Recruiting Everyday Repertoires as Resources for Interrogating Political, Social, and Economic Challenges

• In Event: 61.017 - Post-Truth? The Power of Repertoires of Everyday Practice of Youth From Nondominant Communities

Abstract

Literature offers unique opportunities for youth to interrogate what it means to wrestle with challenge, including challenges emerging from the experiences of racism and poverty. In a similar vein, music narratives, in this era particularly hip hop also offers similar opportunities. Both medium as narratives embody technical interpretive challenges in terms of uses of figuration, problems of point of view, irony and satire. Adolescents, particularly youth from non-dominant communities, develop critical interpretive skills in the interrogation of such literary technologies in their routine practices outside of school, and yet these skills are rarely acknowledged or recruited in formal schooling. These everyday repertoires also include conceptualizations of social, political and economic issues in the public sphere.

This paper is based on a longitudinal 4-year intervention in an African-centered urban charter high school serving a predominantly African-American low-income student population. The intervention based on the Cultural Modeling framework designed literature and history units that recruited these youths’ everyday repertoires for interpreting technical literary problems and conceptualizations of social, political and economic issues affecting their lives to scaffold the further development and use of such knowledge with literary texts and primary source documents in history. This coordination of attention to everyday texts along with formal disciplinary texts across the disciplines of literature and history in the contexts of schooling represents an important conceptual shift in what counts as critical literacies in these disciplines and a shift from the deficit meta-narratives commonly invoked around the skill sets of these youth. This intervention also represents a shift in the goals of schooling beyond technical skills to include supports for youth developing dispositions and skills in interrogating the social, political and economic challenges in their lives and the ability to conceptualize pathways of productive resistance.

The data include micro-genetic analyses of videos of instruction in both literature and history classes: documenting the instructional practices supporting metacognitive attention to everyday literacy reasoning strategies; comparing the invocation of literacy interpretive skills with cultural data sets (e.g. everyday texts) and canonical disciplinary texts; the distribution of skills in argumentation between students and teachers as a result of recruiting students’ everyday knowledge and skills. These data are complemented by surveys of epistemology in literature measuring students’ beliefs in the potential of literature to inform life decisions and of literature to be open to multiple interpretations; and in history measuring beliefs about contestation about historical events. These sets of beliefs, epistemological dispositions, are crucial for wrestling with debates in the current political climate.

Findings document that students’ everyday interpretive repertoires are invoked as they examine everyday texts and these same repertoires are made public and formalized as they transition to disciplinary texts in both disciplines; that students contribute to the development of robust argumentation in ways that are not exclusively driven by teachers; and that after experiencing the intervention, they do develop these disciplinary epistemological dispositions, and that such dispositions are positively correlated with close transfer assessment outcomes requiring critical examination of text sets to write formal arguments.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University