Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation

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Author: Lucinda Pease-Alvarez; Sandra R. Schecter

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LEARNING, TEACHING, AND COMMUNITY Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation

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LEARNING, TEACHING, AND COMMUNITY Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation

Edited by

Lucinda Pease-Alvarez University of California, Santa Cruz

Sandra R. Schecter York University

2005

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright Ó 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 www.erlbaum.com

Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Learning, teaching, and community : contributions of situated and participatory approaches to educational innovation : edited by Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, Sandra R. Schecter p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-4867-3 (c. : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8058-4868-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Multicultural education—United States—Case Studies. 2. Multicultural education—Canada— Case Studies. 3. Community and school—United States—Case Studies. 4. Community and school—Canada—Case Studies. 5. Educational innovations—United States—Case Studies. 6. Educational innovations—Canada—Case Studies. I. Pease-Alvarez, Lucinda. II. Schecter, Sandra R. LC1099.3.1.443 2005 370.117—dc22

ISBN 1-4106-1319-4 Master e-book ISBN

2004061994 CIP

Contents

List of Contributors

ix

Foreword Christine Sleeter

xi

Preface

xv

Acknowledgments

xxi

PART I: LINKING PEDAGOGY TO COMMUNITIES

1

“It’s Our Kuleana”: A Critical Participatory Approach to Language-Minority Education Kathryn A. Davis, Sarah Bazzi, Hye-sun Cho, Midori Ishida, and Julius Soria

2

“I Would Sing Every Day”: Skepticism and the Imagination Cindy Ballenger

3

It’s All About Relationships: Growing a Community of College-Oriented Migrant Youth Margaret A. Gibson

3

27

47 v

vi

4

5

CONTENTS

Writing in the Margins of Classroom Life: A Teacher/Researcher Partnership Using Dialogue Journals Annette Henry

69

Toward a Pedagogy of the Land: The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors’ Program Celia Haig-Brown

89

PART II: PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR DIVERSITY

6

Teacher Research, Professional Growth, and School Reform Sarah Warshauer Freedman

7

Working Through Dilemmas About Homework in an After-School Program: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, Cathy Angelillo, and Pablo Chavajay

8

9

10

Teachers, Mentors, Friends?: Undergraduates’ Engagements With Latino Children in an After-School Program Pablo Chavajay, Cathy Angelillo, and Lucinda Pease-Alvarez From an Ethic of Altruism to Possibilities of Transformation in Teacher Candidates’ Community Involvement R. Patrick Solomon, Randa Khattar Manoukian, and Jennifer Clarke Critical Dialogue: Transforming the Discourses of Educational Reform Jerri Willett and Cynthia Rosenberger

111

131

151

171

191

PART III: LEARNING IN COMMUNITY (AND COMMUNITY IN LEARNING)

11

12

Constructing Aspirations: The Significance of Community in the Schooling Lives of Children of Immigrants Carl E. James

217

Lengua Latina: Latina Canadians (Re)constructing Identity Through a Community of Practice Karleen Pendleton Jiménez

235

CONTENTS

13

14

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Veronica’s Story: Reflections on the Limitations of “Support Systems” Rosemary C. Henze

257

Who’s Got the Norm?: Community and the New Work Order Sylvie Roy

277

Author Index

295

Subject Index

303


List of Contributors

Cathy Angelillo, University of California, Santa Cruz Cindy Ballenger, Cheche Konnen Center Sarah Bazzi, University of Hawai’i Pablo Chavajay, University of New Hampshire Hye-sun Cho, University of Hawai’i Jennifer Clarke, York University Kathryn A. Davis, University of Hawai’i Margaret A. Gibson, University of California, Santa Cruz Celia Haig-Brown, York University Annette Henry, University of Illinois at Chicago Rosemary C. Henze, San José State University Midori Ishida, University of Hawai’i Carl E. James, York University Randa Khattar Manoukian, York University Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, University of California, Santa Cruz Karleen Pendleton Jiménez, York University

ix

x Cynthia Rosenberger, University of Massachusetts Amherst Sylvie Roy, University of Calgary Sandra R. Schecter, York University Christine Sleeter, California State University, Monterey Bay R. Patrick Solomon, York University Julius Soria, University of Hawai’i Sarah Warshauer Freedman, University of California, Berkeley Jerri Willett, University of Massachusetts Amherst

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Foreword Christine Sleeter California State University, Monterey Bay

Frequently I am asked, “What does (or could) equitable education in a multicultural society look like?” Often the questioner assumes a fairly singular, bounded description that can be offered up and then transplanted from one location to another. Yet any singular description of an education that addresses issues of equity and social justice would cast an image frozen in time and space, removed from specific people, dynamic and complex communities, and historical contexts. Abundant descriptions and elaborations of “multicultural education” can be found in the literature and in workshops for educators. However, in their prescriptions for what teachers should do, many of them simplify the complex reality involved and gloss over complicated and layered cultural processes as they actually occur. On the other hand, complex portraits of “what happens” in classrooms and communities do not necessarily suggest to educators what could happen differently in their own fields of operation. Herein lies a long-standing tension between research and advocacy. How can research portray what happens in a way that helps us envision what could be, in our own schools and classrooms? Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation bridges this tension. This volume offers a rich set of ethnographic portraits that illustrate community-referenced education “in action” in various contexts, both in and out of schools. By reading the vivid portraits captured in this edited volume, set in both Canada and the United States, educators can see possibilities for improving education in their own local spaces. xi

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The contributors develop several ideas that are key to educational equity. Central is the idea, well documented by research, that learning is socially and culturally constituted. Learning cannot be divorced from the culture and language of learners, or from their identities, rooted in family- and community-based social networks. Culturally responsive teaching recognizes and builds on this fundamental idea, and—according to Gay (2000)— uses “the knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (p. 29). Similarly, Garcia (2004) argued, “Learning is enhanced when it occurs in contexts that are both socioculturally and linguistically meaningful to the learner” (p. 507). Learning and teaching are always culturally situated; they are never culturally neutral. Thus homework, viewed from the vantage point of a community-based after-school program, is a cultural process that may or may not engage young people, depending on the extent to which it connects with their own knowledge and interests (see chap. 7). By situating learning in community contexts and student agency, Learning, Teaching, and Community asks important questions: How do learners draw on community resources available to them in attempting to navigate oppressive systems? What can we learn about teaching and learning by listening to young people, whether in community centers or school-based cultural support centers, through dialogue journals, through student multimedia products, or through closely listening to students who are routinely not heard? Further, how can teachers learn to teach in culturally responsive ways? Equity-oriented preservice and inservice opportunities for teacher education are frequently constructed as courses or workshops in which information about diverse groups is transmitted. But research evidence does not support the effectiveness of a transmission model of teacher education (Sleeter, 2001). Based on a review of research on multicultural teacher education, Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (2004) pointed out that “experiences in diverse communities are promising but somewhat uneven strategies in teacher preparation” (p. 963), depending on the quality and extent of the field experience, readings, and reflections. Chapters in Learning, Teaching, and Community illustrate well-constructed community-based learning that places the teacher-education student in the role of researcher, investigating pedagogically relevant questions. We see here possibilities for transforming teacher education in ways that construct teachers as active learners and pedagogy as a terrain of inquiry. We see as well that when students are supported culturally and linguistically, they can transcend prevailing patterns and thrive academically. For example, we encounter high school students of Mexican descent who are headed to college, and who draw on supportive relationships forged in their school’s migrant education program (chap. 3). We meet young First

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Nations adults who, by negotiating knowledge that is respectful of their histories and learning indigenous knowledge taught by indigenous teachers, can claim a future rooted in an indigenous identity (chap. 5). We meet students who assert linguistic sophistication by learning to navigate across multiple languages and dialects, including their own community-based language that had been suppressed (chap. 1). Ultimately, this book complicates simplistic conceptions of multicultural and antiracism education. In so doing, it helps us reach toward a conception of education that “allows equality to exist as a dynamic community of difference” (Lei & Grant, 2001, p. 235).

REFERENCES Cochran-Smith, M., Davis, D., & Fries, K. (2004). Multicultural teacher education. In J. A. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 931–975). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Garcia, E. E. (2004). Education of Mexican American students: Past treatment and recent developments in theory, research, policy and practice. In J. A. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 491–514). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Lei, J. L., & Grant, C. A. (2001). Multicultural education in the United States. In C. A. Grant & J. L. Lei (Eds.), Global constructions of multicultural education (pp. 205–238). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Epistemological diversity in research on preservice teacher preparation for historically underserved children. In W. G. Secada (Ed.), Review of research in education, 25 (pp. 209–250). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.


Preface

SITUATED AND PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES TO LEARNING In recent years, increasing attention has focused on situated and participatory approaches to learning and teaching. This volume, for the first time, brings together established and new scholarly voices with the aim of exploring the ways in which these approaches can contribute to educational equity. Within a situated participatory perspective, the complex ecologies in which individuals live and learn continually define and shape the cultural practices that constitute the activity of everyday life and learning. Educators working within this perspective have articulated and contributed to views of learning as socially and culturally constituted (Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1997, 2003; Wenger, 1998). Their studies have been foundational in the development of educational innovations focused on student populations that have not been effectively served by schools in the United States and Canada. At the same time, critical perspectives on situated learning have heightened our awareness of how power disparities between groups and individuals contribute to the continued reproduction of social relations of inequity, including inequitable access to and distribution of intellectual resources (James & Schecter, 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). Over the course of the last 20 years, a range of instructional approaches, including multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogy, bilingual xv

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education, and cross-cultural education, have stressed the importance of schools and classrooms becoming places that draw on the experiences and resources of ethnic- and linguistic-minority students. Although many of these approaches are grounded in discourses that are primarily concerned with preparing minority students and families to facilitate the school’s agenda, we are encouraged by recent work where educators, in collaboration with caregivers and community members, have developed and implemented classroom-based innovations that incorporate the cultural practices, beliefs, and goals that constitute children’s participation in communities and social networks outside of school (Lee, 2001; Orellana, 2001; Schecter & Cummins, 2003). These approaches have helped promote a respect for diversity and the inclusion of all students within the school and/or class curriculum. Other efforts have linked situated and participatory perspectives to the development of teachers or prospective teachers working with ethnicminority populations. Drawing on the principle that students’ communities are key resources for instructional innovation, teacher educators have involved practitioners in inquiry-based projects investigating learning and teaching in minority students’ communities and social networks (Vásquez, Pease-Alvarez, & Shannon, 1994). Teachers participating in collaborative learning communities have also elicited the help of community members in interpreting practices and events that they found difficult to understand (Ballenger, 1999).

ABOUT THIS VOLUME Through critical examinations of educational innovations and engagements, the authors of the chapters that follow provide insights into how educators understand and enact their commitments to diversity and equitable access. The volume is organized into three main parts, comprising original essays that address different facets of innovation focused on enhancing and understanding learning opportunities available to linguisticand ethnic-minority populations. Contributors to Part 1, “Linking Pedagogy to Communities,” describe dynamic initiatives where practitioners collaborate with community members and other professionals as they acknowledge and build on the cultural, linguistic, and intellectual resources of ethnic-minority students and their communities. In chapter 1, Kathryn Davis, Hye-sun Cho, Midori Ishida, Julius Soria, and Sarah Toohey report on a critical participatory project in which teachers, students, parents, community members, and university researchers collectively assume responsibility for transforming educational practices and attitudes within a predominantly Filipino (Ilokano-speaking), Samoan, and Hawaiian community and high school. In chapter 2, Cindy Ballenger de-

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scribes what she and her third- and fourth-grade Haitian students learned about their own and each other’s cultural understandings and approaches to reading and constructing knowledge through their joint discussions of literature, especially in those moments when she and her students disagreed about text. In chapter 3, Margaret Gibson continues the exploration of school-based innovations in an account of how Mexican-descent teachers and students in a migrant education program create a space, both as a physical site and as a set of relationships, that supports migrant students’ resolve to persist in school. In chapter 4, Annette Henry examines classroom dynamics and literacy practices involving two Caribbean American girls in a class taught by a Jamaican American middle-school ESL teacher renowned for her culturally affirming teaching practices. Chapter 5, in contrast to previous chapters that highlight school- or classroom-based initiatives, examines a communitybased initiative, the Indigenous Knowledge Instructors’ Program, designed to prepare prospective Aboriginal teachers committed to developing instructional programming situated in traditional knowledges. Celia HaigBrown’s vibrant account of this program describes how First Nations people literally re-member their own knowledge through using it in everyday living and interactions with others. In Part 2, “Professional Learning for Diversity,” authors discuss their experiences in facilitating opportunities for working with prospective and practicing teachers to develop situated pedagogies, highlighting both the challenges that emerge in their collaborative work and the transformations that occur in the practices and perspectives of the individuals with whom they work. The section opens with Sarah Warshauer Freedman’s detailed account (chap. 6) of teacher learning in three different teacher-research networks involving university-based faculty and practicing teachers who work in schools serving ethnically diverse student populations. In chapter 7, Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, Cathy Angelillo, and Pablo Chavajay examine dilemmas undergraduates experienced in helping children to complete homework assignments in the context of an after-school program serving lowincome Latino children that is linked to a university course in education. In chapter 8, Pablo Chavajay, Cathy Angelillo, and Lucinda Pease-Alvarez describe how through their participation with Mexican-descent youngsters in an after-school program, undergraduate students developed and expanded their perceptions and understanding about different ways to engage with (and help) children, often assuming multidimensional roles. Chapter 9 broadens notions of teaching and teacher roles to encompass community involvement. In their study of teacher candidates’ learning through their participation in a service-learning practicum in inner-city Toronto, Patrick Solomon, Randa Khattar Manoukian, and Jennifer Clarke describe teacher candidates’ vacillation between conceptions of community

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involvement as charity work and as political engagement. In chapter 10, drawing on a theoretical framework that conceives of transformation as negotiated through dialogue across difference, Jerri Willett and Cynthia Rosenberger describe their involvement in critical and dialogic inquiry among a university, schools, and communities in western Massachusetts. They highlight the current political and structural milieu in which dialogue takes place and the ways in which this milieu has tended to privilege middle-class discourses and status quo relations. The chapters in Part 3, “Learning in Community (and Community in Learning),” illustrate how educational innovation can extend beyond the realm of schools and classrooms by elucidating ways in which individuals construct learning venues in out-of-school settings. In chapter 11, using information obtained through interviews with Black Caribbean Canadian postsecondary students, Carl James examines the role of “community” in the educational and occupational aspirations of immigrant students. In chapter 12, Karleen Pendleton Jiménez complicates theoretical perspectives on the role identity plays in the learning of marginalized individuals through her examination of one participant’s experiences in Lengua Latina, a creative writing group of Latinas in Toronto. She alerts the reader to the challenges marginalized individuals face as they explore and negotiate identities, even within the context of supportive communities. Chapter 13 presents a case study in which Veronica, a 10-year-old girl living in poverty and instability, is mentored by the author, Rosemary Henze, who describes how schools, individuals, social service agencies, and community-based organizations are limited in their ability to make a positive difference for marginalized children and their families, and may even serve to further disempower and disenfranchise them. In chapter 14, through her innovative study of standardization of communication in a call center in southern Ontario, Sylvie Roy demonstrates how an Anglo-dominated corporate sector with its commitment to globalization, efficiency, and competition has redefined the identity of a francophone minority community, rendering its bilingualism and native-language ability a commodity. Collectively, these insightful essays complicate our notions of community, alerting us to ways in which community can be constructed other than in geographical and ethnoracial terms. Such representations may include alliances of a textual or ideological nature as well as collaborations that develop as a result of individuals having been grouped together to accomplish or negotiate shared agendas, or communities of practice. Authors describe communities that are committed to and enact their own reform agendas, underscoring the role of agency in representational practices and identity formation. Through these essays, we also gain insights into the precarious nature of individuals’ odysseys and the evolution of their social networks within the

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everyday environments in which they live, work, and learn. The chapters attest to the complexity of the processes involved both in the marginalization of minority individuals and in the construction of productive learning/teaching opportunities situated in their needs, resources, and circumstances. Finally, this collection of essays offers us a vision of individuals’ participation in groups as dynamic, multifaceted, and mutually constitutive, and in so doing expands notions of collaboration premised on the roles of “experts” and “novices.” In contrast to stereotypical perspectives of ethnicminority individuals as passive or uninterested participants in learning, authors emphasize how they act as agents in their own and others’ socialization. This focus on agency combined with social context, a dialectic to which all of the authors speak, enlarges and invigorates our sense of what is pedagogically possible in societies characterized by diversity and flux.

REFERENCES Ballenger, C. (1999). Teaching other people’s children: Literacy and learning in a bilingual classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. James, C., & Schecter, S. R. (2000). Mainstreaming and marginalization: Two national strategies in the circumscription of difference. Pedagogy, Culture, and Difference, 8(1), 23–41. Lee, C. (2001). Is October brown Chinese? A cultural modeling activity system for underachieving students. American Educational Research Journal 38(1), 97–142. Orellana, M. F. (2001). The work kids do: Mexican and Central American immigrant children’s contribution to households and schools in California. Harvard Educational Review, 71(3), 366–389. Rogoff, B. (1997). Cognition as a collaborative process. In W. Damon (Series Ed.) & D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler (Vol. Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (pp. 679–744). New York: Wiley. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press. Schecter, S. R., & Cummins, J. (Eds.). (2003). Multilingual education in practice: Using diversity as a resource. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany: State University of New York Press. Vásquez, O. A., Pease-Alvarez, L., & Shannon, S. M. (1994). Pushing boundaries: Language and culture in a Mexicano community. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


Acknowledgments

This project grew out of a professional and personal collaboration over a period of almost 20 years. While sharing our views and experiences about learning and teaching, we have had the opportunity to reflect seriously on what matters to us in education and to move beyond a mere exchange of ideas to a transformative vision. It is in the context of this rich and generative relationship that we decided to work together on this volume. We would like to thank those who helped make this project a reality. We are most appreciative of the efforts of the authors who have been willing to revisit their work time and again to produce essays of insight and integrity about complex topics. Their contributions will provide readers with an opportunity to better understand what is entailed in working toward educational equity in an increasingly diverse society with unequal power relations. We also wish to thank the family and community members, teachers, aspiring teachers, and university educators whose experiences and perspectives are shared in these pages. We extend thanks to Lawrence Erlbaum Associates for appreciating the crucial importance of the topics we address here to those committed to enhancing the educational opportunities of all learners, and especially those who have endured histories of marginalization. We would particularly like to thank Erlbaum senior editor Naomi Silverman, who has played an important role in enacting this appreciation and who, along with her assistant Erica Kica, has been patient and supportive through the process of preparing the final manuscript. Also, we are grateful to the manuscript reviewers xxi

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who provided invaluable feedback on the chapters while respecting the different frameworks in which authors worked. Finally, special thanks go to Robert Chodos, who assisted greatly in the editing of the manuscript. His ability and diligence in reconciling stylistic inconsistencies while privileging authors’ meanings account in large measure for the polish and coherence of this volume.

P A R T

I LINKING PEDAGOGY TO COMMUNITIES


C H A P T E R

1 “It’s Our Kuleana”: A Critical Participatory Approach to Language-Minority Education Kathryn A. Davis Sarah Bazzi Hye-sun Cho Midori Ishida Julius Soria University of Hawai’i Kuleana translates from Hawaiian as “right and responsibility.” Since the early 1900s native Hawaiians, immigrants, and local speakers of Hawai’i Creole English (HCE) have been denied the right to maintain their heritage languages1 and receive the academic preparation needed for educational and socioeconomic success. This chapter reports on a critical participatory project in which teachers, students, parents, community members, and university researchers collectively assume responsibility for positively transforming educational practices and linguistic attitudes within a predominately Filipino (Ilokano-speaking), Samoan, and Hawaiian high school. Participants are committed to educational programming that acknowledges and builds on the linguistic and cultural resources of communities that have suffered years of economic, social, and political oppression.

LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION IN HAWAI’I Present-day educational policies and practices in Hawai’i have their roots in the state’s colonial past, beginning with the institutionalization of a formal 1 1 The working definition of the term “heritage” is adopted from Valdés (1992) who defines a “heritage” speaker as one who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken and is to some degree bilingual in English and the HL, including understanding but not speaking the home language.

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DAVIS ET AL.

educational system by haole2 missionaries in 1820. This educational system was established as a means of converting indigenous Hawaiians to Christianity and operated as a means of maintaining a stratified colonial social order. “Select” English-medium schools served White mission children and the children of Hawaiian royalty, whereas Hawaiian-language “common schools” provided education for all others. In 1894, a year after the American coup that toppled the Hawaiian monarchy, the Hawaiian language was banned as a medium of instruction and replaced by English throughout the islands’ schools. This policy led to further decline in the use of the Hawaiian language, resulting in its near extinction and in educational segregation based on proficiency in English. Although the number of Hawaiians had decreased3 by the turn of the 20th century, investment in sugarcane and pineapple production by the offspring of Caucasian missionaries brought an influx of immigrants from China, Portugal, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and Puerto Rico to work on plantations. The language mix occurring under plantation conditions prompted the creation of a pidgin that eventually developed into a creole (Hawai’i Creole English or HCE) as children began to adopt pidgin as their first language.4 Constant immigration to Hawai’i contributes to an ongoing diverse cultural and linguistic landscape. Of a population of just over 1.2 million, 41.6% is Asian, 24.3% is Caucasian, and 9.4% is Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Ilokano (a Filipino language) and Samoan are among the leading languages spoken in the home. Other native languages of Hawai’i residents include Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tongan, Laotian, Mexican Spanish, and Thai. Recently, increasing immigration from the Marshall Islands and Micronesia has resulted in immigrant native speakers of Marshallese, Yapese, Chuukese, Ponapean, and Kosraean. The 2000 U.S. Census reports that there are more than 100 languages spoken in Hawai’i communities. Thus, through a historical legacy of colonization and immigration, Hawai’i is now home to the indigenous Hawaiian language, the creole language HCE (known as Pidgin by the local population), and a vast number of immigrant languages. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of the islands, U.S. mainstream norms have dominated language policies and schooling practices. Since the early 20th century, Americanization campaigns have resulted in the suppression of a multilingual press, the closure of heritage language schools, and ongoing attempts to eradicate Pidgin. English Standard Schools from the 1920s through the 1940s privileged speakers of main2

Haole is the Hawaiian/Local term for persons of Caucasian descent. The indigenous population decreased drastically from 900,000 to 250,000 3 through the introduction of diseases carried by Caucasian sailors and missionaries in the late 19th century (Benham & Heck, 1998). 4 HCE is currently the4native language of most Hawai’i-born residents. 2

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stream U.S. English by using this language as the primary criterion for admission. This legacy of linguistic and economic privilege has continued in the form of private schools. Today, 20% of students in Hawai’i attend private school, the highest proportion in the United States (Benham & Heck, 1998). In contrast, Hawai’i public schools have been charged in 1976, 1979, and 1999 for civil rights violations associated with neglecting the language and academic needs of immigrant students. These violations include underidentification of language minorities, lack of services for those who were identified, disproportionate placement of language minorities in special education programs, inappropriate staffing of programs designed for language minority students, and improper mainstreaming procedures (Talmy, 2001). Hawai’i is clearly not alone in its tradition of educational policies and practices that deny the language and ethnic heritage of indigenous, local, and immigrant populations, or in the educational needs created by these discriminatory actions. Hawai’i represents the range of linguistic issues confronting educational systems in the United States and worldwide: reviving or maintaining indigenous languages; recognizing and building on nonstandard language varieties; and acknowledging language rights and building on heritage language resources. In addition, recent policies and practices in Hawai’i hold promise for modeling transformative minority language and educational policies and practices. With more than 1,200 children in K–12 Hawaiian immersion schools, Hawai’i leads the way in developing school programs designed to regain the indigenous language and culture (Hinton, 1996). A strong literary movement in Pidgin has transformed this language from one of disdain to a place of acceptance within many schools and communities. These movements aimed at linguistic and cultural acceptance have opened the way for increased appreciation for heritage languages as resources and efforts to meet the English-language needs of immigrant populations. In the following section, we describe the theories and praxis of a critical participatory approach to language and academic development that we hope will provide a model of educational transformation for linguistic minorities.

A CRITICAL PARTICIPATORY APPROACH The Studies of Heritage and Academic Languages and Literacies (SHALL) curriculum is being developed and implemented at the largest public high school in Hawai’i. In the school year 2000–2001, Filipinos accounted for 58.4% of the Farrington High School student population, and Samoans for another 13.3% (Hawai’i Department of Education, 2001). This school population represents the overall predominance in the state of Ilokano-speaking

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Filipinos and an increasing Pacific Islander population. The federally funded SHALL project5 is directed by a University of Hawai’i faculty member in the Department of Second Language Studies who also directs the Center for Second Language Research (Kathryn A. Davis) and employs a staff of experts in the areas of heritage language instruction (Julius Soria, Michelle Aquino, and Jacinta Galea’i), English as a second language (ESL)/academic English (Sarah Bazzi6 and Gina Clymer Rupert), educational technology (Randy Gomabon), and assessment (Hye-sun Cho and Midori Ishida). The director worked with the principal, vice-principals, and key teachers at the school to incorporate SHALL courses into the preexisting program. They agreed that SHALL instructors would develop and pilot curriculum that would then be shared with other Farrington High School teachers to use in ways that fit their particular needs and purposes. The SHALL program is specifically designed to meet the needs of Filipino and Samoan students at Farrington High School by drawing on recent crossdisciplinary theoretical and ideological developments intended to redress inequitable schooling for linguistic minorities. Recent literature on the identity of the learner (Canarajah, 1993; Norton, 1997; Norton & Toohey, 2000) views contexts and identities as multiple and varied (Bourdieu, 1991; Gee, 1996; Wenger, 1998). Such contexts extend beyond narrowly defined language and literacy skills to include the socially constructed values, understandings, and behaviors associated with language use. Within their local communities, students commonly navigate multiple and complex identities. The Kalihi neighborhood, where most students live, is largely Filipino and Samoan. A constant influx of relatives from home countries provides a continuum of cross-generational linguistic abilities and cultural practices. Friendships and marriage across ethnic cultural communities, a unifying local language (Pidgin) and culture (Local7), and U.S. mainstream English and social influences ensure a rich tapestry of language and culture, which we encourage students to explore in view of their own emerging cultural identities. In our courses at Farrington High School, we use a student-as-ethnographer approach to examine the multiple layers of the cultural and linguistic practices that are part of students’ lives in their homes and communities. At the intercultural level, students explore what “family” or “community” means within their cultural milieu in terms of how these meanings are lived in the routine practices of everyday life and how these relate to their peer5

This project is supported by a Development and Implementation grant from the Federal Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition. 6 Sarah Bazzi left the project to pursue a law degree. 6 7 The identifying feature of the complex mix of ethnic social 7 practices, beliefs, and behaviors known as Local culture is Hawai’i Creole English (HCE) or Pidgin. To our knowledge, there are no in-depth ethnographic studies of the Local Hawai’i culture. 5


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group and school communities of practice. Students then engage in a critical examination of their own identity formation through exploring who they are and how others within and outside their communities view their emerging multiple identities. For example, there may be tension between family and church attempts to maintain traditional Samoan cultural practices and students’ need to “fit in” by adopting Local culture and the Pidgin language. This exploration not only aids students in considering a possible hybrid cultural and language identity, but can also help parents and teachers value students’ ability to draw on a repertoire of cultural and linguistic knowledge for appropriate language use in particular interactional situations. Through community explorations, students begin to develop metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness about how language is structured and used that they then can transfer to understanding school communities of practice. Because many of the students we work with have little understanding of how to “do school” in the United States, we have found ways to support them in gaining explicit knowledge of how school tasks are performed. When observing classroom interaction and collecting classroom documents, students also use student-as-ethnographer strategies that enable them to understand and identify norms and expectations regarding the use of written and oral language in school communities of practice. Through careful analyses of reading material and writing assignments at the textual and rhetorical levels, students begin to “notice,” and thus have the capacity to reproduce teacher expectations for classroom behavior and written work. However, because our curriculum rejects a pure “apprenticeship to” or “socialization into” the school community of practice, students do not necessarily learn to conform to the norms and expectations that they have found underlie classroom participation. Rather, they engage in and share critical discursive analyses of texts and practices, which ultimately enables them to enter into discussions and decision making about their own schooling. As documented in studies about schooling in Hawai’i (e.g., Kadooka, 2001; Talmy, 2001), many of our students have been treated in dehumanizing ways, considered illegitimate members of the larger society, and subjected to a form of censorship that has denied them the right to have voice in school and other communities. However, they have also routinely resisted these forms of oppression and positioning by employing counterdiscourses. We help students build on this practice by encouraging them to draw from their own experiences as they “talk back” or respond to written texts. As they engage in this process, they learn to cross-reference their own experiences and theories with those of so-called “experts,” and use these sources to develop cohesive, academic critiques of the texts that they encounter, thereby moving beyond simply disagreeing with texts to providing carefully substantiated rationales for and descriptions of their views.

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Integrated throughout the curriculum are assessment procedures that reflect our process and discursive orientations. Through developing individual electronic portfolios of their work, students learn sophisticated technological applications such as Power Point and iMovie, reflect on their own literacy progress, and engage in critical analyses of school and society. When assessing students’ oral language ability, we use procedures that tap a range of communicative language abilities that are not usually recognized on foreign language tests, such as skill in code switching (in the heritage language, Pidgin, and standard English), interactional competence with friends and family, and self-assessment of language abilities. In sum, the theoretical perspectives described above represent a critical participatory approach to education. Rather than hold low expectations and employ rote memorization practices commonly found in low-income schools, we assume high levels of student achievement and provide for use of higher order cognitive skills through project-centered work (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). Also, through their research in their communities and schools, students develop a flexible repertoire of strategies that enables them to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning (Garner, 1987).

THE ACADEMIC LANGUAGE AND LITERACIES COURSE Students enrolled in the Academic Language and Literacies (hereafter referred to as academic English) course engage and investigate issues associated with language, identity, and academic development. The following further elaborates the theoretical underpinnings and instructional practices that constitute the pedagogical vision underlying the course. Language and Identity Investigations of cultural identity and language use draw from Gee’s (1996) notion of Discourse: Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize. (p. 127)

Gee further explained that individuals have a Primary Discourse into which they are socialized as children growing up within a particular linguistic and cultural community. They begin to experience Secondary Discourses out-

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side the home and community, in schools and other institutions. Students in the academic English course explore their Primary Discourse(s) as well as the Secondary Discourse of Standard English and schooling. They commonly have experienced two Primary Discourses: one based on their heritage language and culture and the second involving the larger Hawai’i Creole English (Pidgin) Local cultural community. However, multiple discourses are not always clearly demarcated. Students’ spoken language often includes features of English, Pidgin, and one or more heritage languages, representing a mixture of discourses or what is referred to as hybridity (Willett, Solsken, & Wilson-Keenan, 1998). Egan-Robertson and Willett (1998) noted that “discourse shapes what we can think and say, and who we can be, as well as locates power in some places and instills control in others” (p. 14). In classrooms, multiple discourses often intersect, yet the dominant Discourse of the school tends to silence other practices. This silencing can create a language mismatch that may exclude students weak in the dominant Discourse or who feel participation in that Discourse is threatening to their identity (Willett et al., 1998). To avoid the negative effects of silencing, academic English teachers worked toward creating a third space (Bhabha, 1994) where students’ primary and hybrid language practices were viewed as “an inherent feature of negotiation across differences” within the academic Discourse of the classroom. This third space provided opportunities for “disrupting” the dominant classroom Discourse and creating room for new and more inclusive discourses (Willett et al., 1998, p. 168). The following poem, written by Carlos, a ninth-grade student, was the result of an assignment8 that challenged the authority of using only Standard Academic English Discourse by encouraging students to write for people like themselves who are multilingual and multicultural: Where I’m From I am from the name Carlos,9 tall and chubby. I am from Pinakbet and Guinataan sweet and delicious. I am from Adidas shoes, sports clothes, and Jansport Bag. I am from TV, fan, and stereo, From Bryan, Eric, and niece Precious. 8

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Activity adapted from Christensen (2001). All student names are changed to protect 9their privacy.

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I am from masanting and maganaka, From the faces that we see, I am from the house by the papaya tree. (June 2003)

Carlos shows multiple facets of his identity by creating a hybrid text in which he smoothly switches between English, his heritage language (Ilokano), and the Filipino national language (Tagalog). He further describes himself as an American teen wearing Adidas shoes and carrying a Jansport bag while also being a Filipino boy eating Pinakbet in Hawai’i by a mango tree. In effect, this poem serves as a mini oral history of Carlos’s life as he picks out the elements that are most important to him. The rhythm and imagery of Carlos’s poem also show his skill as a poet as well as his understanding of audience and purpose. Through additional “third space” activities, students explored the features, perceptions, and roles of English, Hawai’i Creole English, Ilokano, Samoan, and other languages spoken in the community. They read pamphlets on the myths and realities of bilingualism (Hawai’i Council on Language Planning and Policy, 1996, 1997) written in Ilokano, Samoan, and English. Many students had never seen print media in their first language outside of the Heritage Language classroom and were excited to read the bilingual materials. Students further explored their identities by reading literature on multicultural themes and writing about themselves. For example, students read a local author’s poem about her name and responded with a poem about the origins of their own names. One student wrote: Justin is my everyday name, Given to me by my mother, The best name in the world, It fits me. Taouli is my Samoan name, I got that name from my dad, All my pride is in that name, It is my Samoan heritage, It is my strength.

By claiming his Samoan name, the author of this poem, who has a Filipino surname and appearance, was able to reveal pride in the part of his identity that is not outwardly visible. Thus, affirming multiple identities allows students to claim selves that have been intentionally or unintentionally hidden.


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Students often completed their multilingual assignments with the help of family members or friends. As they drew on community language and culture capital, they began to value bilingualism as a resource rather than viewing it as a problem for them and their parents to overcome. Students were also encouraged to appreciate multilingualism through sharing texts that were important to them in languages other than Pidgin or their heritage language (e.g., the Tagalog national anthem of the Philippines and a Hawaiian text advocating sovereignty). Students taking Japanese or Spanish classes also enthusiastically included these languages in their discussions and course assignments.10 Although students spoke a number of different heritage and foreign languages, Pidgin often served as a common language both inside and outside the classroom. We urged students to explore the historical roots of Pidgin by reading about and discussing the conditions that necessitated Pidgin and allowed it to develop into a fully formed language. Students built on previous language awareness studies as we engaged in linguistic analyses of Pidgin that included the origins of its lexicon and features of its grammar and orthography. In addition, students engaged in critical discussions of how Pidgin was portrayed in literature about Hawai’i written by outsiders, such as Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux (2001), which described Pidgin as “birds squawking” (p. 13). We also examined the sociopolitical aspects of Pidgin literature via analyses of audience (e.g., Local, mainstream) and purpose (e.g., sociopolitical, entertainment). Reading and studying local literature had the additional effect of helping some students adopt a previously rejected identity of “reader.” An academic English teacher described one such transformation as follows: Up until today I would have characterized Bruce as a reluctant reader. But now, Bruce thumbs through the Pidgin short story book Da Word by Lee Tonouchi (2001), the self-proclaimed “Pidgin Guerrilla.” I am so pleased I try to ignore him sneakily reading it under the table after reading time. At the end of the class, eyes wide open, he proclaims, “Miss, I can read this. It’s in my language!”

Given Fairclough’s (1992) observation that schools operate under a hegemonic appropriacy model that “uses the educational system to transmit shared language values (if not practices) based around the hegemony of a particular dialect” (p. 43), we asked students to describe the observable and desirable usage of Pidgin in different contexts. They discussed how, de10 One possible problem with student-produced heritage language work is that it may be difficult for teachers who do not speak the language to assess. However, students realized the importance of audience and translated their multilingual work for teachers. Additionally, teachers relied on their own funds of knowledge in the form of the SHALL Ilokano and Samoan teachers.

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spite Pidgin’s unifying effect within the Local community, the use of the language in the classroom has often been forbidden and is still commonly frowned on. Students continued their examination of language attitudes by reading the work of Lee Tonouchi, a Local author who strives to alter the notion of appropriateness by doing everything in Pidgin, including writing a résumé that he used to obtain a job in higher education. We shared a poem he cowrote with his students at Kapiolani Community College called “If you talk Pidgin, you no can . . .” (2002), which is a compilation of all the things people had told the college students they could not do with Pidgin. On reading the poem, our students became angry with its negative irony and “no can” claims, which they countered by insisting that it was their right to speak Pidgin everywhere, including at school and on the job. These students then wrote their own poems called “If you talk Pidgin, you can . . .” One student wrote the following: Dey say if you talk pidgin you can . . . Communicate with other pidgin speakers Blend in with the locals Bad talk people that no understand pidgin Dey say if you talk pidgin you can . . . Go get kama’aina11 rate Go swap meet and get discount Go Waikiki walls and fit in Go into Gucci and NOT be expected to buy anything! Dey say if you talk pidgin . . . YOU LOCAL!!!

Through drawing on the unifying influence of “being Local” within the diverse Hawai’i society, this poem turns negative stereotypes of Pidgin speakers into positive features. The writer reclaims power by suggesting that Locals use Pidgin to “bad talk” people who don’t understand it, including outsiders who criticize it. She also turns to her benefit the stereotype of people who speak nonstandard English as economically disadvantaged: It allows her to go into Gucci without the expectation of buying anything, and she can get a good deal at the already discounted biweekly swap meet at the stadium, where locally produced items such as clothing, snacks, and music are sold. Language and Academic Development Our conceptualization of a multilingual, multicultural, and hybrid approach to language instruction did not ignore the necessity of teaching the Dis11 A kama’aina (literally people of the land) rate refers to a discounted price that Hawai’i residents receive on some products, services, and amenities.

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course of power to students from nonmainstream language, dialect, and cultural backgrounds (Delpit, 1998). For this reason, the academic English classes were also designed to expose students to academic discourses and apprentice them into an academic community of practice. By academic discourses, we refer to the practices and skills necessary for students to succeed in mainstream U.S. academic contexts. As students analyze texts at multiple levels, they further develop their academic language and critical understanding of the texts that they are expected to read and write in school. Drawing on the contention that successful literacy learning involves focusing on interrelated textual, rhetorical, and discursive levels of analysis (McComiskey, 2000), teachers provide students with opportunities to explore appropriate grammar and structural usage (textual); genres of use in terms of particular purposes, audiences, and situations (rhetorical); and critical reflections on their learning processes (discursive). The following sections describe how students engage in these different types of analysis. Textual Analysis. Students initially engaged in textual analysis through an oral history assignment in which they were asked to use their heritage language and/or Pidgin to interview a family or community member. They were then asked to translate the interview into academic English and conduct analyses of the syntactic, phonological, and lexical similarities and differences between their heritage language and English. In addition to helping students further develop their metalinguistic awareness, this and other compare-and-contrast assignments promoted multilingual literacy practices. For example, a student wrote the following note to a friend (T = Tagalog, E = English): [T] Kumusta ka na? Sana [E] ok [T] ka lang . . . Wala akong magawa . . . Ginawa mo na ba yung [E] assignment [T] mo? (So, how are you? Hope you’re doing fine . . . I’m not doing anything . . . Did you do your homework?)

In discussing this note with her academic English teachers, the student explored the lexical features of the two languages as well as rhetorical features such as audience and purpose. In these discussions she commented on the complexity of language evolution and use when observing that the word homework was an alternative to her use of the loan word assignment. Rhetorical Analysis. At the rhetorical level of analysis, students focused on gaining an awareness of the different literacy practices that they encounter in their lives. They analyzed the structure of texts that had been written at home and school, paying particular attention to the organizational patterns that characterized different genres (e.g., personal letter, lab report).

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They also examined visual cues such as the use of artwork in newspaper advertisements and paintings or photos in history books. Rhetorical analysis also involved a discursive critique of how the use of academic English is perceived by many as a threat to their identity and an incomprehensible form of expression to which they have had little or no access. We illustrated how they already had a mastery of several types of English genres by using a “three voices” activity. The instructor dramatically performed three ways of describing the same event: stream-of-consciousness writing, an e-mail message to a friend, and an essay for a teacher. She then talked students through the differences in content, form, and audience before asking them to write their own three voices narratives.12 Many students showed a sophisticated understanding of voices and content. One student wrote in her stream-of-consciousness voice an e-mail to a friend about how much she hated helping her family move. In her school essay, she stressed the importance of family and how proud she was to be able to help them move despite the hardships she incurred.

Discursive Analysis. McComiskey (2000) observed that although the discursive level of evaluation is the most important for understanding the nature and effects of dominant discourse practices, it is the one least often addressed in classrooms. In addition to discursive analyses of rhetorical aspects of text, students critiqued institutional, economic, and cultural factors that shape texts to understand the position of the writer and reader in their micro and macro environments. For example, students were introduced to the course research project on social issues with the song “Changes” by the late Tupac Shakur (1998). We discussed the social environment Shakur describes and some of the institutional factors that shaped that environment. Students then responded to the song, with many expressing outrage over racism and making parallel comparisons with their own communities. Students were also encouraged not to see themselves as passive receptacles of information; instead, they interacted with texts, talking back to them as they developed their own stances and opinions. For example, Samoan students read an early (19th-century) missionary account of Samoa that suggested that people from this culture are lazy and ignorant. Students used their own experiences and research to counter this racist ideology. In this way, students begin to see how institutions, cultural values, social values, and individual standpoints may constitute the writer, and how students’ differing subjectivities may contribute to either passive acceptance 12 Serendipitously, in the first-period class, a student happened to be passing a note to a friend during the teacher’s explanation. The other team teacher took the note and pretended to read it to the class as the student pleaded with her to give it back. This served as a real-life example of audience, an example that was repeatedly referred to.

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of or resistance to the texts that they are subjected to. This type of critical, in-depth response also paved the way for learning how to engage in various genres of school writing such as argumentative, compare-and-contrast, and position essays. Learning How to “Do School.” Going beyond multilevel text analysis and production, we found that an additional component of learning academic Discourse is learning how to be a successful participant in it. Therefore, keeping with the original theme of the class, we wanted to help students learn how to “do school.” However, we found many of the topics and concepts in how-to-study books and guides limiting and potentially harmful (e.g., one study guide’s focus on alerting students to “control [their] impulsivity”). To provide students with the opportunity to explore their own needs and purposes in learning to “do school,” we had them write several journal entries about being a student. From these journal entries, we found that many students had trouble navigating school and teacher expectations. To address this challenge, we suggested that students compose “Dear Study Guru” letters asking an imaginary expert for advice on school problems. Students then discussed these problems in groups and chose one issue that they wished to respond to more thoroughly in writing. The open dialogue that characterized these discussions included opportunities for problem solving. One example of problem solving focused on students’ complaints that a required course that they were taking was so demanding that more than a third of the students were failing it. As we generated a list of ways to help improve their grades, students challenged one another’s interpretations and experiences. Our resulting list of “how to do” the course provided a comprehensive guide for navigating this particular course. However, more importantly, the exercise suggested problem-solving techniques that students could use in addressing problems in other classes and situations. The academic English course culminated in a final research paper that integrated research and analysis skills used throughout the semester, such as reading texts critically, critiquing multiple sides of an issue, conducting observations and interviews, and engaging in process writing. The project also required new skills, including creating appropriate research questions, evaluating sources of information, conducting surveys, and citing readings. Students generally chose to research problems within their home or school community in order to find possible solutions. Although they began their projects by doing library research, they also conducted research on the Internet. Through computer class assignments, students explored how issues of intellectual property and digital media related to their research activities. When learning to evaluate different types of media, they learned to judge the purpose and validity of Internet sites. A

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problem that arose while students conducted library and Internet research involved plagiarism. In an informal survey, we found that students often copied text in an attempt to accommodate to the dominant Discourse of the classroom. To solve this problem, we worked extensively on analyzing, quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing text. Modeling and practicing scholarly language also allowed students to frame their ideas according to academic conventions such as “According to name of author (year), . . .” Students also learned how to collect observational, survey, and interview data in their communities. Because students had difficulty finding interviewees who were “experts” on their research topics or were intimidated by contacting strangers, they turned to community funds of knowledge for data. This reliance on community knowledge and innovative ways of collecting data proved productive on several different levels. Some students creatively turned parents’ lectures on issues ranging from a missed curfew to teenage sex into interview dialogues. The dialogical process of talking to parents about sensitive issues such as teenage sex seemed to have a side benefit of encouraging students to listen to parents and allowing parents to talk more freely under the guise of “research.” Indeed, as students took ownership of data, they began to look at their topics in new ways. For example, although students in public schools have experienced years of antidrug rhetoric, one student held up a book that he was reading for his research paper on drugs and exclaimed, “Miss, do you know what drugs can do to you?” as if this was the first time he had access to this kind of information. In sum, the academic languages and literacies course offered the opportunity for students to integrate home and academic communities. The student-as-researcher approach empowered students to create space for dialogue that bridged community and school discourses. Students were provided not only with research tools, but also with techniques in metaanalysis, reflection, and critical discursive thinking. Through learning to use these skills, they celebrated their hybrid identities and learned to actively participate in the academic community. Heritage Languages Students enrolled in heritage language courses in Ilokano and Samoan engaged in many of the activities and projects found in the academic English courses. They reflected on their hybrid identities, conducted interviews in their heritage language within the community, analyzed oral language and text to develop metalinguistic awareness of the structure of Ilokano or Samoan, explored notions of culture as experienced in everyday life in their home countries and local communities, and worked on projects that allowed them to integrate their learning experiences. In addition, the course


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projects focused on creating opportunities for students to draw on community funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) by interacting with relatives and community members in their heritage languages and by gathering cultural and language information for inclusion in projects. For example, in investigating the Filipino medicinal use of herbs, one student found that she needed to work with community members both in gathering this cultural information and in developing the language skills she needed to speak about this topic in a class presentation. By participating in a final culminating unit on drama in their heritage language courses, students had further opportunities to draw on community funds of knowledge for use in school. As students wrote and produced plays, they participated in venues that support the maintenance and development of their first language or dialect and standard English. In the process of creating compelling characters and plot lines that relate to their experiences and identities, students examined their lives, opinions, and values. Students and teachers worked together to create meaning as they interpreted, dramatized, and dialogued with texts. The following section of a script written by students in the Ilokano class illustrates the ways in which drama served multiple purposes (E = English, I = Ilokano, P = Pidgin): Danilo: Ruth: Sundae:

Sundae: Danilo: Sundae: (Danilo: Ruth: Sundae:

Sundae: Danilo: Sundae:

[E] Excuse me, [I] naimbag a bigatyo babbalasang. Sapsapulek no sadinno ti ayan dagitoy klasek. [The three girls giggle.] [P] Ah, braddah we no understand you. [P] Hoy, no talk to him la dat. [I] Apay kastakayo? [E] You’re Filipino too you know. [I] Apay haanyo nga naawatan ti imbagana? [The three girls giggle again. Sundae goes up to Danilo.] [I] Siak ni Sundae. Dagita dagiti gagayyemko. Ania ti masapulmo? [I] Kayatko koma a damagen no ayan dagitoy klasek. [Danilo shows his class schedule.] [I] Oh, adda met klasem nga Ilokano. Surutennakami. Excuse me, good morning ladies. I’m trying to find my classes. [The three girls giggle.] Ah, brother we don’t understand you. Hey, don’t talk to him like that. Why are you acting like that? You’re Filipino too you know. Didn’t you understand what he said? [The three girls giggle again. Sundae goes up to Danilo.] I’m Sundae. Those are my friends. How can I help you? I’m trying to find where my classes are. [Danilo shows his class schedule.] Oh, you’re taking an Ilokano class, too. Follow us.)

