Eco-Cultural Modeling Framework: Designing Literacy as Resource for Imagining Future Selves and Possibilities

• In Event: Imagining Future Selves and Possibilities: The Engines of Education in the Public Sphere

Abstract

Adolescence is a unique life course transition for critical imagining future selves and possibilities. These critical identity wrestlings are complicated for minoritized youth living in poverty by the dual challenges of adolescent development and the particular challenges imposed by positioning around race/ethnicity, class, and gender. This paper examines a model of how schools as public spheres can serve as forums to address the complex interplays among the cognitive work of schooling and its consequences for future lifecourse outcomes, and socio-emotional driven wrestlings around who am I and what can I become as possibilities for particular kinds of identities to open up in the spaces of public schooling.

The model is based on the Eco-Cultural Modeling Framework that articulates design principles integrating the organizational structure of schools and the structure and focus of literacy instruction across disciplines to operate in complementary ways to address jointly cognitive and socio-emotional learning. It takes into account the role that self-perceptions along multiple dimensions play in influencing goals, effort and persistence; and the ways that such self-perceptions are intertwined with conceptions of the self in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, perceptions of intelligence and self-efficacy as these play out in youths’ roles as students, as peers, as gendered people in the process of moving toward adulthood. It further takes into account that the evolutions of such identities are not merely attributes of internal states of individuals, but equally important socialized in terms of dialogical relations among people in routine spaces, such as schools, and the tools available in the social setting to facilitate such identity wrestling.

This paper presents a four-year longitudinal study in an urban low-income African-American charter high school. The intervention design included at the administrative level a system of culturally responsive advising/mentoring, at the classroom level a focus on disciplinary reasoning in literature and history classes. Based on the Cultural Modeling Framework, literacy instruction scaffolded students’ everyday knowledge and linguistic repertoires to build discipline specific skills, epistemologies and dispositions, with the content of text selections addressing the social, political and economic challenges – historical and contemporary – facing these youth, with the intent of offering pathways for interrogating their circumstances, for resilience, and for their own and community’s future possibilities. A digital tool – SenseMaking in the Disciplines – created by the project was used to provide micro-level comprehension supports.

Data are presented from a year’s senior literature and history classes: micro-level discourse analyses of classroom videos; log data of students’ comprehension moves in the digital tool in literature and history; pre-post assessments in history and literature of disciplinary argumentation; and survey data of racial identity, resilience and growth mindset. Analyses address relations between racial identity, resilience and pre-post assessments by discipline; relations between meaning-making processes/foci in the digital tool and classroom discourse.

Findings document positive racial identity associated with resilience, growth mindset and skill in disciplinary argumentation. Discourse analyses document moves from individual reasoning in the digital tool to distributed reasoning embodied in African-American rhetorical moves, and the uptake of cultural themes for resilience and possibilities. (500)

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University