Beyond “Building Bridges”: Repertoires as a Necessary Educational Metaphor in a Hybrid Society

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Identities and Repertoires: The Social Constructions of Race, Multiculturalism, and Figured Worlds

Abstract

This theoretical article describes how strategies designed to help students from non-dominant cultures achieve school success are undercut by metaphors inherent in the language used to describe culture and identity. The spatial metaphor implicated in language such as “building bridges between home and school” constructs home and school cultures as static, discrete objects, and reinforces an essentializing worldview. An alternative metaphor, that of repertoires, constructs home and school cultures as dynamic and expanding resources that can be drawn from selectively in specific contexts for specific purposes. The metaphor of repertoires replaces “building bridges” with language such as “growing intersections,” reinforcing a social-constructionist view of identity and culture aligned with the theoretical grounding of multicultural education and resource pedagogies.

Author

• Michael Metz, Stanford University