Ziplining With Moffett

(The making of a National Bilingual Literature Curriculum for Costa Rican Experimental Bilingual Schools)

(The Peace Corps requires volunteers to file a “description of service.” Without any guidance, I consulted my calendar for the last year and produced this. I learned a month later Peace Corps wanted a bullet-point list of activities and not a narrative. Sigh. Glad I wrote it nevertheless. Special thanks to Tim Dewar from UCSB Education Department and Jefe de South Coast Writing Project who acted as my “thought mentor” throughout the year I spent toiling for the Ministry of Education. Without his questions and feeding me the latest articles from English Journal, I doubt the center of gravity for this curriculum would exist as it does.)

October and November: The Lay of the Land and Needs Assessments

For the first month and a half at the Ministry of Education, my new-found role required me to read endlessly, ask myriad questions, pay strict attention to the structures of the ministry, understand the layers of leadership, and follow the direction MEP wished to pursue in the coming year.

To this end, my counterpart had me read the English Language Curriculum, the English Literature Curriculum, and the CEFR- the Common European Framework of Reference. Over two weeks, I consumed and annotated these documents in PDF form. Nine-hundred pages of MEP pedagogy and adherence to the CEFR showed a literature curriculum without a comprehensive pedagogical through-line that held it together; and, in some cases was so dated (2011) and incorrect, “students should not write until they have mastered the English language”, that the fragmented nature of the curriculum’s focus confused both me and the teachers I spoke with later during our high school visits

After reading these three documents, my counterpart Marinella asked me to read a 26-question survey of Bilingual Literature teachers from 2024....and the findings were dismal, disheartening, and showed a true concern by the teachers regarding the connection between the pedagogy, the methods, and the expected outcomes they needed to teach to and record.

I wrote a statistical analysis of the teacher survey and showed it to my counterpart; I also shared with her my misgivings with the current literature curriculum: my training with the National Writing Project and thirty-six years in the classroom compelled me to speak to the incoherence and pedagogical frailty. Fortunately, my counterpart presented me with a 12-month work plan that explicitly asked for me to revise the Bilingual Literature curriculum.

We agreed on a need for change. And, I was tasked to produce a national curriculum for 11,000 students. Marinella gave me carte blanche.

I had early on asked for the chance to meet with teachers and students, and during the first week in November Marinella placed us both in rooms with graduating seniors and later with teachers. I asked three questions: What would the students keep in the curriculum? What would they banish? And, how close to them were the readings and activities? At both school sites, the students reported the same set of concerns: they felt bored from the repetitive nature of instruction, disliked its superficial requirements, and sadly noted its lack of connection to them, their culture, their society, and in the end asked nothing of them as thinkers with opinions. I saw in their concerns those I had known for decades with my American students: give us meaningful work and ask us what we think.

The teachers told us the following: they had no support in terms of resources and direction; they had had no training, and the expected indicators of learning they needed to account for were not always measurable or connected to their work. The teachers sounded angry, frustrated, and in some cases betrayed by a system that asked for what was not deliverable and not supported by MEP.

A Perfect Storm of conditions wherein the students wanted more, and the teachers felt hamstrung by inconsistent requirements and a lack of direction.

I explained a pedagogy to Marinella that has roots going back fifty years in the United States and further suggested that its application would meet the needs of both students and teachers. Marinella’s response: write a pedagogical framework and we will evaluate its usefulness.

This I did, and with Marinella’s approval, we moved forward.

For the next five weeks I did the following concurrently.

· Wrote school districts on the West Coast asking for their cast-off books for use in classroom in Costa Rica: no help whatsoever.

· Ordered and read three books: The Legacy of James Moffett (His Shaping Influence on Writing Studies, English Education, and the Teaching of English; Student Centered Language Arts, K-12, by James Mofett and Betty Jane Wagner, and Teaching the Universe of Discourse by James Moffett.

· Spoke with the director of the South Coast Writing Project at UCSB- a good friend and a man steeped in current research who sent me three articles just published in the English Journal and presented at the NCTE national conference: theses proved pivotal, as they posited these central ideas: students “make meaning” while they mediate a text, and students “make knowledge” as they respond to and produce ongoing and culminating work.

