“I Once Was Lost But Now I Am Found”: Teaching Against Cultural Reproduction

• In Event: Bridging New Literacy Studies, Classroom Language Ethnography, and Bourdieu’s Social Philosophy

Abstract

The presentation focuses on the pedagogical approaches of an African-American teacher in a predominantly African-American working-class community who utilizes African American culture, language, and community as a set of tools to refract and reposition dominant discourses. Rather than using Language Arts instruction as a means to encourage academic literacy alone, historicizing literacy in the African-American community is used as nexus between sets of reading practices and choice making that align student as learner and student as actor in one’s own life. The paper highlights teacher questioning and student response as syncopated acts for thinking in an environment where teaching is often positioned as a pedagogy of reproduction. Bourdieu’s notion of “field” is exemplified in how the classroom community is reconstituted through literate thinking activities to build a space where culture is a tool used for sense making. The classroom field is defined by the engagement between the teacher and the students even as they participate in learning in opposition to the dominant cultural norms that often define pedagogy. Through classroom ethnography, the nuances of African American culture and language are visible as New Literacy Studies provides a framework language in situ to have alternative meanings.

The presentation uses Bourdieu’s sociology and the New Literacy Studies as a mode of inquiry alongside Critical Race Theory. The presentation underscores the complexities and overlap that exist when education seeks to serve as a critical and liberating set of processes.

Discourse Analysis is used as a methodology to deconstruct the linguistic interaction in the classroom unveiling how our modes of inquiry run parallel rather than as tangential lines (Dixson, A., & Bloome, D., 2007; Bloome, D., Carter, S., Christian, B., Otto, S., & Shuart-Faris, N. ,2005).

Data for this presentation comes from a larger year-long ethnographic study conducted in a 7th grade Language Arts classroom which included video-taped data and transcripts of that data from classroom instruction.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
(In this section could you list some specific findings such as what was found through the discourse analysis or what was found about the literacy practices constructed in the classroom).

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: Bourdieu’s theories of education, reproduction, and cultural production, the theories of the New Literacy Studies and their challenge to autonomous models of literacy, provide an opening for understanding the potential of a cultural politics of reading curriculum and pedagogy. But, they are not enough. The close examination of Ms. Wilson’s and her students’ pedagogic action, and in particular their instructional conversations around literary texts, accompanied by recognition of the various historical and institutional contexts in which they acted, suggest new ways of conceptualizing reading and literacy curriculum and pedagogy. The reading and literacy practices Ms. Wilson is pushing her students toward are not scripted nor predetermined; but rather are spaces for improvisational practices as they address the cultural politics of personhood and of being actors in the world (as opposed to just being acted upon).

Author

• Ayanna F. Brown, Elmhurst College