Using VCE to Explore Latinx Immigrant Children's Ideas About Learning

• In Event: Reimagining Early Childhood Education Research Using Video-Cued Ethnography

Abstract

Children’s conceptualization of learning shapes the ways that they engage with their education. Much of the existing literature examining children’s ideas about learning characterizes or describes children’s ideas but falls short of considering how children’s sociocultural contexts shape those ideas. In this presentation, I use critical approaches to sociocultural learning theory to consider the relationship between the classroom discourses and experiences and the ideas about learning held by Latinx children from immigrant families.

This investigation was guided by sociocultural theories of learning that emphasize the inseparability of learning and development from social, cultural, and historical contexts and the influence of power relations on learning and development. Accordingly, learners are both transformed and transform their immediate space and community (Rogoff, 2003) through a cultural process shaped by power relations (Moje & Lewis, 2007). Learning necessarily takes place within social relationships or discourse communities that share ways of knowing, thinking, believing, acting, and communicating (Gee, 2011). In these relationships, the learner takes up existing discourses or disrupts and transforms fixed discourses. This process is an expression of power with constantly developing influences on the learner’s identity and agency.

Using qualitative methods informed by multivocal video-cued ethnography, I collected ethnographic classroom observations of children’s learning experiences in two pedagogically distinct first grade classrooms serving children from Latinx immigrant families and conducted one on one video-cued interviews with ten first grade students in each class about their ideas about learning. Two sources of data informed the findings in this study: ethnographic classroom observations in two classes and video-cued teacher (N=3) and child interviews (N=20).

Findings show that Latinx children from immigrant families do indeed take up the learning discourses they encounter in their classrooms. In this study, classroom language policies included implicit discourses that shaped children’s agency, identity, and ideas about learning (García-Mateus & Palmer, 2017). As an example, children at SOAR adhered to a strict language schedule that mandated when they were allowed to speak Spanish and when they were allowed to speak English. This policy inherently restricted children’s agency and prevented them from naturally drawing on cultural and linguistic resources to express their bilingual identities in the classroom. In the expression of their belief that learning must be teacher directed, several children at SOAR cited the importance of speaking the language mandated by the teacher. In contrast, children at Byron Mason translanguaged throughout the school day. This flexibility allowed children to express themselves in ways that developed their bilingual identities and coincided with children sharing thoughts, experiences, and stories with their teacher and peers.

Latinx children’s early ideas about learning are developed within their families and communities as well as through their classroom discourses and experiences. These contexts, in turn, are shaped by larger discourses at institutional and societal levels that reflect issues of power and oppression. In classrooms serving young children from Latinx immigrant families, these issues of power and oppression typically manifest through discourses of control , school readiness , high stakes standardized testing , and “no excuses” academic and discipline policies.

Author

• Molly Ellen McManus, San Francisco State University