MATC SYNTHESIS PAPER 1

MATC Synthesis Paper: Not I Alone, But We Together

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Teaching and
Curriculum Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Tom Collins
December 2023
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In pursuing a masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction, I looked at many different

programs around the country, but the MATC program at Michigan State was, along with being

the highest rated, one of the only programs that offered a concentration like Socio-Cultural

Perspective in Teaching and Learning. I wanted to be a part of remaking the American

education system to address the many inequities that exist and making school a place where all

children feel represented, accepted, and centered in their education. Through my experiences in

this program, I have developed a better understanding of the curriculum landscape, the myriad

ways that educational inequalities manifest, and the work that people throughout the United

States and around the world are doing to create more diverse, just, and loving educational

experiences for this and future generations. I am confident that this program has prepared me

approach the work of curriculum development with the knowledge to help make meaningful

change as well as the humility and self-reflectivity to know that

My first course, TE 808: Inquiry into Classroom Teaching and Learning, provided a

strong foundation for my development as a teacher-researcher and the self-inquiry skills I would

build on in future courses. The entire course consisted of developing the action research

project (Artifact 1), which was quite a challenging, but ultimately very rewarding experience.

Though I had been part of a lesson study group in my school, I had never done action research.

At the beginning of the process, I approached the task with more of a social science mindset,

hoping my implemented strategies would provide a certain result. It took reading more about

action research, such as The Power of Questions (Falk and Blumenreich 2005), and continued

prompting from my professor to focus on the process of inquiry and not be so outcome oriented

in order to shift my mindset. I think that many teachers are conditioned in their preparation

programs, and often then in their professional lives, to believe that theory is meant to be

absorbed and applied more than critiqued and that personal experience only has validity within

one’s own classroom. The action research project, through iteration and revision based on
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feedback from my professor and peers, helped me to see myself as a teacher-researcher and

that conducting such research could be a benefit to myself, my students, and other educators

(Goal 1, Standards 3 and 4).

My next course was TE 818: Curriculum in Its Social Context, which was my introduction

to the Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Teaching concentration and engaged me in a wholly

different kind of self-reflection. This course provided my first experience with many of the

concepts about curriculum that I have returned to and expanded my understanding of

throughout my time in the program. For example, I learned about many definitions of curriculum

and how curriculum is what is planned, what is enacted in the classroom, and what is received

by students in their individual experiences. I found concepts of the “null” and “invisible”

curriculum, which I first encountered in Elliot Eisner’s The Educational Imagination (1979), to be

fascinating and profoundly true for all educational experiences. I became more reflective about

what I was implicitly taught in my K-12 and undergraduate experiences and how I absorbed

those lessons as a cisgender, heterosexual, white man as compared to my classmates who

were not in those socially dominant identity categories. I also further interrogated the

minimization of LGBTQ+ and indigenous students in the classroom, of which I was guilty in my

own ways. I came to understand the ways in which western, colonial settler ideologies were the

foundation of education in American, which intentionally devalued and other epistemologies

such as the land-based education of some Indigenous Americans or the environmental

perspective which decenters the human and considers how we could educate with the goal of

harmony with the environment (Goal 1, Standard 1).

TE 818 also brought me my first experience with running a blog. Though it was very

unlikely that someone outside of my class or the MATC program would stumble across my blog

on Curriculum in Its Social Context, I still felt somewhat exposed. I also thoroughly enjoyed

reading and responding to the posts and comments of my peers and professor. One drawback

of the asynchronous, fully online MATC program, is that it can sometimes feel isolating, as if
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one’s thoughts and work are being sent off into the void. This feeling was likely furthered by the

ongoing Covid-19 pandemic at the time of the course. However, the engagement in TE: 818,

and several other courses I took later, provided some aspects of what I loved about being in a

classroom in person. The exposure and interaction, as it does for some with certain phobias,

ultimately strengthened my confidence in sharing my work ‘publicly.’ I could see how the

blogger-educators that I read and admired were able to believe that their perspective on

education and social issues mattered enough to be heard. And ultimately, I came to see the

myriad benefits of blogging, or other forms of authentic assessments which in the same way

bring student work outside the confines of the classroom.

For my final reflection in TE 818 I created two poems (Artifact 2), which represented a

synthesis of the readings from the course and my application of the ideas within those readings.

The first poem essentially focused on the idea that several of my significant and visible aspects

of identity as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, Caucasian, man, may symbolize the white

supremecist, settler-colonialist ideologies of the broken education system that tries to enforce a

single canon and way of knowing and being, but that I as an whole individual, can advocate for

change. The second poem focused on my state of residence at the time, New Jersey, and the

passage of a law to include discussion of LGBTQ+ people and their contributions in all courses.

I wrote about ways that teachers in various disciplines can take the first step in acknowledging

the contributions of LGTBQ+ people and their ideas. And in an effort to go beyond a passing

reference to these significant figures, I also hyperlinked various resources about each person or

concept mentioned. Looking back on this work, I find that I am both proud of it and that strong

stances I take, but also the sense that it is talk and not action, that it does not go far enough. In

my latter courses, I found my work being more and more oriented to solving the practical

problems of actually enacting culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education and

addressing specific injustices. However, I still see value in all of the learning and self-reflection
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that went into those pieces and the call to action that they represent. I don’t think I could have

written either of them before taking TE 818, and certainly not in my first year of teaching.

