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Volume 17, Number 3           December 22, 2014    ISSN 1099-839X 
 

 

Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s  

Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 
 

Susan A. Sturm 

State University of New York at Fredonia 

 
In this article, a case study is presented of an urban first grade teacher’s perceptions of 

teaching English language arts (ELA) within a district-mandated scripted curriculum. The 

teacher was observed during fifteen sessions of whole-class, 90-minute reading over two 

months and was interviewed four times. All curricular materials were analyzed, including 

the commercial ELA curriculum and the school district-supplied Common Core State 

Standards materials. Qualitative analyses revealed that the teacher possessed three 

discourses, or “distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling...thinking, and 

believing” (Gee, 2011, p. 177) which she accessed in order to talk about her experiences. 

The teacher’s three discourses were: (1) an academic discourse derived from her Master’s 

program; (2) a professional discourse that developed during her career; and (3) a personal 

discourse that came to be throughout her life. The teacher’s discourses remained 

compartmentalized and possible reasons are explored, with implications for 

administrators, policy makers, and teachers in similar situations. 

 

Keywords:  scripted curriculum, ELA curriculum, Common Core 

 

This is one teacher’s story of what it was like to 

teach first grade in a school that had a mandated 

curriculum for English language arts (ELA). This story 

details her perceived frustrations, joys, and innovations as 

she and her twenty-three first graders navigated the murky 

waters of, not only their school district’s mandated ELA 

curriculum, but also New York State’s recent adoption of 

the Common Core State Standards. In telling her story, 

the hope is to provide comfort for others in her position 

and to give voice to just one of the many teachers in the 

United States who are now in similar positions of 

maneuvering multiple standards, programs, and curricula.  

With teachers’ performance being more directly 

linked to their students’ academic performance, many 

educators find themselves under almost-constant pressure 

to teach in a way that prepares their students to take 

exams.  Educational theorist Arthur Applebee (1996) 

wrote, “It has been very clear in recent years that systems 

of assessment have a profound effect on the nature of 

classroom teaching and learning” (p.115). Namely, many 

schools have adopted mandated curricula in order to 

standardize what is being taught and to make sure that all 

“children are getting the best possible education no matter 

where they live” (National Governors Association Center 

for Best Practices, 2010).  An unfortunate result of these 

mandates has been an increase of scripted programs in 

English language arts (ELA) (MacGillivray, Ardell, 

Curwen, & Palma, 2004) in order to create a more 

uniform approach to meeting the standards.  Research has 

shown that “mandates do not necessarily result in 

substantive teacher learning, thoughtful instruction, or 

best classroom practice,” (Valencia, Place, Martin, & 

Grossman, 2006, p. 114) and that by “narrowing the scope 

of curriculum, teachers’ craft is often stagnated” 

(MacGillivray et al., 2004, p. 138).  Additionally, some 

(Anagnostopoulos, 2003) have argued that even though 

English teachers do not intend to marginalize their 

students’ discourse, pressure on teachers to prepare 

students for an exam and to stick to the curriculum often 

results in marginalization. In essence, an increase in 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

2 

federal mandates and teacher accountability for their 

students’ test scores, and the resulting dependence on 

scripted curricula, has created negative impacts on the 

teaching of English language arts. Research into the 

perceptions of teachers of ELA can reveal how educators 

are negotiating working under mandates from their states 

as well as from their school districts, how their teaching is 

affected by the use of commercial curricular programs, 

and what can be done to ensure that children are receiving 

the best education possible.  

This case study was designed to explore the 

ways in which a first grade teacher in an urban classroom 

used a scripted English language arts curriculum to teach. 

Bounded by the first grade classroom environment and 

the event of ELA instruction, the research questions 

driving this case study were: 

 What discourses does a first grade teacher with a 

scripted and mandated English language arts 

curriculum assume? 

 In what ways, if any, do these discourses 

influence her identity as a teacher? 

Review of Literature 

The trends that have influenced the field of 

English language arts have appeared at local, state, and 

national levels and have been responsible for a variety of 

fads, practices, and paradigms. Presently, the field of ELA 

is among a new wave of reforms that are affecting how 

the subject is taught. Teachers are under immense 

pressure to help their schools make adequate yearly 

progress and to prepare students for state exams. At the 

same time, many schools across the country are rolling 

out the new Common Core Standards and subsequent 

curricula. Being stuck in a fuzzy grey area of transition, 

ELA educators are still responsible for preparing students 

for state exams while at the same time implementing new 

practices to address the internationally-benchmarked 

standards of Common Core. The result is an even higher-

stress, higher-stakes classroom environment that makes 

many teachers feel like plate spinners in the educational 

circus. 

Scripted ELA Curricula 

Living in an era of accountability, school 

districts are under immense pressure to produce ever-

higher test scores. As a result, many schools are adopting 

commercially-produced ELA curricula to help them 

manage the difficult task of meeting all of the standard 

requirements. “Highly-directed (scripted) curricula with 

pacing guides, ‘embedded assessments,’ and ‘flashy 

publishers’ web pages provide teachers with all of the 

content, pedagogy, assessments, and even classroom 

management tools they should need” to prepare their 

students for assessments (White, 2012, p. 194). 

Proponents of curricular programs argue that they provide 

standards for teachers as well as a means by which school 

districts can ensure that coherent and consistent content is 

being presented across all classrooms (Ogawa, Sandholtz, 

Martinez-Flores, & Scribner, 2003). Commercial 

curriculum designers, such as Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt 

Brace, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson have capitalized on the 

desire for standardization of curricula by creating 

programs that are designed to align with learning 

standards. Programs such as Open-Court Reading 

(McGraw Hill Education, 2005), Soar to Success 

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), and Treasures 

Reading (McGraw Hill Education, 2006), promise to 

“make all the right connections to ensure that no child is 

left behind” (Macmillan-McGraw Hill, 2006).  

On the outside, scripted ELA programs seem to 

be an effective and convenient method for meeting the 

requirements of educational standards; however, as 

convenient as this sort of standardization may sound, it is 

certainly not without risk. Smagorinsky, Lakly, and 

Johnson (2002) described a scripted program from their 

research in which “all teachers in all schools [in the 

school district] would read the same literature on 

approximately the same day, ask the same questions, use 

the same assessments, and otherwise provide each student 

in the district the same instruction” (p. 198). The 

standardization they described is precisely what scripted 

ELA programs are designed to create. The authors 

reported on the resulting “acquiescence, accommodation, 

and resistance” (p. 187) that a first-year teacher 

experienced within the program. Similarly, 

Anagnostopoulos (2003) showed how the state-mandated 

exam and the district-mandated curriculum in ELA were 

positioned between students and teachers and worked to 

“silence students’ emergent attempts to engage with and 

construct understanding” (p. 207) of their English 

curriculum, sometimes without their teachers’ realization.  

 With so many school districts adopting scripted 

curricula to manage the requirements of educational 

standards, it is essential to explore the these programs and 

to consider the effect that scripted curricula have had on 

teaching practices and the state of the education 

profession. 

Teaching in Scripted Curricula 
 As long as there have been ELA curricula, there 

have been studies about teaching practices and 

perceptions of working with such programs. Ogletree and 

Dipasalegne (1975) examined teacher perceptions of 

working within a Direct Instructional System for 

Teaching Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR) program, a 

very early version of a scripted curriculum. They found 

that most teachers felt that the program limited their 

creativity and they felt the need to make modifications to 

the materials that they were provided.  Likewise, in the 

1980s, Ball and Feiman-Nemser (1988) found that 

prospective teachers felt that good teaching did not 

involve textbooks or teachers’ guides, but rather creating 

lessons and materials individually. This theme of feeling 

the need to modify or amend the materials that are 

provided in curricular programs has continued through 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

3 

current research. Specifically some have found that 

teachers have been concerned with how to adapt 

curricular materials in order to meet the needs of 

“students who have been historically marginalized by the 

public school system” (Stillman, 2011, p. 149); to make 

the curriculum more relevant to the students’ interests 

(Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2008); and to address the 

learning of students for whom English is a second 

language (MacGillivray et al., 2004). These concerns 

speak directly to the acknowledgment by teachers that a 

culturally sensitive curriculum is preferred and that 

scripted curricula do not allow them to address the 

varying sociocultural backgrounds of their students as 

well as their professional needs as a teacher. 

 A second theme from the research on teaching 

within scripted curricula was a perceived sense of lost 

identity as a teacher. Scholars have reported that working 

with a scripted curriculum has left teachers feeling “very 

frustrated because [the] curriculum does not resemble 

what [they] want to do in [their] classrooms” 

(Smagorinsky et al., 2002, p. 199) and that they were not 

able to create a teacher identity freely. Likewise, 

Ainsworth, Ortlieb, Cheek, Pate, and Fetters (2012) 

reported that first-grade teachers felt that their semi-

scripted ELA curricula placed too much emphasis on “test 

scores” which “precluded the classroom teacher in her art 

of teaching” (p. 89). Other research has argued that 

teachers cannot develop and grow if they are “absolved of 

the thinking about the what, why, and how of their 

instruction and its effects on student learning,” as 

sometimes occurs in scripted programs (Valencia et al., 

2006, p. 114). Still others have reported teachers being 

“swept up in a flow of mandates that consumed their 

thinking, their energy, and for some, even their love of 

teaching” (Valli & Buese, 2007, p. 545). A true sense of 

loss is present in the research on teaching identity among 

scripted language arts programs. As Santoro (2011) 

stated: “If high-stakes accountability renders the moral 

rewards of the [teaching] profession inaccessible, it is 

likely that strong teachers will find little to sustain them in 

the pursuit of good work” (p. 18). With little to sustain 

them, some might be faced with the decision to stay or 

leave the profession. 