In this scene, student authors are making a critical statement about their views on and use of Pidgin by including it in the script. They are also ac-

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FIG. 1.1. Students practicing in an Ilokano class.

knowledging the tension commonly felt between recently arrived and Local Filipinos in Hawai’i by commenting on heritage language use. They reclaim their heritage language and dissolve the discriminatory stance taken by Local Filipinos toward recent Filipino arrivals by allowing Sundae to speak Ilokano and by acknowledging that they were all taking an Ilokano course (Fig. 1.1). In sum, activities in heritage language classrooms provide students with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness13 along with analytical, presentation, and interpretation skills. The SHALL heritage language curriculum roots pedagogical activities in students’ home experiences to facilitate their engagement as they develop language and literacy. The curriculum also serves to value the resources that multicultural and multilingual students bring with them to the classroom, which, in turn, fosters cognitive abilities, multidimensional identities, hybridity, and practical skills needed for academic success. Oral Language Assessment Most of the students taking the Ilokano and the Samoan language courses are “circumstantial bilinguals” (Valdés & Figueroa, 1994); that is, they listen to 13

“As students become more aware of the totality of language and its varying human characteristics and meaning-making uses, they will attain metalinguistic awareness, and they will, consequently, be more sensitive to and competent in using language confidently, deliberately, and intentionally” (Andrews, 1998, p. 8).

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and/or speak their heritage languages at home and in the community. Because there are no models for assessing the language ability of circumstantial bilinguals in their two languages, Midori Ishida, the oral language assessment coordinator for the SHALL project (and coauthor of this chapter), developed assessment procedures that capture the rich and complex language abilities of bilingual students. Drawing on various social and psychological conceptions of bilingual language proficiency, this approach assesses a collection of abilities that can be observed in the interactions between students and their interlocutors that are part of course activities and assignments, including (a) communicative language ability in the target language, which can be assessed both in monologues and dialogues; (b) interactional competence in conversing with others; and (c) code-switching practices. Drawing on language scales created by Bachman and Palmer (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996), raters assess aspects of communicative language ability for those students enrolled in the Samoan and Ilokano language courses. In tapping “both knowledge, or competence, and the capacity for implementing, or executing that competence in appropriate, contextualized communicative language use” (Bachman, 1990, p. 84), these scales assess students’ oral communicative language ability across the following dimensions: range of structures, accuracy, vocabulary, cohesion, and register. When addressing interactional competence, the SHALL approach to language assessment draws on discourse analysis of interaction processes to assess how interlocutors jointly construct the “social, dialogic dimension of cognition and emotion” (He & Young, 1998, p. 3). This is achieved through analyses of “conversation micro skills,” which assess how interlocutors introduce topics, manage turns, complete adjacency pairs, provide backchannelings, initiate repair, assure comprehension, and use compensatory strategies (Riggenbach, 1998). In fulfilling a key pedagogical goal of SHALL heritage language courses, the celebration of “hybrid” discourse practices, students are expected to use three languages (English, Pidgin, and the heritage language) for efficient communication in the classroom context. To assess this aspect of their multilingual ability, language assessors analyze students’ use of code-switching in the context of natural conversations for real purposes and needs. Drawing on a system of analysis developed by Zentella (1997) to gain important information about students’ oral language ability in multiple languages, their analyses focus on frequency, function, and effects of students’ code-switching patterns. Assessment of these three aspects of students’ oral language proficiency focuses on a variety of oral language performances, including students’ naturally occurring conversational exchanges with others and audio- and videorecorded samples of their oral monologues and dialogues that constitute course assignments and interaction with others during class. Portfolios contain planned and, in some cases, rehearsed speech, including semistructured

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tasks such as interviews with native speakers of the target language and rehearsed speech in drama presentations. Unplanned and spontaneous segments of conversations are also included in these portfolios. In addition to micro analyses of student discourse, the evaluation specialist visited each of the Samoan and Ilokano language courses once a week and either video-recorded the class or wrote notes summarizing classroom events. She also asked students to participate in interviews or respond to end-of-unit questionnaires when collecting their self-reports and reflections on their own learning processes and performances. In addition, surveys were administered that explored students’ attitudes toward their heritage languages and cultures as well as their perceptions of their own language abilities and practices. In addition to providing additional assessment data, students’ ratings and descriptions of their own language abilities, attitudes, and performances helped them become more aware of the strategies they could use to further their language development. This innovative approach to oral language assessment both provided important feedback to teachers and helped students identify language learning strategies that they could use after they completed the course. Thus, heritage language classroom and assessment activities combined to provide productive learning experiences. Electronic Portfolio Assessment Interwoven throughout both the academic English and heritage language courses was an electronic portfolio project that helped students develop technological skills while they documented their academic progress. The computer lab, which met once a week, was taught by a technology expert (Randy Gomabon) and assisted by an electronic portfolio assessment specialist (Hye-sun Cho, a coauthor of this chapter). The SHALL instructors worked closely with the technology experts to integrate the curricula of the two courses and use assessment procedures both to improve the SHALL courses and to allow students to reflect on their progress. By recognizing new ways of capturing the complex ways people read, write, and understand text, including media technology, electronic portfolio assessment (EPA) helped students expand their definitions of and understandings about literacy (Blair & Takayoshi, 1997; Flood, Lapp, & BaylesMartin, 2000). In developing their portfolios, students learned to use video to analyze visual representations and communicate ideas to real audiences, expanded their knowledge of the rhetoric of electronic environments, and engaged in a process of reflection and revision that deepened their understanding of curriculum content (Becker, 2002). Through their involvement with EPA and other projects in the SHALL classroom, students seemed to change their perspectives on their heritage language and culture. At the be-


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FIG. 1.2. Screen shot of a Samoan student’s cover page.

ginning of the SHALL curriculum implementation, students were reluctant to use their heritage languages in the classroom. However, at the later stage of EPA, most students incorporated their heritage languages in their electronic portfolios to some extent (Fig. 1.2). Students also searched research topics related to their heritage culture (e.g., Tatau [Samoan tattoo], Filipino folklore, songs, and food) through the Internet and wrote research papers on these topics. As evident in the following commentary by a Samoan female student, they inevitably came to appreciate the way their languages and cultures were recognized and valued in their courses: I knew little about my own culture before I took this class. With this electronic portfolio, I can put things together that I made in the classroom, like a family album. I think that’s pretty neat.

The integration of technology into the SHALL curriculum also provided a flexible, student-centered instructional environment. Teachers could adapt instruction to meet the needs of individual students by adjusting the sequence, pace, and style of their technology-based presentations and by supporting individual students as they engaged with different types of tech-

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FIG. 1.3. Screen shots of a Samoan student’s family/friends album.

nology. Some students who were technologically more adept than others were also able to contribute their expertise in helping their peers. Using technologies to construct portfolios increased students’ control over the form and function of their collection of work. Rather than including a set of assignments or artifacts approved by their teachers, students had the opportunity to choose the content and format for their portfolio. As Myers, Hammett, and McKillop (2000) noted, composers of hypermedia, like readers of literature, make personal connections between self and multimedia text and explore the self through the selecting and organizing of electronic portfolio artifacts. In particular, their self-explorations promote a sense of personal agency. Consequently, EPA provided students with a sense of ownership over their own learning (Gagliano & Swiatek, 1999). Also, because students’ electronic portfolios contained music, movement, pictures, and other images that conveyed their ideas and identities, EPA enabled students to develop an expanded notion of literacy, showcase their literacy and artistic abilities, and develop skills for lifelong learning (Fig. 1.3).

CONCLUSIONS Through engaging in a critical participatory approach to education for linguistic minorities in a public high school in Hawai’i, we discovered that it is possible to promote the classroom as a site of relevance and interest, challenge dehumanizing school actions, and provide opportunities for students to explore identity and exercise power. We also realized that funded pilot projects often flounder at the point of promoting innovative practices for


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use in other classrooms and schools. Although we wished to involve high school teachers from the beginning in critical and academic-oriented curriculum development, we were aware that there could be struggles and tensions in implementing a project that challenged commonly accepted language curricula, pedagogical practices, and attitudes toward language minority abilities and resources. Rather than engage in encounters over conflicting ideologies and philosophies that could threaten teachers with loss of face, we decided to focus on developing and piloting courses, documenting curriculum activities and student learning, and providing inservice courses about the theories, practices, and products of our curriculum. We intend that this nonconfrontational approach will open dialogue with teachers and administrators and thus allow a critical participatory approach to evolve through our ongoing presence at the school, informal inservice courses, publications, presentations, and workshops. Increasingly, teachers at the high school tell us that “students who attend SHALL courses are different”—engaged in their own learning and able to navigate school expectations for academic performance while asking questions about those expectations. This response augurs well for expanding the use of a critical participatory approach to other classrooms. Yet school recognition is not enough to build the capacity of this approach to serve linguistic minorities in public schools throughout Hawai’i. To address the need for effective capacity building, we have begun to engage in educational efforts outside the classroom and school. First, we have initiated development of an undergraduate program in ESL and Bilingual Studies14 that draws on our critical participatory approach model and resources in preparing heritage language speakers15 to teach in elementary and secondary schools. We are also exploring the potential for including critical language and culture issues in current graduate-level teacher preparation programs. In addition, efforts are being made to develop links with other funded projects and community or state agencies. For example, we have combined our SHALL project efforts with a federally funded GEAR UP project that is designed to prepare disadvantaged children for college. We are also working with the state Civil Rights Commission in developing educational outreach programs that address diversity and discrimination issues, and seeking ways to collaborate with the state Department of Education on developing standards, testing approaches, and programs that meet the needs of linguistic minorities. In other words, we are engaging in collaborative efforts, at both grass-roots and educational policy levels, to effectively address educational and socioeconomic inequities. 14 This project is funded by a Federal Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition, Career Ladder grant. 15 We are currently recruiting Ilokano 15 and Samoan speakers into the program, but plan to include individuals from other minority language groups as the program expands.

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The SHALL project and other efforts described here are intended to initiate statewide change in educational practices and attitudes from the prevailing “language as problem” Discourse to one of “language as resource.” Long-term critical, participatory, and action research endeavors that collaboratively coordinate efforts and resources among local, state, and national agencies promise to lead to a transformation from language policies and practices that harm or ignore immigrants and other disenfranchised groups to ones that actively aid them, in the United States and beyond.

REFERENCES Andrews, L. (1998). Language exploration and awareness: A resource book for teachers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Becker, M. (2002). What is all this talk about digital portfolios? Tahlequah, OK: Northeastern State University, Center for Teaching and Learning. Benham, M. K., & Heck, R. H. (1998). Culture and educational policy in Hawaii: The silencing of native voices. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Blair, K. L., & Takayoshi, P. (1997). Reflections on reading and evaluating electronic portfolios. In K. B. Yancey & T. Weiser (Eds.), Situating portfolios: Four perspectives (pp. 357–369). Logan: Utah State University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Canarajah, A. S. (1993). Critical ethnography of a Sri Lankan classroom: Ambiguities in student opposition to reproduction through ESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 601–626. Christensen, L. (1997/1998). Where I’m from: Inviting students’ lives into the classroom. Rethinking Schools, 12(2), 22–23. Delpit, L. (1998). The politics of teaching literate discourse. In V. Zamel & R. Spack (Eds.), Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning across languages and cultures (pp. 207–218). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Egan-Robertson, A., & Willett, J. (1998). Students as ethnographers, thinking and doing ethnography: A bibliographic essay. In A. Egan-Robertson & D. Bloome (Eds.), Students as researchers of culture and language in their own communities (pp. 1–32). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Fairclough, N. (1992). The appropriacy of “appropriateness.” In. N. Fairclough (Ed.), Critical language awareness (pp. 33–56). London: Longman. Flood, J., Lapp, D., & Bayles-Martin, D. (2000). Vision possible: The role of visual media in literacy education. In M. A. Gallego & S. Hollingsworth (Eds.), What counts as literacy (pp. 62–84). New York: Teachers College Press. Gagliano, K., & Swiatek, L. (1999). Improving student assessment through the implementation of portfolios in language arts. Unpublished master’s action research project, Saint Xavier University, Chicago. Garner, R. (1987). Metacognition and reading comprehension. Cognition and Literacy Series. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Philadelphia: Falmer Press.


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Hawai’i Council on Language Planning and Policy. (1996). A conversation with parents about language. Honolulu: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. Hawai’i Council on Language Planning and Policy. (1997, May). Common myths about bilingualism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Center for Second Language Research. Hawai’i Department of Education (2001, Fall). Farrington High School: School Status and Improvement Report. Retrieved April 10, 2004, from http://arch.k12.hi.us/pdf/ssir/2001/Honolulu/ ssir106.pdf He, A. W., & Young, R. (1998). Language proficiency interviews: Discourse approach. In R. Young & A. W. He (Eds.), Talking and testing: Discourse approaches to the assessment of oral proficiency (pp. 1–24). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hinton, L. (1996). Flutes of fire: Essays on California Indian languages. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Kadooka, J. (2001). ESL: “A different kind of academics”: An ethnographic study of a public high school ESLL program in Hawai’i. Unpublished manuscript, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. McComiskey, B. (2000). Teaching composition as a social process. Logan: Utah State University Press. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Myers, J., Hammett, R., & McKillop, A. M. (2000). Connecting, exploring, and exposing the self in the hypermedia projects. In M. A. Gallego & S. Hollingsworth (Eds.), What counts as literacy: Challenging the school standard (pp. 85–117). New York: Teachers College Press. Norton, B. (1997). Language, identity, and the ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 409–430. Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2002). Identity and language learning. In R. B. Kaplan (Ed.), Oxford handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 115–123). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Riggenbach, H. (1998). Evaluating learner interactional skills: Conversation at the micro level. In R. Young & A. W. He (Eds.), Talking and testing: Discourse approaches to the assessment of oral proficiency (pp. 53–67). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Shakur, T. (1998). Changes. On 2Pac—Greatest Hits [CD]. New York: Interscope. Talmy, S. (2001, November). Historical and political contexts for educational transformation. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Conference, Washington, DC. Theroux, P. (2001). Hotel Honolulu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Tonouchi, L. (2001). Da Word. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press. Tonouchi, L. (2002). Dey say if you talk Pidgin you no can . . . Bamboo Ridge 81, 10–12. U.S. Census Bureau. (2000). Census of population: Social and economic characteristics—Hawaii. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Valdés, G. (1992). The role of the foreign language teaching profession in maintaining nonEnglish languages in the United States. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Languages for a multicultural world in transition, 1992 Northeast Conference Reports (pp. 29–71). Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company. Valdés, G., & Figueroa, R. A. (1994). Bilingualism and testing: A special case of bias. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Willett, J., Solsken, J., & Wilson-Keenan, J. (1998). The (im)possibilities of constructing multicultural language practices in research and pedagogy. Linguistics and Education 10(2), 165–218. Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Malden, MA: Blackwell.


C H A P T E R

2 “I Would Sing Every Day”: Skepticism and the Imagination Cindy Ballenger Cheche Konnen Center

For many teachers and teacher researchers like me, Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) close analysis of the different oral and literate tradition of three communities, one African American working-class (Trackton), one White working-class (Roadville), and one made up of both Black and White middleclass people, helped us first realize how knowledge of the cultural practices of different communities could help us in our work. Heath’s work addressed the differences between talk at home and at school and, along with other such studies (e.g., Au, 1980; Boggs, 1985; Cazden, 1988; Foster, 1983; Gee, 1990; Labov, 1972; Lee, 1993; Michaels, 1981; Philips, 1983; Vásquez, PeaseAlvarez, & Shannon, 1994), helped us become critically aware of the different experiences children have with print, with questions, and with norms of talk and participation in various contexts. This literature has also helped us to regard behaviors we had puzzled over in the classroom with more respect and understanding, to see how we contributed to these behaviors, to recognize and value the knowledge that children came to school already possessing (e.g., Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar, 2004), and even to design curriculum that built on cultural strengths we had not previously valued as relevant to academic endeavors. However, this knowledge has not brought about the dramatic changes that were hoped for in our classrooms. I think there are two interrelated reasons for this that have to do with a narrow and overly formal view of what we counted as culture: (a) We did not consider ourselves in our role

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as teachers in schools as cultural beings and our teaching as cultural practices, and (b) we did not regard cultural practices as being shaped, each time anew, in encounters and activities that occurred in schools and classrooms. Instead, we looked for the big differences that we had heard about, such as variations in narrative style. These we tended to see as static and defined once and for all by certain characteristics and belonging permanently to particular sorts of people. Despite our best intentions, when we did recognize that there were cultural differences in communicative practices and traditions of language use among our students, we viewed these as deficits. For example, although many of us read in Heath’s Ways with Words that Trackton children participated in rich and complex oral storytelling and joking events, we focused on what we deemed to be missing in their lives—that there was no one who read to them. When we encountered this missing experience among our own students, we tried to make up for it by spending more time reading to them. Because we did not recognize communicative practices associated with communities other than school as intellectually powerful in themselves, we did not explore other aspects of our students’ literary repertoires, including the language practices that were part of their everyday experiences. Thus we did not build on their practices in school, nor did we question our own. In fostering classroom communities that build on students’ intellectual and cultural resources, teachers need to engage in explorations of their own classrooms as rich and complex sites of interaction involving different cultural practices. These practices include the dynamic and flexible habits, perspectives, and values that students learn in their communities and homes and draw on when making sense of new information and activities in classrooms (Moll, 1992). I believe that through this process of exploration, which entails examining and reflecting on what children say and do as it happens in the details of everyday classroom activities, we, as teachers, become aware of our own tacit, and largely unexamined, beliefs about classroom-based activities and content. Further, I believe that this process of exploration can be a normal and particularly rewarding part of the everyday work of teaching. In this chapter, I hope to show how the practices of teacher research, particularly as employed by the Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar (BTRS), can help us challenge our own assumptions about teaching and learning in ways that ultimately enable us to expand our views about what counts as intellectually useful thought and participation in school. I do this by sharing an account from my own teaching focused on the things my Haitian American students said that I considered surprising or puzzling, or that got in the way of my plans for their learning.

2. I WOULD SING EVERY DAY

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A PUZZLING MOMENT I begin with a field note that I took one day after class. This note was prompted by the unexpected response of my students to a story that I was telling them. Although I did not know it at the time, their response led me to a question that I followed throughout the next year. It was the start of a study that centered on the skepticism and imagination of my Haitian American third and fourth graders as we studied whales. Their responses puzzled me a good deal at first and, eventually, challenged my assumptions about how we learn from books. Is This Fiction? Today I was telling the story of David, the one who killed Goliath with his slingshot, to my bilingual Haitian American fourth graders. After he killed Goliath, David became the favorite of King Saul, but eventually Saul became jealous of David’s fame and popularity. In his jealousy, Saul went crazy, and he sought, and evidently succeeded, in talking with Samuel, who was dead. When I reached this part of the story, my students suddenly got very excited. “Is this fiction?” they asked. Well, there’s a question, I thought. Is the Bible fiction? Some say yes; some say no. The story of David and Saul is likely based on historical fact although, in my opinion, talking with someone who is dead is fiction. As I tried to respond to all the different meanings of fiction I suddenly saw looming before me, my students told me that Jill, a teacher at our school, had told them that their stories of zombies and other fearsome things in Haiti were fiction. They told me this with some annoyance, as though they were disturbed by Jill’s comments. Butting heads with Jill maybe, but not so sure. “Were they being dissed or not?” they seemed to be asking. However it seemed likely to me, and I think to them as well, that Jill was trying to protect them from what she regarded as superstition.

This incident is an example of what, in the BTRS, we call a puzzling moment, which we capture in written field notes, as I did here, or in audio recordings. Puzzling moments are times during the school day when unexpected and unplanned events take place, as when children take some measure of control of the conversation in unexpected ways, or say something that we, their teachers, think is incorrect. Puzzling moments may be times when children appear unable to respond in the ways we think they should. They may also be moments of unexpected engagement or lack of engagement, dispute, or humor. Although their duration is short, these moments often yield a great deal. Indeed, we have found that many of our most compelling questions and new understandings come from studies of events of this kind.

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When my students first uttered the question “Is this fiction?”, they sounded like teachers, which struck me as funny. It was clear that they wanted their question to be taken seriously. I had always thought it was obvious when something is fiction. But as I told this story to various people to make them laugh, I came to understand the meaning behind their question. I could see that my students did not conceive of fiction in the technical, flat, and unexciting way that I did, as part of a familiar two-way division: fiction versus nonfiction. Rather, they thought of fiction as alive—as part of the process of actively placing something in one category or another. By relating the Bible story to the story about Jill, they were showing me that although the word fiction has a definition, which they knew, how you understand it depends partly on who you are and what you are doing. Further, there was some resentment toward Jill. And yet there seemed to be some gratitude, too. Neither the term nor their feelings about it seemed simple. Puzzling moments like this are occasions when culture and cultural difference, ours and theirs, as well as other differences in experience and in personal style, become visible. The children are expecting something from me that I don’t deliver; I am expecting something from them and get something else. Exploring these moments provides us with venues for accessing and inspecting deeply tacit ideas and values, mine and theirs, about the different meanings and uses we assign to the things we say in school and for doing this in the context of whatever it is we are doing together. I kept this event in my mind. THE BROOKLINE TEACHER RESEARCHER SEMINAR The Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar is a group of elementary and high school teachers that was originally convened by Steve Griffin, a speech and language therapist. After taking a new job in a school serving a predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class community, Steve was troubled when he discovered that the children referred to him for speech and language therapy included most of the African American students in the school. A few months later, he became even more concerned when he learned that Judith Steinbergh, a poet-in-residence at the school, considered many of his students to be skillful poets. He wondered how students who were proficient enough with language to be exceptional poets could have significant language disabilities. Inspired by Steve’s concern, the BTRS was formed around this question. As members of the BTRS, over time we asked many other related questions: Were we seeing deficits where there were actually strengths? What kinds of language did we value in school, and whose language practices and goals were made less visible as a result? What kinds of language could be useful in learning and in doing science or history? What skills and interests do children have that we don’t give them


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the time or space to pursue in school? How might these skills become a part of our curriculum? As we posed and addressed these questions, it became clear that the need to challenge our assumptions about language, learning, and talking was at the genesis of the BTRS. Our approach to understanding cultural differences was built on the idea that our own assumptions about talk, meaning, and appropriate participation often stand in the way of “hearing” all that a child is trying to say, and grounded in our examination of the puzzling moments that were part of day-to-day classroom activities and conversations. A central feature of our work was to investigate classroom talk by tape-recording classroom conversations or taking field notes, sharing our notes and transcriptions of recordings with BTRS colleagues during our weekly meetings in one another’s classrooms. We would try to make sense of these conversations by reading them through, assuming the roles of the various interlocutors. In doing this, we focused more of our attention on the talk of children whose ideas or responses we didn’t easily understand. More often than not, these children were children of color, poor, or bilingual. We probed their talk for the meanings we might have missed in the fast pace of classroom interaction. We found that we learned the most from those aspects of talk and activity that we did not at first see as valuable or academic. We found it helpful to rely on notes and transcriptions rather than on our stories or anecdotes. When we referred to field notes and especially to transcriptions, there was always something about an event or interaction that we had not remembered or had not understood at the time that it occurred. When we told anecdotes about classroom events without referring to our notes or transcriptions, we found that the interpretation of what the child had done was embedded in our anecdotes and that we were not as open to new perspectives. Having data to refer to challenged our readymade assumptions about the children’s meanings and intentions. We explored our own role in setting contexts and investigated how different contexts allowed children to present different aspects of themselves and engage different “ways with words.” On many occasions we relinquished some of our control by taking ourselves out of a context to see what children might do if left more to themselves. When this happened we found that the children’s questions emerged powerfully. We talked less, and when we did talk it was often to check our understanding of a child’s meaning. Although many of the activities in our classroom stayed the same, the kinds of conversation surrounding these activities changed. MY STUDENTS My students’ parents spoke Haitian Creole at home. Sometimes they spoke English there as well; sometimes they did not. Many parents had not gone far in school, and some could not read and write well. The children were in

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their final year in a bilingual program where English and Haitian Creole were spoken. Some of the children had gone to school in Haiti and learned to read and write there in Haitian Creole or French. However, others had attended school sporadically or attended poor schools. Some of the children over the age of 10 were illiterate when they came to the United States. Other children were born in the United States and had never been to Haiti. Some children remembered Haiti with affection and looked forward to summer visits. Others associated Haiti with poverty and, in some cases, hunger. At times children expressed negative feelings about Haiti and Haitian Creole. And yet they enjoyed and appreciated many aspects of Haitian culture, such as the food and music. The school where I taught had an enormous commitment to Haitian students, and yet teachers faced many challenges when working with them, particularly once they left the bilingual program and were placed in mainstream classrooms. When most of the Haitian students entered mainstream classrooms, they were assessed as having low literacy and math skills. A disproportionate number were referred to special education. Many of the upper-grade teachers felt that their general knowledge of history and science was inadequate. And this was true in many ways. Many did not know how many planets there were, or what Europe was, or that whales breathed air. It was my job as a third- and fourth-grade literacy teacher to smooth their transition into the mainstream classrooms in whatever way I could. Often my students and I worked together, reading and discussing books in small groups. In the following sections, I focus on one of these reading groups.

SCIENCE AND FICTION The study that is the focus of this chapter began when the children who had questioned the veracity of the Bible story about David and Goliath once again claimed that a book we were reading could not be true and must be fiction. The following field note describes this interaction. The Size of Baby Whales As we begin to read our first book about whales, the children read that baby whales were bigger than elephants. Abel said that he didn’t believe it. Vitale agreed with Abel. There was a chorus of disbelief. Abel remonstrated that there were monsters pictured in the book (they are included as examples of what people once believed about sea life) and so this book was fiction. “This book is fiction,” they claimed as they had before about David and Goliath. And they did so with conviction. Other children will have encountered


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ideas about the great size of whales in books their parents read to them, in dinner table conversations, and in visits to museums. For my students, this information was new, and quite unbelievable. I disagreed with them and tried to explain why the book had monsters in it and why we should trust it, but generally I didn’t feel that I was very effective. I said that I thought the book was reliable; they said that they thought the book was unbelievable.

This was the start of my inquiry. It began when I noticed for the second time the question “Is this fiction?” and the seriousness and force with which the children stated their opinions about what was true and what was not. As often happens when beginning an inquiry project, I did not know what my study would be about. I only had the sense that something unexpected was going on and that the students thought it was important. PURSUING MY STUDY My questions as I began were: What did my students mean when they asked these funny, unexpected, and surprising questions about truth and fiction? Why were they skeptical about books? What did they consider unbelievable? Was it different from what I considered unbelievable? What did I take for granted, and what did they? Was there a cultural difference in the way we related to books? I set out to consider my students’ concerns about what is true and what is fiction in a conversational space such as the one I have described. I taperecorded conversations and wrote field notes when something came up that seemed relevant to these concerns.1 As I present these, the reader can see that I included among them times when my students challenged the veracity of something we read and times when I thought they were fantasizing or speaking from imaginary worlds. Initially I made tape-recordings and observations of these two types of events because they were occasions when students were highly engaged in discussion. Later I realized that children’s talk during both kinds of events conveyed their beliefs about truth and knowledge. I also recognized the role that imagination played in these beliefs. This first became apparent to me in my reflections on the event captured in the following account, drawn from both field notes and taperecordings, of one reading group’s study of whales: 1

When taking field notes I often wrote down the children’s utterances as fast as I could, adding comments later. When I could not write down what they said as they said it, I would write down my recollections of our conversations. On those occasions when I audio-recorded our conversations, I also made notes describing what children were saying and what I thought about their remarks. After a day or two, I often wrote additional comments after rereading my field notes as part of the process of planning for our next reading group session. I returned to make further notes on some events many times, even after the passage of several weeks. 1

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Whales Are Born Alive As I worked with this group of students, I noticed various things that seemed to stand in the way of them being seen as competent students, including the difficulties they had with certain kinds of classifying. They didn’t know that whales were mammals, and they had trouble with questions asking them to identify types of rocks and fish. Given these concerns, I decided to involve the group in a study of whales and, in so doing, provide students with opportunities to classify whales according to different categories (e.g., as mammals; baleen and toothed whales; humpbacks and gray whales). In elementary school we highlight the classification of the whale as a mammal, which means, among other things, that they breathe air and that they nurse their young. But for many of us, including myself, why we group together animals that breathe air and nurse their young has never been explained. I didn’t want my students to understand that whales were mammals in the way I had understood it as a child, as an odd fact that was remembered mainly because it was so odd. Instead, I wanted them to grasp the deep and compelling meaning that underlies the classification of animals. For this reason, I provided them with opportunities to organize animals into categories. We began by listing those creatures that are born alive and those that are born from eggs. During this activity, I told my students that whales are all born alive and that most creatures that are born alive are also mammals. I asked for examples of other creatures that are born alive, and the children provided a list: dogs, horses, cats. Then Hervé suggested, “Birds.” Radine remonstrated immediately, “Nan zè yo fèt.” (“In eggs they are born.”) Hervé exclaimed, “Oh, eggs? Eggs? How they feel in the egg?” Hervé seemed to marvel, as I did, at his question. Radine responded to him with some exasperation, “How do you feel in your mother?” Perhaps she was assuming that no one would be able to answer her question. However, Hervé responded, “I remember.” “Do you remember?” I asked. I wanted to hear more. Abel chimed in, “The [babies] feel good.” Hervé and Abel said that they remembered this. I was charmed and puzzled. I had the tape recorder going and I also made notes for further reflection. Our list now had two headings: one for animals born from eggs and one for animals born alive. I asked the children where on our list to place whales. Hervé answered. He placed whales on the list with the creatures that were born alive and told me that the other list is of animals that are born from eggs. He also said that whales were mammals, like horses and cats. When I listened to the tape recording of this conversation later, I noted that he answered in a relaxed flat tone of voice, with none of his usual verve. He knew I wanted him to understand this classification business, and he knew the answer I wanted and he provided it, but without a lot of excitement. I evaluated his answer, “Very good.” I expected this to be the end of the interaction, but suddenly he had a question for me. “How do you know?” he asked. “How do I know?” I responded with surprise. “From the book. I haven’t seen this.” How do I know? We had recently read this. What more is there to say? I thought to myself.


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A few minutes later Vitale, answering the same question, said, “[Whale] babies are born alive.” Her tone of voice was also flat, as if she were disinterested. She was repeating what I had taught her. Hervé then jumped in excitedly. “It is true,” he assured me, “because when the whales are going, I see them big big big, no eggs like can [be that big].” Hervé’s energy was back. This time he was satisfied with his contribution to our conversation. He claimed to have seen how big whales are, presumably, when they are born. Given their size, he suggested, no egg could contain them. Our list was now verified by Hervé’s personal experience; that is, by what he claimed to have seen.

When jotting down notes about this interaction later on, I mentioned that the students seemed to grant little authority to texts. They didn’t believe them. “Were they unfamiliar with this genre of book?” I asked in my notes. “Didn’t they know it was a science book?” I had not seen a whale give birth, but I did not doubt that the book was correct. I wondered if this attitude toward books was evidence of a difference in our cultures. It is certainly true that my culture is highly engaged with books. I use books to do everything from cooking to planning trips to relaxing and enjoying myself. I knew that the Bible was the only book in many of my students’ homes and that it was carefully placed out of reach of young children. As I looked over my notes while pondering my research questions, I began to wonder about Hervé’s claim that only relatively small baby creatures can be born from eggs. I also continued to wonder about Hervé’s thinking during this conversation. In response to Radine’s rhetorical and impatient question, Hervé and Abel claimed they knew what it felt like inside a mother’s stomach. Hervé even claimed that he remembered his own experience in his mother’s womb. What did he mean when he made this claim? At first I thought he was being whimsical, and perhaps lying a little to be persuasive. I thought he was charming, but I didn’t think he was contributing very seriously to the discussion. However, after thinking about this and looking at the work the children did over time in their study of whales, I now think Hervé was sincere. He was trying hard to remember his time in his mother’s womb. He also was trying to sense what it would be like for a bird inside an egg. His imagined experience led him to question how big eggs could be and whether a shell could contain a whale. He knew how big some whale babies were. Noticing that their size was no longer in doubt, Hervé was using his imagination as a way to address the information I wanted him to know. He used it to judge this information and to determine how it fit with other things he knew. Later I asked a biologist friend of mine what he thought about the issue of egg size and big babies. He told me that eggs provide nutrition and oxygen through a passive system and that, because animals hatched from eggs have no circulatory system (unlike creatures that have a placenta), there is no way to pump important things like blood and oxygen around. Because

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oxygen would have to permeate and circulate through an eggshell, a large creature would have difficulty getting enough oxygen to live. So Hervé’s idea is not uninteresting. Of course, he did not have access to the biologist’s explanation. But his intuition, based on his ability to put himself into imagined situations, was not wrong. In this case, Hervé helped us make a sort of visceral and biological sense of the difference between these forms of reproduction. The following two anecdotes were taken down as field notes. Nursing Babies and Belly Buttons During the following week we learned more about definitions and distinctions relevant to whales. The dictionary defined mammals as the class of animals that nurse their young. Vitale did some research on her own from one of our books about how whale babies are born and swim with their mothers. One morning she shared what she had written about whales. She wrote that many whales live long lives and that they all nurse their babies and care for them. She explained to the others what the word nurse meant, reminding them, with some impatience, of all the mothers and babies they had seen. To help the boys recall, she demonstrated briefly but authoritatively on her 10-year-old body how one nurses. Hervé told us that he knew a man in Haiti who nursed a baby, which he too tried to demonstrate. But this time no one believed him. Abel asked if boy whales are mammals too. Abel’s question suggests that I came close to teaching him, and maybe the others, that all mammals are female. So much for my interest in straightening out their ability to classify. Abel’s question was probably one I should have anticipated. It reminded me how strange the language of these definitions is. The dictionary says that mammals are the class of creatures who nurse their young. The “class” part of the definition is evidently supposed to make it clear that we mean both males and females, but this is not obvious to everyone. Later in the meeting, Vitale and Radine claimed to know the place on a mother whale’s body from which a newborn baby whale emerges. They disagreed with each other as they proposed various fins as the site. Vitale claimed to know from a book she had read. We had a book with us that helped, and as we looked through it and read the text, the girls used their knowledge of babies and childbirth to realize that whales must have a belly button. “Where was it?” they asked me. I had no idea. I experienced a moment of pure panic as I assured myself that whales must have belly buttons. After all, they were born alive so they must! Later that day I emailed a friend who should know. He assured me that whales do indeed have belly buttons. Teeth and Baleen My interest in classifying also led me to try to make sure that my students knew that there were different kinds of whales. In addition to the distinction between


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creatures born from eggs and creatures born alive, our understanding of whale categories included another dimension. We had divided whales into those with teeth and those with baleen, which is a major division that biologists use to categorize whales. The children were interested in the baleen whales especially, and how the baleen allowed whales to trap little shrimp-like animals called krill in their mouths. As I was walking down the hall with Hervé, he told me he thought that if a whale swallowed him, he could get away from the whales that have baleen, but not the toothed ones because he, unlike the tiny krill, could swim back out through the baleen. He went on to explain to me how you can tell the baleen from the toothed whales. From looking at pictures in books, he had learned to distinguish these two kinds of whales by the shape of their heads. I was impressed. This visual distinction between the two kinds of whales was not something I could make or even knew was possible.

THE RELEVANCE OF DETAILS What was going on in these last two incidents? Vitale engaged her imagination when describing how whales nurse their babies. However, she didn’t go as far afield as Hervé. Rather, she stuck to her own imagined future as a mother. When responding to her vision, the boys felt excluded. They knew that they would never nurse a baby. Hervé in his distress imagined a solution—men can nurse babies. While Abel didn’t accept this, he thought about it in relation to our definition of mammals as creatures that nurse their young. Could boys at least be mammals? The girls continued to think about childbirth, which led them to wonder about the belly button. During both of these incidents, the students saw details that I had not seen or had not wondered about: that the two categories of whales had differently shaped heads and that whales had belly buttons. I often thought that these kinds of detailed responses were off topic or unimportant. But as I reflected on them further, I could see that these details were the defining criteria of classification systems. The whale’s belly button is, as a friend of mine called it, a deeply conceptual detail that enables one to classify whales as mammals. Knowing that baleen and toothed whales have discernibly different jaw structures helps one make sense of the way these two types of whales are classified. My students were using imagined lives, as mothers, newborns, and prey, to understand the physical facts of whales and their lives. They were learning to classify as I had hoped, and so was I. I would present some information, that whales are mammals and that there are toothed and baleen whales. My students would then proceed to make connections until they had made a deeper sense of these pieces of information. What sounded off topic or simply playful was helping me as well as my students to gain a deeper understanding of science.

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ARE WHALES BORN NEAR HAITI? This last long incident has three parts and took place over a series of days. Again my students disputed the truth and imagined various scenes. As they placed themselves in these scenes to determine what could be, we also see most vividly how they worked to put their lives in contact with science. Part 1 When we were reading Humpback Goes North (Bailer, 1998), we came to text that said that humpback whales were born near the Dominican Republic and migrate north each summer. “Do you know where the Dominican Republic is?” I asked. “Oh yes,” the kids responded happily. “Right next to Haiti,” I said. “Yeah, I know it,” said Abel. “So this little whale was born right next to Haiti,” I continued. Suddenly there was an extended silence. No one said a word. Then I heard someone say under his breath, “Lying.” Radine then exclaimed, “That’s not true, M kanpe, m pa t wè l [ ] Ayiti.” (“I’ve stood there, I didn’t see them [in] Haiti.”) I replied, “I think it is true, ou pa t wè l men.” (“You haven’t seen it, but.”) They asked if I had seen any whales when I was in Haiti, and I admitted that I had not. Hervé asked, “Are you playing?” “Playing?” I responded, “No way, it says here that the little whale was born north of the Dominican Republic. I think it’s true.” I continued, “This book was made by the Smithsonian. That’s a museum, so they tell the truth. This is a science book. It’s made to teach you.” A little later on Hervé explained his thinking: “You know why I don’t believe the story. There’s no whales in Haiti, because I never saw one, every time with my mom I went to swim, ’cause I know how to swim, I don’t see whales.” He argued by saying that when he had been in Haiti, swimming—something I know that he cannot do—he had not seen whales. I explained why he and Radine might have missed the whales when they were in Haiti. I said, “Maybe you weren’t far enough out in the water. They’re way, way out in the middle of the water.” Radine evidently found this persuasive and reiterated for the others in Creole, “Yeah, they’re not in the shallow water. They’re way out deep.”

I was astonished when they challenged the idea of humpbacks being born near Haiti. I had no idea that they would find this unbelievable. I heard myself on the tape saying, “You didn’t see it, but.” I didn’t go on. I seemed to say that there are things in books that you haven’t seen. I felt compelled to state that I believed the book and to invoke the authority of the Smithsonian. I was trying to be clear about how I understood the role of these books, trying to counter the children’s skepticism toward science books.


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I was distressed, but when Hervé set the scene for me, I was sucked in. I naturally placed the whales for him and the others in the ocean, but just beyond their view. We were imagining this together, something we often did as we worked out how whales leap to smack the barnacles off their skin or create nets of bubbles to trap fish. But I was not sure if they all finally believed me, or if they had learned how to respond to science books. There was some sense of discomfort in this incident, particularly in the students’ use of lying. I wondered what was bothering them so. Part 2 A few days later, we were discussing the term “migrate” to describe the journey the whales took from Haiti to Maine. Hervé asked calmly if it was true that whales are born near Haiti. He undoubtedly remembered that the book said so, and that I had said that I believed the book. When I said that it was true, Radine asked if I had seen any whales when I was in Haiti. I said no, suggesting that the whales must have been too far out in the ocean for me to see them from the shore. Abel also commented that he had never seen whales from the beach. Hervé then told me that you have to watch your back in Haiti because bad people live there. He then went on to list the generations of whale mothers born near Haiti. He rhythmically intoned “The mothers, the mothers’ mothers, the grandmothers’ mothers” have their babies where it is warm and then go north for food. This was a close, but more poetic, paraphrase of the words in the book. He seemed to be seeing generations of migrating whales make their way north from Haiti. Everyone was listening peacefully and seemed to find the idea of whales born near Haiti entirely sensible.

When reflecting on this interaction I was reminded of the discomforting conversations about fiction and the Bible story of David and Goliath. Aspects of our conversations about whales were also discomforting, including my students’ concern over the way others categorized their stories and their claim that information in the book about whales was a lie. Both had to do with statements made by others about Haiti: Haitian stories as fiction and Haiti as a birthplace of humpback whales. It seemed that the children were surprised to have access to information about Haiti in school. What did academic interests, like fiction and humpbacks, have to do with their life in Haiti? The second time we talked about whales, Hervé warned me about watching my back in Haiti. Like some of the other children, he may have seen some violence in Haiti, and he was perhaps remembering this as he warned me. Still, this comment seemed odd and off track—why should he mention bad guys in Haiti in a conversation about whales? It reminded me of other remarks that I had deemed to be random associations that were unrelated to a topic that we were discussing. However, after further thought, I con-

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cluded that Hervé was imagining the situation in vivid detail. After accepting the book’s claim about whales in Haiti, he had put himself on the beach, searching for whales, and he found that he had to be looking both ways, at the ocean for the whales and behind him for bad guys. For Hervé, bad guys were a part of his experience in Haiti. Hervé seemed to celebrate his comfort with his new knowledge through his poetic phrase “mothers, mothers’ mothers, grandmothers’ mothers,” all born in the warm water. As he dreamily recounted these words, he was clearly pretending. This time his reference to Haiti was not about bad guys, but about a warm and nurturing place. These final comments, to which the other children listened attentively, were resonant with the details of Hervé’s own immigration story and those of the others, leaving grandmothers, warm weather, and even bad guys to come north to grow up. This session had a sense of finality about it, and yet a few days later the final conversation about this topic was initiated by Vitale. Part 3: Talking and Singing Today, Vitale, who hadn’t weighed in on this topic earlier, said, “I saw whales in Haiti.” Again, I doubted it since she had previously said nothing about this. The conversation immediately took off. “Do they talk?” asked Radine. Evidently since Vitale has seen them, she should know. But then Radine answered her own question: “They do. All animals talk. I saw ants, yon ravek ki mouri (a roach that died). All the ants went to him. Some stayed, but most went. So they talk.” Abel said that birds say, “Eek eek.” Abel and Vitale mentioned other animal sounds. Hervé found and pointed to the place in the Smithsonian book that describes the sounds that whales make. He said the sounds meant hurry up. We then read that whales can sing. “I would sing every day,” said Hervé. They had no trouble believing that whales can sing.

