Deep Living: The Art, Science, and Soul of Transformative Classrooms

• In Event: 34.063 - Deep Learning: Life as Embodied Primary Text for Reading the Word, World, and Ourselves

Abstract

Literacy lives in the students we teach; if we want to teach them, we have to first reach them in their own languages on their own cultural terms. This study explores the tensions and possibilities of placing community-based poet-mentor educators into low-income secondary English classrooms. Over six years (2010-2016), data collection occurred inside three separate school districts; the project involved 47 secondary classrooms, two juvenile detention facilities, and eight after-school programs. Altogether, 1,360 students and 55 educators received at least one year of a unique literacy intervention based upon spoken word performance poetry. The youth and teachers came to use writing as an educational and emancipatory tool for reading the word, the world, and themselves anew. Neighborhood experts can shift the classroom culture in innovative ways: opening up space for local funds of knowledge and courageous vulnerability that impacts achievement. At the classroom level, educators are on the frontlines of social reproduction. Autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1997, 2001, 2008) views literacy as a universal technical skill. This rigid standardization divorces skill from meaningful social context and interactions of everyday life. An ideological model of literacy views literacy as a social practice, situated in the local co-construction of knowledge among members of a community of practice (Freire, 1970, 1973; Street, 1997, 2008; Gallego & Hollingsworth, 2000). English is not a neutral communication tool in multicultural settings; it’s a gatekeeper by which assimilation and conformity are measured. Yet, literacy is the gateway into agency, self-efficacy, and empowerment. Therefore, ELA classrooms are fertile ground for transformative praxis. This mixed-methods study included participant observation in treatment courses with a poet-mentor educator (PME) as well as control classrooms. All participating teachers and PMEs were interviewed at least twice (60 minutes each) and a sample of 50 students. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded based upon etic and emic themes. Student and teacher writing was analyzed as primary data sources. All teachers reported an increase in student engagement; 92% explain that the poet-mentor helped them understand how to build student literacy and writing skills; 54% of teachers report that students complete class assignments more frequently in their courses with a poet-mentor. Also, they calculated a 48% increase in student attendance in classes with a poet-mentor and a 17% increase in high school completion among participants. Instead of educating students to read and use literacy as a form of escaping their environment, spoken word performance poetry reinforces communities because it is rooted in the cultural practices, needs, lexicon, and realities of a particular context. Evidence suggests that spoken word literary arts reconfigure the classroom culture wherein learning becomes a transformative act. My findings suggest that spoken word performance poetry is an educational model in which the ideals of multiple literacies take root and blossom. In such classroom spaces, the writing of young people literally and figuratively becomes center stage. Life becomes the primary text that offers educators a doorway into their student’s lives and multiple literacies.

Author

• Vajra M. Watson, University of California - Davis