Challenging Effects of the Common Core on Multilingual Children's Identities and Participation in Literacy Practices

• In Event: Reimagining Common Core Practices: Perspectives on Classroom-Based Multilingual, Multiliteracy, and Multimodal Teaching/Learning

Abstract

Purpose: In this presentation, we call attention to the effects of current literacy policies and practices in the United States that directly impact the oldest children on the early childhood continuum, children age 5-8 years (grades K-3). We focus our attention on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the academic standards that have dominated policy and have a direct impact on young children in their earliest years of elementary school and their literacy participation and identities. Further, they stand to impact the quality and content of preschool as reform calls attention to the added needs of young children to be “ready” for Kindergarten.

Methodology: This paper draws on two year-long ethnographic case studies (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of the participation of emergent bilinguals in literacy within dual language programs (Spanish/English) in public schools. The studies examine children’s participation in a balanced literacy curriculum. Data was collected through participant observation during literacy events, interviews with teachers and families, and analysis of children’s work during literacy blocks. Data was analyzed through a recursive process of reading with multiple lenses including multimodal analysis.

Theoretical Framework: We situate our work in sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978) and critical sociocultural perspectives on language and literacy research, with the assumption that language and literacy learning is situated and shared meaning making that is both interpretive and interactional (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007). Our framing emphasizes multimodal theories of literacy (Kress, 2003; Wohlwend, 2011) that consider the multiple sign systems and modes of communication and representation through which meanings are expressed to produce, transform, and make sense of the world.

Findings: Our analysis of the influence of CCSS on curricular policy and practice attends to linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse urban children and their families. Such policies furthered false assumptions about “readiness” and what “counts” with regard to language and literacy in early childhood and presented a dangerous portrait of some children “falling behind” or struggling when empirical evidence had not offered evidence to support those assumptions (Hiebert & Mesmer, 2013). Findings included a tendency towards practices such as direct instruction of basic literacy, decreased time for playful practices, and policies to promote “academic-skills” in school and at home. Such policies pushed teachers towards enacting a narrowed version of school literacy learning, a “notably eroded” (Genishi & Dyson, 2009) early childhood education with shifts in favor of skills-based approaches to academics and more regulated, teacher-directed interactions. We draw specific attention to playful literacy practices and the potential for frequently overlooked critical ones that focus on reader factors, such as sociocultural contexts, reading and writing identities, interests, languages, and background knowledge, as well as textual ones such as surface features, design, genre, and ideas.

Significance: This paper will bring together ideas and critical perspectives on the CCSS and early childhood education. We are interested in engaging in a conversation with colleagues that might spur advocacy, activism, and publication and better mobilize voices of dissent.

Authors

• Lorraine Theresa Falchi, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Tamara Spencer, Saint Mary's College of California