Why did Vitale say that she had seen whales from the beach in Haiti? She was the one who did book research on her own. She tended to believe texts. She was silent during the original argument about the humpback whales’ birthplace. I think she decided that this was an important question and that she wanted to state her position publicly. She did it by claiming an imaginary kind of experience the way Hervé did so often, professing to have seen whales when she was in Haiti. I had never heard Vitale make such fanciful claims prior to this exchange. It seems that this way of staking a claim had become an identifiable practice among this group of children. She too wanted to imagine herself somewhere and then make a claim based on this imagined experience. I suspect that Vitale was trying the practice on. Radine followed up with a question of her own. We had just read the section in the book that discussed the sounds humpbacks made. Radine found


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her own experience of watching ants relevant here and answered her question herself. The children then found the places in the text where whale sounds were described and expanded on this with their own ideas. Next we read the statement that whales can sing. Hervé considered its truth with an imagined experience—if Hervé were a whale, he would sing every day. So it was at least likely that whales felt the same way. The children spent time during three class periods considering the claim that humpbacks are born near Haiti. At first they rejected the text. Then they imagined the situation with themselves in it. Hervé referred to what he saw when swimming with his mother even though he did not know how to swim. They all imagined themselves on the beach in Haiti, scanning for whales. As they shared their ideas about grandmothers, going north, and animal communication, the text became a participant with them. They were contentious at first, but later they became peaceful and, finally, joyful.

BELIEVING IN BOOKS Let me return to my initial questions. Did my students really not believe books? Why were they skeptical of books? Was the difference in the way my students and I related to books a cultural difference? Haitian culture values challenge and skepticism in many ways. The cultural practice of bay odyans is a form of social argumentation practiced in many joyful and engaging contexts within the family, among friends, and in public places (Brodwin, 1996; Hudicourt-Barnes, 2003). Children undoubtedly hear this sociable give and take, which comprises logical claims, claims based on personal experience, hypotheses about what could be true, descriptions of extreme situations concocted to test possibilities, and jokes and stories. This practice may well have been a resource that my students were drawing on as they interrogated the books we read and sought to engage with the world of whales contained in them. However, although I have found that a dichotomous approach to understanding cultural difference—often characterized in terms of “they do this and, in contrast, I do that”—is a stage in the process of understanding puzzling behavior, it leads to shallow and sometimes disturbing understandings, including deficit views of others’ cultural practices. When I find myself using dichotomies of this kind to think about my students, I try to turn my questions around. I began this study with questions that focused on how my Haitian students and I were different. To tap a deeper understanding, I needed to explore how we were similar and how my students’ practices are not something only “others” do. I certainly do not mean to deny cultural differences. Rather, I believe that to see the intellectual power of practices that seem to belong to “others” and not to us, we must look for these same

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practices both in our own lives in different contexts and in the practices of other thinkers, including scientists and writers. Thus my questions became: (a) In what ways do my students believe books? (b) When do professional scientists respond in similar ways? (c) When do I respond like my students, with skepticism and imagination? In thinking about my students’ response to books from the perspective of my respect for literate authority, I think I can see now that they were trying very hard to make sense of the books we read. They felt that the books were important. They weren’t disagreeing in any involuntary or casual way. They had higher standards of belief than I expected. They were expecting to know things deeply, to make their knowledge a part of their lives, which was revealed in the way Hervé “knew” the book was right about whales being born alive, the way he ultimately understood the humpback’s migration, and the way Vitale and Radine envisioned whale belly buttons in their minds and then searched for them in pictures. They weren’t accumulating information gleaned from a set of loosely related facts. Instead they wanted to be able to see the world that they knew through their engagement with books. In this way, their respect for books was enormous. This idea reminds me of something Vivian Paley (1990) wrote about her nursery-school students and the dramas they acted out: “Stories that are not acted out are fleeting dreams: private fantasies, disconnected and unexamined” (p. 25). Is this also true of science? Did my students need to connect and to examine the information that I was giving them and that was contained in books about whales, and did they do so by entering the world of whales as actors? Because I think that the answer to these questions is yes, I think that my students have something to offer all children. Many of the children of the educated middle class—my own children for example— are so accustomed to books and booklike information from their parents that they forget to take it seriously. Although they may believe books in some sense, what do their beliefs mean if they do not come into contact, or conflict, with other beliefs and experiences? The intellectual atmosphere that my students bring to our classrooms can help everyone learn. What do my students’ “ways with words” have to do with those of professional scientists? As educators, we are often concerned that students who are learning English lack what we call “academic language.” They don’t speak in a way that suggests the serious discourse of an academic field. When making these claims, I wonder whether we are failing to recognize the joy and playfulness of many serious practices of academic thought. Consider how Sir James Black, a Nobel laureate, discusses one aspect of his scientific thinking about viruses: “I daydream chemical structures. You make a number of assumptions. You assume that the receptor doesn’t know any more about chemistry than chemists do, and you then try and pretend that you are the receptor. You imagine what would it be like if this molecule was


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coming out of space toward you. What would it look like, what would it do?” (Wolpert & Richards, 1997, p. 126). Hervé and his peers liked to imagine themselves as part of the phenomena that we were studying. Hervé felt himself being born. He wondered how birds feel. Vitale and Radine saw the newborn whale in their minds’ eye and wondered where the belly button was. All of my students verified that humpbacks were born off the coast of Haiti by imagining themselves standing on a Haitian beach. Like Black, they used their imagination to understand something and to consider what could be true. And like Black, doing this led them deeply into the knowledge and the connections that constitute scientific thinking. When do I respond with skepticism toward authority, and then with imagined engagement? I worried many friends and colleagues about this question, asking them if they could think of situations where they had felt something like what my students seemed to have felt. One mentioned the highly skeptical response of many student teachers when they are expected to adopt forms of child-centered pedagogy. She said that they first respond with disbelief, and then reimagine themselves and their students in ways that enable them to incorporate this new practice. Similarly, on receiving a diagnosis of a disease, many people initially enter a period of denial: “This can’t be true. It is not a description of me and my life.” Afterward they reimagine themselves into a new story. Finally, what the children did reminds me of my own experience of reading new books about teacher research, or culture and education. These books relate to what I know and care about and to how I live my life, and I generally read them with skepticism. Relying on past, reconsidered, and imagined experience, I must see for myself in my mind the implications, details, and feelings associated with the new claims in the books. I believe these children were doing something similar.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have shown how an inquiry attitude toward puzzling events helped me understand and appreciate how my students productively engage with books and science through skepticism and imagination. Based on the tradition of teacher research that I know, this attitude requires a number of supports. It requires some way to record interactions so that one can reflect on the meaning of what was said in calmer moments, rather than relying on unexamined assumptions. This is mostly easily done by keeping field notes of events. In the beginning it can be difficult to remember very much, but after practice one remembers a great deal when the time comes to sit down to write. Tape-recordings are sometimes neces-

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sary because, in my experience, there are things one never remembers having said or heard. The recordings always offer important surprises. Teaching with an inquiry attitude toward puzzling events requires talking with people about events and children to get more perspectives and to gain distance from assumptions. I talked with many people, including the school secretary, my biologist friend, and other teachers. Each helped by providing opinions and by giving me another chance to tell my story. Finally, teaching with an inquiry attitude requires taking students’ behavior seriously enough to look for it in the outside world, which includes our encounters with other adults and the thoughts of scientists, novelists, or philosophers. It requires that we look at our students’ behavior as a part of a tradition of human thought and action. The payoff is that teaching with an inquiry attitude cultivates a deep sense of humor and a sense of the joy in teaching. Once when the BTRS presented its work at a meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, the stories we told and the data we shared made people laugh. Afterward, other teacher researchers who were present asked us why our work was so funny. We were surprised by their question. We thought that everybody’s research accounts would be funny. When we reflected on this question later, we decided that our accounts were humorous because they focused on “puzzling moments.” In these moments, it was inevitably we, the teachers, who were the “straight men.” The laugh was, in some sense, on us. By revealing to us what they were thinking and intending, the kids often helped us see something new and important in what we were teaching or some limitation in how we were defining things. They helped us get back in touch with ideas that had lost their mystery, see new and novel connections, and become curious about unquestioned assumptions. This was a source of great joy. As Vivian Paley (1990) wrote, with pleasure, not distress, “We only need to listen for our own errors and there is enough . . . [curriculum] to fill the school year.”

REFERENCES Au, K. (1980). Participation structures in a reading lesson with Hawaiian children: Analysis of a culturally appropriate instructional event. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 11, 91–115. Bailer, D. (1998). Humpback goes north. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Boggs, S. T. (1985). Speaking, relating and learning: A study of Hawaiian children at home and at school. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Brodwin, P. (1996). Medicine and morality in Haiti. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar. (2004). Regarding children’s talk: Research on language and literacy. New York: Teachers College Press. Cazden, C. (1988). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.


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Foster, M. (1983). Sharing time: A student-run speech event. ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education ED 234 906. Gee, J. P. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. London: Falmer. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hudicourt-Barnes, J. (2003). The use of argumentation in Haitian Creole science classrooms. Harvard Education Review, 73(1), 73–93. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lee, C. D. (1993). Signifying as a scaffold for literary interpretation: The pedagogical implications of an African American discourse genre. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Michaels, S. (1981). Sharing time: Children’s narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in Society, 10, 423–442. Moll, L. C. (1992). Bilingual classroom studies and community analysis: Some recent trends. Educational Researcher, 21(2) [special issue on bilingual education], 20–24. Paley, V. (1990). The boy who would be a helicopter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Philips, S. (1983). The Invisible culture: Communication in the classroom and community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. White Plains, NY: Longman. Vásquez, O. A., Pease-Alvarez, L., & Shannon, S. (1994). Pushing boundaries: Language and culture in a Mexicano community. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wolpert, L., & Richards, A. (1997). Passionate minds: The inner world of scientists. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.


C H A P T E R

3 It’s All About Relationships: Growing a Community of College-Oriented Migrant Youth Margaret A. Gibson University of California, Santa Cruz

“We feel wanted and we feel part of the school by doing activities with MSA [the migrant student club].” —Migrant student, Hillside High School class of 2002 “We motivate each other, the [club] members. For example, Marta and I, we talk about where we got accepted [to college] and we say, ‘Oh yeah, we are going to college!’ ” —Migrant student, Hillside High School class of 2002

A major assumption underlying the research presented in this volume is that learning in school is not simply an individual matter; it occurs in interaction with others and cannot be separated from the social worlds that children inhabit (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990, 2003). Students’ sense of fitting in and being comfortable in school and their decisions about applying themselves to their studies are constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed on an ongoing basis through their relationships with both peers and teachers. From this premise—that learning is a social process and that it occurs through active participation within social communities—it follows that the nature of one’s membership within a classroom or school community plays a critical role in shaping one’s manner of participation. As is evident from the educational research literature, a sense of belonging and acceptance enhances participation in school and ultimately learning (Osterman, 2000). Marginality, on the other hand, restricts participation and can hinder or even foreclose opportunities for learning (Wenger, 1998). 47

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Research (Goodenow & Grady, 1993) also indicates that academic motivation and mobility “grows out of a complex web of social and personal relationships” and that a sense of membership in the school community directly influences student “commitment to schooling and acceptance of educational values” (pp. 60–61). Membership and belonging are similar constructs, which refer to “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others” in school (Goodenow & Grady, 1993, p. 61). Quite simply, students function better and participate more in settings and situations where they feel they belong. Conversely, participation and performance decline in those contexts where students experience feelings of rejection or alienation (Osterman, 2000). As Goodenow and Grady (1993) pointed out: Unless students identify with the school to at least a minimal extent; feel that they belong as part of the school; and believe themselves to be welcome, respected, and valued by others there, they may begin the gradual disengagement process of which officially dropping out is only the final step. (p. 61, drawing from Finn, 1989)

This disengagement process appears to characterize large numbers of Mexican-descent youth, many of whom leave high school before graduating or finish school without the necessary coursework to continue on to college. Especially at risk are the children of migrant farmworkers, who are the focus of this chapter. Many migrant children fall behind academically as they progress through school, and by some estimates only half receive a high school diploma (State University of New York Oneonta Migrant Programs, 1987; Vamos, Inc., 1992).1 Like other youth, migrant children benefit academically through their participation in social networks with adults and peers. Supportive and trusting relationships with teachers and other adults in school settings are essential to academic learning. So too are supportive relations with other students (Gibson, Gándara, & Koyama, 2004). Unfortunately, too few migrant children develop such connections in school, particularly at the high school level. Many feel isolated and socially distanced from their teachers and other school staff. Even when students do have positive interactions with adults in school, these too rarely translate into the kinds of mentoring relationships that can guide them on a path to college (Stanton-Salazar & Spina, 2003). Similarly, few develop the sorts of peer relationships that are supportive of school success (Gibson, Bejínez, Hidalgo, & Rolón, 2004). Yet research demonstrates clearly the importance of informal mentors and role models in the lives of Mexican-descent youth (Stanton-Salazar, 1 1 Although now more than a decade old, these are the best and most recent national studies of school completion rates for migrant youth.

3. IT’S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

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2001; Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, & Mehan, 2000). Likewise, recent studies point to the positive influence that academically oriented peers can have on the school trajectories of working-class youth (Betts, Zau, & Rice, 2003), including youth of Mexican descent (Stanton-Salazar & Dornbusch, 1995; Valenzuela, 1999). Studies have shown, for example, the benefits derived when working-class youths form friendships with middle-class peers in college preparatory classes and extracurricular activities (Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz, 1996; Stanton-Salazar, 2004). However, Mexican-origin students have been described as tending to cluster with friends of the same ethnicity and social class, particularly in high school contexts of relative segregation and socioeconomic inequality (Gándara, O’Hara, & Gutiérrez, 2004). When working-class Mexican-descent youth are surrounded by coethnic peers who are struggling academically or who exhibit antischool attitudes and behaviors, as too frequently is the case, they end up having little opportunity to interact with students who have proschool, proacademic identities and who plan to go to college. Even in high schools where students are drawn from a mix of ethnic backgrounds and social classes, curricular tracking and the larger social context reinforce already established tendencies for students to socialize with others who share their perspectives and experiences with schooling (Fine & Weis, 2003; Oakes, 1985; Wing, 2002). For these reasons it is imperative that Mexican-descent youth develop relationships with adults and peers through which they gain access to academic resources and develop and sustain a vision of themselves as college bound. This chapter offers one example of how such relationships can be developed. It focuses on a particular group of Mexican-descent migrant students who forged supportive relationships with adults and with peers through the Migrant Education Program (MEP) and the Migrant Student Association (MSA) at their high school. The field site for the study is Hillside High School (HHS), a large multiethnic public high school located along California’s Central Coast.2 All students in our focal sample graduated from high school on schedule in June 2002, and 85% had plans to enter college the following fall: 25% were headed directly to a 4-year college, 60% expected to enroll in one of California’s community colleges, and the remaining 15% intended either to join the military, attend trade school, or work.3 Considering the many barriers to school success that these young people faced on a daily basis, this obviously is an impressive record.

2

As a condition of gaining access to student transcripts and to personal information about the students and their families, we promised the study participants anonymity. Accordingly, all names are pseudonyms. 3 These data are drawn 3 from cards that all HHS seniors complete a week before their graduation. 2

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As the opening quotes to this chapter suggest, migrant students who participated in the MSA developed a network of academic and social support involving other members of the club and the club’s advisors.4 Together with the MEP teachers, these young people built a vibrant, college-oriented student community. Their success in creating a space of belonging and support is all the more remarkable given the larger school context. Although HHS is known for its rigorous college preparatory program—it was recently ranked among the top 4% of high schools in the United States on the basis of the large number of Advanced Placement (AP) courses offered—it is also a high school with deep social and academic divisions between student groups. Mexican-descent students in general feel marginalized in the day-today social life of the school, in a large majority of its extracurricular activities, and in many of the academic classes.

THE SETTING AND FOCAL SAMPLE The findings reported here are drawn from a multiyear project investigating the links between high school students’ peer affiliations, their participation in school, and their academic achievement. In this larger study, I and a team of researchers followed all students in Hillside High’s class of 2002 from the time they entered ninth grade in the fall of 1998 through their senior year 4 years later. For comparative purposes, we also interviewed students in other classes. We selected HHS as our field site because of its solid academic program and strong teaching staff and because of the multiethnic nature of its student body. Hillside High, so named because of its location on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, serves students from two distinct communities, Hillside and Appleton, which together with some smaller towns and unincorporated rural areas form the Appleton Unified School District. Students residing in and around Hillside—who make up just 25% of the overall district enrollment—come largely from middle- to upper-middle-class households where the median family income in 2000 was $73,515 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002a) and where the large majority of parents have attended college. Most Hillside students are European Americans and self-identify as White. In sharp contrast, most students from Appleton are of Mexican origin and come from working-class and migrant families. Most self-identify as Mexican or, in the case of students whose parents were born in the United States, Mexican American. In 2000, the median income for Mexican families who lived in 4

MEP teachers are not part of the high school’s regular teaching staff, but rather provide supplemental instruction and other forms of support to migrant students and their families (Bejínez, 1998; Gibson & Bejínez, 2002). 4


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Appleton and attended HHS was about $33,000; household earnings for many of the migrant farm workers were substantially lower.5 Most Appleton students attend schools in Appleton. However, as a result of severe overcrowding at Appleton High School, some students are bused to HHS, the only other comprehensive public high school in the district. At the time this study began, Hillside High’s freshman class comprised nearly equal numbers of White and Mexican-descent students, with most of the latter being students from Appleton. Elsewhere we have described HHS as a bimodal high school, not only because of ethnic and economic differences that characterize the study population but also because of differences in academic preparation prior to high school and the sharp social divide between the two major student groups (Gibson, Bejínez, Hidalgo, & Rolón, 2004). At the start of ninth grade, 88% of the White students (n = 257) but just 39% of the Mexican-descent students (n = 248) were placed directly into college preparatory math and English classes. Another 10% of the Mexicandescent students took English 9 SDAIE (Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English), where they received extra support in learning academic English. Grades offer another indicator of academic performance disparities. At the end of ninth grade, the mean grade point average (GPA) for White students was 3.03 (a B average); for Mexican-descent students it was 2.09 (a C average). The achievement gap persists through high school, both in grades received and in college preparatory courses taken. Just 21% of the Mexican-descent students who graduated from HHS completed all courses required for admission to a California state university, compared to 68% of their White classmates. The findings reported here come from a range of sources including extensive participant observation at Hillside High; interviews with students, including the officers of the MSA for two different years; interviews with all teachers working in the Migrant Education Program at HHS during the 4 years of our fieldwork; student records, to which we had full access; a survey given to 64 MSA members; and interviews with more than two dozen migrant parents. Two members of the research team also traveled to northern Mexico during winter break to visit migrant families while they were residing in their home villages. In this chapter, we focus on the school performance and school participation of the 73 migrant students in the class of 2002 who were members of MSA during their senior year. In all cases both of their parents had been

5 5 This estimate is based on the median family income for the Appleton Census tracts with the highest concentrations of Mexican-descent families (U.S. Census, 2002b) and on information provided by MEP staff regarding the average earnings of migrant workers (personal communication, July 23, 2002).

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born in Mexico and half of the students were themselves foreign-born. Most of the parents had moved to the United States as adults to find employment and in hopes of providing their offspring a better economic future than was available to them in Mexico. In each family at least one parent was employed as a seasonal farm worker (or had recently been so), which qualified their children for supplemental support in school through the federally funded Migrant Education Program.6 Most of the parents had low-paid menial jobs, generally picking, sorting, and packing fruit and vegetables grown in the Appleton Valley. Given their low wages and the high cost of living in the area, all migrant families lived in or near poverty and struggled to make ends meet.7 The large majority of families in our study resided permanently or semipermanently in the Appleton area, but because of the seasonal nature of their work some returned for a period each winter to their home villages in Mexico, where the cost of living was far cheaper. As a result, their children might miss a week or more of school in December (at the time of final exams) or in January (when HHS makes new class assignments). Other families followed the crops seasonally, living in Appleton only 6 months each year when work and housing were available to them. When the migrant camps closed in late October these families either returned to Mexico or found winter employment in southern California, returning to Appleton when the camps reopened in late April or early May. Their children thus either missed long periods of schooling each year or, more commonly, split their academic year between two schools. Switching schools twice each year was particularly difficult for high school students who were preparing to attend a 4-year college. In spite of the hardships in their lives, most of the parents we interviewed reported that they were better off in the United States because of the very limited employment opportunities available to them in Mexico. At the same time, many felt trapped in their jobs as migrant laborers and wanted something more for their children. They believed that schooling was the avenue to this better life, and they made this clear to their children, admonishing them to do well in school or face the consequences. As one parent said8: 6

To be eligible for MEP services, a child must have moved from one school district to another within the past 3 years to obtain temporary or seasonal work in agriculture or fishing, or to accompany family members seeking this kind of work. Each migratory move can initiate a new period of eligibility. 7 Housing costs in Appleton 7 and the surrounding area are among the highest in the United States. In September 2003, the median-priced home cost $414,000 in Appleton and $595,000 in Hillside (figures downloaded October 25, 2003, from DataQuick Real Estate Statistics at www.dqnews.com). 8 Parent interviews 8 were conducted in Spanish and later translated into English. 6


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Whatever she wants to study, hey, go ahead and study because I don’t have anything else to give them. Whoever doesn’t want to study will definitely go to the strawberry fields. That’s what I tell her.

Many of the parents also recognized that their children needed more than a high school diploma to get a good job. They wanted their children to go to college. One woman explained: Without a degree, you can’t work anywhere. So I tell him [her son], “Look at me, I go to interviews and since I don’t have a BA degree, no one wants to hire me.” . . . If he only graduates from high school, he’ll only be working at McDonald’s. . . . So going to college for 4 years . . . they have a chance to get a good job with benefits.

As much as the parents aspired to higher education for their children, most were unable actually to assist their children with their schoolwork because of their own limited formal education, lack of knowledge of the U.S. schooling system, arduous work schedules, and limited English skills. This was especially true when children reached the upper grades. Just 4 of the 73 students had a parent who had graduated from high school, and most parents had attended only elementary or junior high school as a result of the limited opportunities for schooling in rural Mexico. For the most part, parents had little contact with their children’s teachers. This was particularly the case once their children entered HHS, not only because of the distance in miles from Appleton to Hillside but also because of the social and cultural distance. The parents had difficulty communicating with their children’s teachers because few of the teachers spoke Spanish. Moreover, many parents had a distinct feeling of not being welcome at HHS. Parents commented directly about these issues: Sometimes we go to open houses at the school and we can’t communicate with the teachers because of their lack of ability to speak Spanish . . . I’ve heard that sometimes they give out some equipment where the translation is done, but . . . we can’t really get involved. We . . . can only listen.

Some parents also chose not to attend school meetings, believing themselves to be “a burden” on the school (“Como que uno esta como arrimado”). Others who did attend, and who spoke up in meetings, felt their concerns were ignored or given less weight than those of the Hillside parents. One woman explained: Many parents that I’ve talked to say that they stopped going [to meetings] because when they do [attend], they give their opinion and it isn’t paid attention to. . . . It’s as if their opinion doesn’t count. For example, at Hillside Junior

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High I have heard commentaries that since there are many Anglo families that have money, they are the ones who count, because they have money.

THE HHS SOCIAL SCENE In much the same way as their parents, many of the migrant students shared a feeling of not having the same voice, importance, or sense of entitlement as the White students who attended HHS. Although most reported that their teachers encouraged them to do well and that Hillside High was a good school, it became apparent from our interviews and observations that there were a large number of places on campus where Mexican-descent students did not feel comfortable and, as a result, did not participate or participated only minimally. These included many of the classes, especially the AP and Honors classes, where Mexican-descent students generally made up only a small minority of the enrollment; most school-sponsored extracurricular activities; and the central quad, which is the largest gathering spot for students on campus and the location of most lunchtime activities. When we asked students why they avoided the quad, their responses revealed a deep sense of marginalization (Koyama & Gibson, in press). One young woman, an officer in the MSA, explained: You just feel that you don’t fit in. Just by walking, passing through the quad, they don’t even [pauses, searching for words] . . . they don’t even notice you. And it’s like you don’t belong there. It’s weird, and I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just this feeling that you have.

Another high-achieving migrant student, who was also a member of the boys’ varsity soccer team, explained that he only talked to White students “when we’re on the field.” He continued, “If I just go to the quad where all the Anglo students are and just start talking to them . . . I don’t feel comfortable, it’s just like it’s not my place.”9 This uneasiness when interacting with White students was heightened for students who were not fluent English speakers, as one student explained: You feel out of place. You feel like you’re this tiny little person, like a whole bunch of eyes just looking at you. That’s how I felt [upon arriving as a third grader]. . . . All those people just looking at me, or the things they were saying 9

There is a historical context of contention at HHS fueled by the attitudes and actions of some parents, students, and community members from the Hillside area. For example, many Hillside parents believe that academic standards have suffered since the school district began busing Appleton students to HHS. This history and its impact on the position of Mexican students at HHS are described elsewhere (Donato, 1987; Hurd, 2003). 9


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about me . . . I heard them talking English and look at me. I knew they were talking about me. . . . So I know for the [high school] students who are learning English as their second language, I know they do feel like that, left out.

Feelings of not fitting in and not belonging at HHS might be particularly acute for English learners, but because they attended separate Englishlanguage development classes for much of the day, these students also had limited occasion to interact routinely with White peers. Migrant students who were fluent English speakers, on the other hand, attended regular classes, and in the more advanced academic classes they could sometimes feel quite alone. One young man, an officer in the MSA who was on track to attend a 4-year college, compared his behavior in AP classes with his behavior in MSA: I am like the only Mexican in there [names an AP class], just me and some other guy. . . . It is totally different the way I act when I am at the MSA club or [with] my other friends. I am more reserved [in class]. I am quieter. I just talk about schoolwork. I don’t talk about what I do in my free time. . . . But when I have class with more friends, I am always talking, more active.

These themes of being “quieter,” “more reserved,” and reluctant to participate actively in their classes permeated our interviews with the collegebound migrant students. They described a reluctance to volunteer answers in class, to ask questions, or to seek help from White classmates. It was, they explained, “because you don’t want to look bad in front of everyone.” They noted, too, that if they did ask for help, some White classmates “won’t even pay that much attention to you, [saying,] ‘Just look in the back of the book,’ or saying, ‘No, I’m really busy right now. Why don’t you ask the teacher.’ ” Although most students noted that not all White students behaved this way and that they “get along” with White classmates, a fear of being judged negatively and of not belonging prompted most migrant students to remain largely quiet in classes where they were in the minority, often hoping to avoid bringing attention to themselves by sitting in the back of the classroom or to the side. Students also worried that if they asked a “stupid question,” they would “be judged as a stupid person.” As one student explained, White students might think (or even say), “Oh he’s a gangster. . . . He is ignorant and stupid like the other Mexicans that are in gangs.” Not surprisingly, students also explained that they were far more comfortable in classes where they had more friends or where the large majority of classmates were of Mexican origin. They cited AP Spanish as an example, explaining: Student 1: In Spanish you’re not embarrassed to [ask classmates for help]. Researcher: Why is that?

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Student 2:

It’s because, maybe, like those people you’re talking about in AP Spanish have similar experiences to you . . . Student 3: It’s like, for instance, in Spanish, you see us, we’re loud. We’re talking, and when you see yourself in some of those [majority White] classes, you think, “What if I’m talking and my accent—” Researcher: But you don’t even have an accent. Student 3: But I mean, I think I do. Maybe I don’t pronounce a word right.

Our observations supported these students’ views. They were much more active learners in the AP Spanish classes. It was in part, they said, because they felt more comfortable in classes where they could code-switch between Spanish and English. Also, they noted that it was easier for them to read out loud in Spanish, their first language, than in English, where “we don’t know all the words,” and where, they said, White classmates sometimes “start laughing.” In AP Spanish they also had a large support group to turn to for help. They were the dominant group in these classes, which were usually attended by only a handful of White students. They were, as they said, able to “just be themselves.”

THE MSA AS SUPPORT NETWORK AND COMMUNITY Given the feelings of marginalization that many Mexican-descent migrant students experienced at HHS, combined with the many other challenges these students faced in their lives both in school and outside, how can we explain their comparatively high rate of school persistence and college attendance? The answers lie, we believe, in the nature of the relationships that characterize students’ and adults’ participation in the Migrant Education Program and the Migrant Student Association. We look in particular at the ways adults and students constructed a community that supports an academically oriented, successful Mexican-descent student identity. With 110 members on its roster for the 2001–2002 school year, the MSA ranked as one of the two largest clubs at Hillside High. Although it was open to all students, those who joined were overwhelmingly first- and secondgeneration Mexican-descent youth. The large majority of members are migrant students, but in 2001–2002 a significant number (28%), including three of the club’s four officers, were nonmigrant. Sponsored by MEP, the club had as its stated mission to “promote higher education, celebrate cultural differences, participate in school activities, and organize community service activities.” Students responded positively to these goals and to the club’s supportive environment.


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We saw MSA as being very inclusive, and its combined social and academic focus as appealing to a wide array of students, freshmen to seniors, including recent arrivals from Mexico and those born in the United States. A few members had gang ties, but only a few. Two-thirds of all migrant students in the class of 2002 were MSA members their senior year, including three-fourths of all the girls and more than half the boys. One-third of these students had a cumulative GPA of B-minus or better and had completed all courses required for admission to a 4-year college in California. Other club members had lower GPAs, some much lower, and had completed only a few college preparatory classes, but they participated in MSA because of the community it created, the activities it offered, and the support it provided. In the following pages we move back and forth between teacher and student voices, exploring how both viewed MSA and MEP. The Migrant Office as a Safe Space During our study the MEP office was a hub of student activity, the spot where migrant students gathered and where the business of the Migrant Education Program took place. The office was a large, converted classroom with tables, chairs, computers, books, and other academic resources readily visible. There were separate cubicles for the two MEP teachers, who jointly were responsible for working with all of the HHS migrant students and their families. In the 2001–2002 school year there were 370 migrant students in grades 9 through 12. During the 4 years of fieldwork, there were six different migrant teachers at HHS, all of whom held California teaching credentials.10 MEP staff members wore many hats and fulfilled many roles, including formal tutoring, academic advising, college counseling, assistance with the college application process, and career guidance. They acted as mentors, role models, advocates, bridges between students and other school staff, intermediaries with parents, and trusted friends. They also organized paid work experiences for the migrant students and served as advisors to the MSA. Although MEP activities were intended to be supplemental to the regular school program, we observed that the migrant students relied on MEP for much of the basic information and support needed to progress through high school and on to college. This was, in large measure, because of the close relationships they developed with the MEP teachers. On entering the MEP office one immediately noticed that the walls were covered with pictures of current and former students, the names of universities they had attended or planned to attend, and copies of college accep10

There is variation between school districts in how MEP is organized and run. The program that we have studied is somewhat unusual both in its size and in its use of fully credentialed teachers to staff the program.

10

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tance letters. Also prominently displayed were various symbols of Mexican culture and motivational statements written in English and Spanish—“Si, se puede” (“Yes, you can”) was one. One heard students chatting freely among themselves in either Spanish or English, and during breaks one often heard Mexican music playing in the background. The room was full of instructional resources, including a bank of computers with Internet access, a printer, college catalogues, and SAT materials. In the center of the room was a large table where students did their homework and held meetings, and there was a phone that students can use to call home. There was also a small area with snacks, which MSA members sold to raise money for field trips to college campuses. As part of the MSA survey, we asked students how often they visited the migrant office and why. An astounding 52 of the 64 respondents answered “nearly every day”; 9 others said “usually one or more times each week.” Their reasons clustered into the following categories: academic support; help with personal problems; advice about their future (including career opportunities and in particular the whole process of applying for college and obtaining scholarship support); buying snacks; doing homework, using the computers, or calling home; and meeting friends and to plan MSA activities. During class time students came to the office mainly for academic assistance and counseling. During breaks and after school they gathered to socialize with friends, buy food, do their homework, check out information about colleges, and plan club activities. MEP teachers were mindful of the importance of creating a welcoming space for the students to gather, and they saw a clear link between the support provided through MEP and students’ willingness to strive to succeed in the larger school setting. They recognized, too, that the rest of the campus was not always as welcoming. Mr. Rodriguez, one of the migrant teachers and himself the child of migrant farmworkers, explained:

We need to provide an environment where students feel they belong. The migrant office has a lot to do with it because students feel they’re part of this program. . . . They really feel comfortable being here, where we have to remind them that they have to go to class. And it’s probably the environment [in class]. It’s not like it is in this office, that kids feel they belong, and they go to a class where they feel like they’re not part of it.

Our own observations and interviews with students support these comments. Students did in fact feel more comfortable in the MEP office than in many other parts of the campus. Another migrant teacher, Mr. Ortiz, remarked specifically on the differences between the MEP office and other areas of campus, such as the coun-


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seling office, where the counselors readily admitted that they had far too little time to get to know the students well or to meet their individual needs: I think the difference between upstairs [where the counseling office is] and down here [in the migrant office] is that the doors are always open. . . . We can be writing a letter, in the middle of a letter, but still students feel that they can come in here. . . . I think that’s the main difference, that even if I have a parent here, they can still sit there [waiting their turn]. They know sooner or later I’m going to get to them. . . . I think that everything is how the students feel. Do they feel wanted? Do they feel like they’re actually being listened to?

Students did feel accepted and listened to when they visited the MEP office. It is a place where they felt free to be themselves, could be part of a caring community, and felt safe in an otherwise sometimes hostile environment. As a college student who tutored at HHS observed, “The migrant office in a way is a sanctuary for a lot of students.” Building Relations of Trust and Care Like their counterparts nationwide (Perry, 1997), most of the MEP staff members who worked at HHS were themselves the children of migrant farmworkers. They had grown up in the Appleton Valley, had attended Appleton schools, and now lived in the same neighborhoods and belonged to the same churches as many of their students. One of the teachers, Mrs. Mendoza, explained that because of her background she was very aware of the students’ needs and could readily relate to the challenges they faced: “There’s empathy [and] it’s easy for us to understand why students have to leave in December for three, four weeks or what have you.” Because of their shared experiences, the students found it easier to develop relationships with the migrant teachers than with other teachers. They felt comfortable with them because they had grown up in similar circumstances and shared a common culture and history—they enjoyed the same food, spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, and cheered for the same sports teams. One student commented: They did not have a lot of money when they grew up. They were migrant workers. They are like the symbol that you can do it, too. When I see them, I think, “They did it, why can’t I do it?”

The students came to realize that they, too, could finish high school, attend college, and prepare for a good career. The MEP teachers were their role models. The success of the migrant students at HHS had much to do with the nature of the relationships created between the teachers and students and

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among the students themselves. MEP provided many essential types of support, but they all rested on the foundation of trust, care, and respect. The migrant teachers consciously and deliberately built an atmosphere of trust in their interactions with individual students and when working with groups of students. Students, in turn, engaged in the same behaviors when interacting with one another. In describing his relations with students, Mr. Rodriguez specifically referred to the metaphor of a family. Mr. Rodriguez: I think we create that family environment in MSA, and it lets students know that you can be involved, you can be part of the school . . . Researcher: How do you make it feel like your family? Mr. Rodriguez: I care for the students and I know Mr. G [another migrant teacher] cares for them too. Once they see that we really care and we want to help, I think they feel part of it, and it just becomes like a family . . . Mr. R and Mr. G—these are my friends that really care for me and aren’t going to let me do something really stupid or get into trouble.

As Mr. Rodriguez explained, “being there” for the students when they need support (which is most of the time) and helping them deal with personal as well as academic problems takes a great deal of time and emotional energy. Students’ personal problems can be very serious, and they sometimes broke down crying in the MEP office because of the enormous pressures. Just remaining in high school can be very difficult. Boys often feel a responsibility to quit school to help support their families financially. Many of the girls carry a heavy load at home, cooking, cleaning, and caring for younger siblings while their mothers are at work in the fields, which can make it extremely difficult for them to find either the time or the focus needed to excel in their classes. Some also reported that their parents’ expectations for how they should spend their time outside of school conflicted with the demands of a college preparatory program. Others described pressures to marry early. A few, mostly boys, felt pressure to join gangs. And many, particularly those who were tracked into remedial classes, had to contend with peers who had lost interest in school and who often disrupted instruction. To make sense of and get support in dealing with these competing demands, migrant youth need adults within the school setting who understand their lives outside of school, who will listen to them, talk to their parents, and go to bat for them with other school officials when necessary. The students in MSA came to see the MEP teachers as such adults. The migrant teachers often describe their role as that of surrogate parents, as Mr. Rodri-


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guez explained: “I really treat them like I was their father. If I see students doing some dumb things . . . I’ll call them aside and talk to them.” In his view all teachers, coaches, and club advisors should play this role, serving as both role models and disciplinarians, setting goals with students, raising expectations, and letting students know without a doubt when their behavior is out of line. To help develop rapport and trust, the MEP teachers made a point of being involved with students outside of school, for example, playing soccer or basketball or golf with them on a Saturday morning. Again, Mr. Rodriguez explained: You learn so many things about students when you do things outside [the classroom] . . . When it’s a teacher-student relationship, they’re not going to be sharing as much. I learn things from these kids . . . you wouldn’t get in the classroom.

Students did in fact come to see the MEP teachers as friends and as people they could trust and rely on. Two boys described this relationship: Juan:

Pedro:

On Saturday, I play basketball with them, and it’s fun because you get to interact with them outside of school. And they’re like normal people . . . [You] can play around with them like how we play with our friends.

The sense of friendship created is a key to building trusting relationships. Several girls also commented on this: Alicia:

Mr. R. is more than a person there to help you. He’s more like a friend. Researcher: How does he express that? Alicia: The way he talks to you Lupe: Con mucha confianza. (With much trust.)

Students also described specific ways in which the teachers helped them to be successful in school: They encouraged me to get good classes so that I can go into the university. . . . They were the ones that told me I could do it if I wanted to. For me, it was the information they had. I was not up-to-date with all the stuff I could do to go on [to university].

In addition, students also reported numerous examples of how the MEP teachers had extended themselves on their behalf. One recalled how her

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teacher spent weeks and many long-distance phone calls sorting out a transcript error so that she would not have to repeat a class. Another, a young woman whose family lived in the migrant camp, explained how a migrant teacher arranged for her to live with his family so that she would not have to switch schools when her parents moved south to follow the crops. Lucia’s parents were understandably reluctant to accept this arrangement. However, after two MEP teachers visited with them on two occasions in their home and explained how difficult it would be for Lucia to meet all requirements for admission to the University of California if she had to move, they consented. For Lucia, living with her teacher’s family for 6 months brought many new opportunities. In particular, she commented on how she no longer had to keep her home and school worlds separate. For example, she said she welcomed the opportunity to talk about school affairs over dinner, which was difficult with her own parents: We talked all about school, things that were going on at school, with the MSA club, with Migrant itself [the program], with my projects. They [the teacher and his wife] even helped me with one of my physics projects. . . . We talked about the [Migrant] State Ceremony. . . . We discussed the senior banquet. . . . We did so many things. . . . It was really cool, not just home things but school things, too.

Although Lucia’s parents wanted her to do well in school, they had difficulty relating to the kinds of academic work she was engaged in and the demands this work placed on her time even when she was at home. Because of this, Lucia found it extremely difficult to juggle her two very separate worlds, and without the support and encouragement she received from her MEP teachers, she would have given up her dream of a 4-year college. Lucia ended her senior year with top marks and a full scholarship to the University of California. Peer Support As part of the MSA survey, we asked students why they participated in the club and why they felt the club was important. More than half pointed to MSA’s role in building community—creating a sense of family and belonging. One student commented as follows: I think I could go up to any student or advisor and talk to them really about anything. They make me feel comfortable and try to help me . . . I can even think about them as family members.


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Another explained that club members “motivate each other.” For example, she said, “We talk about where we got accepted [to college].” MSA members constantly referred to the support they provided one another, explaining that they could turn to any other member and ask for help, even from those who were not close friends. The peer support and opportunities to talk about college are critical aspects in the success of the MSA and the larger migrant program. As earlier noted, low-income Mexican-descent students rarely have the opportunity to develop close relationships with peers who plan to go to college. One migrant parent made just this point with reference to her daughter: I don’t think she’s ever had a close friend or someone that she knows of that says, “Well, my plan is to go on to the university,” or something like that. I think it’s the persons that she is around.

MSA and MEP addressed this need directly, by promoting a collegeoriented community of Latino youth. Through their involvement in MSA activities, students developed a large network of peers to whom they could turn for information, academic assistance, and emotional support. Although the club depended heavily on the leadership, dedication, and teaching abilities of the MEP staff members who served as club advisors, these advisors alone did not and could not make the club successful. It was of necessity a very reciprocal relationship. The advisors facilitated and kept the momentum going, but the students took leadership roles, shaped the activities they would be involved in, and devoted many hours to carrying out the club’s work. Community building occurred as part of carrying out shared activities. Through their participation in the club, migrant students also gained a voice and a presence in the larger school community. As students explained, MSA “unites all Mexicans in order to make a difference in this school,” and “to have a voice in the school.” Although few members participated in other clubs on campus, those who did credited MSA with helping them develop the skills and confidence needed to participate in schoolwide activities where Mexican-descent students were in the minority. Through their participation in MSA, club members also came to associate being Mexican and migrant with academic achievement. The club created a space and an opportunity where migrant students, with support, developed a college-bound academic orientation. Mexican-descent students who participated in MSA inevitably heard peers voicing proacademic values and saw them focusing on the steps involved in getting into college. By design, MSA empowered students to help themselves. Although not every MSA member would talk about college with his or her friends, many did,

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and all members developed relationships with other Mexican-descent students who planned to go to college. On many occasions we observed MSA members working together in the MEP office on their college, scholarship, and financial aid applications. We also observed them helping one another in their classes. In response to our question about how students support one another with their classes, one young woman explained, Sometimes it’s him [another Mexican-descent student and MSA member] telling me, “Oh, take notes because I’m really tired right now.” And then in a class that he is a TA for, he will say, “Don’t worry about the notes, because I got them already.” So he gets me organized. . . . We help each other all the time.

In the AP and Honors classes, where there were usually only two or three students of Mexican descent, this kind of peer support and encouragement can prove essential.

DISCUSSION/IMPLICATIONS As noted at the outset, if we understand learning to take place through active participation within social groupings, it is essential that students feel a sense of belonging, community, and safety within school settings. Unfortunately, the structures and practices of schooling all too frequently work against the actual inclusion of students who come from workingclass and minority backgrounds. This is particularly true in large public high schools that serve multiethnic student populations. As Fine, Weis, and Powell (1997) noted, having youth from different racial and ethnic groups attend the same school does not in itself produce an inclusive and equitable learning environment. This study and many others have shown that even officially desegregated high schools tend to marginalize and silence minority voices (see, for example, Fine & Weis, 2003). If these schools are to provide equal opportunities for all children to progress through the academic pipeline, they must address issues of belonging, membership, and equal participation. In this chapter we have presented a case study of the Migrant Education Program and Migrant Student Association at one high school where we carried out research over a 4-year period, describing how the MSA helps to create a sense of membership and support for Mexican-descent students within a larger school setting where these same students often feel silenced and unsupported. MSA becomes for these youth a community in which they draw on their shared cultural experiences as they work together to promote school success and build pathways to college. Together with the MEP teach-


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ers, they create an atmosphere of mutual trust, care, and respect, which in turn contributes to student participation, engagement, and achievement. The MEP teachers, who shared their students’ cultural and neighborhood affiliations, initiate caring relations with their students that extend beyond the classroom setting into the students’ lives outside of school. These caring relationships are reciprocal, and involve contextual processes both founded on trust and leading to trust that are very similar to those described in the research literature on caring (Chaskin & Rauner, 1995; Noddings, 1992; Oakes, Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). Through these caring relationships, students gain access to social and academic knowledge aimed at enhancing their academic mobility (Hays, Bahruth, & Kessler, 1991; Stanton-Salazar et al., 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). The relationship that the migrant teachers create with their students is almost that of a surrogate parent. In turn, the atmosphere created among the members of MSA and between them and their teachers is like a family. Not only do the students see the migrant teachers as role models, mentors, and adult friends they can count on for support and guidance, they also come to depend on one another in a similar fashion, much like siblings who take care of one another. MSA members even describe the club as “como una familia” (“like a family”). And they support one another in ways that help create a college-oriented and college-bound community. Students look out for one another in class, help one another with the college application process, and praise one another for their hard work and academic achievements. As shown in Raley’s (2004) recent study of Pacifica College Prep High School, this sort of college-oriented “peer-relations-like-family” is not to be taken for granted. It is an achievement that results from the hard work of young people working collaboratively with one another and with their teachers and mentors. As Fine and her colleagues reminded us, drawing from Heath’s work with inner-city youth in after-school community organizations, “Belonging within a space ensures safety” and “Having a sense of place and space empowers” (Heath, 1995, p. 52, cited in Fine et al., 1997, p. 253). They also raised the provocative question of whether such spaces, where young people are safe to try on, play with, and toss off new identities across the divide of race and class differences, can in fact be created in public schools (Fine et al., 1997). MSA provides one example within a public school setting, but its success is circumscribed by the larger school context. MSA helps empower its Mexican-descent migrant student members to succeed in high school and to prepare for college, but it does little to change the larger school structures that isolate and marginalize low-income students of Mexican descent. Nor does MSA promote dialogue across racial and class divisions. These may be construed as shortcomings of MSA and the larger Migrant Education Program with which it is associated, yet MEP

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on its own cannot change the larger school and community structures that cause inequality of opportunity to persist. For real and lasting change to occur, the entire school community must commit itself to fostering relations between the different student groups that ensure their equal status and voice (Fine et al., 1997). This is no easy task. For social relations to flourish across racial and ethnic lines, schools must work consciously, continuously, and deliberately to build a deep sense of community, a true commitment to the “analysis of difference, power, and privilege,” and an ongoing and “enduring investment in democratic practice with youth” (Fine et al., 1997, p. 249). MSA and MEP offer us some insight into the types of social relationships that can foster successful learning communities, but a great deal more is required if we are to promote and sustain intellectual and social communities in public high school settings where all groups of students have equal status and where all can be equally smart (Fine et al., 1997; Oakes et al., 2000).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research discussed here was made possible through generous grants from the Spencer Foundation (MG 199900129) and the U.S. Department of Education/OERI (R305T990174). Although I am the sole author of this chapter, the fieldwork and analysis described herein reflect the significant work of other members of the Peers Project research team. I wish especially to acknowledge the contributions of Livier Bejínez, Clayton Hurd, and Cony Rolón. I would also like to express my thanks to all the students, staff, and parents from Hillside High School who contributed to this work, and most especially the students and teachers involved with MSA.

REFERENCES Bejínez, L. F. (1998). Caring, identity, and academic achievement: The role of the Migrant Education Program in a racially mixed high school. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz. Betts, J. R., Zau, A. C., & Rice, L. A. (2003). Determinants of student achievement: New evidence from San Diego. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California. Chaskin, R. J., & Rauner, D. M. (Eds.). (1995). Youth and caring. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9), 665–718. Donato, R. (1987). In struggle: Mexican Americans in the Pajaro Valley schools, 1900–1979. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Fine, M., & Weis, L. (2003). Silenced voices and extraordinary conversations: Re-imaging schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Fine, M., Weis, L., & Powell, L. C. (1997). Communities of difference: A critical look at desegregated spaces created for and by youth. Harvard Educational Review, 67(2), 247–284. Finn, J. D. (1989). Withdrawing from school. Review of Educational Research, 59(2), 117–142.


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Gándara, P., O’Hara, S., & Gutiérrez, D. (2004). The changing shape of aspirations: Peer influence on achievement behavior. In M. Gibson, P. Gándara, & J. P. Koyama (Eds.), School connections: U.S. Mexican youth, peers, and school achievement (pp. 39–62). New York: Teachers College Press. Gibson, M. A., & Bejínez, L. F. (2002). Dropout prevention: How migrant education supports Mexican youth. Journal of Latinos and Education, 1(3), 155–175. Gibson, M. A., Bejínez, L. F., Hidalgo, N., & Rolón, C. (2004). Belonging and school participation: Lessons from a migrant student club. In M. Gibson, P. Gándara, & J. P. Koyama (Eds.), School connections: U.S. Mexican youth, peers, and school achievement (pp. 129–149). New York: Teachers College Press. Gibson, M., Gándara, P., & Koyama, J. P. (Eds.). (2004). School connections: U.S. Mexican youth, peers, and school achievement. New York: Teachers College Press. Goodenow, C., & Grady, K. E. (1993). The relationship of school belonging and friends’ values to academic motivation among urban adolescent students. Journal of Experimental Education, 62(1), 60–71. Hays, C. W., Bahruth, R., & Kessler, C. (1991). Literacy con cariño. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Hurd, C. A. (2003). Belonging in school: The politics of race, class, and citizenship in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Koyama, J. P., & Gibson, M. A. (in press). Marginalization and membership. In J. Van Galen & G. Noblit (Eds.), Late to class: Social class and schooling in the new economy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mehan, H., Villanueva, I., Hubbard, L., & Lintz, A. (1996). Constructing school success: The consequences of untracking low-achieving students. New York: Cambridge University Press. Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. New York: Teachers College Press. Oakes, J. (1985). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Oakes, J., Quartz, K., Ryan, S., & Lipton, M. (2000). Becoming good American schools: The struggle for civic virtue in education reform. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Osterman, K. F. (2000). Students’ need for belonging in the school community. Review of Educational Research, 70(3), 323–367. Perry, J. D. (1997). Migrant education: Thirty years of success, but challenges remain. Providence, RI: Brown University, New England Desegregation Assistance Center. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED421313) Raley, J. (2004). “Like family, you know?”: School and the achievement of peer relations. In M. Gibson, P. Gándara, & J. P. Koyama (Eds.), School connections: U.S. Mexican youth, peers, and school achievement (pp. 150–172). New York: Teachers College Press. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanton-Salazar, R. D. (2001). Manufacturing hope and despair: The school and kin support networks of U.S.-Mexican youth. New York: Teachers College Press. Stanton-Salazar, R. D. (2004). Social capital among working-class minority students. In M. Gibson, P. Gándara, & J. P. Koyama (Eds.), School connections: U.S. Mexican youth, peers, and school achievement (pp. 18–38). New York: Teachers College Press. Stanton-Salazar, R. D., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1995). Social capital and the social reproduction of inequality: The formation of informational networks among Mexican-origin high school students. Sociology of Education, 68(2), 116–135.

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Stanton-Salazar, R. D., & Spina, S. U. (2003). Informal mentors and role models in the lives of urban Mexican-origin adolescents. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(3), 231–254. Stanton-Salazar, R. D., Vásquez, O. A., & Mehan, H. (2000). Engineering academic success through institutional support. In S. T. Gregory (Ed.), The academic achievement of minority students (pp. 213–305). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. State University of New York Oneonta Migrant Programs. (1987). Migrant attrition project: Executive summary. Oneonta, NY: Migrant Attrition Project. U.S. Census Bureau. (2002a). Demographic profile (Table DP-3). Profile of selected economic characteristics, “Hillside” CDP, California: 2000. Retrieved May 17, 2002, from http://censtats. census.gov/cgi~bin/pct/pctProfile.pl U.S. Census Bureau. (2002b). Income and poverty in 1999: 2000 Census tract (Table GCT-P14). “Coast County,” California. December. Retrieved February 21, 2003, from http://factfinder. census.gov/bf/_lang=en_vt_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_GCTP14_CO1_geo_id=05000US06087. html Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany: State University of New York Press. Vamos, Inc. (1992). National migrant student graduation rate formula. Prepared for the National Program for Secondary Credit Exchange and Accrual. Geneseo, NY: BOCES Geneseo Migrant Center. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wing, J. Y. (2002). An uneven playing field: Behind the racial disparities in student achievement at an integrated urban high school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

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4 Writing in the Margins of Classroom Life: A Teacher/Researcher Partnership Using Dialogue Journals Annette Henry University of Illinois at Chicago

In this chapter I explore how through written texts young adolescent Black girls constructed and mediated their subjectivities and social worlds within a learning environment that silences them. As they engaged in journal writing, the girls expressed themselves in ways rarely available to them in whole-group classroom discourse, using what Carole Boyce Davies (1995) calls “transgressive speech.” For Black women, Boyce Davies explains, “transgressive speech” challenges situations of oppression: [It] talks back to authority when necessary regardless of consequences. Speech and speaking out and coming to voice are all forms of the search for modes locating places of authority, identifying the issues that are critical to our survival as a people, and above all, express the inner feelings, needs, and desires of Black women in society. (p. 8)

Here I focus specifically on the processes and outcomes of using dialogue journals with two Caribbean American students, Caprice and Georgette.1 The experiences that I discuss in this chapter, which took place during the 1997–1998 academic year, were part of a 4-year classroom research relationship during which I worked with Enid Johnson, the girls’ teacher, and many of her middle school ESL (English as a second language) female students on a project investigating teacher practice and student learning. 1

1

Names of the participants and the school are pseudonyms.

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Like others who have embarked on similar collaborations, Enid and I viewed research and teaching as dialogic (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lensmire, 2000; Moll & González, 1997). In this project, dialogue occurred on multiple levels, with the teacher and with and between the students, producing new understandings for teacher, students, and researcher.

THE SCHOOL, THE TEACHER, AND HER STUDENTS Enid Johnson, ESL Teacher I met Enid Johnson, the classroom teacher, on a cold, snowy Valentine’s Day in 1995. When I arrived in her classroom, she was in a conference with an adolescent boy who had just immigrated from Jamaica that week and his mother. The mother and son had been apart for over a year. After they left, I began to introduce myself somewhat formally, as if at a job interview. Enid listened quietly. Then she interrupted: You are part of me. I’ll do anything to help you. I’ll do anything to help you. You are part of me. I definitely will. Come to my class any time and do your observation and, who knows where you’ll go from there? What I’m really hoping for is—I am open to all my parents. I am open to educators just the same. So no problem. Come right in.

With this invitation, a collaborative approach to classroom research blossomed.2 At the time, I had been visiting with Black women teachers in Chicago, envisioning a research project that would add a cross-cultural dimension to my Canadian research with Black women teachers’ lives and practice (Henry, 1998b). I wanted to talk with teachers in Illinois about their teaching, hoping to examine the commonalities and differences of Black experiences across various learning contexts. Thanks to this collaborative relationship, the project moved in unanticipated directions. Enid and Her ESL Students Enid emigrated from Jamaica with her husband and four children in 1981. At the time, she was a certified nursery school assistant. Before long, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education at two universities 2

I am by no means assuming “insiderness” on the basis of skin color and cultural background. See Zavella (1997) and Henry (2001) for discussions of “community” and “insider research.”

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in the Chicago area. Enid had not planned to be an ESL teacher. Because of her race, culture, and language background, she was hired as a teacher in the largely Caribbean English-language program at Columbus Middle School, where she began teaching in 1985. In the following, she described how she came to view her role as ESL teacher. At first, I resented it. I wanted to work in the regular mainstream. But as the years unfolded, I began to enjoy it. I’m glad now, because I’m really working with the kids who need me most and whose culture I can connect with. I could not see that at first. It’s a privilege for me to be where I am.

Enid envisioned her role as one of providing a loving, nurturing environment. Theorists have written about the many versions of culturally affirmative teaching (Delpit & Kilgour Dowdy, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Tillman, 2002). For Enid, it entailed providing emotional and psychological support and stressing academic skills. She attempted to ensure that her mostly Black students were not kept, as she put it, “at the bottom of the barrel.” Her students knew that she expected a lot of them. At the same time, her personal and cultural biography enabled her to teach from a “both/and” standpoint (Henry, 1998b). That is, she aimed to provide her Caribbean students with the language and skills necessary to live and work successfully in American society while also validating their language and cultural backgrounds as children of African Caribbean heritage. “I understand from my experience,” Enid explained. Classroom codes of behavior and conduct are quite different for Caribbean students studying in Caribbean schools where they are used to more structured environments and activities. Enid felt that she provided a gentle, guided transition into American classrooms. She also acknowledged that her Caribbean formation had not included the theories of learning advocated in North American schools (e.g., Vygotsky, 1981; Wells & Claxton, 2002) that were the basis of the problem-solving, inquiry-based lessons she was expected to teach. Columbus Middle School served a multicultural population of 561 students, of whom 43% were Black. There was a substantial Caribbean population in this suburban town of 73,000 people. However, most of the Blacks (mostly Caribbean and African American and some African) were not the affluent residents for which the town is known. The ESL program at Columbus Middle School proudly developed an initiative to help its mostly working-class Caribbean immigrants make a transition into American society. The two students who were the focus of my study, Caprice and Georgette, were both 12 years of age. Caprice was from Jamaica and Georgette from Haiti. Both immigrated to the United States with their families at the age of 5. As speakers of French-based Haitian and English-based Jamaican Creoles, they were placed in ESL classes, and had remained there for their 7

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years of American elementary schooling.3 The only girls in this small class, Georgette and Caprice spent their days with five boys of varying English proficiencies and from various cultures (one from Poland, one from Belize, and three from Jamaica). After almost 4 months of documenting classroom interactions and discourse through videotaping, taking field notes, and audiotaping conversations, I found that Georgette and Caprice rarely participated in the social relations of classroom talk. As I describe later in greater detail, these girls, who rarely spoke in class, found themselves negotiating a hostile classroom environment despite being taught by a culturally affirming teacher.

RESEARCH PRECEDENTS Black Girls, Literacy, and Voice Literacy is a communicative practice, operative and variable in various communities (de Castell, 2000) and spread across the curriculum. Sociolinguists Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz (1992) remind us that “literacy is language in use as discourse practices that are associated with textual creation and interpretation” (p. 174). They advocate the importance of understanding discourses in context and emphasize that discursive practices can be seen to shape interaction and the presentation of self. As anthropological linguists explain, the analysis of discursive practices unearths the linguistic and interactional aspects of communicative and social practices and helps us understand the context-bound nature of discourse and social interaction (Duranti, 1997). Furthermore, it helps us understand how, through language interaction, meanings and identities are established, negotiated, challenged, and maintained. Literacy also implicates voice, community, cultural life, class, gender, race, and relations of power. In reflecting on the girls’ plight, I was particularly influenced by the work of Black feminist Barbara Omolade (1994), who argued that for Black women and girls traditional forms of literacy education have required silence, invisibility, and other forms of accommodation. Like the working-class young adolescent girls at Columbus Middle School, her working-class adult female students were often required to separate their lived realities from classroom life, immersing themselves in the “sedentary activities of reading, writing, and speaking in a way that is structured 3

Although the students in Enid’s ESL classes were predominantly from the Caribbean, there were also children from other countries, depending on global events and immigration strictures. Indeed, there are many curricular, assessment, and policy-related questions raised by placing Creole-speaking immigrants from the English Caribbean countries in English as a second language classes. 3


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by certain racial, gender, and class privileges” (p. 145). The formal language of educational institutions caused her students to “freeze up” and “never find a confident or powerful intellectual voice” (p. 149). Like Omolade, who endorses a pedagogy that engages the dimensions of race, class, and gender, I am interested in critical literacy—a widely used term that now refers to a range of educational philosophies and practices (Kelly, 1997; Muspratt, Luke, & Freebody, 1997). More precisely, I am interested in how these dimensions interplay and inform these girls’ reading of “the word and the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987). These interests lead to a call for a “competent education for Black women,” one that does not engage in “subterfuges,” one that emphasizes an education that moves individuals through life as adult citizens “on an independent and interdependent, but not dependent, basis” (Jackson, 1976, p. 18). Critical theorists (Chomsky, 2000; Freire, 1970; Joseph, 1988) argue that discourses of “literacy” often refer to developing skills toward creating productive but “domesticated” workers in a capitalist-driven system, rather than independent and critical thinkers. Educators concerned with transforming traditional classroom practice emphasize the importance of their students learning to value their own ideas (Graff, 2003; Maher & Tetreault, 2001), or “coming to voice,” as hooks (1989) writes. Beverly McElroy-Johnson (1993) has noted that “voice” refers to a student’s sense of self and purpose not only in the classroom but also in the world: Voice, in this sense is having a place in the academic setting, other than just a desk and a book. . . . It is the student’s desire to express ideas in a clear, coherent way, because that student understands that his or her thoughts are important. (pp. 85–86)

Voice has been an important aspect in research on gender and education, especially in the works of women of color (Carter, 2001; Boyce Davies, 1995; Fordham, 1996; hooks, 1999). Voice is a particularly salient concept in the work of scholars who emphasize how girls’ education has been integral to the maintenance of the status quo (Boyce Davies, 1995; Joseph, 1988). In conceptualizing this inquiry in which only two Black girls cohabited an instructional space with many students from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, I drew on the work of theorists whose research aims to transform education for female students of color. My investigations with middle-school girls in this setting and others (Henry, 1998a, 1998b, 2001) corroborate research findings that female students are often delegitimized and that patriarchy is supported in the classroom (Davies, 1993; Millard, 1997; Rogers, 1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Girls are often not heard, afraid to speak out in coeducational classrooms, given

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less attention, and assessed on how they behave rather than on how they perform academically. Moreover, race, ethnicity, language background, and socioeconomic issues figure in girls’ and women’s academic assessment and success (Barr & Birke, 1998; Omolade, 1994; Okazawa-Rey, Robinson, & Ward, 1985; Quiroz, 2001). Students from diverse backgrounds are often denied the right to find their voices from their own informed perspectives in academic settings (Carroll, 1997; Evans, 1992; Joseph, 1988). Thus, as Omolade (1994) writes, Black female students remain “invisible to the naked eye.” The Meanings of Silence According to Deborah Cameron (1998), “Speech and silence have been powerful metaphors in feminist discourse, used to configure all the ways in which women are denied the right or opportunity to express themselves freely” (p. 3). Indeed, the meanings of “silence” and “speech” can be complicated and need to be theorized and explicated more fully. The terms tend to be overused and are most often used metaphorically. Thus, argues Cameron, they do not always name the concrete conditions to which they allude: “A claim that women are ‘silent’ or ‘silenced’ cannot mean that they are always and everywhere literally silent, nor that they lack the capacity to use language” (p. 3). Feminist research has shown that in public life, speaking roles are for men (Collins, 1990; Spender, 1998). Carole Boyce Davies (1995) argued that for Black women, speech is encumbered by dominant messages that they do not have anything useful to say. Black girls are silenced in the classroom, a public space setting boundaries for silence and speech (Carter, 2001; Henry, 1998a). In her ethnography of a secondary English classroom with two Black female students, Carter theorized a Silence Trilogy (“Silencing, Silenced, Silence”), arguing that silence is a socially constructed space of rich yet unaffirmed voices that are devalued in mainstream culture. Along with other feminists (Fordham, 1996; Walkerdine, 1989), she maintained that silence can be strategic. Journal Writing and the Self Feminist writers (e.g., Davies, 2000; Weedon, 1987) have stressed the interconnections between language, subjectivity, social organization, and power. Laurel Richardson (2000) wrote that “language is a constitutive force creating a particular view of reality and of the Self” (p. 928). According to Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff (1996), diaries and journals represent a particular tradition as a form of women’s and girls’ self-inscription. Bunkers and Huff argued that diaries (journals)4 are a form “particularly conducive 4 4 I am using journal and diary interchangeably. See Bunkers and Huff (1996) for a detailed discussion of these terms.


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to women’s writing” (p. 6).5 They suggested that we read women’s diaries as “constant friends to their writers” (p. 18) and that diaries disclose how we construct knowledge and help us understand how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to our culture through the mediation of language. Trudelle Thomas (1996) used the trope of the diary as a “creative midwife,” an assistant that could facilitate all stages of a woman’s growth (p. 169). Most importantly for this discussion, I began to recognize that these writings were a body of literature mirroring social realities and inequities of classroom life. The discursive practices of the classroom were encoded in their “off-stage” writings.

A FEMINIST CASE STUDY As a feminist ethnographer, I am interested in making lives and voices visible (Reinharz, 1992). I apply meaning to observed practices (Alasuutari, 1995; Delamont, 1999). Although I discussed my interpretations of interviews and field observations with participants, I imposed my own interpretations on events and speech acts. As a Black feminist, I work to be conscious of my power as a researcher in school settings. I am cognizant of the ways in which social science research has reduced Black women and girls to essentialist stereotypes (e.g., welfare queens, jezebels, and loud Black girls). Although there are many approaches to feminist research, my interactional methodology with Black women teachers and girls is framed by the following assumptions: (a) It should address women’s lives and experience in their own terms and ground theory in the actual experiences of women; (b) it should promote an interactional methodology to end the exploitation of women as research objects; (c) research on women should provide the women studied with explanations that could be used to improve their life situations, so that they do not become objectified; and (d) the researcher is central to the research and her feelings should be central to the process (Mirza, 1995). Reinharz (1992) argued that, in a sense, all feminist research can be considered “action-research” in that it works toward social change. In working toward this goal in a way that addresses the needs of participants and responds to emerging findings, the researcher may change the contours of the research design in accordance with the needs of the participants and the emerging findings (Lather, 1991; Reinharz, 1992; Ristock & Pennell, 1996). The original research idea was to examine Black teacher practice 5

Historically, Black women had less access to literate activities, and their traditions of writing have not been as well documented notwithstanding a long legacy of letters and diaries (e.g., Bethune, 1995; Brown & Webb, 2000; Drumgoold, 2000). 5

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cross-culturally, but the goal of my study soon became one of providing participants (Enid and her students) with the means (understandings, findings, strategies) to take action to resolve specific problems (Berg, 2001; Clift, Veal, Holland, Johnson, & McCarthy, 1995). Shaping a Research Agenda With Enid and Her Students Shortly after my initial visit with Enid, she and I began to meet weekly to discuss curriculum ideas or pedagogical issues specifically concerning teaching and learning with her Caribbean students. Enid revealed aspects of teaching and learning in culture-centered programs that typically remain undiscussed, yet are fundamental to understanding the possibilities and limitations of daily classroom interaction. During these conversations I was not positioned as an expert. We were both learning together.6 Early on in our collaboration, Enid shared her concern that her female students participated less than the boys in class activities and encouraged me to help them “open up”: The girls, you have to pull it out of them . . . they just block themselves out of everything. They need to remain focused [in their work], need to work on spelling and writing. When they are outside in a social group they can talk up a storm.

At Enid’s suggestion, in March 1995 I started weekly reading/writing/discussion groups with the girls, aged 12 to 14. My program objectives at the time were shaped by critical literacy perspectives and empirical research regarding dialogue journals (Egan-Robertson, 1993; Golden & Handloff, 1993; Staton, 1989; Tierney, 1990). Briefly, the theoretical premise was that reading and writing activities together promote greater learning than when they are treated as separate subjects. Enid and I agreed on the goal of developing the self-expression, thinking skills, language awareness, and writing abilities of her female students (at the time from Jamaica and Belize)—a tall order. 6

Our conversations soon broadened the dimensions of the research at Columbus and at another site 30 miles away. The larger ethnographic study at two schools (1996–1998) drew data from varied sources: audiotaped structured and semistructured interviews and informal conversations with the classroom teachers, girls, and their mothers; videotaped observations of classroom teaching and learning activities; and field notes taken during and after class visits. Dialogue journals and a disposable camera were given to the girls to record their thoughts on meaningful events. Classroom artifacts (e.g., assignments, lessons) were collected and analyzed. A student questionnaire regarding literacy activities was administered in the fall, and a self-reflection was elicited in the spring of the school year. Data were coded both without and with the aid of NUDI*ST software, a program for qualitative data analysis. Data were analyzed for themes and patterns.

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I also decided to involve the girls with whom I was working in reading and writing activities that related to their daily lives. For example, one of our first activities in the reading/writing/discussion group involved a response to the film Rice and Peas, a story relating how a Trinidadian restaurateur keeps her cultural heritage alive in a Brooklyn restaurant. Rice and peas (or beans) are staples in many Caribbean and Central and South American countries. However, the method of preparation varies. During the discussion of the film, the students, from Belize and Jamaica, described different approaches to cooking the dish. I asked them to share their various methods. For example, Monica, a 14-year-old Belizean girl in the class, wrote the following: Frist I wash Rice I wash I two times so ever thing can come out of it. I put some water in the pat so it can boll for 3 minest. You boy a pan of peas form the shop and then you put the rica and peas in the put and leat it coo for 45 M.

Through her writing, Monica, like the other girls, revealed a need for the kinds of support with writing skills that Enid had referred to. But as I got to know Caprice and Georgette during the 1997–1998 academic year, they revealed their own pressing concerns about the class, including what they perceived as the dangers of speaking out and being teased by the boys. Their behaviors disrupted the stereotypical images of “strong Black women” or “loud Black girls” (Evans, 1992; Fordham, 1993). They rarely spoke in their own words, often relying on the textbook for responses for fear that their own ideas “might be wrong,” as Georgette once explained. Moreover, because the girls had been relegated to special language development classes since coming to the United States at the age of 5, they appeared to be intimidated by “correct school English.” When the girls dared to speak up, the boys often mocked their answers. On a written self-evaluation that they filled out on the last day of class, Georgette wrote, “The only thing that bothered me was some of the boys. They tease me.” Caprice responded in a similar manner: “The boys in my class were disturbing because they always bother me.” Yet in conversations the girls had outside of the classroom, without the power dynamic of the teacher or boys, they were able to be “audacious,” “womanish,” and even transgressive (Henry, 1998b). As their fears became clear to me, I wondered how these girls could be transgressive in the classroom when the space for a voice was not permitted. Dialogue Journals: A Methodological Tool Dialogue journals have been widely used in both first- and second-language classrooms (Mlynarczyk, 1998). I fashioned my approach after the work of Staton (1989), who studied the use of dialogue journals with English-lan-

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guage learners, where children responded to literature through journals and the teacher regularly wrote back to students. She found that this approach increased self-knowledge, language skills, and cognitive abilities. In the beginning stages, Enid would help by reminding the girls to write in their journals. I would read with them on a weekly basis, and comment in the margins if they invited responses. Thus, my manifold roles were ever broadening—workshop leader, researcher, pen pal. The medium of dialogue journals allowed Georgette and Caprice to express themselves in ways that countered the dominant texts of official school discourse. Their spontaneous, less polished writing was expressive, from the heart, rather than formal classroom writing often aimed at “pleasing the teacher.” I encouraged them to write about topics of their choice. I responded to them, asked for clarification, introduced new topics, and responded to questions. There were a number of ways in which they interacted with their journals, as they discussed private topics and expressed desires and gender subjectivities (e.g., conflicts with peers, injustices, sexuality, sense of self worth, moral issues). Georgette. Twelve years old, Georgette was the elder of two children in a family that emigrated from Haiti in 1990. Tall, portly, and much older looking than her male classmates, Georgette seemed uncomfortable in her body. In class, she was noticeably tense and grim. She avoided eye contact with the teacher for fear of having to speak and encounter ridicule from the boys. Georgette loved language arts and reading. A storyteller, she would write imaginative compositions. Perhaps this love positioned her well for self-expression through journal writing, in which she revealed herself as comical, forgetful, disorganized, and creative. In the dialogue journal, Georgette took the notion of dialogue literally. She would seduce me into weekly written conversations through her journal. She wrote copiously on a range of topics (holidays, family activities, peers, achievement) and expected an ongoing dialogue, pleading in her journal, “Dr. Henry, please ask me some questions!” She always responded to the questions I scribbled in the margins. Enid’s classroom had strict boundaries concerning teacher–student conduct. Georgette transgressed them in her journal. For example, she overheard a conversation between Enid and me in which Enid was explaining her church’s teachings regarding fasting and prayer. Curious, Georgette needed to understand this practice, unobserved by anyone she knew. She cleverly used her journal to interrogate the practice and push away the boundary: “Dr. Henry, Why do people fast and what if you are fasting and you happen to become ill, are you allowed to eat then?” She would have violated the class student/teacher norm about eavesdropping if she had asked her teacher directly about the contents of a conversation that she


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had overheard. However, the question was a legitimate one to ask via a journal entry to me. She did not feel she could have asked the question otherwise. In her journal, Georgette offered many commentaries on gender dynamics, sometimes with humor: Michel is really making me mad ‘I’ve got some new shoes right and he keeps laughing at them and that making me mad. He made me cuss out loud in class. I wish some one would kick his (ass). OOPS! Excuse my Language! Heeeeelp!

In light of her comportment in daily classroom interactions, it becomes clear that the dialogue journal gave her an opportunity to name and make sense of her learning environment. Finally, Georgette’s journal was a safe forum in which to ask questions about sexuality: “Why is sex popular these days, even at school? Love Georgette.” Or, “How come when a girl thinks a boy is cute his or her parent thinks something will happen in the near future? Love Georgette.” Having interviewed Georgette’s mother, I was aware of parental and cultural apprehensions about Georgette dating “before college,” a euphemistic way of expressing fear of early sexual activity and possible pregnancy. I felt a duty to respond carefully, and wrote back in a more substantial way than the usual comments in the margins: I know how bothersome it is to have our parents make a big deal over things like this. Just remember that they really care for you. That is why they are always thinking about what might happen in the near future. Also, remember that your parents are from Haiti. In the Caribbean, dating practices are quite different than they are here in the U.S. Most mothers are concerned about teen pregnancy. These kinds of thoughts go through their heads as they watch their daughters grow into womanhood.

Georgette’s journal was an intimate friend with whom she could reexamine issues. She would reread selections and refer to previous entries. For example, in May 1997 she revisited something I had written on the first day of classes in January: “Dear Dr. Henry, Remember in January when you wrote ‘hormones are flying’? What does that mean?” As Thomas (1996) suggests, rereading selected entries allows the writer “to gain insights that simply were not available apart from rereading” (p. 183). These literacy events contrasted with Georgette’s classroom identity, one in which she sat, tense, usually sucking her fingers, reluctant to participate in group activities. Through the language interaction in her dialogue journal, Georgette negotiated her identity, shifting her position to one in which she could analyze and challenge her situations more freely. Interestingly, Georgette and Caprice began to exchange and read each other’s dialogue journals, thereby

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establishing a participatory learning structure outside of the formal structures of both the classroom and their dialogue journals. Caprice. Tall, athletic, and quiet, 12-year-old Caprice spoke in whispering tones that made the listener lean forward so as not to miss a word. She usually wore athletic gear and always kept her straightened hair tightly pulled back in a ponytail. She often wore different colors of nail polish at the same time. She had emigrated from Jamaica in 1990, and had lived with her grandmother and father until 1996, when her mother joined the family. Both mother and daughter were finding this transition difficult. Caprice struggled with language and academics, and hence dreaded writing activities, seeing them as a form of assessing her literacy skills. Much like Georgette’s, Caprice’s classroom persona was without spark. She often drifted off in class, seeming preoccupied, as if in some distant place. She was the weakest in her class. Because her sister usually completed Caprice’s homework assignments, she found it difficult to defend or discuss her work. Her oral and written work revealed poor comprehension. She attempted to gain acceptance through neat work and repeated drafts, a strategy that others have documented in girls who struggle with writing or have weak academic abilities (Mlynarczyk, 1998). Cohen, Blanc, Christman, Brown, and Sims (1996) found that these behaviors (such as writing neatly) allowed girls to receive adult approval. As a student who wished to enter the mainstream program and be with her girlfriends, Caprice was anxious about grades. Thus, at first, she perceived the dialogue journal as another form of assessment, and used it to document her scholastic achievement, diligently writing in it on a weekly basis. With time and through discussion with Georgette, she understood that the journal was a place where she could write without fear of censorship or evaluation. This lack of anxiety helped develop her writing skills and confidence as an author. A month after beginning to work with dialogue journals, Caprice and Georgette began to sit beside each other in class. They exchanged journal entries, especially during their free time. One afternoon, I entered Mrs. Johnson’s classroom during the lunch hour. The girls were reading each other’s journals, eating lunch, and talking. Georgette explained, “We thought, rather than write in our journals, we’d just read them and talk about what we wrote instead.” Caprice had written about a new Haitian girl, Marie, who couldn’t speak English. Georgette leaned over and read aloud from Caprice’s journal: “I know that she is new to the state but she understands what we do. I don’t like the way they [the boys] treat her. Miguel has bad taste.” Caprice moved her journal toward her, turned the page and also read aloud, “The new girl is in my math class. And the teacher thinks that I can speak French so she sits by me and I help her. Last Friday when we


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were in math class she tapped my shoulder and said something in her language but I didn’t understand.” “So I had to ask you,” Caprice said to Georgette. “She just wanted to know if it was homework. She should come in our group,” Georgette responded. The girls engaged in other kinds of collaborative talk that related to their journals. I noticed that each would reference the other’s journal in her own writing. For example, Caprice wrote, “In Georgette Journal [sic] you said something about writing a letter to the girl we are going to meet [from another school].” Moreover, they would often write about the same themes on the same day, refer to a prior conversation they had in their entries, and work on responding to each other’s journals sitting side by side. For example, as a strategy to help Marie evade the male bullying in their class, they both wrote on the same day, “Can Marie come in our [reading/writing/discussion] group?” Their burgeoning relationship engendered discussions and writings in which they drew on their personal experiences to analyze their classroom context. In this manner, they solved problems relevant to their lives as young adolescents in a climate of discomfort. Caprice’s self-expression grew through her discussions with Georgette, whom she trusted and acknowledged as more knowledgeable and confident in her writing skills. (According to a sociocultural perspective, learning occurs through the help of a more knowledgeable other [see, e.g., Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000; Wells, 1999].) Week by week, Caprice’s confidence as a writer also grew. In her first entries, she had treated her dialogue journal as her “learning log,” a portfolio of written compositions and other assignments based on stories she had read: 12/17/97 Dear Dialogue [sic], I am read [sic] a book called The Liquid Trap. It getting scared because the two girls are getting read to go in the house and the brother is go to watch out for the lady that lives in the scare house.

Encouraged by her collaborative talk with Georgette, Caprice began to consider her journal a safe place to write, without judgment, criticism, or the language corrections that are tolerated by students in language classes. She was enthusiastic about the journal-writing process. She also improved her ability to name pertinent issues. The two girls would compare their thoughts about their teacher, their schoolmates, the curriculum, the school environment, and their parents. They set up a learning situation outside of the formal learning setting in which they validated and made sense of their own ideas.

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Consider the following entry toward the end of the school year, and note the better developed paragraphs and sense of voice: Dear Dr. Henry 6/3/98 I have this friend that I was not talking to for three week because she lied to me and called me a name that got me upset. She was like a very nice person I would talk to but now I would just walk past her with out even saying a word to her. I always thought she was going to be my best friend but not anymore after the way she talk about me no way I don’t think so. When I was in fourth grade I had this best friend who was in my math class. We both know how to jump double Dutch and we jumped it good but the next year after she went to another school. We still wrote to each other talk on the phone with each other but sense she went to 6th grade we don’t talk call each other or write each other. So now I only have one best friend. Love Caprice.

In this piece, Caprice expressed her ideas about fairness as she reflected on her friendships. Through her participation in dialogue journals she revealed a subjectivity and self-conscious agency that I had not observed in any other context. Through journal writing, she began to realize that she could write confidently and meaningfully about herself and her world as a young adolescent. I am not claiming that dialogue journals alone improved Caprice’s writing skills. However, she envisioned conversations as occurring through writing, which she no longer viewed as scholastic drudgery but as a means of self-expression.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Enid’s cultural background was similar to that of the majority of her students. In fact, her biography was the main reason that she was hired at Columbus School. She validated and built on the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of her students. She strove to teach in culturally affirmative ways, and was highly esteemed in the professional and cultural community. Furthermore, her female students were members of a small learning group of six pupils. One would think that Black girls would flourish in such a setting. However, for the most part, they seemed fearful and distant during class activities. They were, as Barbara Omolade (1994) has written, “invisible to the naked eye.” Yet through their dialogue journals, they expressed a sharp analysis of dimensions of power and oppression in their everyday environment particularly regarding gender inequities. Enid and I discussed these findings. The development of our relationship through the study provided a window for us to examine current policy and


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practice in her classroom and her district. I showed Enid some of my findings concerning the gender dynamics in the classroom and its impact on the girls. This awareness prompted her not only to modify the seating arrangements but also to monitor her own tendency to call on the boys more frequently. We discussed how theorists and practitioners alike view culturally affirmative approaches as panaceas, yet how these discourses can function to veil the contradictions of practice. For policymakers in this district, the existence of the program was evidence of meeting the needs of all students. However, contradictions regarding race and language background were not being addressed. Enid explained: I’m always trying to cut through red tape. You know, these Caribbean kids aren’t considered as having different language needs when it comes to state testing. So they have to take the California Achievement Test, like everyone else. Yet we are providing a whole program for them based on their language needs. The district functions behind a screen. They stay behind a wall and they say one thing, and you’re on the other side. Your perception of what they’re saying is not what they mean. When they come out from behind that screen, they use a completely different language. They’re not consistent. This program fulfills institutional needs. It’s a front. And know what else? These kids go to the same school as the American-born kids, they live in the same area, but because they are Caribbean kids they are not given opportunity for the bus like the other kids who attend the school. So you want to talk about racism?

Caprice and Georgette also invoked the trope of a “screen” or “veil” regarding their Black female subjectivity. I intentionally use the trope of “veil,” not only in keeping with Enid’s use of “screen” but also because, as Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (1997) points out, the veil or mask is a recurring symbol in Black women’s literature and film, “a shifting signifier, that moves between the signing capacity (hegemonic patriarchal discourse) and freedom (as a liberated speaking subject)” (p. 33). Georgette and Caprice were in the classroom of a teacher renowned throughout her school board for using culturally affirmative approaches. Yet they were members of a classroom in which they felt silenced as young adolescent females. Through their writing, they revealed their classroom as a place in which they dared not speak. How could they name issues relevant to their own lives? They manifested great anxiety in the public space of the classroom, while in the private world of journal writing and discussion they were able to come alive. Only in their “off-stage” (Finders, 1997), “unsanctioned” (Moje, 2000) writings could they begin to reveal their anxieties, pleasures, and analyses of the dimensions of inequity, and to speak transgressively. These important “off-stage” or “unsanctioned” literacy events helped me understand their contradictory subject positions. As

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mentioned earlier, silence can have many meanings. One can be silenced, but one can also use silence as a survival strategy as in this culturally affirmative environment that was also hostile to girls. By examining these writings in the margins of classroom life, through discussions with students, Enid and I were able to deepen our understandings of their social and academic context as well as Black girls’ struggles to participate fully. I need to continue in the ethnographic project of learning with and learning from young adolescent Black girls. These findings have implications for how we envision their education. Much educational research is still framed by monolithic views of Black culture (poor, “urban” Black [male] youth) as well as positive perspectives on culturally affirmative approaches. Instead, we need to examine how discourses and practices construct different kinds of subjects in the classroom.

REFERENCES Alasuutari, P. (1995). Researching culture: Qualitative method and cultural studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Barr, J., & Birke, L. (1998). Common science?: Women, science, and knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berg, B. (2001). Qualitative research methods for the social sciences. New York: Allyn and Bacon. Bethune, M. (1995). Mary McLeod Bethune papers, Part 1: Writings, diaries, scrapbooks, biographical materials and files on the National Youth Administration and Women’s Organization, 1918–1955. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America. Boyce Davies, C. (1995). Hearing Black women’s voices: Transgressing imposed boundaries. In C. Boyce Davies & ‘M. Ogundipe-Leslie (Eds.), Moving beyond boundaries, Vol. 1: International dimensions of Black women’s writing (pp. 3–15). New York: New York University Press. Brown, R., & Webb, M. (2000). Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear a native of Africa, who was enslaved in childhood, and died in Boston, January 3, 1815, aged 65 years: by a Lady of Boston. Electronic edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Academic Affairs Library. (Original work published 1832) Retrieved April 21, 2004, from http://metalab.unc.edu/ docsouth/neh/brownrw/brownrw.html Bunkers, S., & Huff, C. (Eds.). (1996). Inscribing the daily: Critical essays on women’s diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cameron, D. (1998). The feminist critique of language. New York: Routledge. Carroll, R. (1997). Sugar in the raw: Voices of young Black girls in America. New York: Crown Trade Books. Carter, S. (2001). The possibilities of silence: African American female cultural identity and secondary English classrooms. Doctoral dissertation, Vanderbilt University. Chomsky, N. (2000). Chomsky on miseducation (D. Macedo, Ed.). New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Clift, R., Veal, M., Holland, P., Johnson, M., & McCarthy, J. (1995). Collaborative leadership and shared decision-making: Teachers, principals, and university professors. New York: Teachers College Press. Cohen, J., Blanc, J., Christman, J. Brown, D., & Sims, M. (1996). Girls in the middle: Working to succeed in school. Washington, DC: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.


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Collins, P. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and pedagogy. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Cook-Gumperz, J., & Gumperz, J. (1992). Changing views of language in education: The implications for literacy research. In R. Beach, J. Green, M. Kamil, & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Multidisciplinary perspectives on literacy research (pp. 151–180). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Davies, B. (1993). Shards of glass: Children reading and writing beyond gendered identities. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Davies, B. (2000). A body of writing, 1990–1999. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. de Castell, S. (2000). Literacies, technologies, and the future of the library in the information age. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32(3), 359–376. Delamont, S. (1999). Fieldwork in educational settings. London: Falmer. Delpit, L., & Kilgour Dowdy, J. (Eds.). (2002). The skin that we speak: Thoughts on language and culture in the classroom. New York: New Press. Drumgoold, K. (2000). A slave girl’s story; Being an autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. Electronic edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Academic Affairs Library. (Original work published 1898) Retrieved April 21, 2004, from http://metalab.unc.edu/ docsouth/neh/drumgoold/drumgoold.html Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Egan-Robertson, A. (1993). Puerto Rican students respond to children’s books with Puerto Rican themes. In K. Holland, R. Hungerford, & S. Ernst (Eds.), Journeying: Children responding to literature (pp. 204–217). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Evans, G. (1992). Those loud Black girls. In D. Spender & E. Sarah (Eds.), Learning to lose: Sexism and education (pp. 183–190). London: Women’s Press. Finders, M. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high. New York: Teachers College Press. Fordham, S. (1993). Those loud Black girls. Anthropology and Education, 24(1), 3–32. Fordham, S. (1996). Blacked out. New York: Routledge. Foster, G. A. (1997). Women filmmakers of the African and Asian diaspora. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Golden, J., & Handloff, E. (1993). Responding to literature through journal writing. In K. Holland, R. Hungerford, & S. Ernst (Eds.), Journeying: Children responding to literature (pp. 175–186). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Graff, G. (2003). Clueless in academe: How schooling obscures the life of the mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Henry, A. (1998a). Speaking up and speaking out: Examining voice in a reading/writing program with adolescent African Caribbean girls. Journal of Literacy Research, 30(2), 233–252. Henry, A. (1998b). Taking back control: Black women teachers’ activism and the education of African Canadian children. Albany: State University of New York Press. Henry, A. (2001). The politics of unpredictability in a reading/writing discussion group with girls from the Caribbean. Theory Into Practice, 40(3), 184–189. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back. Boston: South End Press. hooks, b. (1999). Remembered rapture: The writer at work. New York: Henry Holt. Jackson, J. (1976). Career options for Black women. Washington, DC: National Institute of Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED138812) Joseph, G. (1988). Black feminist pedagogy in capitalist America. In M. Coles (Ed.), Bowles and Gintis revisited: Correspondence and contradiction in educational theory (pp. 174–186). London: Falmer.

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Kelly, U. (1997). Schooling desire: Literacy, cultural politics and pedagogy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lee, C., & Smagorinsky, P. (Eds.). (2000). Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lensmire, T. (2000). Powerful writing, responsible teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Maher, F., & Tetreault, M. (2001). The feminist classroom. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. McElroy-Johnson, B. (1993). Giving voice to the voiceless. Harvard Educational Review, 63(1), 85–104. Millard, E. (1997). Differently literate: Boys, girls and the schooling of literacy. London: Falmer Press. Mirza, M. (1995). Some ethical dilemmas in fieldwork, feminist and antiracist methodologies. In M. Griffiths & B. Troyna (Eds.), Antiracism, culture and social justice in education (pp. 163–181). London: Trentham Books. Mlynarczyk, R. W. (1998). Conversations of the mind: The uses of journal writing for second-language learners. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Moje, E. (2000). “To be part of the story”: The literacy practices of Gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 102, 651–690. Moll, L., & González, N. (1997). Teachers as social scientists: Learning about culture from household research. In P. M. Hall (Ed.), Race, ethnicity and multiculturalism (pp. 89–114). New York: Garland. Muspratt, S., Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (Eds.). (1997). Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Omolade, B. (1994). The rising song of African American women. New York: Routledge. Okazawa-Rey, M., Robinson, T., & Ward, J. (1987). Black women and the politics of skin and hair. Women and Therapy, 6(1–2), 89–102. Quiroz, P. (2001).The silencing of Latino student “voice”: Puerto Rican and Mexican narratives in eighth grade and high school. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 32(3), 326–349. Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist methods in social science research. New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923–948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ristock, J., & Pennell, J. (1996). Community research as empowerment. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Rogers, A. (1993). Voice, play, and a practice of ordinary courage in girls’ and women’s lives. Harvard Educational Review, 63(3), 265–295. Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America’s schools cheat girls. New York: Scribner’s. Spender, D. (1998). Man made language. New York: New York University Press. Staton, J. (1989). An introduction to dialogue journal communication. In J. Staton, R. Shuy, & J. Kreeft-Peyton (Eds.), Dialogue journal communication: Classroom, linguistic, social and cognitive views (pp. 1–32). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Thomas, T. (1996). The diary as creative midwife. In S. Bunkers & C. Huff (Eds.), Inscribing the daily: Critical essays on women’s diaries (pp. 169–189). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Tierney, R. (1990). Learning to connect reading and writing: Critical thinking through transactions with one’s own subjectivity. In T. Shanahan (Ed.), Reading and writing together (pp. 132–143). Norwood, MA: Christopher Gordon.