· Created “Exit Profiles” of 10 “Can Do” activities for grades 7-11 based on the 12 areas of focus from the Common European Framework of Reference. These reside at the start of every semester’s curriculum unit- they determine the outcomes for the students by language level: from A-1 to C-2.

· Wrote to the Department of State at the Embassy, to English Language Fellows, and lastly to Fullbright scholars in Costa Rica to try and coordinate teacher training through the Peace Corps and MEP. We had a handful of video meetings, and I met a number of them when they attended workshops in Perez Zeledon and Liberia.

· Contacted my old school district and wrangled access to ten years of my lessons and activities planning that existed in CANVAS. Downloaded and accessed these for the next five months.

· Started the long process of asking permission for and implementing face-to-face workshops for teachers through MEP.

· Started the grant writing process through Peace Corps for workshop funding, “All Writing is Thinking.”

December-February: Moffett, Camisas de Fuerza, and the Lure of Possibility

For these three months, I learned about the vicissitudes of working within a central governmental structure with multiple layers of responsibility and authority which had to deal with political realities outside of MEP.

By the first week in December, Marinella had created five clusters around the country wherein teachers could gather from the twenty-four Bilingual Schools for one-day trainings. While Marinella made the necessary requests and signed the myriad forms, I put together a workshop training manual/handbook and a complimentary PowerPoint that included embedded videos, lesson plans, the grades 7-11 framework and other tidbits that would prove useful when teachers accessed it long after the workshop ended.

I delivered the Pedagogical Framework to Marinella on December 2nd: “Meaning-Making and Knowledge Producing: The English Language Literature Classroom in the Bilingual High School.” It consists of fifteen pages of argument for focusing on the student’s response to the text, and not the text alone as the crucible in the Bilingual Literature Class. If the curriculum came to fruition, this would make for an active, student-centered, and project-based classroom.

These students had ten periods of English Language instruction each week and four periods of Literature instruction- the literature classes would also act as the impetus for developing language because students would struggle to explain their ideas by speaking, writing, and composing in multi-modal ways.

James Moffett, Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Louise Rosenblatte and a whole cavalcade of the most influential and time-tested teachers and thinkers’ ideas populated this framework and their notions that writing, speaking, listening, and reading are essential practices for developing literacy and and intellectual depth kept this work whole and connected to the functioning of a progressive literature classroom devoted to the development of a learner’s thinking and voice.

For these three months, I produced the following major pieces of work or documents:

· Created “Spray and Pray” : a forty-seven slide PowerPoint presentation used to explain the workshops activities, give context and background to the authors we’d read, present the Bilingual Literature’s curriculum, and would direct the activities we’d participate in during the whole of the day.

· Created “All Writing is Thinking”: a bound 23-page workshop manual that in outline form took teachers though the activities of the day. It included definitions of teaching modalities, explanations of methods and practices, and excerpts of the literature we would read and work with during the day. Teachers would use and then take them after the workshop

· Wrote a draft for a Small Grants proposal through Peace Corps. Killed by DOGE. Thanks to Alvaro for so much support and guidance.

· Wrote four units for the entire 7th Grade curriculum that included the following features: all resources are free to read and accessible through the Internet

o A description of the lesson focus (a genre, an area of study) w/hyperlinks.

o Commonly accepted themes.

o Essential Questions

o Four Subsections: Each with interdocument hyperlinks to resources at the end of the unit: articles, lesson plans, examples of student work and texts, as well as music, art, short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to supplement the primary focus of the unit.

§ Preparing to Teach

§ Into: accessing prior knowledge

§ Through: mediating the text

§ Beyond: Ten possible culminating project types

March-May: Out in the Field and Chained to the Keyboard

Due to the hard work and fortitude of my counterpart, she and I (and twice my Project Manager Jose Cerdas), traveled to the following locations for all-day workshops: Pérez Zeledón, Occidente, Liberia, Guàpiles, and Heredia. We later returned to Heredia for a group who had missed the last workshop date.

