Framing Literacy as "Revolutionary": Creating Transformative Learning Opportunities in a Predominantly Latinx-Serving High School

• In Event: 28.059 - Humanizing Schools for Multilingual Learners in the "Post-Truth" Era

Abstract

Purpose: This study describes elements of a high school in California that created engaging literacy and language learning for multilingual students. Molina High School (MHS) a small, low-SES urban public school, where 76% of students were Latinx (predominantly Mexican descent), 33% emergent bilinguals. Half of MHS faculty were teachers of color, half Spanish-English bilinguals. MHS emphasizes health sciences; students and families commit to participation in relevant after-school activities and internships.
Method: Our diverse team collected (during near-weekly visits) 240 observation hours of school, class, staff collaboration, and community activity; 45 interviews with school leaders, teachers, students, and parents; faculty survey responses; school documents; student work; and listserve communications. NVivo systematized coding interview transcripts and fieldnotes, supported by discourse analysis and classroom interaction protocols. Bi-level analyses uncovered links between instruction and school structures.
Results: Four school elements fostered literacy and language learning for multilingual students. First, a coherent, sustained vision of community-engaged schooling, supported by staff, included community wealth and health as goals and permeable boundaries between school and community. Supporting these goals was a vision of transformative learning to interrupt patterns of injustice and inequity for underserved communities, reinforced in equity-focused professional development and in recruiting teachers of color and professionals committed to equity. Second, distributed leadership for literacy activity was shared by a team comprising the principal, a community partner, and two teachers, with the expectation that teachers would find and use their voices and assume leadership on equity concerns. A key leader was Luz, Colombian-born immigrant and community leader who spearheaded a “Parent Academy” to help parents navigate the system and support academic success; obtained and allocated extramural funds to support rigorous college-prep classes, such as AP Spanish and college writing; hired teachers to provide after-school intervention for struggling students; and pressed emergent bilinguals to embrace literacy as “the tool of liberation.”
Third, literacy was constructed as transformative and “revolutionary,” embodied in language, artifacts, and practices; designed as purposeful disciplinary activity; and supportive of learning, success, and community engagement. Students regularly used oral and written argument to advocate positions on issues including immigration, health disparities, and nuclear arms. Fourth, multilingualism was valued across school spaces, with many acts in classrooms and elsewhere of shuttling especially between English and Spanish. Staff recognized interconnections of bilingualism, identity, and confidence. Impacts were realized in success on conventional metrics, despite contempt for standardized tests. Also, there was enactment of expansive communicative repertoires where students’ languages were valued and linked to academic learning. We observed students using language fluidly for varied purposes, an important process outcome enabled by beliefs about language as resource, illustrating efforts to value home language and culture and expand communicative repertoires. Finally, there were many activities and sources of evidence that community-readiness was promoted at MHS through social justice actions and activism.
Implications/Significance: To humanize education, can we envision experiences, illustrated by the case of MHS, that value students’ diverse communicative repertoires as learning resources, foster community-readiness, and transform ways low-SES urban youth envision their futures?

Authors

• Steven Z. Athanases, University of California - Davis

• Marnie Curry, University of California - Santa Cruz