 Finally, research has revealed reports of teachers 

who were “constrained” (Beatty, 2011, p. 2), “held 

hostage” (Meyer, 2005, p. 106), “colonized” 

(MacGillivray et al., 2004, p. 134), and “put…in a box” 

(Ogawa et al., 2003, p. 166) by their school’s ELA 

curricula. These words connote an embodied sense of 

captivity and entrapment and are not emotions that any 

professional ought to feel upon going to work each day. 

Many researchers have reported teachers feeling as 

though they were forced to comply with their school 

district’s decision to teach with a scripted ELA program 

or face the potential of being ostracized by other teachers 

and administrators (Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2008) or, 

even worse, losing their jobs altogether (Meyer, 2005). 

Feeling threatened to teach in a prescribed way is surely 

not something that teachers expect when entering into the 

profession. Having to teach in a scripted ELA program 

has been shown to cause these types of emotions and will, 

undoubtedly, drive some to walk away from or reconsider 

the profession altogether (Crocco & Costigan, 2007; 

Santoro, 2011; Valli & Buese, 2007). 

Learning in Scripted Curricula 

The research on student learning in scripted ELA 

programs is also vast. Some studies have shown that ELA 

curricular programs, such as Open Court, Success for All, 

and Direct Instruction under the government’s Reading 

First Initiative failed to meet the literacy needs of students 

because they did not address individual needs but, rather, 

assumed that “the process of learning to read will be 

identical for every child” (Milosovic, 2007, p. 29). 

Teachers have seemed to agree with the notion that a 

good curriculum will allow them to use their professional 

expertise to tailor instruction for all learners. Likewise, 

some research mentioned that “the diverse ethnic and 

cultural makeup of today’s classroom make it unlikely 

that one single curriculum will meet the needs and interest 

of all students” (Ede, 2006, p. 31).  Others have argued 

that “the rigid use of a commercial reading program may 

crowd out silent reading, literature, writing, and 

discussion from the curriculum, with harmful effects on 

children’s literacy development” (Yatvin, Weaver, & 

Garan, 2003, p. 30) as well as that effective teaching does 

not rely on a script as students need on-the-fly, authentic 

instruction that changes as do their needs (Allington, 

2002).  

In order to meet the needs of all learners, a 

curriculum has to move beyond “low-order skills” and 

focus more on “higher level, meaning making instruction” 

that is tailored to the students’ needs (Joseph, 2006, p. 

91). Research has shown that scripted ELA curricula tend 

to lead to a narrowing of skills or a “bracketing” of 

“students’ learning because [teachers] are not available to 

them to help address their cognitive, social, and spiritual 

needs” (Meyer, 2005, p. 105). Instead, “the material 

struggles of children’s lives are too often rendered 

invisible” (Dutro, 2010, p. 281) inside of scripted 

programs that do not welcome ideas outside of what is 

available contextually. Students have been reduced to a 

test score, and the chance for teachers to forge meaningful 

relationships with students in order to know more about 

their sociocultural backgrounds, has been taken away by 

mandates and time constraints (Crocco & Costigan, 

2007). Conditions such as those described in the research 

on learning in scripted programs work to perpetuate 

systems of marginalization and oppression in schools with 

students placed at the bottom of a rigid hierarchy of 

power. 

 

 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

4 

Talk in Scripted ELA Curricula 

According to Applebee (1996), “a curriculum 

provides domains for conversation” (p. 37) opening up a 

space for dialog between teacher and students. Talk is the 

means by which students learn about the ways of others, 

themselves, and the world around them, and teachers are 

the direct link between students and the curriculum. If, 

indeed, the curriculum lays the groundwork for talk, it is 

interesting to consider what scripting a curriculum does to 

the potential for conversation. Teaching in scripted 

programs relies heavily on traditional patterns of talk, 

such as the Initiate-Response-Evaluate (IRE) model, in 

which the teacher asks a question with an intended right 

answer, one student responds either correctly or 

incorrectly, and the teacher confirms or denies his or her 

response with some form of evaluative remark (Cazden, 

2001; Mehan, 1979; Nystrand & Christoph, 2001). Such a 

pattern of talk might sound like this: 

Mrs. Sam:  Okay class, who can tell me

   what year Columbus arrived 

  in America? Let’s see, Johnny? 

Johnny:   1492. 

Mrs. Sam:  Excellent, Johnny. Now who 

  else can tell me the name of his 

  ships? Mary? 

Mary:   The Niña, the Pinta, and the 

  Santa Maria. 

Mrs. Sam:  Very good, Mary, you’re right.  

This pattern of talk is teacher-centered rather than 

student-centered and creates a hierarchy of power in the 

classroom with the teacher positioned at the top, assuming 

the job of filling the students’ minds by “making deposits 

of information which he or she considers to constitute true 

knowledge” (Freire, 1993). Missing from this model are 

most of the five principles that Alexander (2006, p. 28) 

claimed make teaching dialogic:  

1) participants collectively learn;  

2) reciprocity among participants’ listening to 

and sharing ideas;  

3) support for all ideas from all participants, 

without the fear of being wrong;  

4) cumulative building of knowledge and 

information in oral communication 

5) purposeful and open dialogue that is 

structured around a learning goal 

Traditional patterns of classroom talk, such as IRE, rely 

on the teacher’s control of the pace and direction of the 

talk (Christoph & Nystrand, 2001), recitation of material 

by students (Cazden, 2001), and multiple exchanges 

between participants with little connection between 

exchanges (Mehan, 1979; Wells & Arauz, 2006). The 

focus in traditional classroom talk is on the teacher and 

the content rather than on the students and the 

development of thinking among them. 

Classroom talk of a traditional nature does not 

allow much room for multiple perspectives or points of 

view. Instead, traditional patterns of talk perpetuate “a 

highly routinized form of knowledge” (Fine & Weis, 

2003, p. 97) in which “the form is the curriculum in a 

sense, since no other curriculum is really available” (p. 

98). Learning becomes more about how to “do” school 

and how to “talk” academic rather than how to grow 

intellectually and independently. Children’s personal 

perspectives are traded in for context-based questions and 

test-style reading passages.  

Traditional talk patterns are a feature of many 

scripted programs and sets up a classroom context of the 

teacher as the authority source (Gutierrez, Rymes, & 

Larson, 1995) or the keeper of the official discourse (Gee, 

1996). In fact, scripted programs assume the role of 

authority text in the classroom and often usurp the 

teacher’s power to “respond to what her children’s 

behaviors are telling her” (Meyer, 2005, p. 105). When 

even the teacher feels uncomfortable straying from the 

scripted language of the program, it’s no wonder that 

children have to fight to have a voice (Dutro, 2010) 

within their school’s scripted ELA curriculum. 

Gap in the Research 

While research into the many facets of scripted 

and mandated ELA curricula is extensive, what seems to 

be missing from the research is specifically how early 

elementary teachers deal with working within a 

prescribed program. How does a school district’s 

mandated curriculum affect an elementary teacher’s 

discourse? Do elementary teachers feel that there are 

opportunities for professional judgment and flexibility 

when teaching with a scripted ELA program? How are 

teachers’ choices about the their teaching influenced by 

scripted programs? Do teachers in urban settings believe 

that scripted ELA programs meet the cultural needs of all 

of their learners? From a wider perspective, more research 

is needed in what role politics and national educational 

reform have on day-to-day life in the classroom. Is there a 

connection between large reform movements and the 

discourse of the classroom? Do teachers notice and 

consider the broader goings on of the education system? 

This research aims at exploring some of these big 

questions and to develop a deeper understanding of what 

it is like to be an elementary teacher who is mandated to 

use a scripted English language arts curriculum. In doing 

so, the hope is that more teachers in this position will feel 

a sense of community and that a conversation can begin 

about a teacher’s place in the larger political scene. 

Theoretical Framework 

In considering this case study, a sociocultural 

perspective will be used. Specifically, Bakhtin’s concept 

of discourses will be applied to analyze the data gathered 

and to consider the role of discourse on one teacher’s 

identity. Then, a closer look at the theories on social 

justice education will take place, situating this case study 

among this larger body of thought.  

 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

5 

Bakhtin and Gee’s Notions of Discourses 

In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin (1981) 

explained that language “gives expression to forces 

working toward concrete verbal and ideological 

unification and centralization, which develop in vital 

connection with the process of sociopolitical and cultural 

centralization” (p. 271). In other words, language 

represents the coming together of a speaker’s verbal and 

ideological worlds, and thereby represents him or her as a 

part of many sociocultural processes.  At any given 

moment of speaking, a person’s words are symbolic 

expressions of who he or she is, where he or she has been, 

and what he or she would like to be. This notion of 

discourse as a symbolic expression of identity will be 

used to explore the case study at hand of one teacher.  

Furthermore, Bakhtin continued, we all possess 

“languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘genetic’ 

languages, languages of generations and so forth,” (p. 

272) that “may all be taken as particular points of view on 

the world” (p. 293). The discourses that we each assume 

have emerged from a variety of worldviews that are 

developed as we move through different social situations 

and events. “The word in language is half someone 

else’s” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293) and this dependence upon 

others to make language one’s own is what creates the 

link between speakers. Without others, one would not 

have or need language: 

Language is not a neutral medium that passes 

freely and easily into the private property of the 

speakers' intentions … Language, for the 

individual consciousness, lies on the borderline 

between oneself and the other. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 

294) 

The other’s response to language has the potential to 

change everything about how the speaker identifies, 

forever altering his or her discourse and way of being.  

In schools, teachers make up a community of 

professionals who share in a very specific genre of 

language. They depend on one another to become socially 

situated among a group with shared interests and goals. 

As a result of this dependence, speech genres emerge 

which represent the intersection of many speakers, ideas, 

and ways of being. In a school, speech genres tend to be 

recognizable and can consist of very specific language 

such as “APPR,” “IEP,” “formative assessment,” and 

“differentiated instruction,” all phrases and terms that 

might seem foreign to anyone outside of the education 

speech genre. Becoming an accepted member of a 

community of teachers entails, to some extent, taking up 

the discourse of the other teachers around you. 