These workshops proved transformative and enlightening for me on a number of levels: I started to get a feel for the literature teachers, I started to understand how they worked together in groups, I saw and heard how they interacted with the prose and poetry we read, wrote about, and discussed, and I was warmed by their kindness and willingness to “play-along.” The workshops’ ethos was one built on Writing Project methodology: we read, we write, we speak, and we place in context the methods and strategies for our own students and classrooms. This happened beautifully here in Costa Rica.

Sometimes, because of the distance, we would have to overnight in the towns, and my counterpart Nella always made sure we visited high schools in the area, talked with teachers, and met students. These interactions as a whole helped me better understand what the teachers and the students needed. And, these conversations and observations shaped the kinds of materials and the way in which the rest of the units in the curriculum developed.

By the end of May, the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade (semester 1) were finished in their draft form. Each of these units employed an integrated style of instruction where central ideas for for each semester found in the major works were supplemented by short fiction, poetry, music, art, and non-fiction texts.

I spent these months scouring the Internet, the NCTE archives, and other resources for digital resources that teachers could access. Importantly, at each level, teachers can choose which primary sources to study and which secondary resources to use in an integrated way. So, for instance in 9th grade semester 1, teachers can choose from on of three novellas, and semester 2, teachers can choose from one of three plays. Each novella and each play had their own constellation of resources and integrated works to help explain how ideas work across many genres: art, music, prose, and poetry.

For these three months, I produced the following units:

Grade 7, Semester 1

o Unit 1: Literature & Non-Fiction

o Unit 2: Costa Rican Folk Tales; International Folk Tales

o Diary, Journal, Folk Tale, quickwriting (writing)

Grade 7, Semester 2

o Unit 3: Mythological Tales

o Unit 4: The Fable

o Diary, Journal, Fable, Myth, quickwriting (writing)

Grade 8, Semester 1

o Unit 1: Poetic Forms

o Unit 2: Literary Non-Fiction & Journalistic forms

o Personal Narrative, Basic Poem, quickwriting (writing)

Grade 8, Semester 2

o Unit 3: Graphic Novels and Cartoons

o Unit 4: The Short Story

o Multi-media, Personal Narrative, quickwriting (writing)

Grade 9, Semester 1

o A Novella of Choice (of 3)

o Short Stories of Choice

o Poems of Choice

o Non-Fiction: primary source documents: Includes the subgenres of exposition, argument, and functional text in the form of personal essays, speeches, opinion pieces, essays about art or literature, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical, scientific, technical, or economic accounts (including digital sources) written for a broad audience.

Lit: Depending on the reading levels and the focus of the semester for “thematic” ideas, teachers can choose from one of three titles proposed in the Unit Plan. With each title, short stories, poems, music, and art have been curated to reflect the major themes in each work.

Approach: The integrated approach includes music, art, and topics in other disciplines the students currently study. Teachers can choose poems and short stories whose themes, motifs, and time periods compare and contrast with the novella: instead of teaching the poems and short stories in isolation, the teacher has the choice to weave them into the reading of the play, so that ideas found in all of these genres exist together and not in isolated segments.

Activities and Writing: Paired/small group/class discussions, multi-media presentations, panel presentations, producing original artwork, music, and written genres to interpret ideas in the literature. Multi-modal compositions.

Grade 9, Semester 2

o A Play of Choice (of 3)

o Short Stories of Choice

o Poems of Choice

o Non-Fiction: primary source documents: Includes the subgenres of exposition, argument, and functional text in the form of personal essays, speeches, opinion pieces, essays about art or literature, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical, scientific, technical, or economic accounts (including digital sources) written for a broad audience.

Lit: Depending on the reading levels and the focus of the semester for “thematic” ideas, teachers can choose from one of three titles proposed in the Unit Plan. With each title, short stories, poems, music, and art have been curated to reflect the major themes in each work.

Approach: The integrated approach includes music, art, and topics in other disciplines the students currently study.

