Practitioner Research With Latinx Teachers: Designing a Social Justice Literacy Curriculum Using Photography

• In Event: Participatory Research Methodologies in Equity-Oriented Research: Action Through Literacy

Abstract

Background and Theoretical Perspectives:
Latinx children navigate a range of multilingual literate practices to make sense of and engage their worlds, but these often are not legitimated within educational reform efforts or mandated literacy curricula, where a discourse about the deficits of children of color prevails (Genishi & Dyson, 2009; Nieto, 1995). In a parallel way, teachers often find themselves cast as “implementers” of reform and held accountable for student achievement, without much say in designing curricular opportunities to cultivate student learning or being able to draw on their own cultural and linguistic resources in the classroom (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). There is an urgent need, then, to attend to the knowledge of Latinx teachers and students in order to re-envision schools as more equitable. This presentation draws on bilingual language and literacy frameworks (García, 2009; González & Moll, 2002; Gutiérrez, 2008; Orellana, 2009) and transnational feminist theories (Anzaldúa, 1999; Mohanty, 2003) that underscore how experiences derived from one’s minoritized identities can be a source of knowledge about our shared world. These lenses provide a foundation for collaborative research towards creating more pluralistic literacy learning opportunities for Latinx students.

Methods and Data Sources: This presentation focuses on the qualitative (Erickson, 1986) and practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) portion of a mixed methods study that documented bilingual teachers’ and children’s engagement with a photography and literacy curriculum that sought to attend to students’ cultural and linguistic resources. The project is currently entering its fourth year, with the curriculum taught in an average of 8 afterschool classrooms per year to approximately 400 participating students. For this session we spotlight our collaborative work with teachers during the third year, both as part of ongoing professional development sessions (n=25) and in a smaller inquiry community (n=5) that focused on learning from the children’s work and designing a follow-up curriculum. Data sources include transcribed audios from inquiry sessions with the teachers, fieldnotes from classroom instruction, artifacts produced by teachers during inquiry sessions and by students during the afterschools, and teacher interviews. Data were analyzed thematically (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and discursively (Fairclough, 2003) to attend to the collective negotiation of meaning.

Findings and Significance:
As we showcase, the participatory nature of the project has been an avenue for teachers and researchers to inquire into their own positionings and strive to collectively “read” students beyond deficit labels. The diversity of experiences and backgrounds of the primarily Latinx teachers in the inquiry group let to at times contentious discussions regarding competing definitions of “culture.” Teachers directly challenged each other about the extent to which some cultural holidays were “accurate”, unpacked their own layered cultural identities, and troubled theirs/our assumptions about what counts as culturally relevant and sustaining literacy instruction for the Latinx students in their classrooms. Teachers’ own cultural, linguistic, and historical knowledge became resources to surface buried experiences and invite children into inquiry-based learning. We explore implications for how participatory research can inform dialogic learning opportunities that value the knowledge of immigrant children and their families.

Authors

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Patricia Martínez-Álvarez, Teachers College, Columbia University