Redefining Nonfiction Reading and Writing as a Critical Community Practice

• In Event: Immigrant Families and Literacies: Collaborative Research and Advocacy in a Diverse Faith Community

Abstract

Context and Objectives:
This presentation examines a yearlong inquiry with Indonesian and Latina/o youth--The Community Researchers Project--which invited them to investigate topics relevant to their lives. The project began in response to parents expressing a desire for university support for their children (grades 5-9) in reading and writing nonfictional texts, as this was a focus of the CCSS reforms taking place in their schools. This poster presentation details Youth Participatory Action Research designed with these goals in mind. As university researchers, our objectives were to examine what happens when we invite immigrant youth to bring their experiences and interests to bear on the study of nonfiction, and to support students’ research endeavors by providing conceptual and methodological guidance.

Theoretical Framework:
Undergirding this project is a view of immigrant youths as cosmopolitan intellectuals who mobilize a wealth of experiential, linguistic, and community resources—all forms of epistemic privilege (Authors, 2011). Such resources are often neglected by standardized school curricula, resulting in a flattening of experience by focusing on mechanical, decontextualized literacy ‘skills’ (Genishi & Dyson, 2009). One goal of our project was to “build on, rather than tear down, what students bring” (Nieto, 2000). We framed students’ sharing of their experiences – what Maria Lugones (2003) calls “world-traveling” – as an act of resistance, as it motivated greater understanding across similarities and differences of the minoritized youth.

Methods and Data Sources:
The yearlong project was conducted as practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), with members of the research team planning lessons based on ongoing observations and discussions. Data sources included fieldnotes for each session, artifacts – student-produced writing and artwork – and semi-structured interviews with the youth researchers. Inductive coding and analysis proceeded via the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Findings
Our analysis documents how youth mobilized their transnational identities and experiences to create multimodal nonfictional texts that examined their own social worlds. We found that, contrary to our expectations, the topics students chose to investigate were not those that directly addressing a immigrant experiences affecting their families and communities (i.e. deportation or criminalization). Rather, students explored issues reflecting the particularity and hybridity of their lives, in the process revealing individual and communal “buried stories” that are often obscured by “model minority” stereotypes. Further, students worked together to resist structures they read as unjust, in both their overt enactments and through their everyday actions (Lugones, 1987).

Significance:
Current policy in literacy instruction emphasizes nonfiction reading as a comprehension skill bounded by a text, reinforcing a binary between personal experiences and informational reading and writing. As a result, students’ identities and epistemologies are often marginalized, rather than harnessed as an intellectual resource. This presentation demonstrates how educators might respond to the educational desires of communities (predicated on the current policy climate), while still honoring students as intellectuals, by providing space for curiosity and criticality and cultivating an ethics of care in educational inquiry communities.

Authors

• Grace D. Player, University of Pennsylvania

• David Eric Low, California State University - Fresno