuss content, and solve posed problems with other class members. I ask each student to develop a list of principles upon which they will base their future reading instruction, including rationales and praxis. Simultaneously, they investigate a related topic, using both primary and secondary research. Finally, I provide experiences in which they put what they have learned into practice, with real students, in real schools, assisting real teachers.

My teaching goals grow out of what I hope is tempered idealism. I would especially like to make a difference for those who are not successful in the world of school and whose feelings of success or inadequacy in the world often hang on issues of literacy. While teaching in secondary schools for thirteen years, I saw problems that were so systemic that what I tried to do in one classroom with one student was obviated by things over which I had no control. I have given issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and empowerment serious attention in my research and in my classroom, but I would like to focus on another goal here. As an English teacher educator, I continually concern myself with questions such as: Should education serve the personal needs of my prospective teachers or should it serve societal goals? Are these two mutually exclusive? A non-UMD colleague of mine and I have continued conversations on these questions. The dialogue often runs like this:

Colleague: You get students to think deeply about what learning and teaching is; the pedagogy that you present, as research-based as it is, may be too different from what they will meet in the local schools.

Linda Miller Cleary: But if they enter into the teaching situation without thinking deeply, nothing will change. If I believe strongly that research, my own and that of others, about the teaching/learning process runs counter to what is currently going on in the schools, then I need to let students know what will make a difference. I want them to become change makers, not capitulate to a system that does not serve all students. As teachers, they must prepare students for our complicated future.

Colleague: They will become demoralized when they go into the schools and see what they have to fight against. They will quit.

These conversations have made me face a part of my job with undergraduates that lies outside of the university, that in the beginning of my university teaching I wanted to ignore. I am now working to provide my students with strategies for survival in situations that run counter to their own emerging beliefs, to provide a sort of scaffolding for them in transition, and to work with the teachers in the schools so that the dissonance between the students's beliefs and classroom possibilities is not overwhelming. For years I have been providing bi-monthly sessions for student teachers in the field to help them remain reflective as they meet with the reality in the field. More recently, I have begun to work towards these ends by collaborating with the Department of Education to develop a system of student teacher placement which will provide cooperating teachers whose practice is less dissonant with the methods that prospective teachers are learning. I have, on and off through the years, worked with the state curriculum people, again hoping to reduce the disparity between what students are taught and what they will be expected to teach.

I have also begun to work with area teachers. This may not seem to be a part of undergraduate education, but I feel committed to this work simply because it provides teachers who will become better mentors for my students. I spend time with teachers when I am in the field supervising student teachers, handing books to them at critical moments. I lend support and resources when they confront censorship for the first time, and I have worked on curriculum development at the Fond du Lac Reservation School and other area schools. I have also collaborated in developing a course called "Teacher as Researcher" which supports teachers in researching their own practice. Though much of this work goes unacknowledged, it helps create a community in which student teachers can survive and thrive.

The teachers I prepare must be neither mindless revolutionaries nor capitulators; I want them to create change when they see (or can create) a space for it. They must think clearly about thinking and learning if they are to deal with this world that is increasingly complex, and they must prepare the next generation of students to do the same. If they go into a system and feel no tension, change will not occur. If they meet with frustration at every step, we will lose our very best teachers. I must endeavor to prepare these teachers for the world that they will live in, not the world that I have lived in.

There are ways in which my teaching reaches beyond the undergraduates in my own classrooms. This will take some explanation. When I was in graduate school following thirteen years in secondary school classrooms, I was shocked to find myself unknowledgeable about the research that had occurred since my own teacher preparation at UC Berkeley in 1966. And upon reading that there was a fifty year gap between research and broad application of that research in classrooms, something strong was struck in me. I vowed that any research that I did would be disseminated in a way that would make it directly accessible to classroom teachers. I was determined that what I learned would not remain on dusty shelves holding journals meant only for other researchers. For example, in my last publication Collected Wisdom: American Indian Education, with Thomas Peacock, we have attempted to present the narratives of more than sixty teachers of American Indian students in a way so that the readers, both prospective and practicing teachers, might become more effective in the challenging work of teaching American Indian Children. Readers are encouraged to connect their own felt experience with that of the sixty teachers, thus constructing ways to teach or to improve their teaching. My own research comes more directly into my own classrooms, as I ponder with my students the universals connecting learning, oppression, and literacy which I have observed in Costa Rica, Belize, the Aleutian Islands, and Australia, and, in the spring, New Zealand.

I would like to end this statement describing the humility that I have felt as a learner of late and how it has affected me as a teacher and as a teacher of technology. I begin this ending with a story about the immense potential and the potential misuse of technology in our world. When in Australia, I drove north to an Aboriginal school, traveling four hours without seeing any human life. When I arrived at a community with a few buildings, a satellite dish, and a school, the teacher asked me to tell his students about Minnesota while he went to arrange for lunch. Before I could get started, an adolescent girl said, "Do you know Brenda, Miss. We do. She just moved from Minnesota to Beverly Hills." Astounded, I told the children that Minnesota and Beverly Hills were quite distant and both heavily populated, and that I didn't know Brenda. I started to talk about the cold of Minnesota, but there was palpable disappointment in the group. Later I asked the teacher about this visitor from Minnesota, and he laughed, saying that she was a character on "Beverly Hills 90210," a sitcom which came in on satellite, and that he was having trouble getting the students to understand the concept of actors. As my friends often call me media deficient, I didn't know of the Brenda of Beverly Hills, so it was hard for the world of the Aboriginal children and my own to meet. I had underestimated the worldliness of their knowledge and was at once thrown by the cultural misconceptions and ignorance that we both could have. The gap was huge. Technology has the capacity to bring the world close, but there are such deep cultural rifts in the world (and the gaps in our own United States are perhaps even more subtle and, thus, more powerful). I will be watching very carefully as the use of technology develops in the classroom. And for just this reason, I feel committed to learn and have my students learn the uses and possible misuses of technology in the classroom.

In this process I have "re-seen" the frustration possible in learning. At the moment, I have managed, with student assistance, to create a homepage for the "Teaching English" Program, and I have had my students publish their teaching units on it for their own and community future use. Of that I am proud, but I am humbled in not yet knowing how to edit this creation. My teacher is a technologically-gifted student, and I have felt shy enough in this learning to allow him to lecture to me about the process, for instance, of transferring text from Corel 7.0 to HTML without demanding that I do it simultaneously myself. I have "re-seen" the need for active learning, constructive learning, for small steps and small successes in learning, and for ownership in the learning process. This has renewed my commitments to my own stated beliefs about learning, and the more global experience leaves me, again, committed to diverse learners.