Foregrounding Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in Developing Disciplinary Identities

• In Event: Literature and History as Pathways for Wrestling With Complexities

Abstract

Objective:
This session highlights the power of cross pollination: foregrounding tenets of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) to support students’ negotiation of the disciplinary practices (Moje, 2015; Authors, 2016; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008) of the English language arts (ELA) (Rainey, 2017).

Theoretical Framework:
A critical sociocultural theoretical lens (Lewis, et.al, 2007) focused students’ opportunities to learn and power redistribution in classroom interactions between teachers and students.

Methods:
7th-grade students (2016: n=29; 2017: n=28) attended City Center (pseudonym), a public school reflecting racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity atypical of the district. As a teacher (White male; 17-year veteran) and researcher, I worked in a research-practice partnership to reimagine students as contributors rather than participants.

Commonplace school-based, power structures were dismantled (Authors, 2017) to nurture collaborative spaces including: (1) privileging non-canonical texts, drawing on cultural data sets of students (Authors, 2014 ), (2) empowering students as co-designers, (3) promoting self-selected writing groups (Elbow, 1998), (4) encouraging authentic audiences to challenge teacher as arbiter (Applebee & Langer, 2011), and (5) adopting a framework of appreciative feedback (e.g. emotional reactions, personal connections, and/or lingering questions) to disrupt traditional grading practices.

Data sources included student artifacts, 9-week unit plans, teacher reflections, audio recordings, pre-post-inventories, and focal students interviews. Analytic memoing (Charmaz, 2006) supported iterative cycles of coding and the construction of themes across the dataset (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005; Saldaña, 2016).

Findings:
Foregrounding students’ culture(s) and identit(ies) resulted in more sophisticated disciplinary engagements. Across focal students, a deeper appreciation of the epistemology of ELA, in providing access to different lifeworlds, was observed and more refined understandings of rhetorical situations (e.g. audience, purpose, and message). Focal students supported dynamic identity negotiations (e.g. Jeff’s use of sarcasm to critically interrogate representations of Latinos in the media, Rae Lynch’s drawing on her facilitywith culinary discourse to describe the effects of divorce and cyberbullying on her mental health; Alex’s performative command of spoken word to grapple with the death of a loved one).

Significance:
By highlighting the evolution of a spoken-word poetry unit and foregrounding students’ experiences, I hope to steward possibilities associated with creating spaces for youth to own their truth.

Author

• Rick Coppola, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author