Response to Andrew Gilbert’s Review of Going against the Grain: Supporting the Student-Centered Teacher

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Andrew Gilbert's review of my book. I also appreciate the opportunity his review has provided me to reread my own text for the first time in six years, and thus remind myself of Sheila's extraordinary teaching and amazing courage, and of the extent to which my own teaching has irrevocably changed because of her. I regret, however, that Professor Gilbert seems to have found Going against the Grain not to be what he needed for his own situation. I had to reread it because his criticisms made me wonder: Had I in fact forgotten to include the aspects he finds so glaringly missing? My reply to his review will try to offer him, and other readers of my book, a way to find in it what may not have appeared on the surface. To begin with, I am not quite clear about which of three methodologies he finds confusing, unclear, or insufficiently grounded: my own research methods, my methods for supporting Sheila, or Sheila's methods with her classes. To address the first, although he seems to recognize that I used a qualitative research design, he seems uncomfortable with its not being laid out for him. Since he does an excellent job of creating a synthesis that he felt "forced" as reader to reconstruct from what he calls "fragmented pieces," perhaps my research methods were more accessible to a careful reader than his criticism suggests. Moving away from the more standard evaluative, comparative paradigm was initially difficult for Sheila, too: