Two Meanings of "Culture Building" in the Classroom: Viewing Cultural and Linguistic Differences as Assets and Helping Students Build Enduring Capacities for Democratic Discourse

• In Event: 52.039 - Critical Language Awareness in Action: Examining Poetry Inside Out From the Perspective of Youth Researchers, Teacher Researchers, and University-Based Researchers

Abstract

This paper, unlike the other three in this symposium, is more conceptual than empirical — focusing on Poetry Inside Out as a curricular practice that does more than support academic skills of critical language awareness. It also builds social and intellectual capacities for public reasoning. The paper builds on earlier published work on two meanings of “culture” in the classroom (Cazden, 2008). The first relates to home culture: the ways that the languages and cultures that students bring from home can be leveraged in promoting work of social and intellectual consequence. The second relates to the classroom culture that is no one’s home culture, but rather, an interactional achievement of teachers and students, mediated by the tasks and talk they engage in collectively.
The paper also engages with Spindler’s notions of the “enduring self” and the “situated self,” by exploring the impact of Poetry Inside Out on students’ sense of belonging and confidence. Students noted that they felt different as members of a PIO classroom — where they “could talk to anyone, sit next to anyone, and be taken seriously” – as one student said, compared to other classes in their high school where “no one knows you and you don’t feel safe to really talk.” What does it mean to create a classroom culture of public reasoning – building capacities in students from diverse cultural backgrounds for deliberative discourse and collective meaning making? Can these capacities endure beyond the classroom door?
The paper explores elements of Poetry Inside Out, using audio and video taped data from an ESL high school classroom engaged in PIO, and audiotaped interviews in an urban school in Massachusetts, where 90% of the students are low-income, 71% speak a language other than English at home, and 40% are classified as English Learners.
In making sense of PIO as a practice that engages both meanings of “culture building,” the paper explores several principled commitments that guide PIO. First PIO is guided by the idea that translation is not simply a matter of substituting one language for another. It is an act of creation, as the translator must engage in work of consequence by transforming the original language. Second, PIO reflects sociocultural and critical perspectives on language, which foregrounds children and youth as linguistic and cultural beings who use language to participate in, and speak to their worlds. Lastly, PIO assumes that intellectually rigorous work can also engage students’ individual imaginations. PIO is designed to create a safe space where students can take risks, and delve into facets of language such as word meaning, syntactic structures, metaphoric language, nuances of rhythm or rhyme. In the process, students’ home culture and linguistic proficiency in moving between languages becomes an academic asset, and just as important, the practice of collaborative translation motivates students to listen to one another, not out of politeness, but out of an authentic interest in what others have to say, in the service of doing academic work of consequence in the world.

Author

• Courtney B. Cazden, Harvard University