Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics: Remixing of the Communal and Hegemonic in an After-School Program

• In Event: Collaboration for Transformation: Critical, Community-Led Action Research in Language Education Policy

Abstract

This paper explores the development and implementation of a Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (CS SFL) framework and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project (Youth Art Institute; YAI) instituted within an afterschool program in a middle school in the American Southeast. The purpose of the project was twofold a) help youth to identify and explore the assets and challenges found in their communities and to develop equity-centered policies to address them and b) support the development of semiotic resources that students could employee in meeting the needs of their community. This program was developed in coordination with teachers and multilingual students at Chestnut Middle school.
To center the needs of minoritized students, Culturally Sustaining pedagogy (CSP) (Paris & Alim, 2014; Paris, 2012) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Harman, 2018) were placed in conversation with each other. CS SFL combines Paris and Alim’s (2017) belief 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) and Halliday’s (1978) socially and functionally-oriented theory of language, SFL. Paris (2012) and Paris and Alim (2017; 2014) conceptualized CSP as an approach where educators help students maintain their languages and cultures while developing the ability to examine community and academic practices critically. CSP decenters White middle-class values and accomplishments as a universal measuring stick. CSP also inculcates “sociopolitical consciousness” (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 75), as it works to break the artificial dichotomy between everyday and specialized language (Flores & Rosa, 2017). SFL complements CSP because it theorizes meaning-making as emerging from a socially constructed pliable and remixable configuration of semiotic choices adapted for particular purposes and audiences. It explicitly allows for a critical examination of languaging practices, working to make hidden ideologies visible/explicit. As such, SFL is a theory about language as a social process, a methodology, and a pedagogy that allows for systematic analysis of language ideologies (Eggins, 2004). CSP’s focus on social dynamics and SFL’s ability to make language usage and ideologies explicit were key in the development of the program.
YAI was built around 10 flexible and responsive learning modules. The modules helped youth examine the assets and challenges they found in their community. The modules included photovoice, modeling, and Boalian theater. Students were able to explore, deepen, and in some cases develop new semiotic resources that they used to analyze, deconstruct, and remix community and dominant literacy(ies) and languaging practices. This process supported them in developing community-centered projects that addressed student identified areas for improvement. Several of the proposals that youth developed were adopted by the school administration.
A critical ethnographic stance and discourse analysis were used to analyze data and interactions (e.g., Fairclough, 2003; Martin & Rose, 2003). Analysis of the data (i.e., video and audio recordings, photographs, reflection journals) indicates that YPAR coupled with CS SFL, supported youth in expanding their semiotic repertoires and co-constructing new communities that support their development as active civic agents.

Author

• Jason D. Mizell, University of Miami