Beyond language, there is also a shared sense of 

being in a school that contributes to a teacher’s discourse. 

How the morning message is delivered, what is 

acceptable dress in the building, the way grade-level 

meetings are run, who sits next to whom in the teacher’s 

lounge at lunch—these are all socially-learned practices 

that come from belonging to a professional school 

community. These social ways of being dictate the 

discourse of a school building and failing to adapt to them 

can lead to feelings of isolation or exclusion. Each school 

develops its own speech genres related to the specific 

student population, geographic location, and the way of 

life inside the school community. In a Bakhtinian sense, a 

teacher’s discourse is reflective of all of these elements—

the community of professionals, speech genres present in 

the building, and the specific characteristics of the 

school—in a fluid and ever-changing way. 

Gee (2011) referred to a similar relationship 

between language and social groups when he wrote, “A 

Discourse with a capital ‘D’…is composed of distinctive 

ways of speaking/listening and often, too, distinctive 

ways of writing/reading. These distinctive ways of 

speaking/listening and/or reading/writing are coupled 

with distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, 

feeling, dressing, thinking, and believing” (p. 177). Gee’s 

definition of Discourse takes into account the interactions 

and ways of acting that individuals demonstrate as a result 

of their social ways of being. Discourses are “specific 

socially recognizable identities” (p. 177) that are revealed, 

not only in how a person speaks, but also in how he or she 

acts.  

Gee acknowledged: "Discourses are not 

mastered through overt instruction but by enculturation 

(‘apprenticeship)’ into social practices through scaffolded 

and supported interaction with people who have already 

mastered the Discourse'" (Gee, 1996, p. 170). Teachers 

learn the discourse of their school from those around 

them. They are scaffolded by others in their professional 

community into the behaviors, norms, and discourse of 

their building. This works to create a sense of belonging 

and community that has potential to provide, not only 

support, but also rigid structure that may be difficult to 

work against. It is important to understand the role of 

discourse in a school building, how discourse reflects a 

school community’s social ways of being, and the norms 

of practice that dictate discourse in schools. Exploring the 

conditions that impact discourse in schools can help us to 

understand the choices in language and practice that 

teachers make. 

Critical interanimation of discourses. A 

teacher’s identity is representative of a variety of 

discourses that have developed throughout his or her life. 

For example, most teachers have access to the following 

discourses: an academic discourse, learned while studying 

in a teacher education program; a professional discourse, 

taken up as they become part of a school building and 

district community; and a personal discourse, developed 

from their own experiences, culture, and backgrounds. 

With each of these social settings come a worldview and a 

genre of language to which the teacher is exposed, 

elements that ultimately contribute to his or her socially-

constructed teaching identity. Since “each word tastes of 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

6 

the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially 

charged life,” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293) what a teacher says 

can reflect intentions from any number of contexts. In 

fact, what each person says is only truly his “when the 

speaker populates it with his own intention” (p. 294). The 

task of the researcher is to analyze the language of 

teachers and to explore what intention they are populating 

their words with, what worldviews they are symbolizing, 

and which identity they are taking up to do so. 

Remembering Gee’s notion of discourse, a researcher 

must consider an individual’s many ways of 

communicating coupled with many ways of acting, as 

well as the “scaffolded and supported interaction with 

people who have already mastered the Discourse” (1996, 

p. 170) in order to make sense of the discourse choices 

teachers make.  

When a speaker is aware of his or her many 

discourses, there is potential for what Bakhtin (1981) 

called “critical interanimation,” or “[active] choosing [of] 

one’s orientation among” discourses (p. 296). For 

example, a teacher who is confident in her professional 

life will have little discomfort recognizing and using the 

discourse of both her personal background as well as her 

academic background as she teaches. Interanimation, or 

working between and across discourses, leads to critical 

thinking and the ability to recognize when another 

discourse may be more appropriate or effective, as well as 

why different speech genres exist in the first place. When 

there are limitations or restraints on what we feel we can 

say or do, we tend to lose the ability to critically 

interanimate—our words become more someone else’s 

than our own. Without critically interanimating, a speaker 

may compartmentalize discourses, purposefully keeping 

them separate and only calling on them in the contexts 

where they were learned or where he or she feels they are 

safely acceptable. In Bakhtin’s words, without critical 

interanimation, a speaker is “not able to regard one 

language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) 

through the eyes of another language” (p. 295). Gee 

(1996) might add that the social apprenticeship into new 

speech genres plays a role in critical interanimation as 

“acquisition must (at least, partially) precede learning” (p. 

171). A teacher could very likely acquire the discourse of 

her building without actually learning all that there is to 

know about the discourse, where it comes from, and the 

privilege gained by accessing it. 

Research into the nature of discourses assumed 

by teachers working with scripted curricula can help to 

uncover the many emotions and concerns that arise from 

working within such a setting. Likewise, research of this 

nature can provide a clearer picture for what it is like to 

teach under mandates and how teachers’ identities are 

influenced. 

Finn’s Domesticating Literacy 
  When we think of the word domestication, it is 

often in reference to animals. Domesticated pets, wild 

animals domesticated in captivity, the domestication of 

cattle for beef production. Rarely does the word 

domestication bring to mind children. Such a word does 

not belong near children. It connotes manipulation, 

oppression, and taming—not conditions we wish for our 

next generation, especially as pertains to the education 

they are receiving. However, a close look at the history of 

education reveals that domestication is not, nor has it ever 

been, absent from the American classroom (Applebee, 

1974; Squire, 2003). It may be hiding in the form of 

assessment, mandated curricula, or academic discourses.   

Finn (2009) described “domesticating education” 

as “associated with working-class (and, in fact, middle-

class) classrooms. Methods are traditional and teacher 

centered. Discipline and control of students is 

authoritarian. Ideal students are docile and obedient.” (p. 

255) Parallels can be drawn between this definition and 

the types of teaching and learning that are perpetuated 

within a scripted ELA program—traditional, teacher-

centered lessons, docile and obedient students. Finn 

described how domesticating teaching practices 

“invariably accompany the skills and drills ‘solution,’” 

and  “replicate the authoritarian, conformist, powerless 

societies of intimates that make implicit, context-

dependent language and communication inevitable” (p. 

128). By following a script that was written to provide 

middle- and upper-class children with the skills needed to 

thrive (Dutro, 2010) and that may be providing lower-

class children the skills to submit, teachers can 

unknowingly feed into the system of control and power 

that has plagued our schools for decades (Anyon, 1981). 

Finn (2009) added, “Giving children more and more drills 

in phonics and basic skills has and never will lead to 

powerful forms of literacy” (p. 128). The skills in scripted 

programs result in the “highly routinized form of 

knowledge” that Fine and Weis (2003) described: 

“Knowledge is flat and highly controlled within the 

school—thus divorced from the true experiences of 

[students]—and the school simply demands passivity in 

its face in order to ‘pass’” (p. 98). In this learning 

environment, so long as children are obedient and passive 

during ELA, they ought to pass along through the 

educational system unmarked, unmoved, and perhaps 

more dangerously, unchallenged. 

Most scripted curricula are taught in a very 

traditional, skills-based manner (Crocco & Costigan, 

2007; MacGillivray et al., 2004; Ogawa et al., 2003). 

Because many ELA programs are designed to prepare 

children for large-scale assessments, there is often more 

focus on vocabulary and phonics than on conceptual and 

critical thinking. This is the focus Finn warned against 

when he wrote, “Progressive methods are empowering. 

Traditional methods are domesticating” (p. 251). Methods 

such as critical reading and questioning ideas are 

empowering and, incidentally, often left out of scripted 

ELA curricula or, if present, skipped over by teachers in 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

7 

favor of skills that are more likely to appear on high-

stakes tests, such as comprehension and vocabulary 

(Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Ede, 2006). 

 A scripted program eliminates the on-the-fly 

teaching and thinking in which educators are trained, 

replacing it with “teacher-proof” programs (White, 2012, 

p. 193) where teachers “tend to become alienated from 

their reading instruction and begin treating reading 

instruction as merely the application of materials” 

(Owens, 2010, p. 117). A scripted ELA program assumes 

that all students make use of the same patterns of talk as 

well as the same “discourses,” or “ways of talking, 

listening, writing, reading, acting, interacting, believing, 

valuing, and feeling in the service of enacting meaningful 

socially situated identities and activities” (Gee, 2011, p. 

177). Such a standardized classroom would be hard to 

find.  

Research in the nature of discourses and 

practices assumed by teachers working with scripted 

curricula helps to uncover the perceptions of teachers 

working within such a setting, as well as some of the 

injustices that they may or may not recognize in the 

education system. Likewise, research of this nature can 

provide a clearer picture of the many influences on a 

teacher’s practice, and what, if anything, he or she does to 

adapt to these influences. Teaching comes with its own 

socially-acquired discourse and teachers can choose to 

assume, reject, or adapt this discourse according to their 

own needs and their ability to think critically about their 

role in the larger system of education. This research 

examined one teacher’s discourses and the decisions she 

made during the teaching of ELA with a mandated 

scripted curriculum. 

Methodology 

Description of School  

This case study was conducted in a first grade 

class in an urban public elementary school that is part of a 

large school district in Western New York. Freemont 

Public School District (all names of places and people in 

this study are pseudonyms), serves 34,000 students in 

nearly 60 different facilities, one of them being Campbell 

Elementary School, the building in which this research 

took place. At the time of this study, Campbell 

Elementary had a demographic distribution of 85% 

African American, 7% Hispanic or Latino, 5% white, 1% 

American Indian or Alaska Native, 1% Asian or Native 

Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, and the remaining 2% 

multiracial children (NYSED, 2012). There were 528 

students enrolled at Campbell Elementary in Pre-K 

through eighth grade, 46 of them being in first grade. 

Eighty-five percent the school’s children were eligible for 

free lunch and there was an 88% attendance rate in the 

building. 

