Constructing and Complicating Youth Identities: Navigating Language Interactions Within and About a Native American Literature Classroom

• In Event: Leveling the Language of Multilingual/Multicultural Students: Toward Pluralizing Definitions of Academic Language and Humanizing Pedagogy

Abstract

This presentation follows two participants— Eileen, a Native American student, and Abby, a Caucasian American student—and their navigation within and around the 12th grade Native American Literature classroom they took part in. Author (2013) examines the ways their fluid identities are mediated through language interactions centering on the content of this unique classroom. This English-elective class is the only one teaching Native American Literature in this urban location despite the school’s close proximity to two reservations and large population of Indigenous peoples in Arizona. Its creation came during a time when Arizona passed legislation to ban ethnic studies from public schools (HB2281). The class centers on Indigenous perspectives on history and literature, giving students a rare opportunity to read, see, and hear about local and U.S. tribes, both in historical and contemporary contexts.
Using Lomawaima and McCarty’s (2006) Safety Zone Theory, Bakhtin’s (1981) Dialogism, and Brayboy’s (2006) Tribal Critical Race Theory, author (#?), seeks to understand how shifting spaces construct/deconstruct student identities in classroom and online spaces.
The author collected data as a participant observer in the classroom as part of a three-year longitudinal ethnographic study. Seventeen participants were interviewed twice for approximately 45 minutes by asking questions that were fueled by classroom interactions, observations, and discussions. In addition, participants’ written reflections were analyzed and coded (Charmaz, 2006).
Eileen moves between two very different classroom spaces: her second period Native American literature class and her third period American history classroom. This movement traces the many contradictions and complications in moving from an Indigenous-centered literature classroom to a Euro-centric history classroom. Eileen said that having one space where her ideas, her opinions, her identity can be shown and heard allows her to deal with the other spaces in her school and in her community that deny her portions of her self.
Conversely, Abby, who is the only Caucasian-American student in the class, sees this same space as dangerous and unsafe to her beliefs and background, at times feeling as though believing what is being taught is “betraying” her family’s beliefs. She has had to censor what she says in class for fear of starting conflicts. Instead, Abby has reverted to discussing Native American topics outside of class as well as in online chatting spaces where her dominant perspectives are validated and supported.
This paper shares Eileen and Abby’s voice, their confusion, excitement, collective counter-stories, or testimonios (de Certeau, 1988), in order to show the complexity and complications of this new learning environment that attempts to center Indigenous knowledge in the classroom.
The juxtaposition of Eileen and Abby’s experience helps to answer the question: How does classroom discussions make their way into the ideological construction of students and, if in disagreement, how are these same discussions rejected? In addition, the author seeks to answer: How can more safe spaces for marginalized students make their way into schools and communities?

Author

• Timothy Jose San Pedro, The Ohio State University