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C H A P T E R

5 Toward a Pedagogy of the Land: The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors’ Program Celia Haig-Brown York University

Legend of the White Man: Trout Lake is located 20 air miles from Red Lake and its coordinates are 51° 51¢ N and 90° 15¢ W. . . . The water depth of Trout Lake at its deepest is 150 feet. . . . The lake lies within the Precambrian Shield and is classified as Oligotrophic. The true story of Trout Lake lies in the memories and experiences of its people, the NamekosipiiwAnishinaapek. It is etched and documented on its rocky shores and sandy beaches, on Pinesiwachiink, the ridge that defines its western shores, on the islands, reefs and waters. —Dannenmann, 2003a, p. 1

A lake full of gifts where pickerel and trout swim the deep, cold waters and grow strong and big. A lake where muskrat, otter, and beaver reenact the dives of the creation story every day.1 A lake where a First Nations woman sets her nets and her traps just as her ancestors, recent and distant, have done for generations. When she traps a descendant of that first muskrat, she carefully removes the little hands and puts them gently back in the lake in honor of Muskrat’s sacrifice for creation. The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program (IKIP) is a communitybased education program designed to prepare Aboriginal people who have some traditional knowledge to pass that knowledge on to others. At the 1 See Thomas King, Lecture 1 of the Massey Series, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, reproduced in King (2003).

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same time, it provides an opportunity for the prospective instructors to literally re-member2 their own knowledge through using it in everyday living and interactions with others. Historical circumstances and changing lifestyles have often reduced occasions for such activity. With its central focus on a pedagogy of the land, the program design takes seriously a grounded context and an understanding that land and situatedness refer to much more than a material place as defined by legal documents, geological surveys, or points on a map. Ultimately, the innovation of this course of study draws on very old pedagogies by never losing sight of the land as the first teacher. As these old pedagogies are recreated in a contemporary context, they lose nothing of their salience and promise new ways to think about participatory community-based education. THE LAND AS THE FIRST TEACHER In the center of the world, there is a place where people have lived and died since time before memory. With a now misplaced treaty and the coming of the White man—first commercial fishermen, followed by hunters, fishing camp operators, and more recently loggers and mining explorers—the place has faced radical change. And yet much remains the same. The island where Kaaren Dannenmann, who was quoted earlier, grew up is still an island. The nearby beach where the program is held is still a beach although presumably the shoreline has shifted over time. The graves near the lake are still there. Around one there is a new fence, a menikanaatik, erected with loving care by the friends and relatives of a community member who has recently passed away. Tradition guides the relatives to bring the body here and, when the time is right, to perform a ceremony that marks the place in their hearts and on the land, a ceremony that heals. In current theory in early childhood education, arising out of schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the environment is called “the third teacher.”3 This acknowledgment of the tremendous significance of the space in which teaching and learning take place is a welcome addition to curriculum theorizing. In the Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program, we take the notion of environment as teacher a step further with our claim that the land is the first 2

This term re-member is an effort to capture the idea that such knowledge must be put back together out of fragments held by individuals and communities who have had their traditional ways attacked as wrong for generations. Residential schools, the reservation system, outlawing potlatches and gatherings to address land claims are only a few of the manifestations of efforts to assimilate Aboriginal people into a European-based lifestyle. 3 There are many websites on Reggio Emilia schools. The two documents 3 cited here, A’Court and Brooke (2000) and Carnegie Mellon University, Cyert Center for Early Education (2002) provide some basic information, while of course not beginning to do justice to the complexities of the schools developed there. 2

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teacher. The use of first in this instance is a gesture to the primacy of groundedness in all our learning relations. These include historical connections—indeed, connections from time before memory—among indigenous peoples of an area and with the earth, air, and water with which they (all of us) interact, as well as current connections whereby all knowledge is (re)cognized4 as having foundations in and ties to material reality. Even in the depths of the most modern city, we pay attention to and are affected by weather; diverted and abused streams and rivers break their bounds at inopportune moments; and earthquakes rock our deepest assumptions of permanence. In the Americas, indigenous peoples have lived for generations in good relation (see Hodgson-Smith, 1997) with the land in all its complexity. They have known how to listen to the lessons the land is teaching and how to respond in ways that affirm what they have learned. They have taught these lessons to one another down the generations. The conception of land, in relation to which such learning takes place, goes beyond a simple material understanding to the spiritual, where lines between animate and inanimate, animal and human, spirit and material are consciously and deliberately blurred. Such dualities themselves distort the conceptualizations expressed in indigenous languages, which embrace complex interconnections, where verbs are the foundation on which all other syntactical and lexical forms depend, and where all the world is in motion. This elaborate notion of land encompasses an understanding of interrelationships and subjectivities beyond the human: for example, a river or lake may rejoice or suffer with the actions of those around it. This seemingly idyllic but ultimately very practical relation to land (and air and water along with all that dwell in, under, and on) has too often been ignored by the current nation-states of North America. Capitalism-driven colonization arising with the Industrial Revolution in Europe insisted on importing to the Americas incompatible ways of relating to land and resources as entities somehow separate from other life forms, especially human beings. Georgina Tobac of the Dene Nation expresses the incongruity of worldviews: Every time the white people come to the North or come to our land and start tearing up the land, I feel as if they are cutting my own flesh; because that is the way we feel about our land. It is our flesh. (reported in Sioui, 1992, p. 18)

Rather than concern for future generations, a traditional guiding principle in many First Nations cultures, instant gratification in the form of bottomline profit has become the agenda for many people who currently occupy the Americas. 4

The parentheses in the word (re)cognized are intended to direct the reader to the root of the word and to emphasize the significance of coming to know again both in old ways and in new ways.

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How did such a shift occur? Why were the original people unable to interrupt the actions of those who came first as guests to their lands and then stayed to take possession? Huron philosopher Georges Sioui (1992) argued that microbes played a significant role: The key idea is that, had it not been for the European advantage created by the diseases that the newcomers imported in spite of themselves, the Native peoples would have had a chance to absorb the ideological and political shock, which would have been far less powerful. (p. 3)

Once the power of European ideology was given this advantage, the intensity of the assault on indigenous cultures increased. Institutionalized schooling was one of the most potent of the weapons in efforts to assimilate and eventually annihilate what were assumed to be vanishing cultures. Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott’s 1920 statement represents this view: “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian department” (Haig-Brown, 1988, p. 32). The persistence and resilience of Aboriginal peoples in Canada have proven otherwise. The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program is one attempt to acknowledge the historical assumptions and assaults on indigenous knowledge and to contribute to reestablishing its place in contemporary life. As we take seriously what it means to see the land as the first teacher, we work to redress this historic and misguided shift in relations among human beings and all other forms. We work toward a pedagogy of the land where teachings are never merely didactic, but most often expressed in a relation. The tensions of such work are revealed in the following comment on divergent pedagogies in an interaction with one of the program participants and her knowledgeable mother, who was raised on the land: I don’t know what the dynamics are that are different but then when I am with her alone, I can see her memories coming back. She’ll look at something and she’ll work away towards something that we used to do. And when she shows me, her terminology—she’ll speak her language for one thing, and then she talks in terms of “This is the way I saw my grandfather do it” or “This is the way it was shown to me.” It is never in terms of “Do it this way” or “Do it that way.” (K.D., review meeting, September 27, 1999, p. 47/64)5 5

For transcripts of interviews and meetings, I have given a page number as well as the total number of pages of the transcript; for example, 2/39 indicates that the quote is taken from the second page of a 39-page transcript. This symbol gestures to two things: There is a physical and complete transcript of the interaction in existence, and it took place over an extended period of time. Although I use very little of each transcript in a publication, it is important to transcribe the entire work to have access to material which may not seem significant at first read but takes on meaning as the analysis proceeds. 5


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WHAT IS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE ANYWAY? Central to the program described and analyzed here is indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is situated knowledge that arises out of a relation with land (i.e., a very particular place). Although the term has been used in ever-expanding ways as it has become a part of popular academic discourse, for our purposes it is inextricable from the complex relation that people of Aboriginal ancestry have had with specific lands as the source of all life and all learning and teaching. It is knowledge that has been refined over the years and down the generations. As Kaaren said in one interview (March 2000), “Traditional knowledge is all about relationships.” It moves beyond a merely physical relation to a spirituality that draws on those innumerable generations of thinking with and through the relation. The people themselves are inseparable from all other aspects of the environment, whether deemed alive or inanimate by modern science. As one of my students from many years ago, Pat Wilson of the Haisla Nation, announced following a lecture on the characteristics of living things to a class of science methods for preservice teachers, “My people believe that even the rocks have souls” (see Cajete, 1994). Indigenous knowledge is based in an epistemology, a conception of knowledge, that diverges radically from European epistemology. Georges Sioui (1999) caught the tensions between these differing understandings in a look at “time”: With regard to their respective conceptions of time, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists speak languages that are unintelligible to Native people, and vice versa. Professional scholars are absorbed in developing theories with the help of their powerful array of tools and scientific knowledge. Native peoples, in contrast, have been traditionally indifferent to this sort of power, but are intensely interested by the reality of continued communication with their distant ancestors, just as those ancestors are forever present and interested in the lives of those who have received life from them. (p. 52)

Such conceptions are for the most part beyond the reach of the English language, although there are those who work with the language to expand its capabilities in ways that might allow a fitting representation of time, movement, and interrelations to become integral to its mode of expression. The title of Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird’s edited collection, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (1997), eloquently exemplifies this struggle. THE PROGRAM DESIGN The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program is an educational and community-building program designed to provide participants with opportunities to learn, remember, and use indigenous knowledge in its original con-

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text. As one of the program designers commented in a planning meeting, “True knowledge is in the use of it. It is so much more than simply being able to articulate it or analyze it.” Participants who are interested may also choose to consider ways of teaching the knowledge to others. Indigenous knowledge integrates spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical ways of thinking and being. Use of the Anishinaape language (Anishinaapemowin) is a fundamental dimension of the program. The program is very small, with no more than five students per session enrolled. This limit addresses concerns about environmental impact while also ensuring that each person has maximum opportunity to interact with the land and the other students and teachers. Students focus on four interrelated aspects of the program. Participation provides opportunities: (a) to learn and relearn indigenous knowledge on the land by remembering and building on existing knowledge and/or new learning from the program; (b) to use indigenous knowledge in work and play with others in a supportive context; (c) to learn and/or strengthen use of Anishinaapemowin; and (d) to develop appropriate abilities, skills, and knowledge to pass on indigenous teachings to others (adults, children, or other family members) who have less knowledge. The teaching and learning may occur in institutionalized (school) or informal (home, community) contexts. Students who are interested in becoming teachers of indigenous knowledge and who are seeking certification participate in two consecutive summers in Anton’s Beach in Trout Lake and an intervening practicum. To obtain certification, issued jointly by the Assembly of First Nations and York University, students complete three courses: Level 1 Indigenous Knowledge in the first summer; the practicum, Working with Indigenous Knowledge, in the intervening seasons (the time is negotiable with each student on an individual basis); and Level 2 Indigenous Knowledge in a second summer. The program is also open to students who are not seeking certification but want to use and develop their own knowledge; they may opt to come for one or more summers. Each summer the course runs from August 1 to 10, with July 31 and August 11 as traveling dates. In the future, we hope to hold courses in seasons other than summer; weather, travel, and people’s availability have brought us to summer as a starting place. Plans to develop similar programs for different levels and kinds of learners are discussed in the conclusion of the chapter. Four people serve as teachers and facilitators for the courses. One of the original designers, Kaaren Dannenmann, serves as the site coordinator and the heart of the program. Kaaren is responsible for ensuring that the process and content of the courses in the summer remain true to the original intent of providing space for the enactment of indigenous knowledge, as well as all the logistics of the program from recruitment to food delivery. During


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the summer course, two teachers other than Kaaren are present. One is a knowledge keeper who has extensive expertise in and experience with indigenous knowledge, is fluent in the language, and who may be considered an Elder.6 The other, called the facilitator, is a qualified Ontario public school teacher who leads the daily sharing circles described later in this chapter. All who participate in the summer course are of First Nations ancestry. I serve as York coordinator. I am in charge of the practicum component and continue to work closely with Kaaren on the details of ongoing program planning, review, and revision. My practicum work consists of planning with the students an appropriate activity as the focus for the course as well as reviewing their work with them, most often in the form of an interview and/or portfolio assessment, depending on circumstances. What do the courses themselves look like? Indigenous Knowledge Level 1, offered in the first summer of the program, consists of 10 days of actively living on the land in respectful ways (i.e., ways that reflect the values and methods of the original peoples passed through oral tradition). The indigenous knowledge keeper, the site coordinator, and the facilitator guide students in opportunities to learn, express, and use what they know, and to consider the pedagogical implications of what they have been doing. Students are expected to participate in all activities using Anishnaapemowin as much as possible. Students work on the land and waters of Namekosipiink, where they engage in traditional pedagogical events. That is, they live and learn through watching and doing, through working with one another to literally re-member the knowledge that each holds in relation to this activity and this land or another piece of land with which they are more familiar. They may fish and hunt, working with the catch in ways that indicate full appreciation of traditional approaches, such as using all parts of the animal and performing appropriate ceremonies. They clean, prepare, and cook what is caught. They may build traditional structures such as a sweatlodge or a waakinokaan for sleeping. The planning itself provided a time of re-membering knowledge as the teachers debated and discussed various ways of conducting sweats with which they had been involved. The number of rocks, the use of various plants for particular purposes, the wood for the frame and for the ceremony itself, the number of rounds to be made, and the teachings during the ceremony were all points of intense discussion and thought. Other possible activities for the students include gathering traditional local plants and identifying their uses, drum making, basket making, and gathering wild rice. The possi6 6 The term Elder is one that demonstrates respect for the indigenous knowledge that a person, usually an older person, has and is capable of passing along to others. The knowledge may be in the form of oral tradition or expertise with language or living on the land using knowledge reflective of an indigenous worldview. Some people are reluctant to accept such a title, feeling that they are not worthy of it.

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bilities are as endless as the landscape and as variable as circumstance. As someone commented in the planning meeting, “If the caribou swim, then that’s going to change the curriculum, and if they don’t swim, you’ve got to have some alternatives.” This comment refers to the occasional occurrence of spotting caribou swimming in the lake during the summer. Once a day, all involved come together in circle work (see, e.g., Graveline, 1998) to talk through what they have learned, what they are thinking about this learning, and what they want to try to do next. Most importantly, they talk through what the knowledge with which they are deeply engaged in this context will look like in other contexts. This teaching may be planned with other people who have less knowledge than they do. The focus of the circle is on the range of pedagogical implications of their day’s work. They may also strategize about negotiating the limits to teaching indigenous knowledge, such as those imposed by people who are threatened by it or who devalue it as a lesser form of knowledge lacking the currency of Euro/Amerocentric positivism and its so-called technological “advances.” Following the first 10-day session, during the seasons between the summers, students complete the Working with Indigenous Knowledge practicum. Over a period of time determined on an individual basis with the York coordinator, student-teachers choose a context and develop a set of lesson plans to work with others who have less experience with indigenous knowledge than they do. Their teaching is to be at least 40 hours in an educational context of their choosing. The practicum may be with adults or children in institutionalized school, informal community, or extracurricular situations. The student-teachers may work with kids in schools, with Aboriginal street people in the city, in a literacy program in a northern community, or with Aboriginal adolescents at the Trout Lake site in a winter camp of their own. The practicum is graded pass or fail based on a written or oral plan, the delivery of the lessons, and a final report and/or interview regarding the work. The final session for those interested in certification, Indigenous Knowledge Level 2, is a continuation of Level 1. In a second 10-day summer session (the two summers may or may not be consecutive), students have the opportunity to review and discuss what happens to knowledge as it is taken up in different contexts with different people. In this session, students continue to engage in active living on the land. They work with other students in both Level 1 and Level 2 to expand further on their own knowledge. THE STUDENTS The students we want to attract to the program are indigenous knowledge keepers who want to use and share their knowledge with others. Some plan to work with children, some with adults from their communities, and some


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with adults from urban environments. The participants in the program are self-identified First Nations people who have “some traditional knowledge” and “some fluency with the language.” In this case, the language is Aniishinaapemowin, but there is considerable flexibility in this regard and really any First Nations language will satisfy this requirement. Aboriginal people from any nation or community are welcome to apply. Nor are we interested in government definitions of who does and who does not “count” as Indian.7 We have no interest in blood quantum, Bill C-31’s magical creation and termination clauses,8 or any other paternalistic and exclusionary moves made by those who would control “membership” rather than recognize stories and relations. We are interested in “where you are from” and who your family is, but we don’t eliminate anyone who isn’t sure. While this program focuses on the land where knowledge has been practiced over endless generations, it includes people whose roots in the land may be elsewhere and who have traveled many routes from their places of origin.9 The students are all people with a commitment to learning more, to using the knowledge, and to passing it on to others who have less experience with it than they do. We are committed to creating opportunities for people to use and add to the knowledge they have either tacitly or explicitly. Everyone who comes to the program comes as a student to continue his or her learning from the land and to learn from one another. In the Freirian sense, all the teachers are students and all the students are teachers. All expect to build on and use what they know. To date, the participants have included a language teacher from the local high school, a resident of a nearby town, an elder from a southern community, a former assembly-line worker changing careers to work in Aboriginal counseling, a doctoral student from the Delaware Nation (working as research assistant as well), an elementary teacher, a community activist, and many family members from elders to

7 7 The use of the term Indian in this context is very deliberate. It refers to the Indian Act, a piece of discriminatory federal legislation in Canada that pertains to those whom the government defines as “Indian.” 8 Bill C-31 is a significant 8 piece of legislation that, in 1985, addressed one discriminatory aspect of the Indian Act, Section 12-1-B. According to this law, an “Indian” woman who married a non-Indian man ceased to be an “Indian.” Her children were also non-Indian. On the other hand, a non-Indian woman who married an “Indian” man became an “Indian” and all their children were “Indian.” With Bill C-31, this was no longer the case and many women (and their children) who had lost their legal status as “Indians” were able to reclaim it. Bill C-31 has addressed the immediate and obvious injustice. However, it also stipulates certain requirements for maintaining “Indian” status that continue to discriminate against “Indian” women and their children, although the shift is delayed for a couple of generations. Unlike the situation in the United States, blood quantum is not a determining factor for legal status. See Silman (1987) for the details of some of the struggles to achieve this change. See also Imai (1996), p. 21. 9 See Clifford (2001) for an exquisite elaboration of the idea of roots and 9routes and their role in contemporary indigenous identities.

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young children. In keeping with traditional approaches to education, children are not separated from adults. For this reason, students are encouraged to bring children and other relatives who are interested in participating in learning and using indigenous knowledge.

HOW THE RESEARCH CAME TO BE In its effort to appear scientific in a narrow sense, written accounts of research methodology often downplay the deeply personal relationships that are wont to develop in the course of the sensitive and vulnerable work of ethnography (see Behar, 1996).10 At the same time, it is precisely academia (in this case through research grants) that makes possible the initial contacts that may lead to intense friendships, eventually reaching out to include other family members. In our case, this research has led us to a continuing commitment to respectful relations, what we have come to see as an unending dream, a goal to strive for and reinvent in our everyday living (see Haig-Brown & Dannenmann, 2003). This chapter is based on 6 years of research, of developing relationships between and among the people involved in the program and in the accompanying study. The primary relationship exists between Kaaren Dannenmann, an Anishinaape community member and site coordinator of the program, who provided the impetus for its origin and continuation, and me, an academic of European ancestry, the York coordinator of the program, the author of this chapter, and the principal investigator for the study. Around this central connection, a web of relations spins out—other members of Kaaren’s immediate family, extended family, and the Trout Lake community, the students who have participated in the program and members of their families, other First Nations people including academics working out of universities and/or communities in similar programs, and members of First Nations communities and organizations in the areas surrounding Trout Lake. The initial impetus for the program draws on Kaaren’s effort to affirm and have officially recognized that this community has a legitimate claim to this land, which generations of her extended family have occupied and used continuously. Kaaren’s own words exemplify both the relation to land she envisages and the limitations of conventional understandings of land and ownership: 10 I found many resonances between my work and Behar’s, although I realize the extent of our differences and do not want to downplay the particular privileges I bring with me to my work. Notes to myself while reading the text included the comment, “To engage on a deeply personal level in research is to take a serious risk. Personal demands go beyond any notions of objective and distanced observation. The work is dangerous: all one’s senses, history and understandings are on the table.”

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For Anishinaape People, the words my, our, your, his or hers refer to a relationship. When I say, or when any Namekosipiiwanishinaape says, “Trout Lake is my home,” we do not mean that we own Trout Lake, that we possess it (and therefore you do not and neither does anyone else) but rather, it means that Trout Lake is that part of our great Mother the earth with which I have a very special relationship. That relationship includes those with whom we share that home: our aunts, cousins, etc., the moose, bear, gulls, ravens, mice, moles, flies, mosquitoes, fish, the trees and grass and rocks, etc., etc. That relationship is characterized by a spirituality and sacredness, an intimate knowledge and huge reciprocal respect and reverence. This very amazing relationship involves a give and take that requires consciousness and constant nurturing. My Trout Lake takes care of me, is very gentle with me, and teaches me everything I need to know; in turn, I take care of my Trout Lake to the best of my abilities, and I remain open to learning and growing. . . . Every rock and every tree and every blade of grass on my Trout Lake tells me the stories of those who long ago walked these trails. It is said that the clear cold waters of my Trout Lake carry the memories of my grandmothers and grandfathers. It is said that the whispers of the wind in the trees, the murmurs of the waves against the sandy beaches, the songs and sounds of the forested islands are the voices of the future, the voices of our children’s children and their children. This is my Trout Lake, and I lay my claim to say that, but it can also be your Trout Lake. (Haig-Brown & Dannenmann, 2003, p. 456)

Even to begin to represent the program, its intent, and the relations among all those involved, the research methodology must take this comment to heart. The approaches to study are part of a larger study related to protocols for work between Aboriginal communities and universities. They draw on my years of experience in educational contexts, in reflection, and in writing and publishing involving respectful approaches to research with First Nations people and in First Nations communities (see, e.g., Haig-Brown, 1992, 2001). The context for all of this work is a recognition that indigenous knowledge is fundamental and largely inaccessible to English. Time is central: the time to come to an understanding of the other person and that person’s needs, wishes, and desires. The primary lesson is that in each new context, the work of trust building must begin again. Certain code words, phrases, and ideas picked up or discovered over time may reveal to insiders a clear possibility of being in good relation to one another. For example, I have learned over the years to wonder and ask about whose traditional land I am standing on whenever I arrive in a new context. Kaaren has often cited the asking of this question as a moment of recognition that our relationship held unexpected promise. It was not a question she had heard before. One significant methodological aspect of the program design requires that only First Nations people and their immediate family members attend the summer courses. The reasoning behind this is that there are too few ed-

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ucational contexts where people of Aboriginal ancestry have the opportunity to learn with one another and without interruption from those who may come from a different context or have different goals. For this reason, a First Nations research assistant attends the course, often participating and keeping field notes, which become part of the data for the study. I interview students and teachers following the completion of segments of the program. Meetings with teachers and me (in this case as program advisor) held at various times throughout the years are taped and transcribed. Kaaren reads and edits all publications and presentations including this one; indeed, we have cowritten a number of them. Any pieces that draw on the interview transcripts have been returned to the relevant participants for their comments, revisions, and eventual approval.

WHAT THE PEOPLE SAY ABOUT THE COURSES The program ran for three summers from 1999 to 2001 as a pilot with about four students each year. The involvement of various family members and occasional visitors from around the lake swelled the numbers from time to time. In 2002, forest fires kept people away; at this point, we have decided to take time to evaluate and refine the program before it is next offered. One student has completed the certificate; others are partially done and plan to follow through to completion. Of course, the program has been very different from the original plans. As Ted Aoki told education scholars years ago, the curriculum-as-lived is rarely if ever the curriculum-as-planned. The following discussion draws on the way people talked about and made meaning of the program as it was lived, in their interviews and in meetings before and after the courses. One student who grew up spending time on the land on a lake relatively close to Namekosipiink talked first of that experience, memories of which flooded back to her as she participated in the course. Her reflections encapsulate a precise fulfillment of the intentions of the program design. In her interview, she said: I remember the time before I went to school really well because we did so many things. Every spring, we would go out spring trapping. Everybody would move with their dog teams—because at that time when I was growing up, we didn’t have snow machines. So everybody went with their dog teams and put their little canoes on [the sleds] and away we would go to some mouth of a river where it opens earlier. (M.L., interview, March 20, 2000, p. 2/24)

Referring to the moment when her office decided to send her to the program as “a dream come true,” she went on to compare her early life experi-


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ence to her time in the program. Here was an opportunity to use knowledge that had long been lying dormant: When I got to the IKIP course at Trout Lake, I just loved it. It just reminded me so much of home and all the things we did there, like setting a net and going canoeing and just learning about different things. (p. 18/24)

Another student said, “There was a really strong sense of everybody learning at once.” Pointing to the importance of orality in this learning, she went on, “Some people clearly knew more than others. When they were talking, you listened extra closely because of the things they wouldn’t say outright but that they knew and that would come out when we were talking and in the way they were talking.” Students (and teachers) went fishing and hunting. Duck soup and lots of freshly caught fish were part of daily menus. Crispy fried pickerel fins reminded one student of potato chips, “only better.” People compared modes of preparation and cooking. One person with considerable knowledge said, “There were parts of the fish that I’ve never eaten before, like the air sacs. I don’t remember how we prepared them. I think it was over the fire. Anyway they were amazingly good. The actual filleting of the fish we all did different ways and that was kind of neat” (K.D., March 25, 2000, p. 35/36). People worked together to use knowledge that for most had been submerged for a long time. Preparing a partridge became the focus of two participants working to externalize common but deeply buried knowledge. When one form of preparation included singeing the partridge, which most other participants had not seen done before, one person said of another, “It seemed like it was familiar: When one student was doing that [singeing], it was like this memory came back to the other.” This work of re-membering together the knowledge that hasn’t been used for a long time is painful work. For years, governments and churches devalued much of this knowledge while Christianizing (creating regular churchgoers) and civilizing (creating farmers or laborers) First Nations people. As a result of these processes and the removal of children from their homes to attend institutionalized schooling, only a few people still have the knowledge. One of the participants talked of the impact of residential school on her knowledge of both the language and other aspects of living with her parents: You know, all of a sudden, I was losing my language and there were sometimes people laughing at me because of the way I was saying things: I wasn’t saying things the proper way. We weren’t even allowed to speak our language at school. And certain things, especially life skills was where I had problems . . . I don’t want to use the word “stupid” but my knowledge of life skills was so limited because we never did those things at the school. I remember one time pulling the canoe through the portage and I was so clumsy I almost fell be-

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tween the rocks. And shooting the rapids, I mean these things were so rusted that I couldn’t even do these things. (M.L., March 20, 2000 p. 9/24)

For those who have never acquired the knowledge or who have lost it for one reason or another, there is often a sense of failure or coming up short. How can one claim indigeneity and have no connection to using traditional knowledge when “true knowledge is in the use of it”? Aggravated by non-Aboriginal people’s stereotypes of “Indians” as people who innately have such knowledge, the absence or “rustiness” of knowledge referred to earlier becomes a catch-22. If one does not have this knowledge, Aboriginal people may be dismissive of attempts to learn, and non-Aboriginal people rarely have the sensitivity to understand the devastating historical circumstances that have led to this absence. At a recent meeting about a related program for youth, one of the non-Aboriginal people reacted in surprise when she realized that Aboriginal teenagers based in small northern towns might have as little knowledge of traditions as wealthy city kids of comparable age—or even less. Even simple things such as chopping kindling can become the focus of feelings of inadequacy. The course provided opportunities for people to revive these skills, always in the context of an epistemology that moves the actions beyond mere skills and embeds them in a value system of respect for all things animate and inanimate in the surrounding context. Reviving old trails becomes an oral history lesson and a reclaiming of traditional place on the land: “We all trekked up the trail and everybody was involved. Everybody did something. . . . We had different people with different skills and we could accomplish things.” In the sharing circles, the teacher facilitated discussion of the process of the course itself as well as the implications of doing similar work in different contexts. One student commented: The circles were very effective. People participated very well and listened very well and took it very seriously to the point where there was some giving of personal information that really, really made the group cohesive. (D.W., June 26, 2001, p. 12/39)

He went on to describe the content of the circles: planning the days and “polling everyone to give their ideas about what they wanted to do.” He had a specific wish, which was to set a net by himself. It didn’t work out during the course, partly because of weather conditions. He actually took the time to return to the site to set the net a few weeks later. Strategizing the future work of teaching indigenous knowledge involved similar concerns. In an interview, one student talked through some of the


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complexities of wanting to work with a group of adolescents who were having trouble with school. He decried the young people’s lack of appropriate cultural knowledge: “Our kids, when they go through the school system, they’re going through an assimilation wash. And when they come out in the end, they don’t even know how to greet the people. Our old greeting ways are going. Just simply how you greet people is very important.” Although he feared failure because some of the students were ones who resisted any form of authority, he felt responsibility to pass on the knowledge that he has: “I should play a major part in retaining the knowledge and passing it on. I want to do a good job and I am not sure whether I would do a good job.” Ultimately, he wanted to work with students in “setting up some log cabins, getting these kids to help me build them and make a little trapline. Not with a view to trapping animals as such, or making money off them or anything like that, but going back to the land, and re-learning some of this stuff and trying to make them in the end better human beings. . . . It would give them a feeling of who they are.” He also worried about some parents’ support for such work, “because they would say, oh yeah, he’s doing that because he wants to convert them to Native spirituality. . . . It’s the local Church people. They’ve had two hundred years of missionary work and they’re not so willing to go back to witchcraft as they call it.”11 Despite these obstacles he is determined to do this work with people committed to indigenous knowledge. He cites the old people as the inspiration for hope: Some of the old teachers said that the young ones will take this [knowledge] and they will either bring it back or it will be gone forever. But if they bring it back, it will be quite open and it will be interesting to see how they interpret it, how different it will be. They will take it and run with it. (D.W., June 26, 2001, p. 21/39)

Another student took a group of First Nations students for a very successful winter camp at Namekosipiink. Their learning began before the trip started with plans for what to take and how to get to the site of the camp. With the lake frozen, three snowmobiles provided partial transportation. Students took turns walking and riding. Once there, they were responsible for making the fire, chopping the water hole and getting water, cleaning, 11

One of the urban participants in the course recounted her plane trip to Red Lake. She began talking with a person beside her who had some familiarity with the IKIP and had serious concerns. She recalled him saying that “the problems with Indians all start when they leave JudeoChristianity. . . . He was quite blatant in his opinion: Going back to the traditional ways is simply evil. He used the word evil.” She was taken aback by his comments which she saw as “a wake up call. Whoa, you’re in different territory; there are clear oppositions up here. There are black and white boundaries that are painted” (L.M., September 2000, p. 2).

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and disposing of waste water. They skied and snowshoed, set snares (no luck), went ice fishing (successfully), and generally had an immersion in pedagogy of the land in winter. They watched the teacher skin a marten that she had trapped and heard a discussion between two of the teachers (both participants in IKIP) about different ways to skin it. They saw how the teacher treated the carcass with respect, returning it to the land in a gentle way. Most importantly, when they all came to school the day after the trip, “They were all smiles. They all had a really good time” (M.L., interviewed by Kaaren, January 2000, p. 12/12). They began a process of working with indigenous knowledge, which can be built on when the next occasion arises. Of course, there have been a few surprises each time the course has been offered. For example, in the initial iteration, we had not planned on students bringing family members with them. We have since recognized that traditionally students are not separated from one another by age group and that this is a most appropriate way for the course to proceed. We remember as the course unfolds. One student gave her thoughts on traditional learning: “The Native way of teaching is so different from in the White society. . . . In the Native way, you are just learning right beside the person who is teaching you rather than being told or being taught verbally.” This student brought two of her children with her to the course and eventually her husband and a third child joined in and spent a day with the other students. On the other hand, the issue of what constituted a qualified student on the basis of the experience of the first year led us to revise the admission procedures to include an interview to determine people’s level of expertise with using indigenous knowledge. While children with knowledgeable parents fit in the program, one student acknowledged that he simply did not have the experience necessary to benefit from or contribute appropriately to the program. Although we do plan to hold courses for people with little or no experience, the instructors’ program is specifically for those who have spent time on the land and are willing and able to use or revive that knowledge.

COMING FULL CIRCLE In his work For an Amerindian Autohistory, Georges Sioui (1992) outlined Native American values in the Sacred Circle of Life as the basis of his arguments for reconceptualizing history. His words resonated with the underlying principles of the Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program. He wrote: Put simply, the Amerindian genius, acknowledging as it does the universal interdependence of all beings, physical and spiritual, tries by every available


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means to establish intellectual and emotional contact between them, so as to guarantee them—for they are all “relatives”—abundance, equality, and, therefore, peace. This is the sacred circle of life, which is opposed to the [social] evolutionist conception of the world wherein beings are unequal, and are often negated, jostled, and made obsolete by others who seem adapted to evolution. (p. xxi)

He argued that the future lies in what he called the continuing Americization of the settlers and other immigrants to this continent. Through this process, Amerindian values will assume their rightful place in everyday consciousness and activity of the people who dwell here.12 None of this position argues for a return to the “old ways.” Rather, the inevitable outcome is the recreation of indigenous knowledge in a contemporary context. What does it mean in the middle of a major city to take seriously notions of all our relatives? Rather than risk accusations of proposing a salvation story, I leave you, reader, to ponder the deep complexity of such a question we might all learn to ask ourselves. The indigenous people who have been relentlessly asking this question in the face of frightening cultural assault are now seeking out spaces to strengthen, reclaim, and re-member the knowledge in which some answers lie. One of those spaces is in the small and still fragile community-based program this chapter has presented. It has run for 3 years with next to no budget. A community member’s dedication of hours of time and money along with creative research funding have allowed the work to proceed. And yet the program has already demonstrated its potential to accomplish its primary goals: First Nations people have learned, done the painful and painstaking work of re-membering, and taught one another aspects of indigenous knowledge in ways that have allowed them to imagine continuing the work. They have identified connections with others that will allow the work to continue. Throughout the time of the program planning and evaluation, meetings with various First Nations organizations have produced considerable interest in related offerings and endless possibilities for such work. For example, one administrator of a large First Nations organization brightened at the idea of sending recently qualified professionals to the program. Although these professionals have acquired the skills and knowledge available in 12

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to go into the intricate details of Sioui’s argument (which I highly recommend particularly for teachers in schools, the place where the myths of inferior and disappearing cultures begin). He argued that “ever since the ‘discovery’ of America, world society has been engaged in a process of ideological unification that may be simply called ‘the Americization of the world,’ whereby the essence of original American thought is being communicated to the other continents” (Sioui, 1992, p. xxii). Of course, original American thought in this context refers to indigenous knowledge.

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mainstream colleges and universities, to contribute respectfully in indigenous contexts—their own communities in many cases—they need to be able to place that knowledge within traditional epistemologies, values, and worldviews before it can serve in good ways. IKIP provides one way to acquire and/or build on such knowledge. The failure of conventional business models to create peace and justice for all community members is clearly visible; as a result, interest has been piqued in thinking and working through to a place where one might live the best of both worlds. Teachers who recognize the short shrift given Aboriginal history, current Aboriginal issues, and the place of Aboriginal people in Canada see the program as a site to literally ground their pedagogy. Sioui (1992) reminded us: The way history is dispensed to young children—in the absence of many really suitable pedagogical tools—is one of the underlying reasons for the prejudices that keep people from respecting first themselves (for, as an instrument of power, history has cultivated feelings of guilt in people of certain cultures), and then one another (since dividing is the eternal prerequisite for conquering). (p. xxi)

First Nations people living in cities who want to work with indigenous knowledge see such a program as providing what they need to build on the knowledge they have garnered in other contexts. In the winter camp referred to earlier and in other camps held in Namekosipiink, children of all ages have been drawn into an experience where they have spent time on the land and pondered what it means to be respectful of all that it has to teach. First Nations children make connections with their ancestors and their histories and prepare to continue passing knowledge down the generations. Non-Aboriginal children come to a deeper understanding of the foundational nations and peoples of Canada and are introduced to the values which can heal the rifts which colonization has brought. The connections Kaaren and I have made with other community-based First Nations educators working with indigenous knowledge have sparked interest in a broadly based conference where ideas on working with indigenous knowledge at the community level may be shared and thinking in the area furthered. Most practically, recognizing that funding may continue to be an issue, there is the possibility of bringing all people to some understanding of what it means to live respectfully—in a good way—with this land. Somewhere in the future, a very select ecotourism could provide opportunities for nonindigenous people from other continents to learn more about ways of living in good relation with the lands and waters. In the final analysis, the Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program serves as a model of a very old pedagogy speaking to the current context and the future. A pedagogy of the land brings material reality to the fore.


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Based in indigenous epistemologies, this material reality can never lose sight of its complex spiritual, historical, and future possibilities. I leave you with the words of one of the participants in the Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program. She was the facilitator of the circles and fairly new to traditional knowledge: I have survived the onslaught against my people and our culture. I am a survivor because I have survived the intergenerational effects of the residential school system. As I learn my people’s traditional ways, I am learning my role and the sacred responsibility to keep alive and vibrant that culture and science and way of living and pass that on to the next generations . . . I am finding this search for traditional knowledge to be very healing, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as well as healing for all my relationships. I want to make a contribution towards the healing of my community and to me this means making available to our children the sacred knowledge and customs of our foreparents. (K.S., letter, June 30, 2003)

The work continues. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have many people to thank for their thoughtful contributions to this chapter. First and foremost is my dear friend and colleague, Kaaren Dannenmann, who reached out and drew me into the project. It has grounded me in my new province and given me ever-deepening ways of engaging with indigenous epistemology. I also want to thank the people who planned, taught, and studied in the program and agreed to be tape-recorded at meetings and in interviews about their work there. Finally I have a special thank you for Sandra Schecter for inviting me to contribute to this volume and then insisting that I get the work done. Cindy Pease-Alvarez, Alice Williams, my partner Didi Khayatt, and Kaaren Dannenmann have all given invaluable feedback on the chapter. The work was made possible by two grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. One was a network grant, the Research Network for New Approaches to Lifelong Learning, directed by Professor David Livingstone of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. The other was my own Standard Research Grant, Protocol in Community Partnerships: Redefining Boundaries of Aboriginal/University Knowledges. REFERENCES A’Court, S., & Brooke, H. (2000, Winter). Reflecting on Reggio. Journal of the Association of Independent Schools of Australia, pp. 47–49. Retrieved January 3, 2004, from http://louisewww. mit.csu.edu.au/faculty/educat/murrayed2/ReggioEmilia

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Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Cajete, G. (1994). Look to the mountain: An ecology of indigenous education. Durango, CO: Kivaki Press. Carnegie Mellon University, Cyert Center for Early Education. (2002). The Reggio Emilia approach. Retrieved January 3, 2004, from http://www.cmu.edu/cyert-center/rea.htm Clifford, J. (2001). Indigenous articulations. Contemporary Pacific, 13(2), 468–490. Dannenmann, K. (2003a). The history of trap line RL58. Unpublished paper. Dannenmann, K. (2003b). The history of the NamekosipiiwAnishinaapek. Unpublished paper. Graveline, F. J. (1998). CircleWorks: Transforming Eurocentric consciousness. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Books. Haig-Brown, C. (1988). Resistance and renewal: Surviving the Indian residential school. Vancouver, BC: Tillacum Press. Haig-Brown, C. (1992). Choosing border work. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 19(1), 96–116. Haig-Brown, C. (2001). Continuing collaborative knowledge production. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 22(1), 19–32. Haig-Brown, C., & Dannenmann, K. (2003). A pedagogy of the land: Dreams of respectful relations. McGill Journal of Education, 37(3), 451–468. Harjo, J., & Bird, G. (Eds.). (1997). Reinventing the enemy’s language: Contemporary native women’s writings of North America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hodgson-Smith, K. (1997). Seeking good and right relations: Aboriginal student perspectives on the pedagogy of Joe Duquette High School. Unpublished MEd thesis, University of Saskatchewan. Imai, S. (1996). The 1997 annotated Indian Act. Toronto: Carswell. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A Native narrative. Toronto: Ananasi Press. Silman, J. (Ed.). (1987). Enough is enough. Toronto: Women’s Press. Sioui, G. (1992). For an Ameridian autohistory: An essay on the foundations of a social ethic (S. Fischman, Trans.). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Sioui, G. (1999). Huron-Wendat: The heritage of the circle. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

P A R T

II PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR DIVERSITY


C H A P T E R

6 Teacher Research, Professional Growth, and School Reform Sarah Warshauer Freedman University of California, Berkeley

In a casual conversation during a teacher research meeting in Chicago, Tom Daniels commented on how teacher research meetings and especially the sustained opportunity to talk to other teachers helped him and his peers learn and grow: We can never discount the value of having the time for teachers to sit around a table and talk to each other about what they do, how it’s affecting them, and how they feel. Teachers notoriously never get the time to do that and I think that’s really crucial to helping them understand what they do. (M-CLASS Chicago local meeting)1

In San Francisco, Phi Potestio, who was part of the same network as Daniels, explained how the more solitary act of doing research yielded similar benefits for him: 1

All transcriptions consist of the exact words of the speaker. They have been edited to delete speech hesitations (e.g., “uh,” “um,”) and repetitions (e.g., “I I um I think” becomes “I think”). In addition, when other speakers interrupt the flow of talk with backchannel cues (e.g., softly spoken “Uh um” and the like), these are included only if they are necessary to make a point and then are placed inside backslashes, e.g., /Postestio: Yeah/ where they occur in the flow of talk. Insertions to clarify the speaker’s meaning are included in brackets. Sometimes talk is included in parentheses with UC to mark that the tape-recorded language was unclear and that the transcriptionist made a best guess. Insertions made to clarify the meaning are included in brackets. 1

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Because of the nature of my research question [How do students learn to support their opinions in my multicultural middle school social studies classroom?] and because of my total infatuation with reflection as part of my role, I’m indebted to this project. . . . I’m taking small deliberate steps a lot of times that I either didn’t notice that I was doing before or that I never realized I was doing. . . . And I think I also am seeing things more clearly in the kids’ development, especially as far as their writing goes. And a part of that is just because I’m focusing in on them. (M-CLASS San Francisco local meeting)

By the end of the year, Potestio went even further: “I think [teacher research is] much more valuable than anything you learn in education school.” He continued by suggesting, “It would be nice to institute it so that training teachers, or even student teachers, are to some extent evaluating themselves this way” (M-CLASS San Francisco site meeting). Those who write about teacher research frequently comment on its power to stimulate teacher growth and often assume that professional development is the main purpose of the enterprise (e.g., in the United States, Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Goswami & Stillman, 1987; Hubbard & Miller, 1993, 1999; Mohr & MacLean, 1987; and see also British, Australian, German and cross-national writing and collections by Boomer, 1987; McTaggart, 1997; and Winter, 1989). My Berkeley colleagues and I have also observed that almost all of the teachers in the three teacher research networks we have participated in share Daniels’s and Potestio’s feelings about the growth that comes when they talk to other teachers in teacher research groups and when they conduct their research.2 This chapter examines the growth process in these teacher research networks. It reaches beyond the claim that growth occurs to attempt to characterize the nature of that growth. Ironically, we did not even conceptualize the first two networks primarily as professional development activities. In the first, the original Multicultural Collaborative for Literacy and Secondary Schools (M-CLASS), of which Daniels and Potestio were part, we and a number of teacher collaborators designed a teacher research/university research collaboration to generate knowledge about literacy and learning in urban multicultural classrooms. This network consisted of groups of experienced and highly recommended English and social studies teachers in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and the San Francisco Bay Area. When these teachers entered the network, neither we nor they thought that they had much growing to do; they were chosen for their expertise. Our goal was to write a book that would reflect that expertise. The book that resulted contains the writings of the teachers in the M-CLASS network and is titled Inside City Schools: Investigating Literacy 2 2 My Berkeley colleagues for the first two networks included Elizabeth Radin Simons and Julie Kalnin as major collaborators. In the third network, I worked alone.

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and Learning in Multicultural Classrooms (Freedman, Simons, Kalnin, Casareno, & the M-CLASS teams, 1999). The second network, the M-CLASS Site Based Network (SBN), had a somewhat different profile. This network was located in three schools in three different school districts (Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco) and had as its goal action at school sites and, secondarily, contributions to knowledge by teacher researchers (see Freedman, 2001; Kalnin, 2000). It was composed of three experienced teacher researchers from the San Francisco site of the original network, and three less experienced teachers from their schools. The third network, M-CLASS Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE), was the only one with learning as a central goal. It was a graduate seminar for Berkeley’s Credential/MA program. The goal was to teach new teachers to reflect on their practice in ways that would help them solve problems throughout their careers (see Freedman et al., 1999). In all three networks, the learning process was a protracted one. It took at least 4 months and sometimes longer for the teachers in all three networks to even begin to comment on the benefits of the process. They did not initially see teacher research as especially worthwhile. That was the case for Daniels and Potestio in the first network, in spite of their ultimate high praise for teacher research and Potestio’s desire to institutionalize it, just as it was the case for Jessica Gilmore, a first-year teacher in the MUSE program. Reflecting back on the flow of her experience over her teacher research year, Gilmore recalled, “I was really reluctant coming in. I didn’t think I wanted to do it my first year.” However, in the end she concluded, “I’ve really enjoyed doing it. I loved it” (MUSE exit interview). This chapter explores what it is about being part of a teacher research network that ultimately leads teacher researchers to report having reaped significant benefits. Understanding precisely how and why teacher research can lead so many teachers to change from skeptics to engaged learners and to deepen their professional commitment can inform us about the principles that underlie both meaningful professional development programs and successful teacher research groups, even those with purposes other than professional development.

OVERVIEW These three networks shared many of the characteristics of Wenger’s (1998) “communities of practice” (p. 86), where meaning is negotiated across time and where learning is part of the practice. In all three networks the teachers talked and wrote about three broad topics that led them to elaborate and often change their notions of teaching and learning: dealing with teaching problems, taking teaching risks, and understanding students.

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Other descriptions of teacher research meetings (e.g., Mohr & MacLean, 1987) portray teachers engaging in discussions on similar topics. What I found surprising was the fact that different teachers participated in systematically different ways. Some tended to discuss their teaching problems, whereas others mostly gave advice or listened. Some talked about experimentation and risk taking and received support from other group members for these activities. Some discussed their students and got help in understanding the motivations behind their students’ actions and the details of the learning processes. Some focused on more than one of these topics, whereas others did not. In the teacher research networks, participating as an initiator of talk on any one of these topics provided space for the teachers to shift their stance toward their work and to renew their commitment to their profession and ultimately to their students and their students’ learning. They all reported rarely finding space for any of these kinds of supportive talk and writing in their everyday teaching lives. In the end, they worked to renegotiate their identities as teachers as they discussed these topics. In Wenger’s (1998) terms, such identity work is essential to the learning that occurs within a community of practice where “it is a matter of investment of one’s identity and thus of negotiating enough continuity to sustain an identity” (p. 97). The next sections illustrate how different teachers took advantage of or initiated different learning opportunities.

DISCUSSING PROBLEMS In all three networks, the university facilitators presented research as a process that requires tackling and therefore explicitly admitting and discussing problems. In this way, we encouraged problem-focused writing and talk about both research and teaching. As one of the project leaders, I explained to the experienced teachers in the original M-CLASS project during a Chicago site meeting at the start of the research year how I expected identifying problems in one’s classroom or school to play a central role in decisions about research questions: I think [the research question is] most interesting if you take something that’s a hard problem for you, and that [is a] problem for other folks too. . . . And it’s going to be a problem that we need collective minds to start to work on.

Immediately after I offered this opinion, several of the teachers admitted that they continually struggled with difficult issues, an approach that they felt was a characteristic of good teaching.

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The MUSE students were first-year teachers, so as the teacher of their graduate seminar I raised the issue differently. I tried to show them how teacher research could actually help them solve problems in their classrooms: The thing to look out for when you start teaching is things that are problems for you. Day to day there are going to be things that are problems. This happens when you’re teachers. Sometimes you get overwhelmed by the problems, and you just want to go into the bathroom and cry. But if you can turn the problems into something interesting to try to figure out, if you can turn them into puzzles, instead of letting them overwhelm you, then that’s the kind of thing that teacher research can do. (MUSE class)

Across all the networks, the teachers talked freely during teacher research meetings about problems that were extrinsic to their teaching and their classrooms—safety in the school, administrative incompetence, violence in the neighborhoods, poverty, gang activity, and the like. But the teachers varied in their comfort levels in talking about and ultimately writing about problems intrinsic to their teaching. Readings often stimulated problem-focused talk. Readings on multiculturalism and literacy in the original M-CLASS network and model teacher research articles in all three networks led to these discussions. Members of the original M-CLASS network read and discussed Lisa Delpit’s article “The Silenced Dialogue” (1988), which evoked many complex emotions about issues of race and entitlement. In Boston, Delpit’s article stimulated Nancy O’Malley to describe a dilemma she faced when interacting with Asian students in her creative writing class: The students who want the authoritative figure and want to listen most to me as the teacher are the Asian students who, in fact, need the verbal and oral skills the most. Because most of them are coming into a new language after only 2 and 3 years. And so there’s some great dichotomy in the class where they’re the ones who need it [oral practice] most, and yet they’re the most unwilling because their culture says to them, “It’s not so important to listen to Eileen’s piece of writing.” They want to know what the answer is, and we have this constant tension. (M-CLASS Boston site meeting)

O’Malley then said, “It’s gotten better. They have listened to each other but it’s a constant struggle.” After voicing a problem, the experienced teachers often used this strategy of diminishing the significance or difficulty of the problem. This is perhaps a face-saving gesture, but in O’Malley’s case it was also a move that seemed preparatory to taking the bigger risk of ruminating about her role in the problem: “I have to watch myself, too. In en-

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couraging everyone to listen and all, I don’t want to be too much of just the orchestrator. So it’s a balancing act.” O’Malley did not directly ask the group for help, but she left space for its input. Group members first entered the conversation by disagreeing with her analysis of the problem. After acknowledging O’Malley’s interpretation, Junia Yearwood, a Black teacher from the Virgin Islands, used her personal experience to provide an alternate interpretation of the Asian students’ lack of participation, identifying with them and then looking from their points of view: You kept saying it’s a cultural thing, and that’s true. But it’s also that the Asian kids want access to the keys of knowledge, which for them is the mechanics of language, of your language, and that’s why they’re impatient. I’m not Asian, and that’s how I felt when I came to school here in America. I came to college with specific /O’Malley: Yeah, sure./ reasons and the reasons was to get access to this great wealth of knowledge that I just knew was in these gates. /O’Malley: Mmhmm/ And when American kids took up half the period talking and arguing, I was livid. /O’Malley: Sure./ I did not want that because to me, and I heard Asians say the same exact thing, it is not that they are culturally programmed to do this; it’s just that they’re focused. They know what they want, and they think that they’re being cheated of it.

The university facilitators (Liz Simons from Berkeley and Boston site leaders Roberta Logan and Joe Check) voiced agreement with Yearwood, but Simons also identified differences in Yearwood’s and O’Malley’s teaching contexts that might lead them to analyze the same problem differently: “Junia is dealing with kids who need a lot more. . . . Your [O’Malley’s] kids are much more skilled writers just as starters. So that makes a huge difference.” Following this alternate analysis of the problem, one of the teachers, Eileen Shakespeare, moved the talk toward a solution. She suggested increasing the rigor of classroom talk so that immigrant students might benefit more. She referred O’Malley to the Jesuit discussion tradition, which she had appreciated as a student and which she called “hard intellectual discussion.” She explained that Jesuit “discussion is managed in such a way that you can’t just get away with just bullshitting. . . . There’s a certain excellence expected of that discussion.” It is unclear whether O’Malley found Shakespeare’s advice useful, or how she felt about Yearwood’s point or the university-based facilitators’ agreement with Yearwood. O’Malley neither agreed nor disagreed with any of these comments. However, she used her research to continue to grapple with her varied students’ interactional styles as she supported their discoveries about themselves in her creative writing class, finding ways to create a classroom community in which participation structures ensured that all

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of her students would speak. They all took a turn sharing their writing and elicited responses from the rest of the class. O’Malley discovered through her research how to teach her students explicitly to listen to their classmates, to notice what made professional writing and other students’ writing strong and effective, and then to articulate their observations during the class discussion. Ultimately she found that she taught her students “interpersonal skills—ways of listening and responding—and analytical skills— ways of interpreting and expressing experiences” (Kalnin, 1999, p. 210). After analyzing O’Malley’s process, Kalnin (1999) concluded: The dual emphasis . . . on students’ first writing their personal stories and then reading them out loud to their peers created a community in which students had the opportunity to listen to many stories and that did not necessarily match the narrow vision of success or failure communicated in media portrayals of family and culture. (p. 207)

O’Malley wrote about how one of her Asian students, Eric, a Vietnamese immigrant, first shared orally and then drafted and redrafted the story of his father’s struggle to carry him from Vietnam to an Indonesian refugee camp. O’Malley commented on the power of his words and their impact on his fellow students: Nothing that we could have read about Vietnamese struggle during the war could have been more vivid than that firsthand account, told by the infant who was saved, now a writer telling his own father’s story. (Boston site meeting, October 31, 1992)

Eric himself stated in an interview, “When I write, I feel like I am in a holy world—a world of my own. I feel powerful because anything I want I can just write it down. It’s in my head” (Kalnin, 1999, p. 207). O’Malley concluded that through her research with Eric and other students, “[I] recovered my own sense of worth as a teacher, privileged enough to witness great beauty and fortunate enough sometimes to help make it happen” (Kalnin, 1999, p. 205). This example shows a teacher admitting and discussing problems she faced in her classroom. Teaching and research are intertwined in interesting ways. It seems more comfortable, at first, for O’Malley and the university facilitators to discuss research problems rather than teaching problems. The distance of talking about research and of discussing research-related readings seemed ultimately to allow O’Malley to grapple with topics in her everyday teaching. The challenges posed by Yearwood and others in her research group about her response to one of the readings seemed to merge into her research project. O’Malley engaged in a recursive process that involved discussion with fellow teacher researchers, doing research, and writing.

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In the group context, O’Malley presented herself as having problems while Yearwood assumed the role of critic and Shakespeare the role of helper. Neither Yearwood nor Shakespeare discussed her own teaching problems; in addition, their research topics dealt with problems that were, at least on the surface, distanced from their teaching, whereas O’Malley dealt directly with her teaching. Such differences in role taking were typical across the three teacher research groups.

TAKING RISKS The second topic that led teachers to interrogate their practice and change their stance toward their work focused on taking risks in the classroom. In all three networks the university facilitators set risk taking as a goal for the teachers’ research but not necessarily for their teaching. However, taking research-related risks often implied taking risks in the classroom. These risks involved the teachers in reconceptualizing important parts of their teaching. The teacher researchers sometimes used the group for support in taking teaching risks and then in dealing with the consequences. In the Chicago M-CLASS group, Griselle Diaz-Gemmati showed how the other group members supported her risk taking. In the process, she revealed the multiple kinds of risks she took—with her research, her writing, her curricular decisions, and her interactions with her students. From the start, her research topic felt risky to her. She studied explicitly raising issues of race, ethnicity, and social class in her classroom. She also found writing about the topic risky. She told of her fears about the ways her audience might respond: Will . . . a lot of people look at my piece and say, “Okay, so you’ve got them thinking about race. So what?” I still have that fear of committing it to paper, and pouring my emotions out. (Chicago site meeting)

Brenda Landau-McFarland offered support, asserting that public interest in Diaz-Gemmati’s topic would be high: I think it [your writing] will be very relevant to what’s going on in the larger realm of society because we’re making some tremendous transitions by the sheer fact of the political environment being different at this time.

Diaz-Gemmati interrupted to discuss the risks she was taking in her classroom. She was concerned that introducing sensitive curricular issues for her research was pushing her students to grow up too rapidly, to worry about issues that are too adultlike:

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But you know what really shocks me, Brenda, is the fact that these 12- and 13year-olds, the stuff that they say, and it’s spontaneous, it’s not rehearsed, the stuff that they say about inequality in society, gender issues, racial issues, ethnic issues [is] shocking.

Again Landau-McFarland provided support, this time by taking a less emotional stance toward the problem that Diaz-Gemmati perceived. What seemed shocking to Diaz-Gemmati seemed normal to Landau-McFarland: “But they’re a microcosm of society.” Diaz-Gemmati retorted, “You never think that these kids worry about stuff like that.” Landau-McFarland reassured Diaz-Gemmati that her students’ behavior was normal: “Sure they do. It affects them every day.” A few turns later I reinforced Landau-McFarland’s point: I think bottom line for Griselle is that these kids live in a really complex world that they /Landau-McFarland: That’s right./ have to navigate in, and they’re not oblivious to it. Even though they’re little, it affects them. And they are going to cope in various ways, but if everything is pushed under the table at school where they have people who can guide them and who can help them through it, if those people don’t do that, then I think [the students are] missing something.

In the course of the discussion, Diaz-Gemmati began to feel more comfortable about introducing her new curriculum, but she still voiced lingering doubts: [One student] in my classroom, quiet kid, one day came up to me after a heated discussion and said to me, “Why are you bringing all this crap into the room?”

Other group members joined Landau-McFarland in providing a perspective intended to reinforce Diaz-Gemmati’s decision to follow the tack she had chosen. They expressed surprise that the students wanted to see only what one of the teachers called an “Alice in Wonderland” view of the world. At this point I asked Landau-McFarland to provide additional support for Diaz-Gemmati. She responded by saying: Now what you basically have to tell them is that, “It’s something that has to be learned, and this is what we’re working on, and this is the way the world is. You may not have experienced it yet, but it will come your way. If it doesn’t come your way, you’re very fortunate, but you need to be aware that it’s there.” And that’s what I tell them. I’m not saying I have a perfect classroom or anything of that sort because God knows I could tell you stories of me, but by the same token, you’re getting to some point where they respect that they recognize that the tension is there, and that they will deal with it. Before they

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didn’t even want to recognize it. /Diaz-Gemmati: Mmm./ And they were killing each other, literally.

Landau-McFarland had begun by assuming the role of expert, giving directives to Diaz-Gemmati (“What you basically have to tell them is . . .”). However, to maintain her peer role, she quickly denied or at least modified this position when she demurred: “I’m not saying I have a perfect classroom.” An extended discussion ensued among the other teachers about what they consider a mistaken sense that school should be “antiseptic,” a place where difficult and potentially explosive issues are avoided. Diaz-Gemmati did not contribute; she still had reservations about the wisdom of raising explosive topics. Only when the conversation turned to an issue that related less directly to her dilemma—how different teachers handle sexually explicit talk—did Diaz-Gemmati enter the conversation again. Regardless of her discomfort, this conversation, and the many others like it across the year, provided Diaz-Gemmati with the support she needed to pursue her research about explicit discussions of race, ultimately to write about it, and to grow as a teacher. She concluded the chapter she wrote for the book about the M-CLASS project (Freedman et al., 1999) with the following admission: I would be lying to myself if I pretended to be the teacher I was before I had initiated this project. If anything, this research has taught me that hard talk on candid issues can take place within the safety of classroom walls. I know that a society that is free of prejudice is many, many years away, but it’s something I hope to keep striving for—even if it’s only in the microcosm of life that comprises my classroom. (p. 76)

Just as O’Malley was willing to discuss her problems openly, Diaz-Gemmati positioned herself as a teacher willing to take risks (and to reveal her problems). Landau-McFarland assumed the role of helper, as Shakespeare and Yearwood did with O’Malley. Members of the M-CLASS/SBN had similar feelings about the importance of taking risks as teachers, and they too received support from their teacher research group during the process. In the MUSE program, the new teachers did not talk about taking risks in the same ways that the more experienced teachers did. Everything they did felt like a risk. They did not yet have safe classroom routines from which it would feel risky to deviate. Instead, they discussed the importance of the group in providing “a safe place” where they did not feel threatened or criticized. Across all three networks, the university facilitators worked with the teachers to create “safe” and nonjudgmental research groups where everyone would feel comfortable taking risks as researchers and writers and talk-

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ing about risk-taking. For the more experienced teachers, this risk taking in the research arena and the support in the group setting fed into risk taking in the classroom. For the new teachers, it made the whole act of teaching, which was generally a risky business, more manageable.

UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS Although many of the teachers focused their research on changing their curriculum and taking risks in the process, another focus of research and group talk was learning about students’ lives, with a goal of better understanding why students acted as they did and how they learned. Much of the time the need to understand students emerged because of a need to solve a problem related to the student or to teacher–student interactions. On many occasions, however, teachers wanted to learn about students independently of perceiving a problem. A key way the teachers got to know their students was by eliciting their stories, both oral and written. A major reason to listen to students was to help them become more engaged in the academic enterprise and thereby reap its benefits. In New Orleans, Karen Alford, who was White, was having difficulty with one of her Black students. This student vocally expressed a negative attitude toward Whites and refused to write or do other school work. This example originated with a classroom problem but then became a research problem. Alford’s fellow teacher researchers, several of them Black, collectively brainstormed with her about the possible motives behind the student’s behavior. These teachers offered ideas for engaging the student in writing activities, which Alford thought in turn might help the student reflect on and possibly change her attitudes. Alford opened the conversation by reading the New Orleans group a vignette about the time when Tracey told the whole class that she didn’t like White people, not even her teacher “Ms. Karen.” Alford explained her conflicts about handling the incident: She’s entitled to a feeling. Still if a White child had said, “I do not like Black people,” in my class, I would at least have a private conversation with that person. Somehow that remark would sound so hateful. But now I wonder how some of my White students might feel about Tracey’s comment. It separates her from half of the students. (New Orleans local meeting, December 22, 1992)

Alford explained that Tracey’s academic difficulties began with her refusal to do homework. She believed that the curriculum she was developing for her teacher research would help Tracey if only she would do the work:

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I think that some of this writing, the kind of writing and learning in the learning logs, would help her put things in perspective. If you put yourself into other people’s stories, you see different points of view. It seems like that would help Tracey. Adolescents are so wrapped up in their lives. Everything is important and immediate. Maybe part of the reason we study history is to slow down a little.

Alford then revealed that Tracey had recently been suspended. The social worker had concluded that Tracey “has a real problem with authority.” However, Alford saw the problem as more complex and offered the following evidence: The only teacher she likes is Bernie, our P.E. coach who’s Black. But to me, Bernie has been angrier at Tracey than any of us have. He’s much stricter with the kids than I am. She likes him because he’s African American, and she doesn’t like us because we’re White. And you know, I just have to live with that.

Group members tried to help Alford move beyond accepting Tracey as she is. They explained that Tracey’s apparently oppositional actions might not be intended that way. Following up on something Alford said earlier about Tracey’s difficult home life, site coordinator Cindy Roy hypothesized that Tracey sounded like a child for whom “things are probably out of control in her life at home.” Alford concurred, and then Roy offered her explanation of the source of Tracey’s difficulties; others voiced their agreement (note the many backchannels): Maybe school is a place where she feels some control over what she can do, and she’s in an environment that allows her to say those things and /Alford: Yeah./ that may not be such a bad thing. . . . It sounds to me like in your classroom she feels like she can be in control of what she thinks. /Ward: Uh huh./ And that’s really /Valenti: Wonderful, yeah./ kind of exciting and wonderful because I have to admit, social workers always kind of choke me up when they say, “These children have problems with authority.” Children don’t have—[Alford laughs] /Williams-Smith: (UC)/ children have problems in that their lives are out of control, and they don’t /Alford: Yeah./ have any way to take it back and control. And certainly this middle school years, are those years of, how much power can I get from a parent, from a school, from my friends.

Alford agreed that Tracey “digs herself in a hole”: If somebody likes her and supports her, she starts putting up /Roy: Barriers?/ this outright thing, “I do not like White people, and not even Ms. Karen” thing. Seemed to be like she was trying to get me to say, “Well then, I don’t like you either.” /Roy: Hmm./ /Herring: Uh huh. Uh huh./ And I’m not going to fall for that.

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Then Alford and the rest of the group discussed in some detail the social worker’s analysis and recommendations and their shock at how wrong they thought the social worker was: Alford:

The social worker told me to stop caring about it. That’s what she told me to do. She said— Herring: You can’t stop it. You can’t stop caring. Galley: What? The social worker told you? Alford: “You aren’t gonna change her.” She said, “You aren’t gonna change things for her.” Galley: It that right? Jesus Christ. Valenti: I don’t think she meant stop caring about, did she use those words? Alford: She said, “Stop taking a personal—” Caring wasn’t the word. She said, “You get personally involved with your students. Don’t get so personally involved with them.” Williams-Smith: Involved. Galley: You can’t help it. Alford: To me that means stop caring, but— Galley: You can’t help it. Herring: How can a teacher not become personally affected with.

The discussion began with Alford giving the facts of what the social worker said and the others responding. Sarah Herring and Reginald Galley were adamant in their disagreement, repeatedly saying “you can’t” think the way the social worker does. Meanwhile, Elena Valenti at first tried to see the social worker’s point of view, saying she couldn’t have meant what Galley and Herring said she meant, “to stop caring.” Alford agreed with Galley and Herring and then guided the group back to a discussion of Tracey’s refusal to participate in the academic opportunities: “If Tracey would write more, I think it would help, but she doesn’t do her homework.” Alford explained that calling Tracey’s parents is “not gonna bother Tracey,” and concluded, “I can’t make her sit down and write. /Roy: Right/ When she writes she’s a very good writer.” The others continued to try to help Alford find a solution. Sarah Herring recalled how she handled one of her difficult students: This is another story of one of the other kids that I had who was having problems and everything, and what I did. I told her to get a diary, make sure it has a lock and key. That’s your personal partner there that you can talk to at any time you want to. So maybe you could suggest that she get a diary.

Alford built on Herring’s idea with an even better one: “Maybe I could give her one.” Herring added optimistically, “Then maybe, she would feel

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personalized to you, and you could have a dialogue that way. And you could probably help her because I know it really helped this young lady.” Valenti offered another suggestion, related to what has worked for her as a teacher: “Those personal notes from the teacher usually bring them out a little bit.” Others agreed that any personal contacts made a difference. As Herring said, “She may be looking for that attention, and she’s saying that to you because sometimes they are rebellious.” Alford appreciated these suggestions, and all of the teachers of color, led by Galley and Herring, made an attempt to reassure Alford that all would end well, that Tracey really liked her even though she said the opposite. Their explanations for Tracey’s behavior moved from she wants “attention” to she likes you but she “doesn’t know how to express it” to if she really disliked you “she wouldn’t have anything to say to you” to she’s conflicted because you’re White and good. At a later meeting, Alford spontaneously told Sarah Herring, as though it was now her own idea, “I think I’m going to give Tracey her own diary. I’m gonna buy her something like this and give it to her” (New Orleans site meeting). Although it is unclear whether Alford ever gave Tracey a diary, Alford concluded that the process of watching students, which she worked on as she became a teacher researcher, is critical to her teaching: Doing this research project too. We had to be, so observant of our kids and so noticing them and noticing who they really were as learners that it helped me I think this year be a better teacher. (New Orleans local meeting)

Amy Bloodgood, one of the new teachers in the MUSE credential and MA program, illustrated how the new teachers used the research process to learn about their students. She wrote about how, as a first-year teacher, she felt too overloaded to focus on what was really most important to her, her students. She used her research to direct herself back to this most important classroom resource. She wrote in a letter to “the reader” that opened her teacher research MA paper: I wanted my [research] question to provide me with a place to hear my students. I wanted my question to provide a place for my students to shout out silently. Ultimately, my question became: What insights can student weekly reflections reveal to me as a teacher? How will their revelations develop with time? . . . After analyzing the initial data I believe in the importance of student feedback as an integral part of the classroom. They offered me valuable reminders about positive classroom practices, which I will share with you. However, the reflections took on a different form as I began to see students’ lives peering through, as I began to understand what I was looking for. My students began to utilize the reflections as a place to let me in on their private lives.

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As the year went on, because Bloodgood had created a weekly classroom space where her students knew she would ask for their thoughts and feelings, she learned not only about their private personal lives but also about heretofore secret academic needs. A most important moment occurred when one student wrote the following PS to her reflection: “PS will you tech me hwo to read” (Bloodgood, 1999, p. 22). Bloodgood explained: After reading the reflection, I sat stunned in class and stared out at her as she held her book up intently during silent reading. She, after three months, asked me for what she needed. I could no longer sit idly and wonder how to best accommodate Alexis. She called out in a moment of vulnerability, in a moment of strength, and told me. In all honesty I do not know that Alexis’s inability to read was a revelation to me, but it was a reminder that each of these individuals has his or her own needs and no matter how overwhelming that sometimes feels, I can’t stop trying to meet them or at least understand them. (pp. 22–23)

Alexis’s admission spurred Bloodgood to consult a reading specialist and together with the specialist to organize a focused tutoring program for Alexis. Later in the year Alexis wrote in her weekly reflection: Hi how are you. Gas what my reading is getting bater I like being in you’r class. You are one of my favrit techers. I hope I am you’r favrit to. You diserv an award. (Bloodgood, 1999, p. 24)

As with the other two topics, when the teachers talked about and studied their students, they intertwined making changes in their teaching with doing their research. At times, they talked about their changes as local to their classrooms; Bloodgood shifted her teaching strategy. At other times they also discussed changes that involved interactions with other school personnel; Alford analyzed her talk with a school counselor about one of her students, and strengthened her disagreements with the counselor’s points of view and her own analysis of the problem.

CONCLUSIONS The growth process in these teacher research networks was slow and complex. It required teachers to spend time reflecting on and analyzing their work and it depended on structured time for them to interact with peers and others who had something to contribute as well as time to collect and analyze data and think and write on their own. After identifying how the teachers interacted in the group meetings and then carried those interac-

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tions over into their research, I now turn to aspects of how we jointly created the research process that seemed critical for the teachers’ growth. First, as happens in communities of practice, the teachers decided what they wanted to learn to improve their practice as teachers. They were not told what to learn. They decided on the basis of the issues they faced in their classrooms and schools. Many of the highly experienced teachers entered these teacher research networks with the idea that they would take the opportunity to write about what they did well, to tell other teachers about curriculum they had developed and found successful over the years, and to share their expertise. However, most quickly learned that the idea behind research is to look critically, not merely to share successes. It was through this process of critique, analysis, and self-challenge that the teachers found ways to learn and grow, regardless of where they began (see also Kalnin, 2000). Second, the more detailed analysis of the talk shows that different teachers took different routes to learning, depending on their interests and comfort levels. In particular, they focused their attention during group meetings and often their research on different topics. Some took risks and discussed their fears but were reluctant to discuss their problems. Others did just the opposite. Others did both. Still others analyzed their students’ classroom interactions, progress as learners, and responses to school work, sometimes in tandem with the other two topics and sometimes separately. Kalnin (2000) further found that what teachers were able to learn varied, depending on their level of experience and expertise when they entered the group. Third, a supportive community where teachers can take risks as they work together to analyze their classroom life seemed essential to the process. This setting provided a space where teachers could learn through social interaction in a Vygotskian (Vygotsky, 1978) and Bakhtinian (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986) sense. In particular, each community member came to the group with varied sorts of expertise, which they shared with others. Teaching and learning occurred quite naturally within Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” that space where one can manage with the help of others what one cannot yet manage alone. Diaz-Gemmati, for example, could not have helped her students discuss issues of race and ethnicity without the ongoing support of the other teachers in her community. Further, as Bakhtin emphasized, the social interactions that lead to learning include multiple voices all coming together—from the university, the other teachers in the group, the students, the school social workers, the texts the students read, and the texts the teachers read. Fourth, the situated research process gave teachers permission to focus narrowly and deeply, something that seemed luxurious in a work world where teachers must attend to so many competing demands. Not all chose

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to narrow their focus, and those who did were hesitant at first. They feared that it was unfair to focus on one student more than another. They knew that they were responsible for the whole curriculum, not just part of it; they had to cope with large chunks every day. However, once they began to focus, they felt relieved and quickly saw how they could turn what they were learning about a student or a slice of school or classroom life into something that would have greater benefit and wider implications for them as teachers. Focusing narrowly was especially important to the new teachers. JoAnna Buechart in the MUSE program reflected on this aspect of the research: I can just look at one thing and not feel like, “Okay, well, how am I in classroom management? How am I in this, how am I in that?” . . . I really think that it was nice to just allow myself to just think about one thing and didn’t feel guilty that I was thinking about just one thing. (MUSE exit interview)

In many ways the teachers in these three groups assumed the kind of inquiry stance that Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999, 2001) defined as “knowledge-of-practice.” In this stance, It is assumed that knowledge is generated when teachers treat their own classrooms and schools as sites for intentional investigation at the same time that they treat the knowledge and theory produced by others as generative material for interrogation and interpretation. In this sense, teachers learn when they generate local knowledge-of-practice by working within the contexts of inquiry communities to theorize and construct their work and to connect it to larger social, cultural, and political issues. (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 250)

The research process involved teachers in interrogating their practice alongside the knowledge and theory generated by others. They ended by standing in a different relationship to their knowledge than when they started (see also Kalnin, 2000). The inquiry community was central to their learning, and many responded to highly political agendas in what they studied and how they studied it, thus connecting their work to larger social and cultural issues. However, in other ways the experience of teachers in these three inquiry communities does not conform with widely held views about the definition of research as well as the role of university-based research approaches in teacher research and professional development. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) argued that knowledge-of-practice “does not build on the formalknowledge-practical-knowledge distinction” but instead “stands in contrast to the idea that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge for teaching, one that is formal in that it is produced following the conventions of social sci-

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ence research, and the other that is practical in that it is produced in the activity of teaching itself” (p. 273). In the process of arguing against this dualistic conception of knowledge, they placed teachers in a new space, which they defined as based neither on the conventions of social science nor on teachers’ reflective stories. For the teachers and university-based coordinators in the three teacher research networks, a dualistic conception of knowledge also proved unproductive and even logically indefensible. However, the teachers and university-based coordinators spent much time wrangling over what counts as knowledge. These wranglings situated the teachers in what I would like to call a blended space rather than a new space. The concept of blended space is derived from Fauconnier and Turner’s concept in cognitive linguistics of “conceptual blending” (e.g., Fauconnier, 2001; Fauconnier & Turner, 2003; Turner, 1998). According to Fauconnier (2001), “conceptual blending is a basic mental operation” that involves “constructing a partial match between two inputs, to project selectively from those inputs into a novel ‘blended’ mental space, which then dynamically develops emergent structure” (p. 1). In a blended space for teacher research, formal knowledge and practical knowledge would be inputs, and knowledge from teacher research would result from a blend of the two. Thus, teacher research would include some but not all of the social science conventions associated with formal research, as well as the special methods that emerge because teachers are studying their practice. For example, teachers can collect information that outsiders cannot collect in their classroom, integrating data gathering seamlessly into everyday assignments. In one case, the teacher researcher assigned her students journal entries that asked them to reflect on their writing process when she wanted to learn about that process. In this way formal and practical knowledge blend together. New data are collected for the purpose of detailed study, as happens in formal research; however, these data may also be a seamless part of everyday teaching practice. The M-CLASS teachers also defy categorization in the way in which their individual research agendas related to larger social agendas. CochranSmith and Lytle (1999) claimed: The point of action research groups or inquiry communities or teacher networks is to provide the social and intellectual contexts in which teachers at all points along the professional life span can take critical perspectives on their own assumptions as well as the theory and research of others and also jointly construct local knowledge that connects their work in schools to larger social and political issues. (p. 283)

However, our experience suggests that a move toward a more democratic educational agenda works differently for different teachers. Many of the

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teachers we worked with began by doing somewhat formal and individually focused research. Some of the M-CLASS teachers gained as individuals but did not see themselves as part of anything larger professionally; others became politicized as part of the research process; still others used the process to deepen and develop longstanding political commitments. We often saw teachers begin with a local, individually critical, and rigorous research process, which then led them to develop a more broadly critical and political stance. Just as the research process for teachers in these communities of practice was the result of a conceptual blend, so too was the teachers’ learning process, in which they alternated between the roles of learner and teacher and could opt to learn by admitting problems, taking risks, or studying their students. Mary Ellen Bayardo in the M-CLASS Site Based Network prepared her workshop about her research for an audience of other teachers. She hoped to share the power of the discovery process that is part of teacher research with her audience. She explained: My goal is that these teachers leave saying, “Hey, maybe if I did a teacher research process, perhaps I would look at my teaching and the lessons and my students in a different way. It could give me a whole new perspective. And you know, maybe I will take a few risks as a teacher. Maybe I won’t just let students sit wherever they want, and you have African Americans here, Asians here, Latinos here. Maybe it’s my responsibility as an educator to create a state where they can all come together.” So . . . that’s my goal . . . in an hour and a half. (Site Based Network meeting)

Bayardo’s goal resonates with the goal of this chapter: that teachers and potential facilitators come away open to “a whole new perspective,” a blended perspective developed in a community of practice that will lead to change and growth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This chapter is based on “The English Teacher as Curriculum Maker in the Face of Reform,” a paper originally presented at a conference at the University of Chicago, June 1999. Its preparation was supported in part by grants to the author from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of California Office of the President. It was written while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where I was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.) (pp. 259–422). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.; V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bloodgood, A. (1999). Friday’s reflections. In S. W. Freedman (Ed.), Beginning teachers do research. Berkeley: University of California, School of Education, MUSE MA Program. Boomer, G. (1987). Addressing the problem of elsewhereness: A case for action research in schools. In D. Goswami & P. Stillman (Eds.), Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change (pp. 4–13). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24 (A. Iran-Nejad & P. D. Pearson, Eds., pp. 249–305). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2001). Beyond certainty: Taking an inquiry stance on practice. In A. Lieberman & L. Miller (Eds.), Teachers caught in the action: Professional development that matters (pp. 45–58). New York: Teachers College Press. Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280–298. Fauconnier, G. (2001). Conceptual blending. In P. Baltes & N. Smeltzer (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 2495–2498). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2003). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books. Freedman, S. W. (2001). Teacher research and professional development: Purposeful planning or serendipity. In A. Lieberman & L. Miller (Eds.), Teachers caught in the action: The work of professional development (pp. 188–208). New York: Teachers College Press. Freedman, S. W., Simons, E. R., Kalnin, J. S., Casareno, A., & the M-CLASS teams. (1999). Inside city schools: Investigating literacy and learning in multicultural classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press. Goswami, D., & Stillman, P. (Eds.). (1987). Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook. Hubbard, R., & Miller, B. (1993). The art of classroom inquiry: A handbook for teacher-researchers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hubbard, R., & Miller, B. (1999). Living the questions: A guide for teacher-researchers. York, ME: Stenhouse. Kalnin, J. (1999). What teacher researchers say about creating communities of achievement: Empowerment in and beyond the classroom. In S. W. Freedman, E. R. Simons, J. S. Kalnin, A. Casareno, & the M-CLASS teams (Eds.), Inside city schools: Investigating literacy in multicultural classrooms (pp. 197–218). New York: Teachers College Press. Kalnin, J. (2000). Teachers learning: A collaborative research network in action. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. McTaggart, R. (Ed.). (1997). Participatory action research: International contexts and consequences. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mohr, M., & MacLean, M. (1987). Working together: A guide for teacher-researchers. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Turner, M. (1998). The literary mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Winter, R. (1989). Learning from experience: Principles and practice in action-research. London: Falmer Press.

C H A P T E R

7 Working Through Dilemmas About Homework in an After-School Program: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice Lucinda Pease-Alvarez Cathy Angelillo University of California, Santa Cruz

Pablo Chavajay University of New Hampshire In traditional Western formal schooling in the United States, students’ learning is often confined to the classroom, where they have few opportunities to engage in “real-world” endeavors (Dewey, 1900; Lave, 1988, 1997). Students are segregated from many mature community practices, such as work (President’s Science Advisory Committee Panel on Youth, 1973). As Dewey (1900) noted long ago, “Knowledge in schools [has been] isolated and made an end in itself. Facts, laws, information have been the staple of the curriculum” (p. 101)—a characterization of school learning that still applies today. Students’ academic success or failure is generally determined by their individual performance on school tasks that are often made up of problems or questions that require individuals to recall information outside the contexts of its practical use (Lave, 1988, 1997). Teachers use these tasks to measure “what” and “how much” knowledge students possess. Homework is one such task that teachers require children to complete outside of school, often as a means to reinforce students’ academic learning. As is the case with many school tasks, homework is typically composed of practicing school skills that have little direct connection to other community activities outside of school.

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In this chapter, we examine the dilemmas undergraduates experienced in helping predominantly Latino children complete homework assignments in the context of an after-school program. In doing so, we focus on important learning/teaching venues that involved undergraduates (the majority of whom have an interest in pursuing careers in teaching), the children and their families, and ourselves, the project leaders responsible for coordinating the after-school program and teaching classes that involved undergraduates as participants in the program. This university– community partnership, known as UCSC-Links, was guided by a “community of learners” pedagogical perspective (Brown & Campione, 1990; Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001; Rogoff, Matusov, & White, 1996). Drawing on relevant sociocultural theory and research on learning/ teaching, undergraduates and the instructor together, as an integral part of the course, critically examined participants’ engagements in afterschool activities (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1997). This analysis of learning/teaching engagements in the after-school program aimed to help undergraduates and other participants (e.g., instructors; after-school staff) make sense of and more productively participate in the after-school activities, including homework engagements, all the while informing and being informed by theory and research on learning/teaching.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF HOMEWORK IN THE UNITED STATES Since the early 20th century, homework has in some form been the focus of discussions among educators, researchers, policymakers, and families, with different positions on this topic gaining or regaining prominence at different times. In the early 20th century, homework generally involved students memorizing information, as this activity was considered less problematic for students to accomplish in the home and was thought to contribute to “disciplining” the students’ minds (Cooper, 1989; Epps, 1966). However, some educators criticized the emphasis on memorization and raised concerns about the inordinate amount of homework that students were assigned and the use of homework as a form of punishment (Cooper, 1989; Dewey, 1900; Epps, 1966). A growing number of educators advocated that schooling should promote students’ interests and initiatives in learning and problem solving and connect students’ learning meaningfully with life outside the classroom (Cooper, 1989; Dewey, 1900; Epps, 1966). Some educators argued that homework, particularly those assignments that emphasized memorization, did not promote creative learning and problem solving (Cooper, 1989). Some were convinced that a reliance on these kinds of

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assignments acted as an obstacle that impeded students from taking more initiative in their learning. Instead, many educators favored optional or recreational homework that would also allow students to engage in other educational activities outside of school (Epps, 1966). In 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik,1 perspectives on schooling shifted radically (Cooper, 1989; Dickson, 2001; Epps, 1966). Immediately, efforts (including financial support) were directed toward reorganizing the curricula of U.S. schools, particularly in science, math, and technology (Cooper, 1989; DeBoer, 1991; Dickson, 2001; Matthews, 1994). Homework, viewed as a means to promote students’ academic success, regained prominence (Cooper, 1989; Dickson, 2001). Beginning in the mid-1960s, educators once again questioned the role homework should play in children’s schooling. Some thought that students were overburdened by homework and criticized homework demands that took away from other learning opportunities that children might encounter outside of school (Cooper, 1989). However, in the 1980s and 1990s, in response to declining test scores, which were increasingly viewed as valid indicators of academic success, many educators and “informed” citizens dismissed these criticisms. Once again reformers refocused their attention on the educational plight of U.S. students and the need for the country to regain its dominance (Cooper, 1989).2 Differing and sometimes polarized positions on homework have continued to characterize the public and scholarly debate (Cooper, 1989; Doyle & Barber, 1990; LaConte, 1981; McDermott, Goldman, & Varenne, 1984). According to homework proponents, its benefits include practicing and increasing understanding of knowledge, providing parents with opportunities to connect with their children’s learning, and promoting children’s study habits (Cooper, 1989; Doyle & Barber, 1990; LaConte, 1981; McDermott et al., 1984). Opposing arguments suggest that most homework focuses on school tasks that have little practical relevance to community life, discourages children’s interest in learning, exhausts them physically and emotionally, 1 1 The launching of Sputnik triggered a national debate about the state of U.S. education. With the Soviet Union’s success, many people in the United States became alarmed and harshly criticized the U.S. educational system for falling behind that of the Soviet Union (Cooper, 1989; Dickson, 2001; Epps, 1966). 2 In 1983 the U.S. National 2 Commission on Excellence in Education published a report citing a need for the country to resume its position of dominance in various academic fields. Such calls for educational reform (like those immediately following Sputnik) illustrate the competitive approach to teaching/learning that the United States often adopts in aiming to position itself above other countries. From our perspective, this competitive approach to learning/teaching (evident in the educational system where some need to fail for others to succeed in schooling) may hinder collaboration as it involves viewing others as competitors, not collaborators engaged in shared endeavors.

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curtails their involvement in important recreational and educational activities outside of school, and creates tensions among parents, children, and teachers (Cooper, 1989; Dewey, 1900; Doyle & Barber, 1990; LaConte, 1981; McDermott et al., 1984).3 Although much research has focused on the effectiveness of homework, very little has examined the interactional processes of children’s engagements in homework, considering their cultural resources and contexts in accomplishing various types of homework (McDermott et al., 1984; Varenne & McDermott, 1999). The McDermott et al. (1984; see also Varenne & McDermott, 1999) study of two U.S. working-class families of Irish descent demonstrated that children’s homework interactions with others involved complex and dynamic cultural learning/teaching processes. Their research suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to understanding children’s engagements in homework activities with others in cultural context. Toward that end, this chapter examines undergraduates’ and their instructor’s emerging interpretations of homework engagements involving predominantly Latino children in an after-school program. As they assisted children with homework assignments, undergraduates raised dilemmas that helped them reflect on their own and others’ assumptions about what constitutes meaningful learning/teaching practices for individuals from different cultural backgrounds, including diverse socioeconomic circumstances.4

UCSC-LINKS PROJECT: INTEGRATING THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PRACTICE Interested in helping address the academic crisis experienced by many minority children and in better preparing undergraduates for careers working with these children, the University of California (UC) campuses sponsored undergraduate classes that were linked to an after-school program where 3 3 Yet despite the different positions about homework and fluctuations in the attention that is given to homework in policy discussions focused on this practice, Cooper’s (1989) meta-analysis of homework studies suggests that homework is less effective for students in lower grades than those in higher grades. Comparing students who received homework with students who did not get homework assignments, “studies revealed that the average high school student in a class doing homework would outperform 75% of the students in a no-homework class. In junior high school, the average homework effect was half this magnitude. In elementary school, homework had very little effect on achievement gains” (Cooper, Lindsay, Nye, & Greathouse, 1998, p. 70). Similarly, when examining the relation between time spent on homework and academic achievement, “For students in Grades 3 through 5, the correlation between amount of homework and achievement was nearly zero; for students in Grades 5 through 9, .07; and for high school students, .25” (Cooper et al., 1998, pp. 70–71). 4 See Rogoff and Angelillo (2002) for a discussion 4 of culture as integrated and coordinated functioning of community practices.


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university students and minority children engaged in various educational and recreational activities. At the UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus, courses in education and psychology were designed to examine theory and research on learning/teaching and to consider how this scholarly work informed and was informed by participants’ learning/teaching experiences in the afterschool program. Building on a sociocultural approach that considers learning/teaching as culturally defined processes and our5 interests in going beyond traditional school ways of engaging in learning/teaching, the education class and the after-school program that are the focus of this chapter were guided by a “community of learners” perspective (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1997, 2003; Rogoff et al., 1996, 2001). Key aspects of this perspective are a consideration of all participants (including instructors) as learners, collaborating in shared endeavors, with mutual ownership and involvement in decision making and an appreciation of disagreements and mistakes as learning opportunities. During the fall 2002 academic quarter, Language, Diversity, and Learning, taught by Pease-Alvarez, was the education class linked to the after-school program. This course6 examined theory and research on learning/teaching among youth who participated in communities where standard English and mainstream discourse practices were not expected or were not the only mode of linguistic expression. Topics addressed in this course focused on various manifestations of language and cultural diversity in the United States, with special attention paid to the development and use of languages and literacy among minority youth outside of and in school. Twenty-three undergraduates taking the class participated twice weekly in an after-school program serving predominantly Latino children in lower income neighborhoods in the local community. The undergraduates were of diverse backgrounds: 52% were of European descent, 30% were Latino, 9% were Asian, and 9% were African American. Seventy-five children between the ages of 2 and 17 years participated in the after-school program, with approximately 25 to 30 children attending daily. Many of the children spoke English and Spanish and were related to one another as siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. On a daily basis, approximately 10 to 12 undergraduates engaged with children in the after-school program. During the after-school program, undergraduates and children engaged in various activities, such as computer games, Internet searches, use of the Internet to copy and print images, arts and crafts, outdoor and board games, homework, and field trips to the UCSC Arboretum and the UCSC Seymour Discovery Center (a marine life exhibit). Festive occasions, includ5

Eugene Matusov, a collaborator with us, was instrumental in helping establish this project. We refer to the “course” as the integrative experience of both the class and the after-school 6 program. 5

6

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ing Halloween and Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), were also celebrated in the program. Building on a community of learners perspective, all participants—for example, children, undergraduates, project leaders, afterschool staff members, and parents (who sometimes also attended the program)—shared in decision making about what after-school program activities occurred, and how. Often, program participants would raise dilemmas related to our work with children that would become the focus of dialogue and sociocultural analysis in the course. During the fall 2002 quarter, undergraduates participating in the course raised a number of concerns they had in helping children complete homework assignments. In our examination of these dilemmas in this chapter, we draw on undergraduates’ and the instructor’s web-based discussions and field-note observations of after-school activities,7 undergraduates’ research projects and the instructor’s accompanying feedback, and the instructor’s and other project leaders’ reflections on class discussions with undergraduates and conversations with parents in the after-school program.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF HOMEWORK IN THE UCSC-LINKS AFTER-SCHOOL PROJECT Since the inception of the UCSC-Links project in 1996, participants in the after-school program served as resources to one another in helping children complete their homework assignments. However, in the last 3 years of the after-school project (1999–2002), homework emerged as a frequent topic of discussion among program participants. Since the fall of 2000, the number of children doing homework and requesting homework help in the afterschool program had increased in comparison with previous years. Through our conversations with local teachers, we learned that many local schools were strictly enforcing homework policies, reflecting a national trend toward increasing children’s involvement in schoolwork while outside of school. In addition, as a result of drastic cuts in bilingual education programming, the children, most of whom were English language learners, were required to complete homework assignments in English. During home visits and meetings with parents and other family members, we also learned that parents were extremely concerned about their children’s homework situation. Many parents reported that their children’s teachers had told them that their children were not doing well (e.g., not completing homework, not passing tests) and were at risk of repeating the 7 7 A privately accessed class web on the Internet was created to support undergraduates’ and instructors’ dialogue about learning/teaching events in the after-school program.


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same grade. Parents indicated that the amount of homework that their children were expected to complete each night had increased. Most parents found that they had many difficulties in helping their children complete assignments in English, a language that they did not speak or understand well. Several parents told us that their children had completed more schooling than they had, making it difficult for them to offer help to their children in subject areas that were beyond their own schooling. Parents asked project leaders to provide their children with greater opportunities to obtain assistance with their homework in the after-school program. In fact, many parents reported that they had enrolled their children in the after-school program because they saw it as a major resource in helping their children with homework assignments. In response to parents’ concerns, project leaders assured them that the after-school program would provide much greater support in helping children do homework assignments. Consequently, before the program began in each academic quarter, project leaders informed undergraduates about parents’ requests for homework help. During the after-school program, undergraduates and project leaders started each session by identifying children who needed help with homework and undergraduates who would serve as homework helpers. In some academic quarters, undergraduates also developed various systems of rewards (e.g., movie tickets, pizza party) to further promote children’s engagements in homework or other literacy or numeracy activities while attending the after-school program. However, during the fall 2002 quarter, there were no specific reward systems in place in the after-school program. ANALYSIS OF HOMEWORK IN THE FALL OF 2002 As in previous quarters, at the beginning of fall 2002, project leaders explained to a new group of undergraduates who had enrolled in the education course the program’s commitment to honor parents’ requests to help their children with homework. Undergraduates were interested in working with children on homework, and in some cases expressed eagerness. Shortly after the program began, homework became a focus of field notes and commentaries that undergraduates posted on the class Internet discussion web. In their earliest field notes, undergraduates reported on children’s performances in doing homework and described how they helped them. For example, Laura offered the following commentary about a child’s (Patty’s) performance on a challenging assignment involving decimals and Laura’s approach to helping her complete the assignment: It seemed to me that Patty just wanted to finish her assignment without trying to understand the concepts and rules of decimal numbers; not until I kept ask-

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ing questions and reasoning with her. I love asking children questions because it makes them think more in depth, and it challenges their understanding. Also, I want children to question what they learn; I do not want them to be passive learners. With this in mind, I hope I did challenge Patty with my questions and make her think critically. Patty helped me realize that teaching mathematics to younger children is very hard. You have to be very patient with children and work with them individually. It is really difficult to explain the basic materials and concepts to children. Therefore, I need to find an alternative way to help my students comprehend the material. It was an exciting experience and I am looking forward to working with Patty and the rest of the children.

After only a few sessions in the after-school program, undergraduates began sharing their concerns about and difficulties with children’s homework assignments. For example, undergraduates described the instructions attached to many children’s assignments as confusing and vague. Others wrote about the inordinate amount of time some children spent doing homework while attending the after-school program. For example, Annette wrote that after spending an hour and 15 minutes helping Amelia with her homework during one afternoon session, Amelia still had not finished her assignments. When further commenting on the amount of homework Amelia was asked to complete, Annette reflected on the role schools and teachers played: “I’m not sure what makes me more sad—that teachers have to send home that much homework or that they think that kids can finish that much homework in one night.” Throughout the quarter, undergraduates and Pease-Alvarez read literature that described learning as a cultural process situated in the everyday activities of children and adults. For example, Rogoff et al. (1996) described how a sociocultural perspective “takes as a central premise the idea that learning and development occur as people participate in the sociocultural activities of their community, transforming their understanding, roles, and responsibilities as they participate” (p. 390). This and other readings described schools or after-school programs that put into practice the importance of recognizing cultural context in designing learning/teaching experiences (Ballenger, 1992; Heath & McLaughlin, 1991; Moll, Tapia, & Whitmore, 1993; Rogoff et al., 1996). In these settings, participants engaged in activities that aimed to build on their interests and the cultural practices of their families and communities (including peer networks). Pease-Alvarez guided undergraduates in making connections between class readings and the homework activities in the after-school program, including the dilemmas that were emerging in undergraduates’ work with the children. In her responses to undergraduates’ web postings about the difficulties that they were encountering with homework, she asked questions


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she hoped would help them consider how children were making sense of homework assignments, particularly those that focused on discrete skills. For example, in the following web exchange between Ned and Pease-Alvarez, Ned described the difficulties Lionel had when trying to answer comprehension questions after reading a story about how a dog that jumped into a river scared away fish. As he reflected on this event, Ned himself struggled over how to support Lionel’s learning: But when it was time to answer the questions, he [Lionel] consistently tried to get me to give him the answers. And had a lot of trouble focusing. . . . There was one question about the story, one where he had to sequence several events in the story, and then several words he had to alphabetize. With the first question, he had a lot of trouble, so I had him reread the story. He did, but still couldn’t figure out the answer to the question. (Why did the fish disappear?) So I asked him several questions about the story until he got the answer (because the dog jumped into the water). With the sequencing of events, he also had a lot of trouble. I had to ask a lot of questions to guide him to the answer in this one, in fact, I practically gave him the answer, which I was kind of pissed at myself about. The alphabetizing was easy for him. I realized today that I really don’t know anything about how people learn to read. For one thing, I know Lionel can read out loud very well, but I don’t know about his ability to read for understanding. He obviously got some meaning out of the story once it was explained to him what happened, because he was able to answer questions when I asked them out loud in both English and Spanish, but when it came time to read and answer the questions on paper, he had a lot of trouble. I am wondering if this is because the selection was so boring and dumb? Or maybe because of phonics based teaching? How does one learn to understand what they are reading? How do you teach somebody to read for understanding? On the other hand, maybe he is at a good level for his age? I don’t have any real answer to why it was so difficult for him to do the comprehension questions, but I am thinking it may have had something to do with any or all of the following: (a) Lionel continually expressed a desire to go to the computer lab, which distracted him from really focusing on the work. (b) The work was so damn boring and meaningless (in hindsight on this one, I should have asked him if he had a dog or if he had been to a river just to find out if the story had any relevance to his life or not). (c) He has been taught to read in a phonics based way, which ignored using his native language to help him learn how to read in English and ignored the importance of reading in Spanish. . . . Does anybody have any response to this?

In her response, Pease-Alvarez shared her concern about the kinds of reading tasks that children were being assigned to do as homework, and pondered whether there was some way that undergraduates or she could make reading activities more engaging.

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Hi Ned, Your description of Lionel is a really interesting one. Moreover, the many questions you ask really could help us unpack our assumptions about reading and homework. I know that I worry that the kids are being asked to engage with written texts that they don’t find meaningful—because the texts are boring and/ or don’t relate to their experiences and/or interests and/or because they are asked to engage with them in ways that basically aren’t engaging (answering a string of literal comprehension questions, doing phonics activities that are often confusing). I’m wondering what we could do at times to explore their meaningful engagement with reading that also enables them to complete . . . homework assignments. Sometimes I don’t see the two as compatible. . . . Any thoughts? Cindy [Pease-Alvarez]

Pease-Alvarez helped undergraduates further consider how homework assignments related to the understandings, interests, and experiences of children in the after-school program. In discussing the nature of schoolrelated literacy tasks during class sessions, she and the undergraduates examined phonics assignments and passages from textbooks that resembled the homework children had been assigned by their teachers. During their discussions, class members noted that most of these tasks and assignments involved drills on school skills that were removed from the context of their practical use and topics that were less familiar and less culturally relevant to the children. Pease-Alvarez also asked undergraduates to engage in small groups to read and discuss texts in Spanish, a language that many did not speak, read, or write, to gain some awareness about the struggles many children were facing while trying to do assignments in a language that was unfamiliar to them. Undergraduates found that the nature of the children’s homework assignments often diverged from what the class readings (e.g., Goodman Turkanis, 2001) described as meaningful academic activity. For example, Josefa described an occasion when she was helping Juana complete five pages of letter and number tracing: I really felt bad for her [Juana] because I didn’t see how beneficial five pages of the same thing would be. I can understand how letter practicing can help the child learn to write the letters a little neater; however, when it’s five pages, the child gets tired and no longer pays attention to the quality of the letters. When Juana started to write her letters sloppier, at first I told her to slow down but she would tell me that she wanted to do it fast because she already knew those letters and that she just wanted to finish it fast. I could understand and I agreed with her so I didn’t say anything else after that.

Drawing on course readings including Heath and McLaughlin’s (1991) work on after-school programs, undergraduates shared ideas about how


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homework could be designed to relate to children’s lives and be more meaningful. For example, in the following field note, Ana suggested alternative homework activities that she felt had some real-world application and would be beneficial for the children’s learning: I feel like the math homework should be tied into something useful (perhaps learning a math skill while building something for the classroom) or learning about one specific current event (instead of numerous fragmented blurbs), and then writing to a participant in that event. For example, students might be given newspaper stories, become interested in a particular story and request more information from the newspaper editor. This could lead to discussing about how newspapers are put together and the names of the different components of the newspaper. Then the children could put together their own small class newspaper including information that is important to them. There are numerous directions that the teacher could go which would provide fun learning experiences instead of meaningless dribble. Homework needs to be exciting, not excruciating.

Through their work on a research project focused on homework, three undergraduates came to a similar conclusion—the homework that children were required to do was often “meaningless.” Interestingly, these undergraduates began the quarter with very positive perspectives on homework. Like many of their classmates, they were eager to work with children on homework activities because they thought this would provide them with an opportunity to have a positive impact on children’s academic achievement. When they began their research, they thought that they would focus on how undergraduates supported children in completing homework assignments. However, as the quarter unfolded, they were struck by the number of challenges they had helping children with their homework. Through their analyses of field notes and interviews with children, they uncovered the following issues: · Many children find homework uninteresting, boring, or confusing. · Several children reported spending inordinate amounts of time doing

homework. · Homework assignments in English were incomprehensible to children who are just becoming familiar with that language. In contrast to the positive perspectives about homework that the three undergraduates researching homework shared at the beginning of the quarter, they concluded their project at the end of the quarter with the following commentary:

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There were many other activities and community interactions possible at the after-school program that would probably have been much more beneficial learning experiences [than homework]. If children didn’t have homework, they would have had more time to participate in community activities that would facilitate learning more than homework. [Also, at home,] children may help with preparing dinner for [the] family and learn how to read a cook book, take measurements, and understand how heat [a]ffects water and food. Aren’t these experiences more beneficial than a phonics worksheet? . . . The amount of homework should be reduced and meaningless worksheets should not be handed out. Teacher[s] should assign meaningful homework that has some effect on the child’s life. To do this, teachers should ask the student[s] what they find interesting, ask the children what they would like to learn and then tailor the homework assignment to the students’ requests. If the teacher is unable to come up with homework of this sort, then homework should not be assigned that day.

However, there were a few occasions when undergraduates found homework to be engaging for both themselves and the children. For example, Mitzie described an instance when a homework assignment helped her connect with Julia, allowing her to gain insights into the child’s abilities and dispositions: I looked at [Julia’s] worksheet which consisted of questions like my favorite meal is . The homework dealt with a lot of personal likes and dislikes so I really got to know this student. I asked her a lot of questions and encouraged her to describe her answers in more detail. I learned that this child really did not need much help at all. In fact, I think my only role was to initiate dialogue with her to get her to articulate her own thoughts. She had a few errors in spelling, but they were rather minor. She was a very intelligent child. A tiny scholar, if you will. She finished her homework with great ease.

There were also occasions when undergraduates responded to one another’s queries on the web about how they could more effectively support children doing homework. For example, after describing an occasion when she helped Cristal write a story, Melanie asked for advice about how to help children write: [Cristal’s] assignment was to write a story about the day her grandmother died, incorporating dialogue and “show-not-tell” statements.8 She had already written a rough draft of the story and had the dialogue that she wanted to use. She gave me a sheet that had the grading guidelines (“for an A, you must have . . . for a B you must have . . .”). I told her we’d be going for an “A,” to which she responded “I’m an ‘F’ student!” 8

Teachers often develop lessons or activities designed to support children in writing elaborated descriptions rather than brief, general statements. In so doing, they often refer to statements that show rather than tell.

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I began by asking her to tell me the details of the story, which took a while. Then we worked on the first line which, I advised her, should catch the attention of the reader. We proceeded to tell the story, line by line. Cristal was easily distracted throughout and didn’t want for anyone else besides [me and Krissy, another undergraduate] to read her work. It ended up being less than the required length, but it isn’t due until Monday so she said she’d work on it. My biggest challenge in this interaction, which lasted the entire duration of site [the after-school program session], was keeping Cristal focused and keeping myself from giving her too much assistance. I had to constantly ask her to refer back to what she remembered and reiterate the things she told me. She insisted that she was a terrible writer and kept asking me what I would say. Toward the end (when we had about 5 minutes left) I took over the typing and let her dictate what she wanted said. I don’t know if this was inappropriate but both of us really wanted to finish the assignment. It ended up being a beautiful paper (though a bit short) and was as close to an “A” as we could get. Are we allowed to type for the kids? Should we be guiding them in a certain direction when writing papers? I don’t have much experience with tutoring youth in writing and don’t know how much is too much . . . Anyone have any ideas?

Pease-Alvarez and other undergraduates commented on Melanie’s message and responded to her queries with the following web postings which contained advice about how to help children with writing, raised additional questions, and commented on the significance of the homework event that Melanie had described: Hi Melanie, What an interesting engagement. (It seems hard to assign a grade to such a topic, no?) You ask about if it’s okay to type for the kids. I think it makes sense— especially given the time constraints. It also may help free up the child to compose their stories. What do others think? Cindy PS I’d love to read the story you wrote together.

Adriana (an undergraduate) wrote, I, as always, relate this to my youngest brother (Gilberto). Working with him on homework throughout the years I have noticed that he’s really good at verbally summarizing stories he’s read or movies he’s watched, and he enjoys telling me about his experiences but he has a hard time doing this on paper when, for example, he has a book report that requires him to summarize. I have tried different ways of getting him to sit down and write/type but usually what ends up happening is that he writes and I type, revising his writing (with

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his input) as I go through the paper. I think that it is important that kids learn to type because they will need to use this skill throughout their careers as students and in the “real world” but if they need a little help at first, as long as they are writing/dictating their own paper, I am more than happy to first support the development of their thinking skills rather than their visual motor skills. What has worked for my brother in the past is actually similar to what Melanie did with Cristal. I have had him dictate to me what he wants to write (if he hasn’t already written something down) and I’ll ask him to clarify things or elaborate where I think he can improve. I have also had him verbally summarize a book into a micro-recorder (with me present). Like my brother, many students can’t just sit down and write. Gilberto loves to tell stories but he needs someone to be physically present so that he can have a response (interaction) to his stories (or summaries).

Another undergraduate, Jill, contributed this comment: I think that the suggestions that Adriana gave were all very good. I would like to add something about the difficulty of being able to put spoken words on paper . . . I still have trouble with this myself. What works for me and for kids that I have tutored is maybe first brainstorming on paper, just putting down a few words that will trigger memories and are meaningful. Then, talk, using the key words to explain the story and either the listener or speaker could jot down a few more words or notes on ideas that connect one word to the next. The next step would be to validate what the speaker says and begin putting it all on paper in small steps. Begin with one of the words explaining what it means on paper and continue doing this piece by piece, editing or adding as you go along. One really important step is to read the story you have written down out loud to see if it makes sense and captures the essence of what the storyteller/speaker intended on saying.

In addition, Michael (an undergraduate) wrote, Hey Melanie, I noticed you two working that day. It seems like that might have been a difficult topic to work on. My question is how was she handling the content of the assignment? At a young age (at any age really) death is a pretty mysterious topic. I wonder if part of her difficulty in working on it was the fact that these might be hard memories to relive. It’s hard enough to do homework without having to think about emotional traumas. Just wondering if you think that played a role in the situation.

In such class discussions, undergraduates and Pease-Alvarez helped further analysis of learning/teaching activities in the after-school program. In so doing, they sought to develop more effective ways to help children with their homework. Yet, in addition to engaging in some homework activities that they thought were useful or productive, many undergraduates continued to express frustration at being expected to support children as they engaged in


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what undergraduates conceived to be “meaningless” or “confusing” homework assignments. Although they were aware that parents wanted them to be homework resources for their children, some undergraduates stated that they on occasion had avoided working with children on homework, opting instead to engage with them in more “meaningful” activities. Toward the close of the quarter, course readings and class discussion focused on the challenges minority children, particularly those of Latino descent, face in U.S. schools. Through our discussion of various readings, including those that describe cultural patterns of engagement in nonmainstream communities (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987; Eisenberg, 1986; Moje, 2000; Vásquez, Pease-Alvarez, & Shannon, 1994), class members expanded their understanding of what constitutes a productive learning environment. They realized that schools tended to be places where children were expected to conform to mainstream patterns of engagement. In contrast to conventional explanations of differential achievement, which hold minority children’s families and communities responsible for children’s academic failure, undergraduates came to view the cultural practices that were part of children’s everyday lives as potential resources for learning/teaching in school. Some undergraduates also engaged in discussions that complicated arguments raised in these readings. For example, when responding to a classmate’s concerns about the “meaningless” activities that constituted children’s homework, Adriana, one of three Mexican-descent students in the class, provided an analysis that went beyond a negative assessment of homework as “meaningless” and irrelevant to children’s everyday lives. She looked at it as a practice within what she considers a problematic sociopolitical context, in which homework performance carries meaning as an indicator of academic success or failure. Situating the homework issue in this larger sociopolitical context (as she had often done skillfully throughout the quarter), Adriana drew on class readings and her experiences in helping her brother with assignments he found challenging and sometimes “meaningless.” She provided her perspective on the consequences of undergraduates’ decisions not to support children’s efforts to complete homework the undergraduates deemed “irrelevant” or “confusing”: I think this dilemma has come up many times before. As undergrads in a program partly aimed to help children become more successful in school, it’s hard to support something we disagree with but at the same time realize that we are, for the moment, powerless to change. So we either help these kids be better students even if it means conforming to a ridiculous idea of what it means to be a better student or perpetuate a whole different cycle of student failure. Not that these kids can’t do it without us, but we are in a sense there to provide moral, as well as academic support.

Also, throughout the quarter, parents who attended the after-school program made it clear to undergraduates that they expected them to help their

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children with homework. Often they enlisted undergraduates’ help with particular assignments, providing them with additional insights into parental concerns about their children’s academic achievement. For example, Carol (an undergraduate) had the opportunity to talk with a mother about why she had asked Carol to read a book written in English to her son, Junior: [Junior’s] mom was at site [the after-school program] and she was very concerned about the parent reading that was assigned. She wanted to make sure that I at least did that part of the homework packet with him. We read a five chapter book that Junior had picked out. It was about three witch sisters. Junior and I had a really good time reading the book and I answered numerous questions for him. The book did have some really difficult words like “sassafras” in it. So I explained the meaning and I felt like we had a really good experience. I talked to his Mom afterward and she commented that she had tried to read the book to Junior but she didn’t understand many of the words and that the book was not making sense to Junior when she read it to him. Her general feeling was that this was not a good experience for both of them and was very grateful that I had read to Junior. I wonder if the kids can be read to in Spanish? If they have to be read to in English, then many of the kids who have Spanish speaking parents are at an immediate disadvantage. I wonder if the teacher even thinks about this. I think that any reading event in Spanish or English would be beneficial.

Carol’s reflection led Adriana to point out that reading to children was not the only way parents supported their children’s academic development. In making this point, she referred to the course reading “Lisa and Her Mom: Finding Success in Reading the Word World” (McLain, 2000): I think parents might be more likely to read with their kids if the material was in Spanish but we also have to consider the other reasons why parents aren’t reading to their kids. I related Junior’s mom to Lisa’s mom in that although she didn’t necessarily read with Junior she did encourage him to read and supported other[s] reading with him. So, although kids whose parents are not able to read with them are at a disadvantage because they do not have the opportunity to interact and bond with their parents [in the actual course of reading] they may not necessarily be at a disadvantage academically as long as they have a supportive parent(s).

In sharing her view with classmates, Adriana demonstrated the supportive roles parents played in the academic lives of their children, including the resources they sought to help their children accomplish challenging school tasks, such as homework. Parents, children, other family members, undergraduates, after-school staff members, and project leaders came together in UCSC-Links to help children accomplish homework and other edu-


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cational and recreational activities. These collaborative efforts provided opportunities for participants to further understanding about learning/ teaching in an informal context of an after-school program.

DISCUSSION Through their engagements in the UCSC-Links after-school program, undergraduates of diverse cultural backgrounds had many opportunities to work with predominantly Latino children in homework activities. Building on a community of learners approach to learning/teaching, participants in the program shared with one another their ideas and concerns about homework in an effort to help children do their assignments. Drawing on relevant literature and their own and others’ experiences with children, undergraduates and Pease-Alvarez together examined and critiqued the nature, functions, and ways of engaging with children in homework, revealing and grappling with differing perspectives on learning/teaching. Although some undergraduates found their experiences with homework productive for the children and themselves, many frequently found that the homework did not clearly connect to children’s cultural experiences outside of school. In addition, many undergraduates and children often found homework to be uninteresting, boring, confusing, or vague. In coming to situate the challenges of homework in a larger sociopolitical context, undergraduates and Pease-Alvarez sought ways to engage more meaningfully in homework with the children. Literature about innovative schools and after-school programs (e.g., Brown & Campione, 1990; Heath & McLaughlin, 1991; Rogoff et al., 2001) provided insights into how to engage more collaboratively with children in learning/teaching endeavors, moving away from relying on traditional school ways of engagement. Building on these insights, undergraduates and Pease-Alvarez engaged with one another about homework by asking for advice, making suggestions, and raising questions, with the aim of further understanding the cultural aspects of homework activities. Their joint problem solving about homework dilemmas in forums such as in-class and web discussions as well as their actual engagement with children in homework activities helped undergraduates and Pease-Alvarez articulate and negotiate differing cultural perspectives on learning, teaching, and knowing. Through this process, they attempted to shape the help they provided to children in ways that were culturally sensitive to the particular circumstances of participants in the homework activities. In becoming more aware of the cultural constructions of learning/teaching, knowing, and doing, undergraduates, particularly those who had little

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experience with individuals from Latino communities, elaborated their views about engaging with children in homework activities outside of school. They wanted to help children successfully complete their homework. However, they soon realized that this task was often complicated because the homework did not relate to the children’s interests, involved confusing and tedious exercises, or consisted of English-only assignments that were not comprehensible to the children. These experiences enabled undergraduates to question the value and purposes of homework assignments. Through this inquiry process, undergraduates realized that the dominant mainstream practices of school, which many had previously endorsed without question, were reflected in the children’s homework assignments. Undergraduates also became cognizant of how these practices disregarded the cultural practices that are part of the children’s everyday experiences in their homes and communities. With the help of classmates and PeaseAlvarez, undergraduates considered how issues of power, position, and pedagogy can complicate the decisions that educators make about what constitutes equitable schooling (Delpit, 1995). Our experiences with homework dilemmas in the after-school program point to the importance of situating analysis of learning/teaching in sociocultural and historical contexts. Through engaging as a community of learners, many undergraduates came to realize that productive learning/teaching engagements did not have to be entirely constrained by the social organization of traditional schooling, reflective of dominant mainstream European American practices. In fact, many of them came to view their efforts to collaborate with children outside of school as a way to mobilize community resources to help children learn—in effect, the undergraduates were not as “powerless” as they thought. The homework engagements provided undergraduates with opportunities to connect with children and their families and with children’s schooling, positioning them at a crossroads between children’s various communities. This vantage point contributed to developing a deeper understanding of learning/teaching across cultural contexts and highlighted the importance of viewing informal contexts of learning/teaching as resources for schooling.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to express our appreciation to the UCSC undergraduates, the children and their families, and the project staff who participated in the UCSC-Links After-School Project. Their involvement in the program has contributed to important transformations in our perspectives and practices. We also extend our thanks to the University of California Office of the President for supporting the work reported on in this chapter.


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8 Teachers, Mentors, Friends?: Undergraduates’ Engagements With Latino Children in an After-School Program Pablo Chavajay University of New Hampshire

Cathy Angelillo Lucinda Pease-Alvarez University of California, Santa Cruz

Increasingly, researchers and educators are making efforts to enhance children’s learning by providing them with access to a variety of educational and recreational activities outside of school. Examples of such efforts are the “University/Community-Links” After-School Programs (UC-Links, often referred to as the “Fifth Dimension”), initiated at UC San Diego by Michael Cole and Olga Vásquez in 1996. In these after-school programs, which have been expanded across the United States and to other countries, undergraduates engage with low-income/minority children in various after-school activities, many of them computer related. The informal learning context of the after-school programs provides both children and undergraduates with many opportunities for collaboration. As K. Brown and Cole (2002) suggested, the “Fifth Dimension is organized to create an institutionalized version of the form of interaction that Vygotsky (1978) referred to as a zone of proximal development for participants” (p. 227). A number of studies on UC-Links after-school programs have suggested that children benefit through their involvement in the program. For example, low-income children participating in UC-Links demonstrated greater knowledge and understanding of computers compared to their counterparts who did not participate (Schustack, Strauss, & Worden, 1997). Other research involving children attending UC-Links has reported children’s pretest-to-posttest gains on arithmetic word problems (Mayer et al., 1997) and reading and mathematics achievement scores (Blanton, Moorman, Hayes, & Warner, 1997). 151

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Very little research to date has examined undergraduates’ participation in UC-Links after-school programs (Bielenberg, n.d.; Blanton, Warner, & Simmons, 1998; Olt, Gack, & Cole, n.d.). To support and facilitate their learning/teaching in these informal contexts where collaboration is emphasized, there is a growing interest in understanding undergraduates’ involvement in UC-Links. The collaborative participation structures of UC-Links contrast with the hierarchical participation structures characteristic of traditional Western formal schools where adults direct children’s participation in learning/teaching activities. Many undergraduates who participate in the collaborative structure of UC-Links experience frustrations, uncertainties, and confusion in figuring out their learning/teaching roles as they engage with children in the after-school program activities. These challenging experiences have often prompted undergraduates to ask instructors and other classmates, “What is my role in working with children in the after-school program?” Thus, the present study examined from a sociocultural perspective (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1997, 2003) undergraduates’ emerging understanding of their learning/teaching roles in working with predominantly low-income Latino children in a UC-Links after-school program in Santa Cruz, California—referred to as UCSC-Links.1 From 1996 to 2002, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), involved undergraduates in an after-school program that was linked to education and psychology classes that were informed by a sociocultural perspective. The UCSC-Links after-school program and classes built on a “community of learners” approach to learning/teaching (e.g., A. L. Brown & Campione, 1990; Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001). This approach aimed to foster collaborative interactions among undergraduates, children, and project leaders (such as instructors and after-school staff), who were encouraged to consider one another as resources in accomplishing after-school activities. The emphasis on collaboration sought to promote shared ownership of the program among participants. Many undergraduates new to this experience often encountered struggles in figuring out their roles in collaborating with children. UNDERGRADUATES’ STRUGGLES WITH THEIR ROLES IN WORKING WITH CHILDREN Undergraduates who have come to participate in the UCSC-Links afterschool program have been very enthusiastic and eager to work with the 1

Although the various UC-Links after-school programs shared similar goals in helping children and undergraduates, the cultural-historical context of each program was distinct. For example, UCSC-Links differed from other UC-Links (Fifth Dimension) programs in that its structure and philosophy were not based on imaginary play structures that relied on mazes, wizards, and task cards (see Brown & Cole, 2002).

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8. TEACHERS, MENTORS, FRIENDS?

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children. However, many of the undergraduates questioned their roles in engaging with children in the informal learning context of the program. For example, in reflecting on her experiences, Julia2 reported: At the beginning I was a little uncomfortable because it seems to me that we didn’t have previous and definite goals and roles in our work with the kids. This made me puzzled. I thought that to work together we needed a kind of “group policy.” I didn’t feel free to address kids spontaneously. I was always waiting for “collective behavior directions.”

The concerns Julia raised were commonly expressed by other undergraduates in the program. In fact, many reported frustration with the “program’s lack of structure,” the absence of “a defined curriculum,” or the program being “too informal” and at times “chaotic.” These dilemmas tended to surface throughout their participation in the after-school program, even though there were frequent discussions among instructors and undergraduates about alternative ways of engaging with children in informal learning contexts. Undergraduates were encouraged to be flexible in their engagements with children, especially if their “approach” to helping children did not work. Instructors and undergraduates reflected with one another on what did and did not work in their engagements with children, with the aim of “improving” their interactional “approach.” Given the dilemmas that many undergraduates experienced and the key roles they played in the program’s functioning, we examined their struggles in order to facilitate their work with children and inform instructors about ways in which they might better support undergraduates’ learning/teaching. The aspiration of many of these undergraduates was to work with children in careers such as teaching, counseling, and social work. We hoped that undergraduates’ experiences in UCSC-Links would enhance their understanding of learning/teaching processes and inform their work with children, particularly in settings such as schools where traditional mainstream perspectives on teaching/learning predominate and often disregard the experiences of children of diverse cultural backgrounds. These are pressing practical and theoretical concerns that researchers and educators are facing today. The dilemmas undergraduates encountered in UCSC-Links may relate to their years of experience in traditional Western formal school settings where hierarchical structures of teacher–student engagements are prevalent. In these school interactions, teachers are regarded as possessing expert knowledge that they are responsible for passing on to students, who 2 2 The names given to program participants other than the authors of this chapter are pseudonyms.

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may or may not be regarded as active in receiving this information (McCollum, 1989; Rogoff, Matusov, & White, 1996). Classroom interactions based on European American traditions are often organized hierarchically in dyadic fashion (even in the presence of multiple people), with the teacher controlling the flow of communication and the course of instruction (Cazden, 1979; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Mehan, 1979; Philips, 1983; Rogoff, Paradise, Mejía Arauz, Correa-Chávez, & Angelillo, 2003). Students are discouraged from seeking out information from other students (which may be considered cheating), as teachers are regarded as the appropriate sources of knowledge (Delgado-Gaitan & Trueba, 1985). Undergraduates’ familiarity with and use of hierarchical engagements in learning/teaching interactions in traditional Western schooling may conflict with the collaborative social organization aimed for in UCSC-Links activities. In schools, children’s participation is compulsory, whereas children’s participation in UCSC-Links was voluntary. Although schoolteachers teach children of similar ages in dyadic arrangements (including when one teacher addresses the whole class as one interlocutor), UCSC-Links involved undergraduates engaging together with children of differing ages and kinship relations in a variety of group compositions, notably multiparty interactions. In contrast to the prescribed curriculum of schools, UCSCLinks’ activities were improvisational in nature, flexible, and defined by the interests and needs of all participants, including children. The differences between the social organization of learning/teaching in schools and in UCSC-Links provided undergraduates with opportunities to reflect on their roles with children in the after-school program. In reflecting on their roles, undergraduates examined the cultural aspects of learning/teaching, including their own cultural assumptions, values, and beliefs.

UNDERGRADUATES’ ROLES IN UC-LINKS AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS The few studies that have examined undergraduates’ participation in UCLinks (“Fifth Dimension”) after-school programs have suggested that they initially experience disorientation in their roles in working with children (Blanton et al., 1998; Olt et al., n.d.). Olt, Gack, and Cole (n.d.) suggested that undergraduates undergo a process of enculturation, moving from initial confusion and uncertainty to becoming more resourceful participants and coming to see themselves as valued members of the culture of the afterschool program. Other research by Bielenberg (n.d.) has observed that over time undergraduates who initially directed children by using questions or “interrogations” later abandoned this adult-led questioning style, partly in response to children’s refusals to participate in such adult-led in-


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teractions. Undergraduates’ new approach provided children with more opportunities to initiate and shape the course of their engagements in the activities. Participation in UC-Links has also been related to changes in the ways preservice teachers conceive of teaching and learning. For example, Blanton et al. (1998) found that undergraduates who were preservice teachers started off their participation in a Fifth Dimension after-school program with “flawed” preconceptions of teaching/learning. On the basis of openended questionnaires administered at the beginning and at the end of a semester of participating in this Fifth Dimension program, they reported the following changes in undergraduates’ perspectives about teaching, learning, and students: This change is reflected by a movement away from beliefs that teaching is mainly the transmission of knowledge, learning is passive reception, and pupils should be sequestered and controlled to beliefs that teaching is organizing learning activity, learning is the social construction of meaning by active pupils, and success increases participation in learning activities. (p. 12)

The processes that may contribute to changes in the ways undergraduates think and participate in UC-Links seem consistent with the processes of conceptual changes that students undergo in other service learning programs in various fields (Davidson, 2002; Dreuth & Dreuth-Fewell, 2002; Matusov & Hayes, 2002; Roschelle, Turpin, & Elias, 2000; Stukas, Clary, & Snyder, 1999). As a number of scholars have found, students’ active engagement and critical reflection on their practical experiences and how these experiences relate to theory and research contributes to changes in their thinking and participation (Eyler, 2002; Klinger, 1999; Roschelle et al., 2000; Stukas et al., 1999). Involving students in service learning programs that emphasize critical reflection seems to shape students’ cognitive and socioemotional development (e.g., problem solving, decision making, motivation, selfesteem, career development) and contribute to helping and shaping the community in which they engage (Eyler, 2002; Roschelle et al., 2000; Stukas et al., 1999). Engaging in critical thinking with others (e.g., classmates, instructors, supervisors) about their experiences and relevant literature has occurred in venues such as class discussions, field notes, journals, papers, and portfolios. Undergraduates’ Dilemmas in UCSC-Links We use a sociocultural approach (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1997, 2003; Wenger, 1998) to examine undergraduates’ reflections on their dilemmas about their roles in engaging with predominantly Latino children in the UCSC-Links after-school program. In drawing on this approach, we regard

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their dilemmas as well as their other engagements as sociocultural in nature—expected processes of membership in emerging cultural communities. We view the dilemmas as important events in which undergraduates come to question, define, and modify their roles and responsibilities in their interactions with children. Their struggles with dilemmas seem to involve a transformation of understanding, values, beliefs, goals, and identities in cultural and institutional contexts. Through these processes, undergraduates continually discover and revise their roles and responsibilities, which also contributes to shaping the program.

UCSC-Links Activities and Participants Undergraduates of different cultural backgrounds (e.g., European American, Latino, Asian American) enrolled in UCSC-Links education or psychology classes linked to the after-school program. These undergraduates majored in psychology, literature, Latin American and Latino studies, computer science, and other areas, and many of them minored in education. The children attending the UCSC-Links after-school program were primarily Latino, living in low-income neighborhoods in Santa Cruz. They ranged in age from 2 to 17 years old. Many of the children spoke Spanish and English and were related to one another (e.g., cousins, siblings, uncles, aunts). The undergraduates and children engaged in various activities, such as computer games, searching the Internet, arts and crafts, homework, board games, reading, outdoor games, and field trips. Their engagements in these after-school activities were supported by project leaders (including ourselves as instructors and program coordinators), parents (who sometimes attended), and others such as site coordinators and bus drivers. The UCSCLinks after-school program ran 4 days per week during the academic year, with undergraduates attending for about 2 hours on two afternoons each week.

ANALYSIS OF UNDERGRADUATES’ DILEMMAS ABOUT THEIR ROLES The data for this study included undergraduates’ field notes and other written reflections about their engagements with children in UCSC-Links from 1996 to 2002, with approximately 12 to 32 undergraduates in a class per academic quarter. These reflections were posted on a privately accessed class website that served as a venue for class members (i.e., undergraduates and instructors and other project leaders) to discuss, examine, and question learning/teaching interactions in UCSC-Links. On the basis of these reflec-


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tions, we identified occasions in which undergraduates raised issues about, examined, or commented on dilemmas related to their roles in working with children. Undergraduates’ “Initial Thoughts” About Their Roles Undergraduates are often excited about participating in the UCSC-Links course experience. At the same time, many of them express initial concerns, uncertainties, questions, and goals about their roles with the children. For example, Judd, as a newcomer to UCSC-Links, expressed his expectations as well as his views about the dilemma of helping children while simultaneously examining learning/teaching interactions in the program: I have found that the college curriculum does not teach applications of knowledge very well. I’m more interested in the practical uses of knowledge than the academic/hypothetical understanding that most of my classes are focused on. When I got the flyer for this class, I could not believe it was true. I hope that I can see for myself what the nature of learning is. I’m very excited to be part of the ongoing effort to help children learn about new technology around them. The only conflict I see between my personal goals and the goals of this class is that I hope that I can observe the children carefully and still be helpful to them. What I mean is that I hope that it is possible to be both a psychologist and a friend/guider for the kids at the same time; they both seem like full-time jobs.

Another newcomer, Grace, wondered about how to make the experience in the after-school program (which she refers to as “curriculum”) meaningful and accessible to children and herself as a “teacher”: I wonder how I will be able to find ways to make the curriculum meaningful for myself and for the students [children]. Another question that comes to mind is how can a teacher possibly make the teachings meaningful for all students. Students’ point[s] of interest will be different and their modalities for learning will vary.

Even when undergraduates had participated previously in UCSC-Links and enrolled again in the course, they tended to express their hopes and interests about their roles in working with children. For example, Karla conveyed her interests and aims in helping children in activities using “guided participation”: I am so excited to be back . . . I was a preschool teacher for a year and have been a nanny for almost four years now. I am committed to making a difference in the lives of children. I would really like to focus on guided participation this quarter. I feel that this type of interacting proves most beneficial to

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children. I also know that a child’s sense of self competence is enhanced when he/she is an active and equal participant in a particular activity. I hope to foster a high self confidence and self respect within these children.

With instructors’ guidance, undergraduates built on their initial thoughts about their roles in working with children at the start of the academic quarter and drew on one another’s experiences and course readings to further articulate their ideas about roles over the course of their participation in UCSC-Links. As the next sections illustrate, many undergraduates had differing views about the emerging meanings of their roles in helping children in UCSC-Links activities. Undergraduates’ Questions About Their Roles Undergraduates often discussed their struggles about and varying positions on how they interpreted their roles in the informal learning context of UCSC-Links. For example, Julia contributed her views to a discussion among undergraduates and instructors about what undergraduates’ roles “should” be in the after-school program (referred to as “site”): Hi George, Debra, and Cindy [instructor], I’m going to write just a couple of comments about your web discussion. It is more interesting [to look at] your debate concerning the role of the undergrads at the site. George wrote: “Site is not intended to be some kind of mentoring place or teaching hour. It is a place to observe and record what we see and that’s it” while Debra and Cindy think that “Kids need us to help them understand something on the computer or with whatever they are working on. Don’t limit yourself to just observing them.” Well, it seems that all of you have pretty clear ideas of what we should be (observers vs. tutors/mentors) at the site. But why don’t you try to be a little flexible, accepting the fact that our role is not predetermined and it could vary with circumstances, people involved, contingent needs? Let me tell you, this is not an attempt to be diplomatic! I think that we miss something if we go to the site with such a previous statement (= “I have to be this or that”) in our mind. I know it’s not easy to free ourselves from our own pre-concepts, but I think this is an effort to do, especially working with kids. Please let me know what you think about it. Take care.

The debate about what roles undergraduates “should” assume with the children was often interwoven with discussions about the organizational structure of the informal learning context of UCSC-Links. Some undergraduates often contrasted the organizational structure of schools with that of UCSC-Links, considering the implications of these different participation


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structures for learning/teaching. For example, in reaction to Lino’s ideas about needing a “preset infrastructure” for productive learning, Alma wrote: I think you are right in that it is important to think about what our goals are and what our expectations are, but we have to be sure not to get too caught up in that. We [can’t] forget what the kids’ goals and expectations are too. For all we know, our goals and their goals could be totally different and trying to impose our goals through preset structures could create conflict and lack of motivation to participate and continue learning. I think that this is what happens to a lot of kids in jr. high school. Certain goals are being imposed on them, they are being told what they “should” be doing and what they “should” be learning and they decide that they [don’t] like learning, they [don’t] like school and [they don’t] feel that they are part of it. They are right, their [interests] and their goals are often forgotten by teachers and educators. In our [work] with the kids [we] are in the position in that we (unlike teachers) do not have a certain set of curricula that we have to get through during x amount of time. We [have] the space to create relationships with the kids, learn about what “their” interests and goals are and work with them from there. As I see it, there are some [inherent] dangers and also benefits with creating a preset structure. It is beneficial in that there is less room for disorganization and confusion, but I think that its [dangers] may be stronger in that it could lead the kids to not feel a part of the program and not be interested.

Other undergraduates made suggestions to classmates that their roles with children in the informal learning context of the UCSC-Links “should” be that of “friends” rather than “teachers” and that learning would occur naturally. For example, Marcia noted: The undergraduates in the UC links program need to remember what is was like to be a child. Due to the informal setting, the children view the undergraduates as friends, not as teachers, thus the undergraduates should act accordingly. They should decenter from the teacher role. The undergraduate’s purpose in the program is not to dispense their knowledge to the children, but rather to guide the children’s learning and overall development and provide a good role model as a representative of the university. This is not to say that the undergraduates will not educate the children. Learning will take place naturally within the interactions of the undergraduate and child, whether it be the learning of social skills or geography from the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” game. However, the undergraduates should not feel responsible for teaching the children something new.

As the next section demonstrates, undergraduates’ differing views about their roles with children in UCSC-Links were also reflected in the strategies they used in the after-school activities.

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Undergraduates’ Struggles With How to Help Children Undergraduates often grappled with how to help children while engaging with them in the various after-school activities. Undergraduates wanted to contribute to children’s learning and they wanted children to have fun. However, undergraduates at times had difficulties figuring out how to accomplish these goals while engaging with children. Examples of issues that came up included how much information they should provide children and how fluid their roles should be in the activities. Some undergraduates were concerned about how much help they should provide to children in the activities. For example, reflecting on class discussion, Alma shared her experience in helping children play the computer game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” Given that she wanted children to have fun and did not want to “interrupt” the playing of the game, she raised the question of how much help she should provide to children. In raising this question, she suggested that children learned when she provided responses to the clues in the game: On the one hand, I want the kids to learn and think, and on the other hand, I [don’t] want to interrupt the game, I want them to have fun. So—how much of the geography clues should I “give” them? So far I have just been helping them be able to play the game trying to get them to understand the reason why they might want to [remember] some of the clues that are given, rather than just [continually] asking me what the answer is, even if we have seen that same clue before. I think that they are [definitely] learning, even if I might tell them that the country whose flag is yellow, green, and blue is Brazil.

However, other undergraduates at times were uncertain about providing children with assistance, even though they and the children were struggling with the task at hand. For example, Lidia recounted her and another undergraduate’s hesitation in typing out a web address for a child, although the child was becoming increasingly frustrated. In reflecting on this event, Lidia also noted that they could have sought out assistance that was readily available from others: Not only was it difficult to find out what the name [of the website] was but once we figured that out the spelling was another hurdle all together. [Mark] and I allowed him to type in the name while we told him what letters to type. It was hard for us, partly because we weren’t sure if we should have been typing in for him, especially since he was becoming more and more frustrated at our inability to help him. When we found the right spelling, the pages were in Swedish so . . . needless to say, by the time I had to leave (sorry Mark) we [hadn’t] made much progress . . . I think that we should have asked for help from other students and perhaps from the other boy next to us who had in


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fact found the [skateboarder]. It [wasn’t] easy with him making fun of our boy for not being able to find the skateboarder.