 Regarding student achievement, according to the 

NYS, Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in ELA was not 

made for the two years leading up to this research by any 

of the ethnic groups in this school, leading to the school’s 

“Restructuring (Advanced) Comprehensive” status. As 

found in the School Report Card document (NYSED, 

2012), Restructuring (Advanced) indicates the following:  

A school that was designated as a school in 

Restructuring (year 2) in the current school year 

that failed to make AYP on the same 

accountability measure for which it was 

identified; or a school that was designated as 

Restructuring (Advanced) in the current school 

year that made AYP for the identified measure. 

At the time of this study, because Campbell Elementary 

failed to make AYP for a second year in a row, it had the 

worst possible status ranking that a school can have in 

ELA (NYSED, 2012). 

Setting and Participants 

The setting for this study was Colleen Hughes’ 

first grade classroom at Campbell Elementary School. At 

the time of our interviews, Mrs. Hughes had been a 

teacher in the district for her entire career—five years—

and taught ELA with the mandated curriculum that was 

used by all teachers in the district. Her class was a 

representative population of the school’s demographics as 

listed above from the New York State Education 

Department School Report Card.  

Researcher Role  
In observing the teaching of a current scripted 

ELA program in a first grade classroom, I “participate[d] 

in the social life of the community,” in order to gain an 

“insider perspective,” and to “interact with students and 

teachers” in the first grade classroom (Glesne, 2011, p. 

64). Doing so, I was able to “make the strange familiar 

and the familiar strange,” (Erickson, 1973, as cited in 

Glesne, 2011, p. 67) and to gain valuable first-hand 

perspectives of the interactions that occurred between the 

class and the curriculum. Being an observer allowed me 

to take very thorough and detailed field notes, full of the 

“rich, thick description” that Glesne (2011, p. 49) 

recommended for increasing a study’s trustworthiness. 

Likewise, my regular visits and repetition of behavior 

each time I was there solidified my role as a researcher 

first, and as an adult visitor to the classroom second. 

As someone who came to this research with my 

own background in teaching with a scripted ELA 

program, I made sure to continually make reflections in 

the form of research memos and journal entries in order to 

recognize any biases I had that might have interfered with 

my data gathering and analysis. Likewise, I had several 

colleagues review my interview questions and data 

analysis regularly to check for any unintentional 

misleading or insertion of my own opinions. It must also 

be acknowledged that I was conducting this research out 

of State University, the same university my participant 

attended for graduate school. As such, she was likely 

familiar with the ideologies of State University and, as a 

result, may have responded to my questions under the 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

8 

assumption that I held similar ideologies as those of State 

University. Great measures were taken to remain neutral 

in my interviews and conversations with Mrs. Hughes and 

to focus on her opinions and feelings, not mine. I have 

accounted for moments when this bias might have 

influenced a specific response. 

Research Design 

 Creswell (2013) wrote, “…case study research 

involves the study of a case within a real-life, 

contemporary context or setting” (p. 97). The case study 

approach to qualitative research involves exploring “a real 

life, contemporary bounded system (a case) or multiple 

bounded systems (cases) over time, through detailed, in-

depth data collection involving multiple sources of 

information,” (p. 97) and allows researchers to identify 

themes through rich descriptions of the cases analyzed. 

By observing in a first grade classroom during ELA 

instruction, I was able to maintain a bounded case for 

study that focused my exploration specifically on what I 

was interested in understanding, the teaching that 

occurred within a scripted ELA curriculum. This study 

was bounded specifically by the 90-minute English 

language arts block, and events outside of this bounded 

system were not included for analysis (e.g. behavior 

correction, snack time, transitioning between activities).  

Data Collection 

 For this case study I gathered multiple forms of 

data in relation to the teaching that occurred within a 

scripted ELA curriculum. Three formal interviews were 

conducted with the participant, fifteen 90-minute ELA 

lessons were observed and detailed field notes were taken, 

and I was allowed unlimited access to the commercial 

curriculum program (Harcourt, 2003) used by Freemont 

School District, as well the Core Knowledge Language 

Arts (CKLA) supplemental materials provided by the 

district to align with the Common Core State Standards 

(New York State Education Department, 2013). I also 

gathered data in the form of other artifacts from the 

classroom, such as photographs of the space, the building, 

and other curricular materials.  

Data Analysis 

 To analyze data gathered from observations, 

interviews, and classroom artifacts, I used methods 

adapted from Glesne  (2011) Lincoln and Guba (1985) 

and Saldaña (2013). Analysis consisted of immersion in 

the data through reading and rereading, then descriptive 

coding and thematic analysis using a constant 

comparative method.  

First cycle of analysis: Descriptive coding. 

Saldaña (2013) stated, “Descriptive Coding summarizes 

in a word or short phrase—most often as a noun—the 

basic topic of a passage of qualitative data.” (p. 88). The 

result is a comprehensive list of codes that described 

simply what is present in the data. This first cycle of 

analysis was an initial pass through the data, which helped 

me to eliminate any of the notes that were unnecessary as 

well as to “label each passage with a notation system that 

would designate its original place in the transcript” 

(Seidman, 2006). 

Second cycle of analysis: Pattern coding. After 

I grouped all of my data according to the first cycle 

descriptive codes I had assigned, I used constant 

comparative methods to sort data according to “a major 

theme, a pattern of action, a network of interrelationships, 

or a theoretical construct from the data” that emerged 

during first cycle coding (Saldaña, 2013, p. 212). These 

categories emerged from my own intuitive choices and 

represented “a progressive process of sorting and defining 

and defining and sorting [the] scraps of collected data” 

that I had gathered (Glesne, 2011).  

Step three: Revisit theory then return to 

categories. I continued to sort my data into more concrete 

themes, viewing them through a sociocultural lens in 

order to create a move detailed and clearer structure for 

data analysis. This allowed me to recognize the distinct 

discourses taken up by my participant. With Bakhtin and 

Gee’s theories on discourse as guides, I developed a 

theme of conflicting discourses in Mrs. Hughes’ language 

and how these discourses influenced her teaching 

practice. Specifically, I determined that three discourses 

emerged: 

1. Mrs. Hughes’ Academic Discourse 

2. Mrs. Hughes’ Professional Discourse 

3. Mrs. Hughes’ Personal Discourse 

Findings 

February 28, 2013 

After buzzing into the building, I stepped inside 

and was immediately met with the eerily familiar 

smells of elementary school—a mix of crayons, 

cafeteria food, and floor cleaner. I walked up a 

few steps and encountered a man seated at a 

small desk. He was wearing a badge and a 

uniform shirt. He smiled big and said, “You’re 

new, aren’t you?” Gosh, did I stick out that 

badly? I smiled back and said, “I am. I’m Susan 

and I’m here to meet Mrs. Hughes.” He asked, 

“Are you a student teacher?” I answered, “No, 

I’m actually a graduate student at State 

University. I’m here to observe in Mrs. Hughes’ 

class for a few weeks.” He laughed and, at the 

same time, said, “Oh good. ‘Cuz I was gonna 

say, if you’s thinking about teaching here, you 

need to go get your head checked, especially if 

it’s up on that third floor!” I laughed with him 

without really knowing why while making a 

mental note to ask Mrs. Hughes what’s up on 

that third floor. I said politely, “Well, I’m happy 

to be here and I think Mrs. Hughes told me she’s 

on the first floor so I should be safe!”  

The preceding passage is from the first entry in 

my research journal from the first day I visited Campbell 

Elementary School. Beyond this initial experience, there 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

9 

were many other indicators throughout the halls of the 

building to what I would come to find out about life in 

this school for both the teachers and the students. For 

example, each day I entered the building, I was met, not 

only by the friendly security guard, but also by a large 

case that ominously displayed a countdown of the number 

of days left until the New York State ELA and math 

exams. 

Continuing my walk down the hallway to Mrs. 

Hughes’ room, one could find what appeared to be 

colorful examples of student artwork taped sporadically 

down the corridors. Only after several weeks of walking 

by these posters did I realize that they were student 

representations of the school’s behavior matrix, a 

complex chart of expectations for student behavior when 

in practically every physical space of the building with 

regards to attitude, attendance, and academic excellence. 

Also appearing on each classroom’s door was an image of 

a national college or university’s mascot and expressions 

such as the following, which I saw on a Kindergarten 

classroom door: “We are College-Bound, Purdue 

University, Freshman Class of 2025”. While this 

statement is somewhat ironic considering that, 

statistically, fewer than half of the students in the school 

district graduated high school in 2012 (NYSED, 2012), it 

shows but one example of the many ways that children in 

Campbell Elementary were constantly reminded that hard 

work would equate to success. Equal parts behavior and 

academics seemed to be the district’s recipe for success. 

Within the context of the larger building, I 

noticed some interesting patterns in Mrs. Hughes’ 

discourse and behaviors. Considering Bakhtin’s theory of 

discourses (1981) and his suggestion that each person’s 

discourse is a “socio-linguistic belief system that defines a 

distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of a 

language” (p. 356), it is interesting to compare how Mrs. 

Hughes spoke of her experiences teaching within a 

scripted ELA curriculum with what was observed. 

Exploration into her perceptions of teaching, her students’ 

learning, and what innovations she felt that she made to 

the curriculum can help in understanding her varied 

discourses.  

Mrs. Hughes’ Discourse 

A close look at the data showed that Mrs. 

Hughes had three distinct discourses (Figure 1) from 

which she drew in order to talk about her experiences and 

which contributed to her identity as a first grade teacher: 

an academic discourse, a personal discourse, and a 

professional discourse. While these discourses often 

overlapped, each of them also stood alone in many 

examples. As such, they were analyzed separately. 

 

 
 

Figure 1. Mrs. Hughes’ discourses.  

   

Mrs. Hughes’ Academic Discourse  
Mrs. Hughes was a graduate of a literacy 

master’s degree program at State University, a research 

institution located in the same city as her school district. 

