Social Design Experiments for Expansive Teacher Learning: Leveraging Black and Latinx Youth Communicative Repertoires in the English Language Arts Classroom

• In Event: Social Design Experiments, Third Space, and Sociocritical Analysis Across the Disciplines

Abstract

While calls for teachers to leverage the communicative repertoires of their students have been consistent, examples of how to leveraged these practices are still needed. Authors will present findings from a social design experiment (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) related to teacher learning in the English Language Arts context as it relates to leveraging Black and Latina/o youths’ communicative repertoires for expansive learning opportunities (Engeström, 1991). Gutierrez (2008), in reflecting on her earlier work on third spaces, calls on the field to reimagination learning ecologies so that they become saturated with historically robust tools that can mediate learning that is both horizontal and vertical. Engeström (1991) echoes a similar sentiment as he calls for learning experiences that break through the “encapsulation” of learning, learning that fails to consider what learning bring with them. Just as robust learning opportunities can be imagined for students, this work approaches teacher learning in ways that allow for a deepening of teacher knowledge about the historically accumulated communicative repertoires youth bring to classrooms for learning (Author, 2016).

One way to break through the encapsulation of teacher learning is to involve multiple stakeholders into the development of learning ecologies that acknowledge that children and youth of color enter classrooms with rich cultural funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992) and expansive communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2010). This study documents two in-service teachers’ understanding of their students’ communicative repertoires through the use of video clubs (Sherin & Han, 2004), while following changes in their instructional practices, over time. This will be achieved by involving teachers in the creation of classroom data sets that are filmed by teachers themselves, their students, and researchers. These classroom data sets will serve as mediational tools within video clubs where a range of stakeholders will discuss how teachers can transform their instructional practices.

Participants include two English Language Arts teachers from a diverse suburban Northern California high school. Teacher participants both have classrooms with a majority Black and Latinx student demographic. Findings suggest that providing teachers with classroom data sets where they, their students and the researcher can have input allowed teachers to notice and shift the ways they responded to language traditionally stigmatized language in classrooms. Additionally, this work adds to a dearth of scholarship that highlights what can be leveraged, who gets to leverage, and how teacher learning is a longitudinal process that is not divorced from their students, and other key stakeholders.

Authors

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Javier rojo, University of California - Davis

• Crystal Bronte Gray, University of California - Davis