Teachers can choose poems and short stories whose themes, motifs, and time periods compare and contrast with the play: instead of teaching the poems and short stories in isolation, the teacher has the choice to weave them into the reading of the play, so that ideas found in all of these genres exist together and not in isolated segments.

Activities and Writing: Paired/small group/class discussions, multi-media presentations, panel presentations, producing original artwork, music, and written genres to interpret ideas in the literature. Multi-modal compositions.

Grade 10, Semester 1

o A Novel of Choice (of 3)

o Short Stories of Choice

o Poems of Choice

o Non-Fiction

Grade 10, Semester 2

o A Play of Choice (of 3)

o Short Stories of Choice

o Poems of Choice

o Non-Fiction

Grade 11, Semester 1

o A Novel of Choice (of 3) & Part of Essay Unit

o Short Stories of Choice

o Poems of Choice

o Non-Fiction

June-August: Writing, Revising, Editing, and Writing Again, and Then Again

June started with a focus on a Capstone Project for the 11th (senior) grade. Capstone Projects have acted as a mainstay for schools back home for years- they allow students to showcase their learning from previous years: this Capstone Project asked student to trace an abstract idea (love, honor, pride, loyalty...etc.) across their previous three years in the literature they had read. They will need to explain how authors have done this, how this idea plays-out in their community and culture, and lastly how they the student author “sees” this concept.

Following the construction of the second semester grade 11 curriculum, I proceeded to read back though each grade level’s curriculum attempting to unify the look, the sequence, the strategies and methods for each one with the others. In this way, a teacher who worked with 7th and 9th grade courses would find a similarity with the approaches at each level.

By the end of the second reading, MEP decided that the Didactic Resources needed to exist at the end of each unit and not embedded in the body of the unit itself. This necessitated copying and pasting hundreds of pages of information from one section of a unit to another. This also made it unwieldy to find these resources.

Upon talking to some folks in MEP, I hit upon using interior hyperlinks so that a teacher could navigate from page 4 to page 73, and then back again with a click on a hyperlink within the document. This required another reading and two weeks of revision from the last change.

Now teachers can navigate freely within each lesson by clicking on links to move from one section to another.

After this completion, I constructed a Teacher’s Toolkit that includes strategies and methods from many sources. As well, I started a series of PowerPoints and videos that will act as tutorials for teachers in these upcoming years.

Marinella arranged for a set of teachers and Regional Advisors to sit with the curriculum for half a day twice to read and give feedback. It was at this first meeting that I learned that the hundreds of Goals, Outcomes, and Indicators needed to be directly aligned horizontally for each and every one of them. Weeks later, into what was now the fourth revision, the English Literature Curriculum was finally put to rest.

For these three months, I completed the following tasks or documents:

· Grades 7-9 Bilingual Lit. Curriculum: 671 pages.

· Grades 10-11 Bilingual Lit. Curriculum: 685 pages

· Teacher’s Toolkit: 184 pages

· Tutorial PowerPoints: currently 12, more on the way.

September-October: Affirmation by the Superior Council and The Long Goodbye

On the night of September 16th, the Superior Council of Education for Costa Rica met with me, Marinella Granados Sirias, Andrea Cruz Badilla, and Manuel Edwardo Jimenez Campos on a virtual video call. One and a half hours later, we signed-off, and five days later the Superior Council gave its preliminary approval. They then sent the curriculum for review with universities and union representatives. The comments from these other groups will arrive back one month later, and by then this Peace Corps Response Volunteer will have left Costa Rica.

Following the 16th, my time here has been spent with COS requirements (like this one), and putting together further resources for teachers who may just start an integrated Bilingual Literature Curriculum that James Moffett, Donald Murray, and those visionaries from decades past would recognize as one infused by a single notion: education’s essential purpose remains simple- the cultivation of the intellect and the development of the voice for every child who enters a classroom.

With these months now having passed, I leave Costa Rica in a few short weeks carrying with me a profound sense of gratitude and overwhelming humility for this opportunity to serve.

Atentamente,

Kevin C. Buddhu

MA, Education; MA, English; Research Fellow, South Coast Writing Project, UCSB