Much of her academic discourse centered on her 

experiences at State University. She referenced the work 

of her master’s program during our interviews mainly 

when I asked her about the changes she would make to 

Campbell Elementary School’s ELA curriculum if she 

were given the chance. For example, I asked her what a 

reading program would look like if she could design it 

herself. She responded, “I really really like the guided 

reading programs that we all learned about in school.” 

Later, she said again, “I love guided reading…And I love 

Fountas and Pinnell [1996]. And I can’t use that ever so 

it’s such a shame.” In fact, Mrs. Hughes had many books 

on guided reading in her private collection—books she 

had purchased outside of her job despite the fact that she 

felt she could not teach the strategies found in them.  

This frustration at not being able to teach reading 

in a manner that she clearly preferred, evoked strong 

emotions in Mrs. Hughes. Her perception was that her 

school’s curriculum did not allow for the type of 

instruction she learned about in her master’s program. It 

seemed that, because her school had mandated a scripted 

ELA program, there was no room for Mrs. Hughes to 

teach guided reading, a desire of hers that she later called 

“my main wish.”  

 At times, Mrs. Hughes talked about an opposing 

relationship between what she learned at State University 

and what she was required to do in her job. For example, 

when asked if there was anything else she would like to 

add to our discussion about teaching ELA at Campbell 

Elementary, she said, “Well, at first I didn’t think I would 

like it because of the whole—what I was told in school. 

State University does not like scripted.” When I probed 

her for more information about this, she stated, “…A lot 

of the stuff that’s in this particular program [Harcourt’s 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

10 

Trophies, 2003] is in the stuff that we learned at State 

University, just set up differently. And it’s honestly not as 

bad as I thought it would be.” While Mrs. Hughes spent 

much time talking about her “main wish” to teach guided 

reading, a practice she became familiar with during her 

academic career and which was absent from the scripted 

curriculum, she immediately refuted that desire when 

given the chance, paralleling all of the things she learned 

in graduate school to what was in the scripted curriculum. 

While this could have been because of my affiliation with 

State University and Mrs. Hughes’ feeling that she should 

be opposed to scripted curricula as a State University 

graduate, it is clear that she felt that scripted curricula and 

the ideologies of State University were in two separate 

camps. 

Mrs. Hughes acknowledged that the things she 

expressed a deep desire to teach, such as guided reading, 

were supported in her academic career, not her 

professional career. When asked why she felt comfortable 

teaching outside of the scripted curriculum, Mrs. Hughes 

responded: 

I think a lot of it is my schooling, at State 

University, because they taught so many 

different programs or strategies for reading so 

that I could use those outside of the 

curriculum…like guided reading or think-pair-

share or things like that, you know. Those aren’t 

in the books but I know it’s stuff I can do if I, 

you know, in my toolbox, if I have extra time or, 

you know, time to do more strategies if they are 

not getting something.  

While the discourse of State University might have helped 

make Mrs. Hughes comfortable with teaching outside of 

the script, the strategies she learned there were for when 

she had “extra time,” or when a student needed extra help. 

Mrs. Hughes stated it best when she said, “I have to teach 

the curriculum before I go out of the curriculum,” clearly 

giving privilege to the script and her professional 

discourse, rather than her academic one learned from 

State University.  

While she preferred the discourse of her master’s 

program at State University, Mrs. Hughes seemed to 

privilege the discourse of her professional career. Her 

perception, it would seem, was that, in order to meet her 

professional requirement of teaching with a scripted ELA 

curriculum, she was not allowed to access her academic 

discourse. A closer look at her professional discourse can 

help in understanding this disconnect. 

Mrs. Hughes’ Professional Discourse  

 Mrs. Hughes often revealed a strong tendency 

toward her professional discourse, the socialized talk and 

way of life in her job. Specifically, Mrs. Hughes 

possessed a collective mentality that was created in her 

building; she expressed an appreciation for the structure 

of and the planning required in the scripted program; she 

equated her effective teaching with fidelity to the 

curriculum; and she was grateful that her school provided 

her with the new Common Core supplemental materials.  

A collective mentality. As happens with most 

teachers who are part of a larger school building, Mrs. 

Hughes identified herself as part of a group of 

professionals at Campbell Elementary. She often started 

her statements with phrases such as, “We are,” “We have 

to,” or “We all,” referring to herself as a part of the 

Campbell Elementary professional group. When I asked 

her what it was like to work in her building, she replied, 

“We are like family here....We are very close.” While 

Mrs. Hughes certainly did speak about herself 

individually, which will be explored in the final section of 

these findings, much of her identity seemed to come from 

a collective perspective; she was part of a larger body of 

professionals.  

 Structure of the scripted program. At times, 

Mrs. Hughes expressed an appreciation for the scripted 

curriculum. Though she wished she could use the 

techniques learned during her academic career, when I 

asked what she liked about teaching with the scripted 

program, she said, “I love how it’s set up, how it goes 

from working with the sounds and then it has, it 

incorporates the same pattern from the sounds you were 

working on in the morning and into the spelling words. 

And it just, it flows very nicely.” Mrs. Hughes was 

referring to the fact that, in the scripted ELA curriculum, 

each day of the week was structured the same, giving the 

scripted program a pattern that made it easy to implement. 

The structured approach that the scripted program took 

was something that Mrs. Hughes appreciated and felt was 

adequate in meeting her students’ needs. 

Planning in the scripted program. Likewise, 

Mrs. Hughes spoke of the ease of planning, stating, “I 

have—all my spelling was premade for every year. And I, 

everything is done. All those PowerPoints are done and I 

don’t have to reinvent the wheel because I’ve been doing 

it …” Mrs. Hughes was referring here to a series of 

PowerPoint slideshows that she and the other first grade 

teachers made to correspond with the lessons on spelling 

each week in the scripted curriculum. These PowerPoints 

were a transfer of the teacher’s edition overhead materials 

into a slideshow, which could be projected onto the class 

whiteboard, allowing the students to do the same word 

building activity as the manual described while using the 

classroom technology. Mrs. Hughes described this use of 

PowerPoints when I asked what innovations she made to 

the curriculum. In actuality this lesson still followed the 

script precisely; the material was simply presented 

through a different mode. Though she may have professed 

that she preferred the teaching style of guided reading, her 

preference for the minimal planning effort it took in ELA 

re-aligned her loyalty with the school district’s mandated 

ELA curriculum. She appeared to demonstrate a 

preference in her practice toward the professional 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

11 

program over her professed academic knowledge and 

beliefs.  

 Fidelity to the curriculum. Mrs. Hughes also 

defaulted to her professional discourse in expressing her 

fidelity to the school district’s mandated curriculum. 

When asked about being formally observed by her 

administrators, she said, “I think next year’s going to be 

one formal [observation] and then one informal…I should 

say one formal where they announce it and then one 

unannounced…And if you’re teaching and doing your 

job, then you have nothing to worry about.” Here, Mrs. 

Hughes showed an acceptance for the school district’s 

policy of observing their teachers unannounced. Since the 

school had a mandated curriculum, she was also equating 

following the script with “teaching and doing your job.” 

She felt no fear about an unannounced visit, perhaps 

because she rarely went off of the script; she had “nothing 

to worry about.” Safe teaching, to Mrs. Hughes, was 

following the mandated program, something she was 

good at. 

Integration of Common Core. When I 

questioned Mrs. Hughes about the writing of the new 

Common Core supplemental materials that her school 

district prepared the prior summer, she again talked about 

the mandated program as something that made her job 

easier. She said, “Over the summer, the district, they 

created the supplemental guide to enhance our scripted 

programs and they’re actually great. And they did all of 

the work for us…you know, they went through all the 

teacher guides and they aligned them to the Common 

Core, so that’s great.” Upon researching the supplemental 

materials further, I discovered that the school district did 

not, in fact, create the Common Core-aligned lessons. The 

curriculum was downloaded from the EngageNY website 

sponsored by the NYS Department of Education (New 

York State Education Department, 2013) which claimed 

to provide “educators across New York State with real-

time, professional learning tools and resources to support 

educators in reaching the State’s vision for a college- and 

career-ready education for all students” that “can be 

adopted or adapted for local purposes.” Though Mrs. 

Hughes did not seem to fully understand the process 

behind the creation of the EngageNY, Core Knowledge 

Language Arts (CKLA) (New York State Education 

Department, 2013) materials, she did seem thankful to be 

in a district that handled the task of planning for the 

standards for her. 

When I later mentioned how difficult some of 

the CKLA supplemental read aloud stories seemed, she 

replied, “Yeah. But [the students] are doing okay with it, 

and it’s nice to have an additional read aloud because 

there aren’t many read alouds.” It was her perception that 

her students enjoyed the Common Core-aligned lessons 

and that they benefitted from the read aloud activities. A 

closer look at a lesson in which the EngageNY 

supplemental materials were used can provide more 

insight into her statements. For example, during the week 

shown in Figure 2, a CKLA supplemental curriculum 

lesson was taught based on the story, “Writing in Ancient 

Egypt” (Figure 2). Although the Trophies (Harcourt, 

2003) story that week was a non-fiction piece about a 

veterinarian, the CKLA story was an historical fiction 

piece focused on a family who lived in ancient 

Mesopotamia. The following excerpt comes from my 

field notes from that day: 

Mrs. Hughes moved to the rocking chair and told 

[the students] they were going to continue with 

their story about ancient Egypt. She asked if 

anyone could remember the river that they were 

talking about yesterday. A student raised her 

hand to say, “The Nile River.” Mrs. Hughes 

responded, “Very good, the Nile River.” At this 

point she opened the white teacher’s manual 

notebook and began to read the story “Writing in 

Ancient Egypt.” 

She stopped occasionally to ask questions 

including, “What does exhausted mean?” from 

slide 6A-1. When no one answered, she reread 

the sentence from the story that contained the 

word: “They were both exhausted from being out 

in the hot sun all afternoon and relieved to be 

back on the banks of the river.” A student 

offered, “They were tired.” Mrs. Hughes said, 

“Very good, they were tired.” 

This excerpt was but one example of what was typically 

observed during the CKLA read aloud lessons, which 

Mrs. Hughes believed her students were “doing okay 

with.” The comprehension questions surrounding the 

advanced language and concepts from these read aloud 

stories were often met as the question above was: with 

blank stares and silence.  

Though it seemed clear to me that the CKLA 

supplemental lessons were difficult for her students, Mrs. 

Hughes seemed thankful for not having to create the 

materials that would align with the mandated standards on 

her own and, rather than speak ill of them, she praised 

their inclusion for being additional stories for the children 

to hear, positioning them as an enhancement to student 

learning. It seemed that Mrs. Hughes had grown 

comfortable with the materials her district provided and, 

though the discourse about her academic experiences 

suggested that she believed otherwise, she considered 

fidelity to the mandated curriculum as simply a part of the 

job.  

Patterns of talk within the scripted curriculum. 
The observed lessons and materials gathered from the 

curriculum helped to reveal specific patterns of talk taking 

place. While a full discourse analysis is outside of the 

purview of this project, it is still important to make note 

of some of the most salient patterns, including a very 

traditional one present in most lessons observed. Mrs. 

Hughes often had to repeat questions, reread passages,  



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

12 

  

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Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

13 

and reword the language of the curriculum in order for her 

students to be able to answer contextual comprehension 

questions, “Because,” in her words, “it’s not worded for 

the kids.” The pattern of talk described in the above 

lesson on Ancient Mesopotamia was a traditional, IRE 

pattern, which placed the text as the authority source and 

Mrs. Hughes as the keeper of the right answer found in 

the manual. This sort of questioning was quite common 

throughout her teaching of ELA and, though Mrs. Hughes 

expressed a preference toward a more interactive 

approach to instruction, the professional discourse of the 

scripted program influenced her to participate in this more 

traditional, teacher-centered talk. When children could not 

remember the very specific contextual details, Mrs. 

Hughes read again so that they might locate the right 

answer from the text. After the right answer was found, a 

response of “Very good” or “Excellent” often followed. 

This same traditional pattern was seen again and again 

throughout my visits, including in the following passage 

taken from my field notes: 

Mrs. Hughes read aloud from the Little Bear 

story: “He opened his eyes and saw two little 

squirrels. ‘Play with us,’ they said. ‘No time,’ 

said Little Bear. ‘I have to go home for lunch.’” 

Here, she stopped reading and asked, “Why can’t 

Little Bear play?” A student raised his hand and, 

when called upon, answered, “Because he has to 

go home and eat lunch.” Mrs. Hughes replied, 

“Excellent. Can someone find the sentence 

where it says he has to go home and eat lunch?” 

She called on another student whose hand was 

raised. This student read aloud the sentence from 

page 193 of her book and Mrs. Hughes said, 

“Excellent, that sentence told us exactly what the 

answer was.” 

In this short passage alone, we can see two salient 

examples of both a traditional pattern of talk and the text 

being treated as the authority source of knowledge in the 

classroom. Interestingly, the script of the teacher’s 

manual included two other questions, “Why do you think 

Little Bear shuts his eyes and lets the wind brush him?” 

and “How do you think Little Bear looks as he lets the 

wind brush him? Act it out.” While these questions 

arguably invited children’s personal perspectives and 

opinions into the conversation, as well as an embodied 

interpretation of the curriculum, Mrs. Hughes was 

mandated via her district’s pacing guide to forego these 

questions and ask only the context-based comprehension 

question.  

Mrs. Hughes’ Personal Discourse  

 Mrs. Hughes’ personal discourse was made up of 

the various ways that she identified herself as a teacher 

and as a person. Much of this discourse was revealed 

when I asked her questions about the kind of teacher she 

was or what she did apart from the school district’s 

mandates. Even with some very strong personal opinions, 

Mrs. Hughes continued to default to her professional 

discourse throughout my conversations with her. 

Personal identity. Mrs. Hughes assumed a 

discourse through which she created a personal identity 

both within and outside of her professional discourse.  

She spoke very strongly about the kind of teacher she 

was. In reference to how she taught prior to the 

introduction of the Common Core-aligend supplemental 

materials, Mrs. Hughes stated, “I differentiated no matter 

what because that’s just the type of teacher I am, and I 

feel that I can do that more now that I am tenured.” It 

seemed that Mrs. Hughes personally perceived of herself 

as a teacher apart from the mandated program that her 

school used. Demonstrating this, she later said, “I love 

teaching language arts, even though it’s scripted. Like I 

said, I add my own twists to it.” Here, language arts was 

something that she loved, but only when she was adding 

her own innovations or when she taught outside of the 

script. The phrase, “even though it’s scripted,” connoted 

that Mrs. Hughes may have felt that the script was 

something that took away from her teaching of language 

arts, which she claimed to love; a sort of necessary evil 

that she had to “twist” in order to get by. When probed 

more about these twists, Mrs. Hughes shared: “If we’re 

doing a story on maps, I’ll bring in, I have a blow-up 

globe, I’ll bring that in and I’ll show it for artifacts that 

aren’t necessarily included in the script but that—I just 

feel—that add.” Later, when I asked her what changes she 

makes to the curriculum, she responded:  

The spelling I change every time. Day one, there 

is supposed to be a pretest, I don’t do a pretest. I 

do the introduction the way that I do it with the 

routine that I do because I have found through 

the years that it is more engaging for the kids and 

they remember it more than, oh let me see if I 

can get the word right before I’ve even been 

introduced to the word. 

Upon close inspection, these “twists” to the script are 

little more than bringing in an object from home—one 

that is not truly incorporated into the curriculum or 

providing depth to the material—skipping questions that 

she felt were too challenging for her students, or 

eliminating an element of the program that does not seem 

to make sense to her. These hardly seem like innovations 

when one considers some of the impressive research that 

has been published on multimodal composing in urban 

classrooms (Miller & McVee, 2012), play and interaction 

within mandated programs (Kontovourki & Siegel, 2010), 

and the use of technology to open doors for exploration 

outside of the classroom (Kist, 2010). Perhaps Mrs. 

Hughes was unaware of these possibilities or had simply 

accepted the way of life in the mandated curriculum. 

Another part of Mrs. Hughes’ personal identity 

was her need to better herself through “professional 

learning opportunities,” “professional development,” and 

professional magazine subscriptions outside of the 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

14 

workday. When I asked about the support she received in 

her building, she mentioned that Campbell Elementary 

was without a professional reading coach to help them 

manage the new Common Core State Standards as well as 

the regular ELA curriculum. Without the help of a reading 

coach, Mrs. Hughes took it upon herself to subscribe to 

magazines and continue her learning in order to continue 

to grow professionally. When her district failed to meet 

her needs as an educator, she took it upon herself to do so.  

Personal recognition by her school. Mrs. 

Hughes personally identified herself as someone with 

great knowledge, experience, and wherewithal when it 

came to her profession, and she recognized that her school 

district capitalized on her strong teaching by giving her 

the responsibility of teaching the most struggling readers 

in first grade. She said that for the first grade 

“differentiated block that we have…I teach direct 

instruction. So it’s the lowest group and I only have five 

children.”  “Direct instruction,” or DI, was a reference to 

an intensely scripted reading program that the school 

mandated for children who were at the lowest level of 

reading in the grade—in this case, five students who Mrs. 

Hughes met with each day after the whole-class 90-

minute ELA instruction. When I questioned Mrs. Hughes 

about why she was the first grade teacher chosen to work 

with the lowest level of readers in the grade, she replied, 

“They wanted a strong teacher teaching [them]…” It 

seemed that the school decided that the more academic 

need students had, the more scripted their instruction 

needed to be; the more apt a teacher was to follow the 

intense direct instruction, the more likely she was to be 

called on to teach these most struggling readers. 

Mrs. Hughes thought of herself as a competent, 

knowledgeable teacher whom her district relied upon in 

order to help the weakest students in ELA. It could be 

said that Mrs. Hughes was proud of this fact, while at the 

same time, stating, “If I was not teaching direct 

instruction, I would have the area groups [differentiation 

groups], and I could, I could do guided reading. But I was 

told I have to teach DI, so.” Here, we can see the direct 

conflict in discourses: Mrs. Hughes personally wanted to 

teach guided reading but she was professionally mandated 

to teach direct instruction. One can almost sense her 

frustration and, at the same time, her complacency. 

Discussion 

 Mrs. Hughes possessed three conflicting 

discourses from which she drew for her identity as a 

teacher: an academic discourse derived from her time 

studying in a master’s program; a professional discourse 

that developed during her time as a teacher in Campbell 

Elementary School; and a personal discourse that had 

arguably been evolving for her entire life. Specifically 

interesting are why she privileged the professional 

discourse and how she compartmentalized her discourses. 

 

Privileging Professional Discourse Yet Preferring 

Academic Discourse 
 Research has shown that teachers, “ultimately 

receive professional and personal rewards from the[ir] 

district for complying with the mandated program,” 

(MacGillivray et al., 2004, p. 140) including becoming a 

member of a group of colleagues who all identify with 

working with a mandated program and a feeling of 

control and expertise at being able to adequately manage 

a mandated program. Mrs. Hughes seemed to have placed 

great value on her identity as a teacher in her building 

who was willing and able to perform these tasks. By 

complying with her district’s mandates, she had become 

someone who other teachers looked up to. In fact, she 

became someone with enough success at following the 

scripted program, that her school “rewarded” her by 

asking her to teach the lowest level of readers in the 

grade. While this meant very tightly controlled, scripted 

direct instruction, to Mrs. Hughes, this seemed to be 

something to be proud of. Her district knew that, as a 

“strong teacher,” she could follow the script perfectly, so 

she was given the task of working with the most 

struggling readers. Mrs. Hughes seemed to align her 

loyalty with her district’s decision to use a mandated 

program; something that simply became part of her job 

and that earned her recognition as a strong teacher. 

