Imagination and Improvisation as Tools Toward Human Schooling

• In Event: Revisiting Literacies and Identities: Agency, Intertextuality, and Positioning in Learning Spaces

Abstract

To see how literacy practices and identities are transformed through shared histories and improvisation toward imagined futures, this paper follows youth who have been historically marginalized as they occupy positions of creative flexibility and engage in moments of connection, viewed and theorized as instances of love, in classroom spaces. Our paper links findings from two related studies in urban ELA classrooms: a large public high school, and a small, mission-driven charter school, both with high levels of poverty and racial/ethnic diversity. The first study looks at dialogic stances taken up by two African American male students in a “regular” tracked twelfth grade class. The second study analyzes how middle school youth with histories of domestic violence enact culturally agentic identities when negotiating literacies of social critique. We consider youths’ histories of participation and the multiple discourses in play while addressing these shared queries: (1) What are the features of school/classroom cultures when they function as liberatory spaces? (2) What do everyday moments of connection across difference look like specific to literacy practices? (3) What expressions of identity are created as a result of these transformative literacy engagements? Sources include audio/video, photos, field notes, interviews, and student work.
A critical sociocultural framework (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007) addresses the intersections of identities and practices as youth participate in educational spaces. We also conceptualize love, drawing upon critical theorists like Freire (1996) and hooks (2006), as a necessary and unsentimental pre-condition for non-oppressive, dialogic education. Evoking Bakhtin (1981; 1984) in two ways—classrooms as dialogic spaces and the notion of carnival as embodied cultural practice--we discuss how both shape youths’ navigation and interactions of school experience. Critical ethnography (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) and mediated discourse analysis (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) are used together; both seek to highlight “ideas about how to link actions to larger structures of social organization” (Norris & Jones, 2005, p. 10).
Study one finds connections between two students, who together influence the class during sustained discussions about messages in popular media texts. The two create what might be considered heterotopic spaces (Foucault, 2007), or moments of carnival (Bakhtin, 1984) by breaking with the official activity, while still allowing that activity to exist (i.e. improvisational dialogic interactions). Study two includes the discussion on how female youth with histories of domestic violence or HDV youth (Author One, In Press) and educators reshape cultural and institutional Discourses predicated on the dialectical interplay between love, farce, tension, and social critique through literacy practices. All of these practices fed creative tension and problem solving into discussions about media texts and literature, and ultimately offered a counter-narrative about what it might mean to be a black male or a HDV youth in school.
The tools of imagination and improvisation in education, along with manifestations of connection--approaching love—shift what is possible in classroom spaces. We see teacher and student literacy practices/identities as creating new conditions for inclusion and equity.

Authors

• Tracey Pyscher, Metropolitan State University

• Anne Crampton, University of Minnesota