Teachers as Cosmopolitan Agents: Putting Diversity at the Pedagogical Center

• In Event: Cosmopolitan Literacies: Examining the Transnational Turn in Research and Pedagogy

Abstract

Objectives: In a global world where texts, ideas, and people rapidly circulate (Appadurai, 1996), “super-diversity” is becoming the norm (Vertovec, 2007), and networked communication shifts relationships between people and texts in unprecedented ways (Lam & Warriner, 2012), there is a pressing need for educators to develop and foster new pedagogical orientations to difference and diversity, particularly as people grapple not just with differences in language, culture, or ideology but with the heightened challenges of mediated communication. This paper examines the practices of five teachers around the world who participated in an educational social networking project linking adolescents online. The paper traces how teachers negotiated this global ‘contact zone,’ a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt, 1991, p. 34), by developing their capacities as cosmopolitan agents (Hansen, 2011) who reflectively navigated the local and the global by locating difference at the heart of their pedagogies.

Theoretical Framework: This study maps how teachers negotiated global contact zones (Canagarajah, 2012; cf. Blommaert, 2010) by drawing on insights from sociocultural theory about the meditational role of cultural tools in activity. The study is framed by cultural-historical activity theory (Cole & Engeström, 1993), which provides a framework for understanding individual and joint social practices in dynamic and interconnected relationships over time. The elements of mediated activity (Wertsch, 1998) provided a set of flexible conceptual tools for understanding the “horizontal, concurrent, and contradictory forms of movement and change across contexts” (Gutiérrez, 2007, p. 119).

Methods/Data: This multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) traced how five teachers in Norway, South Africa, India, and the U.S. (NY and CA) participated together in an educational social networking project, investigating how teachers’ practices and beliefs around educational social networking and literacy developed over time. Over two years I collected extensive interview, observational, artifactual, and informatic data, including participant interviews, transcripts of teacher-planning meetings, emails/memos, field notes, video/audio data, and all artifacts and communication data from the social network.

Findings: The networked community was characterized by multiple contact zones that teachers regularly negotiated: steering across different beliefs about youth language and literacy practices; balancing the needs of the larger networked community with those of their classrooms and schools; navigating positions of authority and expertise with students and fellow teachers; traversing shifting definitions of academic/social on an educational social network. Over time and through increased collaboration, a new discourse genre of youth-created videos emerged that functioned as transcontextualizing artifacts (Brandt & Clinton, 2002) mediating teachers’ understandings of the networked community as contact zone. Diversity and difference became central to their reimagined pedagogies, and as they began to use diversity as a resource in their teaching (Gutiérrez, Moralez, & Martinez, 2009), new spaces opened for dialogue to emerge.

Significance: This study offers a framework for understanding teachers as cosmopolitan agents, a resource orientation that challenges prevailing deficit discourses about students and teachers, frames difference and diversity as a generative pedagogical starting place, and helps us imagine how to navigate global/local contact zones in thoughtful, collaborative, and ethical ways.

Author

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania