Cultivating Biliteracy and Social Justice Understandings With Latino Children's Literature

• In Event: Sueños de America/Dreams of America: Discourses on Immigration and Social Justice in K–12 Classrooms

Abstract

The call to action for culturally competent and responsive teachers (Villegas & Lucas, 2002) to improve the educational outcomes of historically marginalized students is not new. As such, this study was guided by the research questions: What difference does the exposure to culturally relevant children’s literature make in the development of cultural, linguistic, social and heritage awareness among third grade bilingual students? Examination of this question is important because it has been proposed that when teachers employ the use of texts connected to the learning of culture, heritage, history, and language of students, their academic achievement can increase (Banks et al., 2005). The purpose of the study, then, is to examine the pedagogical approaches (PA) that a veteran bilingual teacher utilizes to improve the educational outcomes of young emergent bilingual learners. Due to the sparse scholarly literature identifying culturally competent teachers in the enactment of successful PAs, the significance of the study lies in better understanding of successful ways to meet the needs of a growing population of diverse learners.
In children’s literature, mentor texts are typically stories that are used as models for writing instruction. They have been utilized in bi(multi)lingual settings for language development in two or more languages and the development of writer’s craft (Sowa & Lancia, 2011). The exploration of the pedagogies of an individual teacher, a third grade public classroom, and classroom literacy events were optimal for a case study approach (Stake, 2005) that took place in Central Texas. The participant sample was obtained with a “criterion based sampling” (Marshall and Rossman, 2011) where the bilingual elementary teacher had more than six years of teaching experience and the students were predominantly immigrant Mexican or of Mexican heritage.
The Continua of Biliteracy (Hornberger, 2003) offers a theoretical and sociocultural framework that facilitates the examination of the bilingual third grade students’ biliteracy development. Through the use of a continuum that focuses attention on contexts and content of biliteracy learning, successful PAs were identified. Attention to the varied points in the continua provided insights into the individual learner’s dynamic development of biliteracy. Hornberger & Skilton - Sylvester (2000) asserted that providing access to the full range of linguistic resources benefits the bi(multi)lingual learner and augments their learning. The emphasis on the continuum of biliteracy facilitated coding and analysis of data collected across two semesters of academic year 2015-16.
Mentor texts used by the teacher provided a critical lens for determining how PAs shaped biliteracy development. Findings indicate that the use of mentor texts facilitated the development and awareness of the self in relation to others in the world. Mentor texts also contributed to the provocation of thought around “social, cultural, political, spiritual, or economic” (Tatum, 2006, p.46) topics. Additionally, they assisted students in developing an interdisciplinary approach within the content areas (Zarnowski, 2008; Pytash & Morgan, 2014).

Author

• Brenda Ayala Lewis, University of Texas - Austin