Challenges and Opportunities in Envisioning Civic Imaginaries as Public Scholarship

• In Event: Taking Up the Challenges and Opportunities of Public Scholarship: Literacy Scholars Engaging With Communities

Abstract

Objectives. Mandates for student-work and teacher-accountability increasingly define what counts as literacy (Krashen, 2013), and delimit youth’s identities (Baldridge, 2014). In New York City, the largest public school district in the U.S. with 1.1 million students, instructional expectations as of 2012-2013 required teachers to oversee English and math tests aligned to Common Core State Standards in third and eighth grade (The New York City Department of Education, 2012). By April, 2015, across 28 states and two assessment consortiums, high-school students took year-end tests newly aligned to the Common Core (Editorial Projects in Education, 2015).
I discuss challenges and opportunities as Black and Latino youth and I, enacting qualitative participatory methodologies as publically engaged scholarship, investigate the diverse literacies, knowledges, and identities already-present in youth’s creative and artistic artifacts and practices. Amid changing notions of student-work and teacher-accountability, youth build upon sanctioned exemplar texts of a standardized curriculum, to envision what I have called “civic imaginaries” (Author, 2015).

Theoretical Framework. I construct a framework that extends Fairclough’s (2003) notion that “discourses not only represent the world as it is (or rather as seen to be), they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world” (p. 124). A notion of civic imaginaries brings together socio-cultural framings of youth participants’ diverse literacies and identities (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007), and framings of participatory citizenship as social and relational toward others (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Youth envisioning civic imaginaries (re)assert their lived experiences, literacies, and identities as participatory, contributory members of U.S. schools and society (Alim, 2011).

Modes of Inquiry. The in-depth qualitative study uses a Social-Participatory Youth Co-Researcher methodology (Watson & Marciano, 2015), building upon Youth Participatory Action Research traditions (Morrell, 2008). Data sources included interviews and focus groups with 11 Black and Latino youth; multimodal artifacts including English-class assignments; and standardized-curriculum policy documents that delineate “text exemplars illustrat[ing] the complexity, quality, and range of reading appropriate for various grade levels” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2015, p. 129-130). Co-researchers and I used grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) as an inductive approach to data analysis.

Findings. In contextualizing civic imaginaries as theoretical construct and teaching practice, I seek to engage conversation and highlight opportunities in considering youth-voiced exemplar texts – student-authored texts composed with participant co-researchers, and put to use in practice alongside sanctioned standardized-curriculum exemplar texts. I seek to grapple with challenges in considering youth-voiced exemplar texts as enacting public scholarship and evoking civic imaginaries with Black and Latino youth, at a time when, as Kirkland (2011) asserts, Common Core Curriculum Standards are “not written with [young Black men] in mind” (p. 378).

Scholarly Significance. I tussle with tensions emerging as Black and Latino youth, in an era of regulated curriculum, are provided or not granted opportunities to make meaning across lived, already-present experiences and schools. Such work emboldens possibilities for English educators and literacy researchers to attend to youth’s lived experiences as valued sites of sanctioned, academic literacies and emerging literacies practices (Kinloch, 2010).

Author

• Vaughn W.M. Watson, Teachers College, Columbia University