Leveraging Youth Cultural Data Sets for Teacher Learning

• In Event: 18.027 - Everyday Learning: Leveraging Nondominant Youth Language and Culture in Schools

Abstract

While calls for teachers to leverage the communicative repertoires of their students have been consistent, examples of ways to identify what can be leveraged and how to leverage these practices are scarce. Authors will present findings from teacher focus groups mediated by a series of cultural data sets that highlight Black and Latina/o youths’ language use within classrooms. Cultural data sets presented to teachers serve as mediating tools for teacher learning in regard to uptake of student’s communicative repertoires. We ask, how can cultural data sets generated from Black and Latina/o youth’s classroom interactions serve to leverage teacher learning?

Steeped in an understanding that children and youth of color enter classrooms with rich cultural funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992) and expansive communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2010), this study seeks to facilitate in-service teacher’s understanding of their students’ linguistic repertoires, particularly repertoires that do not align with their own. Sociocultural perspectives on learning remind us that our communicative resources are premier tools for mediating learning (Cole, 1996). While this understanding is presented as the basis for research with children and youth in classrooms, few studies examine how youth artifacts, or cultural data sets, might be used to leverage teacher learning.

Using youth generated (short documentaries of their communicative repertoires) and researcher generated (transcripts, audio and video clips) cultural data sets, this research will use observational data gathered from high school teacher’s instruction along with transcripts from teacher focus groups where cultural data sets will mediate discussion.

Cultural data sets for this paper were gathered from two separate projects, the first of which took place from 2007-2009, the second during 2010-2011, both in distinct communities in Los Angeles. While each project drew on its own methodological designs (design method, and ethnographic) together they provide unique data that displays youths’ linguistic flexibility and teacher uptake of youths’ communicative repertoires. These data will be turned to audio and video-recorded clips to be shared with diverse in-service teachers in a Northern California. Teacher focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic fieldnotes will be used to explore teacher responses to the cultural sets within the way in which they plan to use their teaching to leverage students’ expansive understandings of language.

Findings suggest that providing teachers with cultural data sets, actual examples of in class interactions, example of youths’ linguistic practices outside of school, and youths’ reactions to teacher responses to their languages made teachers more aware of their own ways of responding to language traditionally stigmatized in classrooms. This varied as teachers’ initial beliefs and ideas about languages ranged from those who were more traditional in their reports of what counted as language, and others who were more acceptable of their students’ linguistic dexterity. This work extends cultural modeling to research on teachers who may not be aware of how and what cultural and communicative repertoires to leverage during classroom interactions.

Authors

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Elizabeth Montaño, University of California - Davis