Curriculum as Advocacy: How Teachers and Students Shape the Content of the "English"

• In Event: Taking Responsibility as Advocates: Research on Advocacy Work for Equitable Education of Immigrant-Origin Youth

Abstract

The study draws on data from a year-long ethnographic study of a high school English Language Arts classroom in New York City which involved working with a teacher to create a curriculum that drew on multilingual, multidialectical, and multimodal texts to engage students in discussions and writing on the topic of language and its connections to identity and power. I explore how one teacher took up what I have termed a critical translingual approach (Author, 2019), a way of designing language and literacy curriculum and instruction that is rooted in theories of translanguaging, critical language awareness, and critical literacy. In addition to exploring the teacher’s curricular designs, I draw on students’ in-class talk and writing to demonstrate how they – through their critical metacommentary (Rymes, 2014), or their talk and writing about language itself – shifted the curriculum and how the teacher responded to such shifts in ways that positioned her as an advocate and ally.
Methods & Data Sources
As a participant-observer, I co-designed the curriculum, observed the teacher as she implemented the curriculum, and observed the students as they participated in, shaped, and re-designed the curriculum. Data consisted of audio recordings and transcripts of classroom sessions, field notes and analytic memos, and documents such as student work and teacher lesson plans. Analysis was done through a combination of deductive and inductive coding and the use of discourse analysis tools. For this paper, I focus on artifacts from the teacher’s practice (PowerPoint presentations, teacher-created handouts, chosen texts) and classroom talk (whole-class conversations; students’ conversations in small groups) to draw out how the curriculum was co-constructed by teachers and students and how it helped foster the teacher’s advocate stance.
Findings & Scholarly Significance
Findings show how a critical translingual approach to curriculum design (a) engaged students in inquiry around issues of language, identity, and power in ways that resulted in rich literacy experiences and (b) fostered a stance of advocate in the teacher. By designing English curriculum so that language minoritized students – bilingual students of color, students labeled English Language Learners, and students of color traditionally viewed as monolingual – can explore the role language plays in their lives and by flexibly shifting that curriculum so that it responds to their questions, observations, and interests, language and literacy educators can better hear and understand their students’ stories and lived experiences. With these understandings, educators can actively take responsibility and learn with and from their students as they critique and disrupt raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that too often shape the educational experiences of language minoritized students.

Author

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University