 Another potential implication of working in a 

school that has a mandated curriculum is the risk of 

equating of good teaching with following the scripted 

program. It seemed that Mrs. Hughes had taken this 

perspective at times. For example, when Mrs. Hughes 

said, “If you’re teaching and doing your job, then you 

have nothing to worry about,” in reference to the potential 

unannounced observation by her administrators, she was 

acknowledging that her job was to follow the scripted 

program. “Teaching” and “doing her job” as her school 

administrators expected was teaching the way they 

mandated and, despite her “main wish” to teach language 

arts using methods she had studied in college, Mrs. 

Hughes was not likely to risk her job by straying too far 

from the script. She seemed to have taken up the 

professional discourse that good teaching was equal to 

following the script. When teachers are audited or 

observed in order to determine their fidelity to a program 

that their school district has mandated, they are left with 

only two options: teach the mandated way or leave. Of 

course Mrs. Hughes would rather keep her job than leave 

it—she expressed a deep love for teaching and for her 

students—and the best way to ensure this was to teach the 

way her district wanted her to. In her mind it seemed, the 

best job safety was to teach by the script in the best way 

she could, something that earned her respect and 

recognition by her administrators and other teachers, both 

incentives to continue following the scripted program. 

 It could be inferred that Mrs. Hughes had great 

difficulty breaking down a façade of happiness with her 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

15 

program that she had built over the five years of her 

teaching career. Being a relatively new teacher, a fact that 

has been shown in much research to increase her 

likelihood of stress, frustration, and burnout (Henry, 

Bastian, & Fortner, 2011; Jones, 2012; Panesar, 2010), 

Mrs. Hughes was still at a risky point in her career. 

However, she had a strong sense of what effective reading 

instruction could and, in her mind, should look like, and 

this was in stark contrast with what she was mandated to 

teach. Instead of using our interviews to complain about 

this situation, Mrs. Hughes chose to speak of the scripted 

program in a mostly positive manner. It seemed as though 

she wanted to make it clear to me that everything in her 

job was fine. She did not express strongly positive 

feelings toward the scripted program, but she also did not 

complain about it. However, when she responded to my 

questions about what she would change, the detailed 

explanations of what she would do differently were often 

followed by comments such as, “It’s such a shame,” or “I 

was told I have to teach DI”. This language was certainly 

sad to hear, yet much of our time talking was spent on 

what Mrs. Hughes liked about teaching language arts. It 

seemed as though she had become complacent. Going 

against her school district’s requests would have been 

extremely difficult and is something that could potentially 

cost her the teaching job.  

Few could blame Mrs. Hughes for her 

acceptance of the situation and, indeed, there are many 

other teachers in her position who privilege the discourse 

of their schools just as she did. When considering this in 

light of social justice education, the implication of a 

teacher who acts with complacency, despite having a deep 

desire and knowledge of how to teach effectively, is both 

sad and frightening. Mrs. Hughes was a hard-working, 

respected professional to whom other teachers in her 

building turned for help and advice. She knew the details 

of her ELA curriculum better than many in her building 

and was called upon to teach the neediest readers in her 

grade. If a teacher like Mrs. Hughes was willing to 

privilege the discourse of the scripted program and what 

has been mandated, what does this say for the teachers 

who have come after her and will continue to join the 

teaching force under others like her? Mrs. Hughes had 

become a point person in her building for teaching other 

teachers about how to maneuver the curriculum materials; 

if she was unwilling to recognize that the scripted 

program was inadequate in meeting the needs of all of her 

students, she is not likely to help others to come to this 

conclusion or to assist others in finding new ways of 

teaching a more culturally relevant pedagogy. This 

systemic and inherited sense of complacency can come 

with privileging the discourse of a mandated curriculum 

and is extremely difficult to stand up against. 

It is important to note that it was possible that 

Mrs. Hughes spoke about her desires to change her 

curriculum in such a manner because she understood that 

I was studying at a university that openly frowned upon 

the use of scripted curricula, the same university at which 

she earned her graduate degree. It is possible that she was 

orienting herself to me as a member of the university 

community and thus presenting her work to a person she 

perceived was a representative of ideologies related to 

teaching that did not support the use of scripted curricula. 

My identity as a researcher from State University could 

have had an influence on how she responded to my 

questions about her scripted curriculum, a curriculum in 

which she may not have found fault. I went to great 

measures to ensure that my opinions about scripted 

curricula were never voiced, and in fact, Mrs. Hughes 

only knew that my study was about teaching ELA and 

was never blatantly asked about her scripted nature of her 

curriculum—she volunteered this information. Still, with 

these precautions, my position as a researcher from State 

University likely played some role in the co-construction 

of the dialogue of our interviews and this bias cannot be 

ignored. Nonetheless, without access to Mrs. Hughes’ 

thoughts, I can only infer what she meant and present 

possible explanations for her statements. 

Compartmentalized Discourses 

 Returning to Bakhtin’s notion of critical 

interanimation it seemed as though Mrs. Hughes 

constantly contradicted herself, saying, for example, “I 

love teaching ELA,” and in the very next breath, “even 

though it’s scripted”.  Although there are likely many 

reasons for why Mrs. Hughes felt the need to qualify that 

her love of ELA was despite the fact that she had a 

mandated and scripted curriculum, it seemed that this sort 

of contradictory talk happened most often when she was 

talking against the school’s mandated ELA program. 

Someone who is critically interanimated is able “to regard 

one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) 

through the eyes of another language,” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 

295) and can make sense of what causes one discourse to 

be voiced while others are silenced. With regards to Mrs. 

Hughes, it seemed as though she was unable to reach a 

level of critical interanimation and, instead, kept her 

various discourses separate, compartmentalized. As a 

result, she seemed to perceive of her job as going well, 

her students as learning adequately, and her twists to the 

script, including the PowerPoint versions of the scripted 

lessons, as innovative.  

Mrs. Hughes’ positive attitude toward her school 

and its curricula show how important her teaching job 

was to her. While other teachers may have taken an 

interview as an opportunity to complain about the many 

mandates placed upon them, Mrs. Hughes used our time 

together to talk about the things she liked. This is 

commendable and concerning at the same time. Why did 

she feel the need to foreground her loyalty with the school 

district? While there is a constellation of causes for 

working complacently in a system of injustice, research of 

this nature calls attention to the social inequalities against 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

16 

teachers and students. Feeling that it is one’s job to teach 

with mandated materials is a form of institutionalized 

oppression. Teachers in this position are side-stepped by 

their administrators and publishing companies and are 

robbed of the opportunity to infuse their teaching with 

their own expertise and skill. At the same time, a 

teacher’s voice is very small up against these entities and 

it is clear to see how loyalty and complacency become the 

only means for survival within the larger system. 

There were probably many reasons for Mrs. 

Hughes to keep her discourses compartmentalized. 

Namely, it seemed as though she had not yet recognized 

and acknowledged how strongly she desired to teach 

using the practices she had learned in her academic 

career. This may have been a result of her still-early 

career position and a lack of the necessary “survival 

skills” (Panesar, 2010, p. 12) for meeting the demands of 

the classroom, including recognizing and speaking her 

concerns to her school administrators. Mrs. Hughes 

placed her job—and its resulting professional discourse—

before her personal and academic experiences, and she 

likely felt that letting go of these other discourses was 

simply a part of being a teacher in Campbell Elementary 

School. Likewise, she was part of a larger system of 

acceptance of the scripted program, a system that was 

likely very difficult to act against. Her work environment 

was one of pressure, accountability, fidelity, and 

standardization, not one of innovation, risk-taking, 

experimentation, and creativity. Mrs. Hughes saw the 

things she learned in college and the things she 

appreciated in her personal life as secondary to the 

school’s mandates. These secondary discourses were for 

“if I have extra time,” or “if [the students] are not getting 

something,” rather than being a regular part of her 

repertoire of practice.  

The ability to think critically about one way of 

being through other ways of being—critical 

interanimation—could provide great satisfaction, 

gratification, and a sense that what a teacher has done and 

learned is valued. Feeling the need to compartmentalize 

what has been learned and what is personal in order to 

focus only on what has been mandated professionally can 

cause tension and feelings of colonization for a teacher. 

Being a member of group of people who are willing to 

accept poor conditions could lead to one’s own 

acceptance of these conditions. A sense that nobody else 

seems to mind, why should I? could emerge. At loss in 

this scenario are teachers who are willing to fight for their 

rights to be contributing members of their school who are 

valued for their professional opinions and expertise. 

Being critically interanimated can allow a teacher to 

understand how and why he or she chooses to take up the 

speech genre of the larger building community as well as 

what propels one to speak against others in the same 

community. The advantage of this is a deeper 

understanding of how discourse impacts one’s ability to 

be creative, individual, and valuable to others in the 

community.  

Conversely, critical interanimation may reveal 

that one is not valued by his or her school, but, rather, is 

asked to compartmentalize the discourses that are not part 

of the school’s chosen discourse, as was seen with Mrs. 

Hughes. This, while disheartening, can lead to recognition 

of injustice, oppression, and inequity in teaching. Being 

critical of the discourses one assumes and recognizing 

apprenticeship into certain social practices can give 

teachers strength to challenge the inherited injustices that 

may be passed down to them. Conscious awareness of the 

discourses at work in one’s teaching can lead to 

reflectiveness and, eventually, to a critical self-awareness 

and the need to change negative factors.  

A More Socially Just Curriculum 

There have long been educators who have 

devoted their lives to fighting for social justice in the 

education system (Freire, 1993; Dewey, 1934; Finn, 2009; 

Fine & Weis, 2003; Anyon, 1981). As we move through 

eras of educational reform and mandates, many have 

voiced concern over how a school curriculum is designed 

and whom it best serves.  The teaching that was seen in 

Mrs. Hughes’ classroom aligns closely with Finn’s 

description of domesticating literacy (2009), with children 

being drilled on phonics and test-style questions. This 

type of learning threatens to perpetuate inequities in 

American schools and does little more than train students 

for life in the working class.  

