ABSTRACT

The absence of a narrative study of culture in teacher education does not mean that we approach teaching absent stories of culture. Instead, we tacitly hold stories of culture that organize what we see, do, and think in the name of public education. Writing about classroom discourse, Cazden (1986) describes a “default” mode in teaching. She observes that, like the default settings in her computer that maintain the characteristics of her text, classroom talk is patterned in ways that reproduce the characteristics of oral texts for learning. Teachers ask questions, students respond, teachers evaluate. Questions tend to be testlike, assessing rather than inquiring, and so forth. Each time we turn on the computer the default settings operate-unless we take direct, explicit steps to change them. Likewise, Cazden argues that direct effort is needed to alter the automatic patterns of our teaching so that classroom interactions and the learning possible within them might be changed.