Using Free-Write Journals as a Tool for Preservice Teachers' Understanding of Children's Biliteracy Development

• In Event: Funds of Knowledge at the Center: A Co-Teaching Model for Arts Integration and Language Diversity

Abstract

1. Objectives In this session, we share how pre-service teachers (PSTs) implement free-write journals with bilingual/biliterate and monolingual English-speaking children to learn about their funds of knowledge and to address their literacy needs for instruction.

2. Theoretical Framework
We framed this study from a sociocultural perspective (Vygotsky, 1978) because this theoretical view takes into account the social, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of knowing and learning in a particular context. It also provides a cogent framework through which we can explore pre-service teacher’s interpretations of children's knowledge through free-write journal writing. One way to address the reading and writing needs of these children is to find instructional strategies that build on the knowledge that these students bring to their learning (Jiménez, García, & Pearson, 1995; Moll, 1992). However, helping marginalized students to share their lived experiences is not easily learned. Rather, it is cultivated through the act of storytelling (Bruner, 2002), where narratives can become vehicles for understanding personal experiences (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).

3. Methods
According to Uduma (2011), journal writing in the ESL classroom can bring about “improvement of analytical ability, improvement of memory, ability to connect course concepts to life experiences and improvement of communication skills and linguistic development” (59). We utilized qualitative research methods (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992) to collect data over two university semesters. This study took place in a low socio-economic school that had over 85% Mexican American students. Of the fourteen classrooms assigned to the PSTs, most of the children’s parents were new immigrants from the northern states of Mexico.

4. Data Sources
Specifically, data were collected through written samples from the pre-service teacher’s (PSTs) sets of classroom free-write journals and their reflections about the journal entries. These were joined with the PSTs community surveys, their interpretations of the children’s knowledge and the construction of their own teacher identities. For data analysis, we used the work of Merriam (1998) and LeCompte and Schensul (1999) to code and construct categories and themes with the explicit purpose of understanding how to mobilize children’s funds of knowledge.

5. Results
Through observation and analysis of the students’ written samples and interviews, we found that the participating PSTs and their classroom children became more proficient in reading and writing, and their free-topic written entries began to employ various literacy skills that the PSTs used in their instruction. It was also found that because the PSTs shared their personal funds of knowledge, they demonstrated that the children’s stories and personal experiences were of value.

6. Scholarly Significance
Berlak (2001) writes that understanding the disparity of academic achievement between white mainstream and marginalized students is a complicated issue, but that research studies point to three explanations that revolve around students’ opinion of available opportunities, opportunities within school settings, and the psychological effect of negotiating a world permeated with racial prejudices. These issues revolve around the barriers and influences, which support students as they construct new identities in personal expression (journals) in their efforts to succeed in traditional, regular education classrooms.

Authors

• Leila Flores-Duenas, University of New Mexico

• Irene Welch, University of New Mexico