Evasion Pedagogies in Middle School: A Day in the Life of Three Multilingual Students

• In Event: Identifying and Disrupting Evasion Pedagogies

Abstract

Objectives
This paper aims to interrogate the cultural and social scripts of teaching and learning in schools that create the conditions that perpetuate evasion pedagogies (authors, under review). Three students’ experiences in their quotidian school lives illuminate the ways that the dominant scripts position teaching as surveillance and learning as compliance with teachers’ and schools’ demands, and also how students’ deployment of linguistic tactics construct counterscripts to disrupt evasion pedagogies.

Perspectives
Foucault’s (1977) notion of power operationalized within “fields of visibility” asserts, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power” (p. 202). As such, the social actor acts both as the one who is surveilled and the surveillant; this lens is useful in understanding the influence of power in the performance of scripts in schools (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995). The tactics deployed through the everyday speech and actions of social actors within school spaces demonstrates their agency in “using imposed systems” as “resistance to the historical law of a state of affairs and its dogmatic legitimizations” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 18) and constructing counterscripts (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995) to the dominant scripts embedded in the life of schools. Expanding on the authors’ (under review) theorizing of evasion pedagogy, we draw on the assumptions that 1) school educators and their work are nested within a stratified and power-laden institution (Foucault, 1977); 2) power is dynamic and manipulated by social actors (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995); and 3) tactics (de Certeau, 1984) of social actors are “a way of making do” in the oppressive and constrained space of schooling.

Modes of Inquiry
We focus on one strand of analysis from a larger team-based qualitative case study (Stake, 2013) exploring what happens in teaching and learning when teachers participate in professional learning around teaching multilingual students. The research was situated in a racially and linguistically diverse middle school in a refugee resettlement city in the midwestern U.S. We observed in two classrooms (grade 8 science, grade 6 humanities) four days each week for one semester and shadowed three students for one full school day.

Data
Data sources included interview semi-structured interview transcripts, classroom observation notes, and shadowing notes. We also analyzed a variety of documents (e.g., teacher lesson plans, student work samples).

Results
We utilized ethnographic methods to analyze the data, focusing on emergent themes and “rich points” (Agar, 1980). Two broad themes emerged: First, students performed a script of learning as compliance by evading notice and completing assignments. Second, students constructed counterscripts by variously deploying their linguistic, social, and cultural knowledge and tactics to create spaces of connection, to ensure their privacy, to mark difference, and to hide.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance of Study or Work
Students’ tactics revealed evasion pedagogies at play and offer implications for disrupting them through professional learning opportunities for educators around drawing out and leveraging students' full linguistic and cultural repertoires for academic learning and cultivating inclusion and belonging.

Authors

• Tricia Gray, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Jessica Masterson, Washington State University - Vancouver

• Kara Mitchell Viesca, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Cara Morgenson, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Svenja Hammer, University of Nebraska - Lincoln