An Inquiry Into the "Undiagnosed" Potential of Upgrading Students

• In Event: Centering Student Identity in Our Practitioner Research: Crossing Borders, Systems, and Educational Life-Spans

Abstract

Objectives:
The objective of this practitioner research study is to document what happens when we reconfigure institutional arrangements and push back against the “normative conceptions” (Campano& Simon, 2010) of students’ capabilities and invite diverse students from a range of “ability clusters” (Cone, 2007) to co-construct curriculum and writing opportunities together.Drawing on data from a larger practitioner research study, this presentation outlines the creation of an Afterschool Reading and Writing Group that was conceived to glean new insights about the literate lives of young adult students entering an academic upgrading cohort in an urban community college.

Theoretical Framework
Zeni (2001) identifies three telling attributes of practitioner research: systematic documentation, self-reflective compositions, and larger audiences for “collaboration, presentation, and publication” (p.155). By viewing teaching and researching as coextensive (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) this work explores the ways that students who come with previous experiences of institutional failure may instead have “undiagnosed potential” that can be documented through critical literacy alternatives (Christensen, 2009). These professional adaptations are designed to counter regimented curriculum distributed in a system that is predicated upon “enduring structures of class, race, and gender stratification and the inequitable distribution of social and economic goods that come to define culture” (Fine p.229, 1991).

Methods/Data
Data from this study consists of student writing, audio recordings of group discussions, and textual interpretations of diasporic literature, which were all coded using the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).In practitioner research, data analysis has been characterized as a “dialectic between the conceptual and the empirical” (Campano, 2007; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), a process whereby researchers continually adjust their theories in the presence of emerging evidence and patterns of salience. This dialectic connects to what Lather (1986) has calledcatalytic validity, a means of measuring how the pursuit of knowledge benefitted participants’ teaching and learning.

Findings/Significance
Findings demonstrate how students who come into The After School Reading and Writing Group without their institutional streaming designations can effectively establish new parameters for shared collaborative reading and writing experiences. These findings substantiate how practitioner researchers who enlist counter-practices (Author 5 &Campano, 2013) can awaken new pedagogical arrangements for collaborative learning and teaching. Such critical alternatives have the potential for revitalizing the public sphere.

Author

• Will Edwards, University of Toronto - OISE