My understanding of the various ways that social inequities manifest in education was

further developed in TE 822 and through my reading of Un-standardizing Curriculum:

Multicultural Teaching in the Standards-Based Classroom (Sleeter and Carmona, 2017). I came

to understand that cultural relevance in teaching is not enough, but that educators must be

culturally responsive to their students and work to help sustain their cultures. I also grappled

with the idea that white supremecist and colonial-settler ideology undergirded the education that

I received in my K-12 experience. Sleeter and Carmona discuss the need to develop

“ideological clarity” (2017, 29), and I found that undergoing that process was an important part

of my development as a teacher. At this time, I had just started a new job at a majority Black

and Hispanic school in the Bronx after having taught at a majority white, well-funded, suburban

school for seven years. One of the reasons why I took the job was to work in a different

environment and address inequities in education, but I also knew that I would need to shape my

curriculum around my students’ cultures and perspectives.

The coursework in TE 822 helped give me the tools to create more equitable

assessment and grading practices rooted in student input and optionality. I also was able to

understand how some of my lessons different cultures amounted to tokenism, and instead

embed multicultural perspectives and epistemologies throughout my units. My culminating

critical analysis paper (Artifact 3) focused on how to enact culturally sustaining practices in the

classroom, and by the conclusion of that course I was able to more clearly understand how I

could use my degree to have a positive and concrete impact on the lives of my students and

those beyond my classroom.

As I moved into TE 823, Learning Communities & Equity, I was able to more clearly see

the connections across my coursework in the MATC program. While TE 823 revisited some

similar texts or ideas I had encountered in TE 818 or TE 822, I found that my understanding of
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culturally responsive or culturally sustaining teaching and racial inequities in education allowed

me to think more deeply about the issues, rather than merely try to comprehend their

presentation in dense, academic prose. Through one of Professor Brittany Jones’s own articles,

I learned about how an analysis of state standards can identify racist and dehumanizing ideas

which are then perpetuated when those standards are used as the basis for curriculum. What to

include and not include in state standards, as well as school curricula and the texts or resources

that are chosen, even to the individual words a teacher chooses to answer a student’s question,

are all choices. They may not always be conscious choices to include and exclude, but they

often are. And it is necessary to reflect on everything from the language of the standards and

curriculum to individual biases, experiences, and beliefs, before any changes towards equity

and justice can be made.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing racial justice protests and

more widespread conversation about systemic racial injustice, many organizations, including

schools, made efforts towards their understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion. My school

at the time, with a majority white student population and almost completely white faculty, even

brought in someone to present on “Diversity 101.” Yet, many of these efforts did not result in

systemic change. Gloria Ladson-Billings had been talking about culturally relevant pedagogy

since the early nineties, and many others built on her work, yet the majority of schools still did

not have culturally responsive practices. I explored the issue of implementing culturally

responsive practices in K-12 schools in my culminating paper for TE 823 (Artifact 4).

My paper explores the concept of teacher buy-in, the relationship between K-12

teachers and academic research, as well as how lack of transparency, collaboration, and

consistency by administrators can lead to teachers being jaded and resistant to any kind of

curriculum reform. Initially, my scope was encompassing many different questions about

culturally responsive-sustaiing pedagogy and how to implement it, but with Professor Jones’s

help, I decided to focus it on teacher buy-in, because that is where I personally had seen and
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anecdotally heard of the greatest resistance to change. I found it difficult to find research on

teacher buy-in, especially to culturally responsive initiatives. However, this research process

forced me to stretch and ultimately grow as a researcher, writer, and academic because I was

not able to rely too heavily on the insights of others from my research. I had to apply the

research that I was able to find to my area of focus and include insights from my own personal

experience. I do not think that my research would have been as successful if it were not for the

work that I had done in TE 808 for my action research paper’s literature review.

The paper that I produced built on my personal experience in schools for almost a

decade, as well as my knowledge from TE 818 and TE 822 and my own research. I found that

the vast majority of teachers did not engage with educational or other academic research in

their subject areas due to a combination of lack of time, not seeing its relevance to their

classrooms, and a fear of administrative backlash for experimenting with new teaching methods

in their classrooms. However, some effective approaches to getting teachers engaged with

research were to show explicit administrative support for it and to have specific teachers act as

liaisons, finding the relevant research and then sharing it with their colleagues. I proposed that

schools who wished to implement culturally responsive pedagogy must first establish the trust of

their staff and that could be earned through sincere apologies for previous issues with

implementing policies or curricula and explicit plans that dedicated time, money, and a

multi-year effort to the curriculum changes. I suggested that once trust was established,

administrators could then begin the important work of self-reflection, examining the curriculum,

and collaborating with administration, students, and parents to decide on goals and a vision. I

advocated for liaison teachers for each department and regular meetings to share the most

relevant research in an accessible way. I also argued that teachers should be compensated for

their time outside of contract hours developing the new curriculum.

I was very proud of my work, and though it was a challenging process, it was one of the

assignments I most enjoyed in my entire MATC Program experience. In TE 823 and through the
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writing of this paper helped me to see my deep desire for my knowledge from the MATC

program to help schools and communities realize their desires for CRS curriculum reform. I

even proposed some of these ideas to my school as part of the Culturally Responsive Teaching

professional learning committee. While there was a lot of excitement for the idea of specific

professional development and department liaisons, I ultimately was not able to receive any

substantive support to further my proposal. However, when I later took TE 870, I was able to

more deeply explore curriculum development and gain new insights into how to realize a

culturally responsive-sustaining curriculum.

Over the course of two summers in the MATC program, I took three courses. While

these accelerated courses did not always allow me to go as in depth in my learning experiences

as some of my full semester courses, I learned valuable things from each one of them.

TE 831, Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology, provided a lot of insight into

how create learning experiences