Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistic Praxis in Teacher Education

• In Event: Academic Literacies for K–12 Multilingual Learners: Critical Perspectives in Teacher Education and Professional Learning

Abstract

Research has shown that teachers develop a heightened understanding of the social and institutional inequities that face their students when participating in youth-led programs. Likewise, research has shown that engaging in reflective praxis can support critical language awareness among educators (Author, 2018). This study provides an explanation of the key tenets of a culturally sustaining SFL praxis (CS SFL) enacted in a combined teacher education and youth programs.
In developing the theoretical parameters that guide our work, we draw from Halliday’s (1978) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Paris and Alim’s (2017) approach to Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). Alim and Paris posit that “culturally sustaining pedagogy exists wherever education sustains the lifeways of communities who have been and continue to be damaged and erased through schooling” (p. 1). This means that CSP is present only when educational programs and initiatives provide nourishment to minoritized communities. A culturally sustaining approach not only strives to bring in the ideas, desires, and needs of minoritized communities, it demands that their ideas, desires, and needs become the center piece in everything that we do. Aligned with this approach, Halliday’s model of language celebrates the ecological nature of language that shifts to accommodate variation in social register and cultural context. In sum, the theory of CS SFL sees all meaning making and embodiment as a complex configuration of linguistic, semiotic and material choices, promoting cultural and language variation equity.
In our CS SFL programs, youth and adult participants are encouraged to convey and elaborate on their insights about what they identify as significant community assets and problems in their school or community. In this inquiry process they engage in a spectrum of modalities and meaning-making resources (e.g., geographical mapping, multilingual resourcing, drawing, acting, rapping). At the end of the program, the teachers and youth present their argument for new resources they have designed to school or city leaders. While engaged in this multimodal and multilingual work, future educators are encouraged to take up a metalanguage of multiliteracies and SFL to attend to the goals, structure, and enactment of pedagogical design.
The presentation begins with an overview of the theoretical premises of CS SFL praxis. It then provides illustrations of the curriculum design, instructional practices and reflections of educators during and after their immersion in CS SFL youth programs. Implications of our work relate to the importance and challenges of designing multimodal and multilingual curriculum in teacher education that supports teachers in high stakes testing schools with English-only practices and discourses.

Author

• Ruth Harman, University of Georgia - Athens