Re-Mediating Teacher Learning for Expansive and Decolonizing Learning for Nondominant Youth

• In Event: 77.026 - Toward Just Forms of Language and Literacy Learning Re-Mediating Pedagogies of Reading and Writing

Abstract

Increasingly, non-dominant children and youth continue to experience, witness, and document racialized violence around them. This violence takes shape in a variety of forms and is perpetrated by a range of individuals whose actions uphold white supremacist ideologies. Calls have been made to interrogate moments of racialized violence in schools, specifically in literacy learning contexts (Baker-Bell, Butler & Johnson, 2017), where educators can work toward engaging youth in making meaning of these complex experiences (Martinez, 2017). This paper highlights the everyday practices of an openly gay, white, cisgendered male teacher who worked to break through the encapsulation of schooling (Engeström, 1991) and the colonizing curriculum of schooling (authors, in press) in his English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. In examining his practices, this paper seeks to interrogate the discursive and pedagogical moves made by the teacher during everyday moment-to-moment interactions with racially and ethnically diverse youth in his classroom.

This paper will highlight a subset of findings from a two year social design experiment (Colleague & Author 2, 2010) related to teacher learning in the English Language Arts context as it relates to leveraging Black and Latina/o youths’ communicative repertoires for expansive learning opportunities (Engeström, 1991). Gutierrez (2008), calls on the field to reimagine learning ecologies so that they become saturated with historically robust tools that can mediate learning that is both horizontal and vertical. Engeström (1991) echoes a similar sentiment as he calls for learning experiences that break through the “encapsulation” of learning, learning that fails to consider what learning bring with them. Just as robust learning opportunities can be imagined for students, this work approaches teacher learning in ways that allow for a deepening of teacher knowledge about the historically accumulated repertoires of practices of youth (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003) including their experiences of being racialized.

Questions that guide this paper are: How does one teacher notice and uptake everyday classroom interactions that index youths’ racialized experiences for learning? What discursive moves are made by a teacher to address everyday racializing experiences that youth experience? What pedagogical moves follow?

Data for this paper come from a two-year social design research study that seeks to understand teacher learning as it relates to leveraging the everyday language and literacy practices of non-dominant youth in literacy learning contexts. Data were collected at Northern California High School, a comprehensive high school located in a racially and ethnically diverse region of Northern California. Specific data include observational fieldnotes and video-recordings and their transcripts from 1) classroom interactions, 2) teacher interviews, and 3) video club sessions (Sherin & Han, 2004) with stakeholders that include teachers, students, administrators and researchers.

Findings reveal how the teacher made purposeful discursive and pedagogical moves to address the racialized experiences that youth in his classroom revealed during everyday classroom interaction. This presentation will highlight key practices made by the teacher to break through the encapsulating and colonizing features of ELA teaching and learning which include shifting what counts as text, what counts as language, and who can shape the curriculum.

Authors

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Javier Rojo, University of California - Davis