Interrogating Cultural Hegemonies in Education: Aleknagikan and Nairobian Youth Voices

• In Event: 69.057 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 69.057-19 - "Boundary Crossings" and Critical Community Engagements: Learning Environments as Promisors of Equitable Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Background
Our contemporary world is increasingly characterized by transnational lives and cross-border connections that span various facets of human life. Classrooms are becoming ground zero for interactions across cultural difference. However, students’ out-of-class experiences and cultural heritage are oftentimes marginalized in teaching/learning. Such marginalization can impede access to education through creating a false dichotomy where students have to erase their cultural sense-of-self to succeed. Notably, the selves and places represented by these students in their online correspondence with each other are variously marginalized. Aleknagik students are Yup’ik, and like other Alaskan Native communities, their traditional practices are silenced and abnormalized in a context characterized by intruding western practices (Ayunerak et al., 2014; Bates & Oleksa, 2008; Oleksa, 2006). Nairobi-based students inhabit cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multicultural spaces yet their ways of speaking and out-of-class experiences are peripheralized in classroom spaces. Moreover, Kenyan experiences are peripheralized on a global scale as emanating from a so-called third-world country (McLaren, 1998; Thiong’o, 1986/1991).
Objectives
The aim of this presentation is to build on scholarship that investigates literacies in contexts characterized by diversity and mobility (see Agar, 1994; Bauman, 1998; Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013; Fairclough, 2006; Morrell, 2008; Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Sharifian & Jamarani, 2013). Specifically, through an examination of discourse in the Alaska-Kenya, asynchronous, classroom-based, online, intercultural collaboration I spotlight stories about selves and places that are often marginalized. This collaboration which was based on a writing exchange between middle school students in two seemingly different contexts (Nairobi, Kenya; and Aleknagik, Alaska), exemplifies classroom interactions where meaning sharing and meaning making traverses geospatial and cultural boundaries. Based on thematic prompts, students took on various roles (e.g., narrators, inquirers, observers, critics, cultural practitioners, and authentic audience) to addressed issues that mattered deeply to them using digital tools, and tapping into their cultural epistemologies.
Research Question:
The eight-year study was guided by the following question: How might a classroom serve as a space that prepares students for communication in a pluralistic world through affording students opportunities for intercultural contact?  
Methodology
This present study relies on Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural learning theories and utilizes ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972) to undertake a geosemiotic discourse analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) of archived data from the Alaska-Kenya collaboration and transcriptions of post-project data. I argue that access to education, for these students, is impeded by postcolonial and other sociocultural systemic structures of hegemony. I also highlight resistance to this impediment by these youth who complicate ascribed identities.
Implications and Significance
Overall, I raise questions about cultural hierarchies implicated in the education that scholar activists clamor for students to access. Beyond calling for equitable access to education, scholarship needs to continue to interrogate implicit systemic structures that perpetuate cultural silencing and erasure. An immersive, student-centered, inclusive-classroom model (Goswami, 1986) that offers opportunities for meaning sharing across difference, as seen in the Alaska-Kenya collaboration, begins to address this implicit imbalance within the education that our students should access.

Author

• David Bwire, The Ohio State University