As schools become increasingly diverse, the 

need for curricular redesign to meet the needs of all 

learners becomes more apparent. The classroom looks 

vastly different than it did even ten years ago, with 

students varying dramatically in culture, religion, 

sexuality, physical ability, socioeconomic status, and 

language ability. It is no longer enough to be aware of the 

various backgrounds of students; educators must strive to 

adopt what Ladson-Billings (1995)  called a culturally 

relevant pedagogy consisting of the “ability to develop 

students academically, a willingness to nurture and 

support cultural competence, and the development of a 

sociopolitical or critical consciousness” (p. 483). 

Culturally relevant pedagogy stems from the ideology that 

all people learn differently based on their backgrounds 

and their cultures, and teachers must equip themselves 

with the tools necessary for maximizing the learning 

experience for all, not just for some learners.  

 Ladson-Billings (1995) described culturally 

relevant pedagogy as “a theoretical model that not only 

addresses student achievement but also helps students to 

accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing 

critical perspectives that challenge inequalities that 

schools (and other institutions) perpetuate” (p. 469). This 

two-part perspective on pedagogy—addressing student 

achievement while helping students develop their own 

identities—is what many scripted curriculum programs 



Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

17 

lack. Student achievement is generally the focus while 

student identity is assumed. Culturally relevant teaching 

takes into account the various diversities that exist in a 

classroom, whether cultural, political, socioeconomical, 

physical, or demographic, and considers what ought to be 

taught to learners based on these characteristics. Teaching 

of this nature is not prescribed, nor is it scripted and rigid. 

Rather, culturally relevant teaching emerges with the 

needs of the learners and is an active, changing process 

that evolves through and with learning.  

Secondly, and arguably more importantly, 

culturally relevant teaching invites students to challenge 

societal norms, to ask questions of their education, and to 

work toward a more socially just life. Classrooms where 

culturally relevant pedagogy is used might recognize a 

problem in the school or community, such as a disconnect 

between the stories of the textbook and the reality that is 

lived by the students. Then, the teacher would work to 

provide a space to change the curriculum to solve the 

problem. For example, in Dutro’s study (2010), a 

classroom of third graders was asked what “hard times” 

meant. The scripted curriculum expected that they would 

respond within the context of the story they were reading, 

a story about a Depression-era family dealing with the 

difficulties of life on a farm during the 1930s. Instead, the 

children used the open-ended question as an opportunity 

to write about their own hard times, creating a space 

within the curriculum to discuss poverty in the 21
st
 

century. A culturally relevant teacher might take this one 

step further and hold a discussion about living with 

poverty, allowing students to share their stories and feel a 

sense of support and belonging. As a class, they might 

explore other books or films that take up the issue of 

poverty or research local or national groups that assist 

those living in poverty. While this might seem far outside 

of the scope of what is typically found in a school’s 

curriculum, this is the type of learning experience that 

would likely benefit the students in Dutro’s study as well 

as the students in Mrs. Hughes’ class, that is, a culturally 

relevant learning experience. 

Implications 

Through this project, insight was gained into 

how an early elementary teacher felt as she worked within 

a scripted ELA program and how she assumed different 

discourses when describing her experiences. Crucial to 

understanding how teachers like Mrs. Hughes—who have 

studied at top-ranking universities and learned many 

practices for innovative teaching—ultimately feel the 

need to compartmentalize their discourses, is to examine 

the larger political scene as it pertains to education. This 

understanding can help in examining how federal 

mandates and teacher accountability, and the resulting 

curriculum programs, influence the teaching happening in 

urban schools.  

Within the theoretical framework of this study, I 

examined the ideas of Bakhtin and Gee, two men who 

talk at length about how language is connected to identity. 

They both describe how what we say relates directly to 

the identity that we construct for ourselves within various 

social situations. Mrs. Hughes spoke often of how much 

she loved teaching, her students, and her school. 

However, she was a member of a school system that did 

not value her and her colleagues as professionals, but, 

instead, opted to use a “teacher- proof” ELA curriculum 

(White, 2012, p. 193) that was planned and packaged for 

her. Even the new Common Core State Standard-aligned 

supplemental lessons were designed without her input, 

becoming a new requirement that she had to address. Mrs. 

Hughes’ language and therefore her teacher identity, was 

scripted for her. What she said as she taught came from 

the scripted curriculum. The discourse of the program was 

expected by her school district and Mrs. Hughes was 

mandated to follow a pacing guide and was observed to 

make sure she was being faithful. Teaching outside of the 

script was not even an option for Mrs. Hughes and so she 

developed a sense of complacency toward her mandated 

program. This can happen when one works within a 

system of power and oppression as was present at 

Campbell Elementary. Mrs. Hughes did not have a say in 

what curriculum was selected by her school, nor did she 

have the right to change the curriculum to meet the needs 

of her students. As a result, she knew that the only option 

was to teach in the way she was mandated and this is what 

she did. This situation of scripted instruction prevented 

Mrs. Hughes from creating culturally relevant and 

effective lessons that would meet the needs of her 

students while also contributing to the school community 

and the community at large. 

Giving voice to those who work daily with 

commercially manufactured curricula can help other 

educators recognize ways that they can “attempt to derail 

these [inequalities] rather than reinforce them, whether 

intentionally or not” (Fine & Weis, 2003, p. 108). 

Teachers are professionals who have trained in how best 

to design and implement curriculum for a diverse body of 

learners. Senge et al. (2000) reminded us that one of the 

“most profound purpose[s] that education might have” is 

“helping young people learn how to create the lives they 

truly want to create” (p. 167). Teachers are the direct link 

between curriculum and student (Applebee, 1974) and 

without the ability to use their expertise to meet each 

learner at his or her point of need, and guide him or her to 

creating the life they want, teachers can be left feeling 

undervalued, overworked, and ultimately frustrated 

(Santoro, 2011; Stillman, 2011; Thomas, 2012).  

It was the goal of this research to listen to a 

teacher working within a scripted ELA curriculum, to 

explore what she liked and did not like about this type of 

teaching, and to contribute to the larger body of research 

that exists on curriculum and instruction. The knowledge 

gained in this study has implications for other teachers 

who are also under mandates to use scripted curricula, for 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

18 

administrators who desire to provide the best support they 

can for their teachers, and for policy makers who have the 

interest of children in mind when they promote and pass 

federal mandates, such as the No Child Left Behind Act 

and Race to the Top. 

Conclusion 
Mrs. Hughes and other teachers like her work 

every day to create a balance between what the school 

district mandates, what they can feasibly cover in one 

day, and what they know is best for their learners. 

Standards were created to help ensure that all students 

receive an equal chance at learning. Curricular programs 

have been designed to help teachers easily meet the 

guidelines set out by standards. However, somewhere 

along this path, practices have been distorted, voices 

silenced, and professional creativity stifled. The system 

has changed from one of helping guide teachers to the 

best curricular choices to one of mandating what is 

provided to all students. Senge et al. (2000) ask, “What if 

the goals and dreams [our students] truly want aren’t on 

the menu? Then they’re out of luck.” (p. 169) When 

adults become complacent within a system operating 

around them, and are either unable to or fear recognizing 

the inequalities of the system, it is always and 

unfortunately children who lose out.   

Studies such as this shed light on the intricate 

details of how school systems work and show just how 

entangled teachers become in the world of mandates, 

scripts, assessments, requirements, and fidelity. While 

Mrs. Hughes likely did not recognize the domestication of 

literacy at work in her classroom, her students were being 

carefully crafted into obedient, rank-and-file members of 

the working class poor. They were not challenged to 

think, create, or question anything about the material they 

were presented. They were not learning skills to help 

them in the inevitable lifelong struggles for “better 

schools, better health care, enriched emotional and 

spiritual lives, powerful political organizations, stronger 

unions, and greater appreciation of their own culture and 

the culture of others” (Finn, 2009, p. 197) that they would 

encounter after leaving school. Rather, Mrs. Hughes’ 

students, via her teaching of the mandated ELA 

curriculum, were being trained to understand that doing 

well in school meant getting the answers right, answers 

that came from the teacher’s manual.  With every ELA 

lesson, a sad circle of power was closing, with Mrs. 

Hughes and the curriculum on the inside, and students, 

inexorably, on the outside. 

Research that delves more deeply into this 

educational crisis is crucial, particularly in low-income, 

high-poverty urban schools such as Campbell Elementary. 

An exploration of several teachers working in similar 

conditions to Mrs. Hughes might offer a more complete, 

system-wide look at how urban teachers with scripted 

curricula perceive their job. Calling attention to the larger 

political issues at work in schools helps teachers to 

understand the choices that they have or do not have 

professionally. Conditions in schools will only change 

when educators become aware of, and then willing to 

fight for, social justice, not only for their students but also 

for themselves. 

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Conflicting Discourses: A First Grade Teacher’s Perceptions of Teaching with a Scripted ELA Curriculum 

21 

 

Article Citation 

Sturm, S. A. (2014). Conflicting discourses: A first grade teacher’s perceptions of teaching with a scripted ELA curriculum. 

Current Issues in Education, 17(3). Retrieved from http://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/1320 

 

Author Notes 

Susan A. Sturm 

Assistant Professor of Literacy 

State University of New York at Fredonia 

Thompson Hall W261 

Fredonia, NY 14603 

sturm@fredonia.edu 

 

Susan is an Assistant Professor of Literacy in the State University of New York at Fredonia's Department of Language, 

Learning & Leadership. Her Ph.D. was earned from the University at Buffalo in Elementary Education. Susan's research 

examines the use of mandated and scripted English language arts curricula to teach reading.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Manuscript received: 10/29/2013 

Revisions received: 06/11/2014 

Accepted: 06/13/2014 



Current Issues in Education Vol. 17 No. 3 

22 

 

 

 

Volume 17, Number 3         December 22, 2014                    ISSN 1099-839X 

 
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