Undergraduates also deliberated about how to interpret children’s requests for undergraduates to do the activity for them. For example, Julia shared her concerns about children “refusing” to sculpt a mask out of clay like the one she had made. She worried that children’s refusals to make their own mask and their requests that she make it for them indicated their lack of “independence.” However, two other undergraduates, Chad and Estela, provided alternative explanations, suggesting that it might be important to consider children’s interpretations of events in terms of relations between experts and novices. They suggested that children as novices might have been “intimidated” by Julia’s expertise. As she commented, Julia explored this interpretation in a subsequent interaction with another child: Reflecting on Chad and Estela’s interpretation, I thought about changing the approach in sculpting clay with the kids. . . . I’m pretty good in making masks just because I used to do them. I’m not a good sculpturist in general! So, I thought to put myself in the same condition of the kids. I told myself: “Next time, I will sculpt something difficult to me.” Then I thought we could sculpt something together, having previously chosen a model to copy. To start from the same point of departure it seemed to me the only way to avoid intimidating performance. Well, that’s just what I did with Andrea and it really seemed to work. Andrea wasn’t intimidated at all, on the contrary she was performing better than me . . . I hope to have the opportunity to use this approach [of] making clay [masks] with more “refusing” kids. I’m wondering what would happen.

In other situations, undergraduates reflected on the assistance they provided, considering alternative explanations as to why children might continually ask for help. For example, Karla wondered whether a child’s continual request for her help in playing a computer game might have been related to the child’s difficulties in reading. She noted, I don’t really know how to interpret this interaction because at first I thought that she was just being impatient and didn’t want to read the instructions, which, many kids do. But, as she continued to look to me for help every time text appear[ed] on the screen I began to wonder whether or not she could read. I really hope this was not the case and if it is I sincerely hope that I didn’t make her feel bad by encouraging her to read what was written. In the future I will be more aware of and be sensitive to this possibility.

When undergraduates appeared more confident about children’s skills in a task, they sometimes withheld help in certain ways to challenge the children in what undergraduates perceived to be important aspects of the

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task that would contribute to children’s learning. Often these situations involved undergraduates negotiating with children about what their and the children’s roles would be in accomplishing the task. For example, Alma did not want to read all parts of a computer game herself as the child had requested. Instead, she negotiated with the child to share responsibilities in reading. When I came in James was already playing Mid Night Rescue, a game that I had never seen or played before. I asked James what he was playing and he told me. I sat there watching for a minute and started to ask him questions about what he was doing and how the game worked. He would answer in short answers, not really giving me too much detail, just the basic answer. Pretty soon he asked me to read the passage that is required to be read in order to answer the question that will give the clue needed to catch the “[mischief] maker” in the school. I told James that I [would] help him read and suggested that we share the reading. He wanted no part of this. He wanted me to read the whole passage on my own. I suggested that he at least follow the words as I read and he replied with “I read all day at school and I am tired of reading now. You read!” I [agreed] that he had a point and realized that it was taking away from the game by trying to get him to read too. I was still trying to encourage him to read though by encouraging him when he would start reading on his own. He [could sense] that I wanted him to help me so he suggested that we make a deal, I read the passage and he would read and answer the question at the end (I now know from Judd [another undergraduate] that this is the same deal that they had come up with the week before). This seemed to work very well for a while.

The Fluidity of Undergraduates’ Roles Over time, as undergraduates continued their participation in UCSC-Links, they often reflected on the transformation of their perspectives on their roles in working with the children. Initially, many undergraduates drew on traditional school structures of participation, considering that they as adults would be the “teachers,” “experts,” or “mentors” and that the children would be the “learners” or “novices.” However, undergraduates soon realized that these roles often did not function in the informal learning context of UCSC-Links. Instead, undergraduates had to make adjustments in their roles to collaborate with children in the various activities. Undergraduates came to characterize their roles as fluid, changing with the situation, which often involved undergraduates becoming learners in their engagements with the children. For example, at the end of the quarter, Lynn reflected on her changing roles and views of learning/teaching in working with children in the various UCSC-Links activities:


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Before I started going to site, I expected most of the time I would be acting as a mentor to the kids. I thought I would be assisting them in their homework and helping to facilitate group games. I didn’t see myself specifically teaching the kids, but I guess I though[t] I would play the role of a more knowledgeable older peer. Because I knew the program would take place in an informal setting, I expected that children would be able to choose among activities they wish to participate in and it wasn’t going to be an adult-run program. Although I knew the program was informal, my first impressions were that it lacked structure. I began to wonder if true learning could happen in such situations and I [have] seen that although it may not be clearly spell[ed] out as learning, [in] some form or another learning is occurring in almost all the activities that went on at site. This has expanded my view of what learning is. . . . It’s so ingrained in me to associate learning with school even though so much of what I learned in school had very little real-world relevance to me. School and life outside of school were two separate bubbles and not much permeated between the two. . . . I realized that my role was not as clearly defined as I expected it to be, and that I was not restricted to a mentor/tutor. My roles changed often and I think most of the time I was a peer (not a mentor) in an activity. At other times, I was the learner, and this also came as a surprise to me.

In response to an undergraduate who was concerned about how to achieve the “right” interactions with children, Lidia, who was in her second quarter as an undergraduate participant in the program, shared her views about the fluid nature of undergraduates’ roles in their work with the children. Lidia also acknowledged that these interactional processes among undergraduates and children might involve learning that was not always explicitly evident in the “moment”: I don’t think there is such [a] thing as a “perfect” or more precisely, a correct type of interaction. In my opinion, our role here at site is fluid, it changes with every situation, and in the end something (whether consciously or unconsciously) is taken away from the interaction. While overall I hope to give the kids something positive to take away from their interaction with me and the program, I try to come to site as open to anything as possible rather than to expect to be the expert or just an observer. This is my second time around so it is much more obvious to me that in interactions the identity of expert/novice is always shifting, never constant. . . . While it is necessary for them [children] to understand that as an adult I have some authority, I like to be viewed as a peer that they can come to talk with, learn from, teach, have fun with! It all comes together somehow, it just may not feel like it sometime[s].

Another undergraduate, Grace, described her transformation in expectations and roles as moving away from relying on an “adult-run” approach to learning/teaching because children had ended up walking away from her when she used this approach. She noted that children served as re-

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sources to one another and she was often the learner in her interactions with children: I learned that I had to put [aside] all my expectations of how this class [was] going to be run and just go with the flow. This was actually very helpful to me. It allowed me to relax and enjoy the time I spent at [UCSC-Links]. The children are wonderful and I saw their abilities in the computer games soar. The children used each other as resources in furthering their [progress] in the games. The first day I went to the computer lab I was so ready to interact with the children in a way that I thought would be appropriate. This would be an adultrun approach. That day I realized that this method was not the method I should continue to use if I wanted to play the games with the children. The children I talked to on that day got up and walked away from me after I hounded them with questions. I would have done the same if I was in their shoes. I [thought] I was going in [there] with more knowledge than them about computers, boy was I wrong. I learned a lot about the different games and how to play them from the children. I enjoyed working with the kids and hope to continue next quarter if possible.

In all, it appeared that through their participation in UCSC-Links activities, many undergraduates expanded their understanding of roles beyond those associated with traditional Western formal schooling where adults direct children’s learning. As they often adopted multiple roles, even within a single activity, they came to view the value of flexibly defining the nature of their roles as they engaged with the children. They became more comfortable with uncertainties about how the activity might unfold, realizing that all things did not need to be “predetermined” and that they did not have to “teach” for learning to happen. As Julia indicated at the end of the quarter, I agree with those who feel that part of our role was just discovering what our role was. And, I add, becom[ing] conscious of the fact that my role of an educator, in an educational setting, is not previously determined and must be flexible. We have been observers, mentors, play companions, teachers, babysitters, helpers, cleaners . . . sometimes we just have been nothing more than ourselves . . . with our un-answerable questions and our weakness. Above all we have been, and we are, learners.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Undergraduates drew on their initial expectations, hopes, and interests in working with predominantly Latino children as they attempted to figure out their roles in the UCSC-Links after-school program. Many undergraduates encountered dilemmas that prompted them to question their roles with children, including the amount and kinds of help they should offer. Initially,


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they perceived their roles as unilateral and “fixed,” with them directing children’s engagements in the activities. However, with increasing participation in UCSC-Links, they became more comfortable collaborating with children, defining their roles more fluidly. Given the dynamic nature of the circumstances and situations that define program activities, undergraduates often assumed multiple roles within a single activity. Undergraduates’ dilemmas about their roles in the after-school program may relate to their reliance on transmission approaches to learning/teaching prevalent in traditional Western schooling (Blanton et al., 1998). In relying on these approaches, undergraduates attempted to assume “control,” leaving little room for children’s contributions to the various aspects of decision making in the activities. However, these attempts to “control” children’s activities often failed in the informal context of an after-school program committed to building on children’s interests, needs, and ways of engaging with others. In the after-school program, children were free to select and create alternative activities and to choose alternative partners, which may have conflicted with undergraduates’ attempts to “direct” children’s engagements. For example, many children did not hesitate to leave an activity when undergraduates took over the activity by telling children what to do or interrogating them (see Bielenberg, n.d.). Yet undergraduates persisted in trying to figure out how to be helpful to the children. Using relevant literature on sociocultural approaches to learning/teaching (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978), they reflected with one another and project leaders (e.g., via in-class and web discussions), seeking to make sense of their experiences and find ways to modify their engagements to better support their collaboration with the children. This process of critical reflection was facilitated by participants engaging as a “community of learners” in both the class and the afterschool program activities (A. L. Brown & Campione, 1990; Rogoff et al., 2001). In line with this approach, all participants are considered to be resources in one another’s learning, and dilemmas are regarded as important and expected learning/teaching moments that contribute to shaping participants’ understanding and participation. Undergraduates’ dilemmas about their roles served as productive opportunities to critically reflect on their learning/teaching interactions with children. In fact, critical reflection has been identified as a vital aspect of deepening students’ understanding of the relations between theory, research, and practice in other service learning programs across disciplines such as education, social work, peace and justice studies, and medicine (Davidson, 2002; Dreuth & Dreuth-Fewell, 2002; Eyler, 2002; Klinger, 1999; Matusov & Hayes, 2002; Roschelle et al., 2000). In reflecting on undergraduates’ dilemmas about their roles in working with children, we do not regard undergraduates’ reliance on transmission approaches to teaching/learning as “flawed,” as Blanton et al. (1998) sug-

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gested. A transmission approach is one of many approaches to learning/ teaching that some people value and make use of in specific contexts (e.g., traditional Western schooling). We think that becoming knowledgeable and skillful in different approaches to learning/teaching expands participants’ (including undergraduates’) repertoire of engagements, which may help provide them with alternatives for working in different cultural and institutional contexts (Chavajay & Rogoff, 2002; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). We take the position that undergraduates are continually engaged in dynamic, recursive, and negotiative processes of interpreting and reinterpreting their approaches to learning/teaching as they make sense of their experiences in the various after-school activities with children, other undergraduates, project leaders, and other community members. Undergraduates’ (and other participants’) understanding of learning/teaching changes in multiple directions, sometimes reflecting tensions between collaborative approaches and transmission approaches to learning/teaching. When undergraduates come to learn how to engage collaboratively in UCSC-Links (or other contexts), we do not assume that difficulties, struggles, concerns, and questions about their and other participants’ roles in learning/teaching disappear. Cultural activity is ever changing, and new understandings bring new dilemmas. In our work in the UCSC-Links after-school program, we favored collaborative approaches to learning/teaching because we found that transmission approaches constrained children’s participation in activities, overlooking their potential contributions and the funds of knowledge of their communities (Moll, Tapia, & Whitmore, 1993). Through collaborative engagements, undergraduates and children (and other participants) took active and flexible roles in helping one another learn, building on the resources of all participants. Such collaboration-based engagements with children may be productive in other settings, including schools (e.g., Rogoff et al., 2001). Indeed, we know of occasions when teachers, community members, and others have engaged in similar collaborations (see Willett & Rosenberger, chap. 10, this volume). Our experiences suggest that undergraduates of diverse backgrounds benefited in many ways through participating in the UCSC-Links classes and after-school program. These contexts provided them with many opportunities to participate in and reflect on “real-life” engagements with predominantly Latino children, their families, other undergraduates, project leaders, and other participants. With the help and support of project leaders, undergraduates engaged in recursive processes of questioning and making meaning of their roles over the course of their participation in the program, taking into account different participants’ cultural values, beliefs, and goals. Through this process, undergraduates examined their own cultural as-


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sumptions about learning/teaching and the ways in which these assumptions shaped and were shaped by their engagements with children and others. These experiences point to the importance of connecting theory, research, and practice in helping undergraduates develop deeper understandings of learning/teaching in cultural context. Such learning is essential for the development of educators and other learning/teaching professionals interested in working with children of diverse cultural backgrounds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are very grateful to the UCSC undergraduates, the children and their families, and the supportive staff who participated in the UCSC-Links AfterSchool Project. Eugene Matusov contributed significantly to getting the project underway, sharing in dilemmas and their analyses with us and other participants. Our collaboration with all of the participants invaluably contributed to insights about the cultural aspects of learning/teaching. This research was supported by grants from the University of California Office of the President.

REFERENCES Bielenberg, B. (n.d.). Collaborating towards improved learning: Interactional events in an afterschool, technology-based program. The Virtual Fifth Dimension Clearinghouse and Propagation Center. Retrieved October 2000 from http://129.171.53.1/blantonw/5dClhse/publications/ tech/interactional.html Blanton, W. E., Moorman, G. B., Hayes, B. A., & Warner, M. L. (1997). Effects of participation in the Fifth Dimension on far transfer. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 16, 371–396. Blanton, W. E., Warner, M., & Simmons, E. (1998). The Fifth Dimension: Application of culturalhistorical activity theory, inquiry-based learning, computers, and telecommunications to change prospective teachers’ preconceptions. The Virtual Fifth Dimension Clearinghouse and Propagation Center. Retrieved October 2000 from http://129.171.53.1/blantonw/5dClhse/publications/tech/effects/undergraduates.html Brown, A. L., & Campione, J. C. (1990). Communities of learning and thinking, or a context by any other name. In D. Kuhn (Ed.), Developmental perspectives on teaching and learning thinking skills (pp. 108–126). Contributions in Human Development, Vol. 21. Basel, Switzerland: Karger. Brown, K., & Cole, M. (2002). Cultural historical activity theory and the expansion of opportunities for learning after school. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learning for life in the 21st century: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education (pp. 225–238). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cazden, C. B. (1979). Classroom discourse. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chavajay, P., & Rogoff, B. (2002). Schooling and traditional collaborative social organization of problem solving by Mayan mothers and children. Developmental Psychology, 38, 55–66. Davidson, R. A. (2002). Community-based education and problem-solving: The community health scholars program at the University of Florida. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 14, 178–181.

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Delgado-Gaitan, C., & Trueba, H. T. (1985). Ethnographic study of participant structures in task completion: Reinterpretation of “handicaps” in Mexican children. Learning Disability Quarterly, 8, 67–75. Dreuth, L., & Dreuth-Fewell, M. (2002). A model of student learning in community service field placements. Active Learning in Higher Education, 3, 251–264. Erickson, F., & Mohatt, G. (1982). The cultural organization of participation structures in two classrooms of Indian students. In G. Spindler (Ed.), Doing the ethnography of schooling (pp. 132–174). New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Eyler, J. (2002). Reflection: Linking service and learning—Linking students and communities. Journal of Social Issues, 58, 517–534. Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32, 19–25. Klinger, T. (1999). Applying sociocultural psychology to the service-learning experience: Service-learning as a pedagogical tool for developing critical thinking in college students. Korean Journal of Thinking & Problem Solving, 9, 25–37. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Matusov, E., & Hayes, R. (2002). Building a community of educators versus effecting conceptual change in individual students: Multicultural education for pre-service teachers. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learning for life in the 21st century: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education (pp. 238–251). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mayer, R. E., Quilici, J., Moreno, R., Duran, R., Woodbridge, S., Simon, R., Sanchez, D., & Lavezzo, A. (1997). Cognitive consequences of participation in a “Fifth Dimension” after-school computer club. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 16, 353–369. McCollum, P. (1989). Turn-allocation in lessons with North American and Puerto Rican students: A comparative study. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 20, 133–156. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moll, L. C., Tapia, J., & Whitmore, K. F. (1993). Living knowledge: The social distribution of cultural resources for thinking. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 139–163). New York: Cambridge University Press. Olt, A., Gack, V., & Cole, M. (n.d.). Enculturation. The Virtual Fifth Dimension Clearinghouse and Propagation Center. Retrieved October 2000 from http://129.171.53.1/blantonw/5dClhse/publications/concept/Olt-Gack.html Philips, S. (1983). The invisible culture: Communication in classroom and community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Rogoff, B. (1997). Cognition as a collaborative process. In W. Damon (Series Ed.) & D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler (Vol. Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (pp. 679–744). New York: Wiley. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B., Goodman Turkanis, C., & Bartlett, L. (2001). Learning together: Children and adults in a school community. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B., Matusov, E., & White, C. (1996). Models of learning and teaching: Participation in a community of learners. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The handbook of education and human development: New models of learning, teaching, and schooling (pp. 388–414). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Mejía Arauz, R., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 175–203. Roschelle, A. R., Turpin, J., & Elias, R. (2000). Who learns from service learning? American Behavioral Scientist, 43, 839–847. Schustack, M. W., Strauss, R., & Worden, P. E. (1997). Learning about technology in a noninstructional environment. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 16, 337–351.


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Stukas, A. A., Clary, E. G., Jr., & Snyder, M. (1999). Service learning: Who benefits and why. Social Policy Report (Society for Research in Child Development), 13(4), 1–19. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.


C H A P T E R

9 From an Ethic of Altruism to Possibilities of Transformation in Teacher Candidates’ Community Involvement R. Patrick Solomon Randa Khattar Manoukian Jennifer Clarke York University

Building authentic linkages between educational institutions and the communities they serve has become an ongoing concern in the current era of educational reform in North American school jurisdictions. At the primary level schools use their communities as curriculum resource, whereas at the secondary level community involvement or service is rapidly becoming a requirement for graduation. At the postsecondary and professional education levels the community has become a site of choice for more authentic, interactive, and experiential education. Over the past few decades teacher educators have become conscious of the community’s potential to prepare its teachers not only for a culturally relevant pedagogy but also for civic responsibility, social justice education, and democratic schooling. In this chapter, we examine the themes that emerged when teacher candidates enrolled in a preservice teacher preparation program engaged in community-based activities1 as an extension of their school and classroom practicum. To make sense of these themes, we use the conceptual framework of Kahne and Westheimer (1996). This framework helps us consider questions about teacher candidates’ perceptions of their community placements, their motivations and goals, and the social relations they develop within the communities served by their practicum schools. More specifi1

Community-based activities are variously labeled as community involvement (or CI), service learning, community-referenced learning, community field experience, and community-situated learning. We use these terms interchangeably throughout this chapter. 1

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cally, we explore how teacher candidates construct meanings from the two conceptions of experiential work in communities—the learning aspect and the serving aspect; how teacher candidates engage with communities that are simultaneously culturally rich and economically poor; and how they struggle with and move beyond dominant-group, middle-class biases and unproductive stereotypes they may have of inner-city communities to work for transformation. This analysis of teacher candidates’ perspectives provides insights into how candidate engagement may foster transformative links between schools and communities and help foster a culturally relevant pedagogy.

SOME THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS Proponents of service learning contend that field-based engagement provides experiential education that can increase learners’ knowledge about democratic politics and civic responsibility and change learners’ frames of reference by making them more aware of their own cultural assumptions, enhancing their critical thinking, helping them make links between theory and practice, and engaging students and schools with communities (Hunter & Brisbin, 2000). The teacher education literature points to such engagement as the most cogent way to develop culturally relevant pedagogy (Boyle-Baise, 1998; Hollins, 1996; Ladson-Billings, 1995). These educators, among others, argue that learning to teach competently and knowledgeably in schools with students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds requires that teachers learn intimately about the communities from which these students come. Such teacher learning should not be restricted to auditing community needs, as is common practice when middle-class teachers go into inner-city centers, but should also engage teachers in a critical analysis of the socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors that have given rise to such conditions. Further, conscious political intervention and social transformation can emerge only from critical inquiry that accounts for the ways in which school culture is embedded in actual communities and at the same time affects the very communities out of which it emerges. This paradigm shift in field-based preservice teacher education from being limited to practica in schools and classrooms to including experiential learning in communities has been informed by a number of philosophical positions that advocate a symbiotic relationship between schools and the communities they serve. Dewey’s (1900) progressive movement in education advocates active and constructive participation in the community, which is both experiential and problem-oriented and can generate solutions to complex problems. Lave’s notion of situated learning in communities of practice or

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situated social practices in the community (Lave, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991) resonates with Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of contextually based educational practices. These notions are further reinforced by Paulo Freire’s (1970/1996) critical pedagogical approaches that focus on addressing individual and community needs through political action designed to transform. Such philosophical positions have given rise to a variety of service learning practices and models in teacher education. These include culturally relevant pedagogies with “cultural synchronization” between school, home, and community (Irvine, 1989; Ladson-Billings, 1995); service work (Narode, Rennie-Hill, & Peterson, 1994; Tellez, Hlebowitsh, Cohen, & Harwood, 1995); and reciprocity in learning environments, with each setting (e.g., school, university, and community) informing and transforming the others (Howard, 1998). But as research on these orientations reveals, there are longstanding structural problems in the community that cannot be quickly addressed through short-term interventions of preservice teachers. Thus, the focus of service-referenced learning is not primarily on immediately changing social contexts but rather on raising teacher candidates’ consciousness and sensitivity to the need for such transformation. In their article “In the Service of What?: The Politics of Service Learning,” Kahne and Westheimer (1996) proposed that students’ perceptions of service learning can evolve from either a charity orientation or a change orientation (see Table 9.1). They conceptualize these two social-psychological frameworks in three key domains: moral, political, and intellectual. When service learning goals, and the curriculum that evolves from them, are pursued in the spirit of charity, the focus in the moral domain is on “giving,” that is, the provision of service to clients. In the political domain, the goal of charity is the kind of socialization that emphasizes good and responsive citizenship, altruism, volunteerism, civic responsibility, and “compassion for the less fortunate” (Kahne & Westheimer, 1996, p. 595). In the intellectual domain, charity goals focus on additive experience, which “might lead to service learning activities that raise self-esteem [and] impel students into new experiences, and demonstrate the value of scholastic abilities in real world contexts” (p. 598). Here, community involvement is seen more as one of many scholastic requirements that students must complete, and less as a constitutive part of their education. TABLE 9.1 Service Learning Goals

Charity Change

Moral

Political

Intellectual

Giving Caring

Civic duty Social reconstruction

Additive experience Transformative experience

Note. Adapted from Kahne and Westheimer (1996, p. 595), with permission.

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On the other hand, when service goals are pursued in the spirit of change, the moral imperative is on developing caring relationships and understanding the reality of “the other” through experiencing it (“walking a mile in another’s shoes”). In the political domain, change goals are directed at active participation as a democratic process, critical reflection on social structures, and the development of skills for intervening and forming social bonds. In the intellectual domain, the change goal and its attendant curriculum combine critical inquiry with action to produce transformation. Emphasized here is the learner’s understanding of “both disciplinary knowledge and particular social issues with which they are engaged” (Kahne & Westheimer, 1996, p. 595). Indeed, Kahne and Westheimer pointed out that the goals of charity and change and the moral, political, and intellectual domains in which they operate are by no means discrete categories and may, in fact, intertwine. They also indicated that service learning can address specific priorities such as the acquisition of vocational skills. Throughout their work, they emphasized the importance of combining service with critical analysis for desired transformative effects. In their words, “It is the combination of service and critical analysis, not either by itself, that seems most likely to promote interest in and insights into these complex social issues” (p. 598).

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT In this chapter, we apply Kahne and Westheimer’s conceptual model to the perspectives and practices of teacher candidates enrolled in a preservice teacher education program at a university located in Toronto, Canada. Community involvement has been an essential component of York University’s Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program since its inception in 1994. This and other features of the program were communicated to admitted candidates through the following notification: [Metro Toronto Sites] fully integrate into all aspects of their program the Faculty’s commitment to equity, diversity and social justice. In addition, candidates at all [Metro] sites do their practicum placements in schools served by these sites. An essential dimension of this practicum is a community involvement program in the geographic community served by the practicum school.2 2

This notification was mailed by York University, Faculty of Education, Office of Student Programs (Admissions), to all successful applicants to its five Metropolitan Toronto sites. A choice of sites and a returned signature form indicated that the applicants had an understanding of the program they were signing up to enter. 2


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Each year the program accepts approximately 70 teacher candidates (TCs) representing a diversity of groups according to race, culture, ethnicity, immigrant status, language, religion, and social class. Students’ practicum placements are often in the city’s most economically needy inner-city communities, characterized by government-assisted housing, high unemployment, poverty, and a transient population. By the same token, these communities are culturally rich and diverse and reflect Canada’s multicultural, multilingual, and multifaith heritage. Part of the Urban Diversity Program’s commitment to its teacher candidates and to teacher education is its ongoing emphasis on critical inquiry into its own innovative practices. This investigative process is intended to improve practice and inform the field at large. For this chapter, we base our discussion on the themes that emerged from a 2-year (2001–2003) study of two cohorts of the Urban Diversity Program that participated in community involvement activities as part of their extended practicum. Data sources were: (a) monthly written reflections on activities, (b) focus group interviews with selected TCs, and (c) a sample of praxis papers that integrate the theory and practice of their involvement. Information gathered from these sources was coded for recurring and emergent themes. The dominant themes emerging from this study are related to teacher candidates’ conceptions of community involvement as charity and service work, and community involvement for community transformation. Throughout the preservice year, theoretical, methodological, and logistical orientations to community involvement were introduced and elaborated on in such courses as Social and Cultural Foundations of Education, Models of Education, and the Practicum Seminar. Community involvement principles and practices were integrated into the entire program to emphasize the importance of culturally relevant pedagogy in learning to teach. In the foundational dimension of the curriculum, candidates were introduced to the study of the social, cultural, political, and economic forces in the larger community that affect the pedagogical process; the concept of community-based teacher education with unique service as well as learning aspects; and theory–practice linkages, critical reflective practice, and an evaluation process that provides the structure for candidates to think, talk, and write (O’Grady, 2000). Constitutive to the program is a commitment to reflective practices— both written and oral—that allow teacher candidates to revisit their experiences on an ongoing basis. Reflective practices are embedded throughout the Urban Diversity curriculum. Teacher candidates are encouraged to reflect on their involvement by talking with their peers and instructors and by writing monthly observations on their field experiences. In addition to these less formal occasions for reflection, the year-long Practicum Seminar course provides teacher candidates with the critical, social, and emotional

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space to explore how their dispositions toward community involvement influence the changing ways in which they perceive their engagement in their placements. A supervisor guides the teacher candidates by resourcing, supporting, monitoring, mentoring, regulating, and documenting their activities. Through reflective practices, teacher candidates confront difficult knowledge that impels them to question their worldviews, their notions of relationality, and their conceptions of the ways in which social attitudes and behaviors toward race, social class and poverty, gender, and sexual orientation affect their own interaction with urban communities. Such documenting and sharing of experiences is intended to sharpen insights, foster critical analyses, and explore new ways of changing situations for the benefit of the community. To help them explore schools and communities as sites of inquiry, teacher candidates (TCs) are provided with orientation to basic teacher-asresearcher skills. Such skills enable candidates to conduct basic demographic studies of communities served by their practicum schools, an assessment of community needs and their impact on the schooling process, an audit of the cultural resources of the community, and basic data-gathering research using such techniques as interviewing, observation, document study, and administering survey questionnaires. Throughout this research process, TCs are urged to bracket their assumptions about communities to ensure some level of objectivity in the research process. Candidates are required to invest 6 hours per month in their field sites. In this study, candidates engaged in a range of activities that we categorize as educational, recreational, health, social, and cultural. In the educational category are such projects as homework clubs, remedial clubs, tutoring programs, early literacy activities, and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs. The projects have unique features as evidenced in their names: Studies and Stuff is a homework program with a recreational component; Students & Parents Together involves children and their parents receiving support with homework activities; Rap & Read involves immigrant children in literacy events where readings are converted into rap music form; and Literacy Circle focuses on various types of literature appropriate for student reading levels. In the health and safety category, there are a number of breakfast and snack programs that provide and emphasize nutritional meals for students. These programs provide the opportunity for teacher candidates to interact socially and academically with students, teachers, and parents. The recreational programs include arts and crafts, drama, sports, and “Cooking for Kids.” The knitting club assists students in making mittens and hats that are donated to the Out of the Cold program. In the day care program, preschoolers are provided stimulating, age-appropriate educational and recreational activities. The Women’s Shelter program has as its clients women


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and children fleeing domestic violence. Here candidates engage in a tutorial program for the children. These programs often respond to more than the explicit needs indicated by project titles. For example, the ESL Project provides adult immigrants and refugees with support to locate and use community resources that help them resettle in their new communities. Although they recognize the need to participate in preexisting programs located in the communities served by their practicum school (some of which were developed by members of previous teacher candidate cohorts), many students developed novel projects based on their assessment of the community’s needs and resources.

DIMENSIONS OF TEACHER CANDIDATES’ LEARNING IN COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT The findings reveal that the candidates experienced a range of learning from their community involvement experiences, most salient of which were: (a) learning about themselves (self-knowledge) and the ways in which their social identities affect their interaction with urban communities; (b) learning about and from students in the context of their home communities; and (c) learning about and from communities and cultures in which they were involved. In these activities, teacher candidates struggled to problematize the learning that Kahne and Westheimer articulated as additive experience to begin moving toward learning as a transformative experience. Yet their learning also involved resistance to difficult knowledge that unsettled their complacency about notions of self, “other,” and the world. One teacher candidate revealed a glimpse of these conflicting emotional and psychological understandings in the following reflection: Upon beginning my community placement, I believed that my community service placement would be the most burdensome task. . . . Now, in a moment of self-reflective honesty, [I recognize that] my initial resistance to my community placement was rooted in the fact that I am in the process of learning how to be an educator and feel ill equipped to tutor others while in the midst of being taught myself. . . . I was fearful that my shortcomings as an aspiring educator would be uncovered by other professionals, thus making me look foolish. Furthermore, I must admit that I seldom engage in any form of activity where I do not have a great sense of control or power. Through my community placement, I realized that power must be acknowledged internally before it can effect change externally.

The following are descriptions of teacher candidates’ narratives that illustrate how these and other processes are implicated in teacher candidates’ learning.

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Learning About Self or the Expansion of Self-Awareness Many teacher candidates entering the program expected that they would learn “the transmission of information to students,” as one student commented, or the “ ‘managing’ [of] the students and their homework,” as another wrote. Through service learning opportunities, teacher candidates began to critique these expectations, problematize their perceptions of community involvement, and allow themselves to “surpass the traditional notions of teacher education . . . to take ownership of [their] own learning,” as one TC noted. Integral to the program is a commitment to reflective practices—both written and oral—that allow teacher candidates to revisit their experiences on an ongoing basis. Through these reflections, teacher candidates become personally implicated in “the sheer complexity of emotional, political, philosophical, bias-related reflection and introspection,” as one wrote. As they confront the social realities of racism, poverty, and sexism and explore how their own social identities affect their interaction with urban communities, teacher candidates grapple with difficult knowledge that impels them to question their worldviews, their notions of relationality, and their selfconceptions. One teacher candidate remarked: I have always thought myself to be a relatively unbiased individual, free of the bonds of racism and prejudice, but I have only recently started to come to grips with what it means to be a middle-class, white Canadian. I have neglected to recognize the power I inadvertently hold, and consequently the possibility that exists that I might come to abuse that power in my classroom.

Another reflected: When I became aware of, and set aside, my white middle class, teacher persona and let myself be taught by the students, I learned more about the community dynamics that in turn, work to inform my role as a teacher.

The need for practicing and prospective teachers to engage in explorations of self-knowledge is well documented in the literature on teaching and teacher education (James-Wilson, 2003; Loughran & Russell, 2002; Solomon & Levine-Rasky, 2003). Learning about oneself in ways that stretch imagination and awareness both personally and professionally allows teacher candidates to become aware of themselves “as dominant group, middle class professionals [whose locations] often separate them from the workingclass, inner city, culturally diverse communities in which they work” (Solomon & Levine-Rasky, 2003). This awareness makes visible the heterogeneous communities in which they work and helps them develop a sensitivity to difference that is heightened through reflective practices that “may stimulate


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the kinds of questions and insights that lead students to improved problem solving and new ways of looking at the world” (Eyler & Giles, 1999, p. 174). Being open to learning about and from the students with whom candidates are involved also facilitates this developing awareness. Learning About and From Students in Their Community Context Through their community-based experiences, teacher candidates learn about students in their cultural context. Engaging with students within community contexts helps teacher candidates distinguish between the sort of learning that young people can engage in within the confines of the classroom and that which they have the opportunity to explore within the informal settings of their community activities. One TC noted: I was able to take their interests, cultures and beliefs and integrate them in the classroom curriculum. I learned quite a bit about their lives, interests, cultures, values, hobbies, beliefs, dislikes and languages. When you are in a formal classroom setting there is not enough time to get to know each and every one of your students on an intimate level. My community placement has helped me to gain the insight into what it takes to establish a bond with students and making learning fun.

Within community-based activities, teacher candidates “learn the language (streets and body) of the students,” deepen their awareness of the ways in which “a teacher’s job does not end at the sound of the bell or at the edge of the school property,” become sensitive to the ways in which “judgments and assumptions can be avoided because teachers are aware of where the students are coming from.” Although learning about students helps beginning teachers develop initial knowledge about the sociocultural and economic contexts in which their students are positioned, they deepen their domain knowledge, empathy, and insight by moving to learn from their students. Teacher candidates reported that this complementary dimension of their learning is invaluable as they learn how to become better learners themselves, engage in deepened relationships with students and the communities they belong to, and begin to challenge their own assumptions about students: Learning continues throughout our students’ day-to-day routines, as do the influences of our teaching practices, including the way we structure the school work that our students take home. They bring our influence with them in their backpacks. If we wish this influence to be effective, we must weigh the atmosphere in which it will be unpacked.

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The value of learning about and from students in the context of their communities is documented in the research on service learning. If teachers become acquainted with students’ cultural differences, they begin to understand the efficacy of service learning as a theoretical and practical “antiprejudice tool” (Erickson & O’Connor, 2000, p. 59) that works to impel movements of social justice and equity. Also, by becoming more sensitive to “the needs of students in markedly different ways rather than on maintaining the status quo” (Guadarrama, 2000, p. 233), they begin to see themselves as role models whose work can empower students. Learning about students “not as isolated individuals . . . but as members of total family and community environments” (Zeichner & Melnick, 1996, p. 176) helps emergent teachers view education as a collaborative holistic process in which they work with parents and community members to engage in work that might help reduce the widening differences between privileged and disenfranchised sectors of society. Community Practice: Learning About and From the Community The findings reveal that teacher candidates struggle with their learning as they vacillate between perceiving the community as culturally rich and economically poor. As indicated earlier, community involvement opens up opportunities for teacher candidates to grapple with the socioeconomic contexts of the inner-city communities from which their students come. This involvement also helps them develop an awareness of the cultural resources, knowledge, and partnerships communities can provide for teachers. One candidate put it this way: As a teacher it is imperative that we find ways to develop relationships with parents, families and community members. Understanding the many influences in the lives of children can help teachers develop curriculum that is meaningful and relevant to student learning. . . . In order to learn about students, teachers need to be able to develop trusting relationships with not only their students but with the people who influence students’ lives.

For teacher candidates, participating in community involvement activities often means that they begin to understand the relationship between their schools and the community in more collaborative ways. This way of thinking is embedded in the physical, ecological, and social space of the community within which the school is located—a community to which they can turn as a guide, a resource, and a partner in teaching. As one teacher candidate reflected, “Prior to this course I would have thought of a school as a building within a community. I now think of the community as being in the school.” Teacher candidates reported that community involvement


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leads to “the development of teaching practices which are responsive to the needs of the community.” This helps them understand how schools could better serve the students and their communities. They also begin to see their teaching practices implicated in their sense of self. One teacher candidate noted: As a teacher if I do not take the time to learn from my community I will become a burden to my classroom. I will be a burden because I will not understand where my students come from and how I can best reach them and their families. If I simply drove to my school each day and returned home at the end of the day I would bring nothing to my classroom. My placement has allowed me the opportunity to grow a foundation for my practice.

In the same vein, teacher candidates’ experiences raise their sense of awareness about the many forms of injustice that proliferate within the service learning communities and the inequities that thrive in society. This teacher candidate explained: I have since learned as a result of the community project that there are many subtle and not so subtle ways in which children’s education is compromised because of the lack of willingness on the part of educators, the education system and society at large to acknowledge that inequity, racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and discrimination do not stop at the school doors. For this reason it is vital that teacher candidates learn first hand and from the people in the community what needs to be done to ensure that schools serve the community better.

Candidates reported that their experience in the program made them more aware of the problems that are faced within inner-city communities and provided them with the impetus, desire, and knowledge to move toward sustainable and viable alternatives for change directed at actual problems faced in the community: Community involvement helps teachers see the problems that are within the community which in turn can help us effect change through our classroom teachings by bringing up topics that may not necessarily be of comfort, but by doing so helps to create an environment that is open to change and to finding out what the equity, diversity and social justice needs of the classroom are.

These findings point to the tensions that teacher candidates in poor and working-class communities confront. On the one hand, they see the community as “a curriculum resource”; on the other hand, they struggle to make sense of their own positions within communities that are poor and their own assumptions about what they can learn from and contribute to such communities.

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To summarize, through their community involvement experiences, teacher candidates struggle with the challenges of gaining a wealth of personal and professional understandings; they learn how to integrate what they learn about their students with what they learn from them; and they recognize the invaluable richness of collaborating with the communities as resources and as partners in learning. Most compelling is teacher candidates’ emerging awareness of community involvement learning as an experiential endeavor that cannot be confined within the classroom walls, but rather must take into account the communities in which students are socialized and to which they turn to interpret their experiences.

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT: CHARITY WORK OR POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT We turn our focus to the meanings candidates construct about what constitutes community involvement. Central to this section is an exploration of candidates’ dominant middle-class biases, their attitudes toward and perceptions of inner-city centers, their discomfort with and resistance to “communities of difference,” and the paradigm shift that often occurs as they vacillate between an ethic of volunteerism and opportunities for change with the potential to lead to personal and professional transformation and a culturally relevant pedagogy. Similarly, we explore the struggles, tensions, and contradictions that occur as teacher candidates move from an exploration of teaching as an academically oriented enterprise toward a conception of teaching as a political project. Community Involvement as Charity Work Teacher candidates’ reflections on community involvement reveal that many initially saw these projects as an opportunity to volunteer rather than an opportunity to transform. As illustrated in the following excerpt, an emphasis on altruism pervades many teacher candidates’ attitudes and perceptions about communities: I am seeing the benefits of giving back to my community. . . . I believe that it is important to be an example for others, pass along the tools that have been passed on to me. . . . Now that I am in a position of power, I need to exercise my power in a manner that will be beneficial for all, and whenever possible, exercise my power to assist those who have been disenfranchised.

Although the ethic of volunteerism and civic responsibility is desirable, a charity orientation often results in the tendency to pathologize inner-city communities on the basis of middle-class values and biases. As one teacher


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candidate explained, “Participation in community-based activities is an opportunity to help children from inner-city environments ‘escape’ their communities and ‘get out’ of the neighborhoods they are confined to.” Some teacher candidates also exhibited a propensity to discuss their involvement with inner-city communities as a “safety net.” One candidate remarked: The help that we are providing for the students is just a band-aid solution. Since it is only the teacher candidates that are involved in this objective, there is no real long-term solution being offered to either the parents or the students. . . . When we leave this program, the students are once again left without the safety net that we have been blindly providing them.

The charity approach represented by this teacher candidate’s comments—that is, a stance of working for, instead of working with, communities—runs counter to principles that guide the Urban Diversity Program. In addition, the type of stereotyping and pathologizing in the preceding narrative, whether intentional or not, further marginalizes the community and contributes to the replication of the negative stereotypes and social relations the program aims to work against. Here is how another candidate struggled to overcome dangerous stereotypes about inner-city communities: By our delving into their community lives and then proceeding to write about them, we are also reinforcing popular stereotypes as, “They are poor, gang ridden, dangerous, illiterate, dirty and lazy.” Even though we are able to see deeper than that, by being restricted to one and two page reflections, only the stereotypes continue to be seen. As such, we are not serving the community in which we are trying to help, but hindering it.

The reflection pages just referenced are what teacher educators use as starting points in structured practicum seminars for the deconstruction of candidates’ experiences in the community. By engaging in sociological theorizing about urban life, candidates develop a critical understanding of these experiences. From Altruism to Political Engagement According to O’Grady (2000), there is a tendency for teacher education to be seen as a pedagogical process and the service learning dimensions as a philosophy and pedagogy devoid of political influence. She went on to express the importance of teachers’ political positioning and civic responsibility: Because education is “contested territory” in which the relations between interest, conflict, and political power are perpetually being played out, . . . teachers who do not specifically explicate political positions can neither

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teach students the meanings of e-pluribus unum nor help students understand the political dimensions of civic responsibility. (p. 11)

What might it mean for teacher candidates to develop an understanding of their community involvement as a political project for transformation? What tensions might emerge and what is at stake for them as they engage in such learning? We turn now to these questions. Although working with the field-based dimension of the Urban Diversity Program provides teacher candidates with possibilities for shifting the ways in which they conceptualize their participation, there are divergent responses to those possibilities. Although some continue to view community involvement as extracurricular work, others have developed an attitude that regards involvement as political engagement. Still others vacillate in the way they conceptualize their participation. For example, in the discussion that follows, candidates reflected on the tensions, contradictions, and discomfort they experienced as they vacillate between teaching as an academically oriented enterprise and teaching as a political project for transformation, yielding insights into the struggles of redefining their role from charity workers to political activists. One candidate elucidated the struggle that they experienced as they began to articulate a culturally relevant pedagogy: In thinking of my community placement I’ve often considered my service to the community to be something that precludes any need for active political involvement in changing the community. I thought that simply helping someone in the community is enough and someone else can worry about changing things. My mistake in thinking this way was that I missed the fact that the very best people to give insight into how a community can develop civic responsibility and improve community action are those who are investing time serving that community. Community involvement is a political act, and should be seen as such if change is to occur.

Another candidate highlighted the tensions and contradictions involved in shifting from a charity orientation to a change orientation that integrates political activism: The biggest challenge of community action I have experienced in my past has been my own . . . hesitation to become or to define myself “an activist”. It was recently that I realized that teaching allows for a construction of self that is both academic and activist. . . . My responsibility as an educator becomes political. When I learn about women and children’s issues from my community work, I will not only be reminded . . . of my own experiences with patriarchy, but I will need to find ways to bring this knowledge into the classroom, school and community.


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As preservice teachers attempt to shift their thinking away from a charity orientation to political activism, they struggle to push back dominant, middle-class identities that often create disconnections, tensions, and “outsider” feelings in the communities in which they are engaged. In the following excerpts, one candidate described her experiences of this “insider/outsider” dichotomy. She began, “I’ll not return to work in this community; not because of the area or the children . . . but because of the unrealistic distance that I travel. My husband is not about to give up his job, and I am not about to ask him to do so.”3 She also contended: Only a teacher who actually lives in the community, or works in the community on a permanent, long-term basis really has a right to interfere in their lives. Only they have the inside knowledge and first-hand experience of what life is really like for residents.

Another candidate expressed an outsider’s hesitation to engage with “communities of difference”: Often people of the dominant culture who enter into culturally or socioeconomically different communities to try and make a difference do so with good intentions, but these good intentions must be backed up by a full commitment to that community, and they often are not.

As the following excerpt indicates, candidates struggled to push back the middle-class bias and to embrace the cultural richness of the economically poor community in which they were involved: By us walking into their community, on our high horses, deciding what it is that they need, offering it temporarily and then taking it away from them, we only serve to enhance their opinion of the dominant culture—how they are ignored, disrespected, uncared for.

We see how rather than deconstructing their own locations within the dominant structures of privilege and Whiteness, some candidates construct a self-image of the outsider. Their concern with whether the outsider has a right to engage “inside” and whether this interaction is an interference reveals that, to a large extent, candidates’ involvements in “communities of difference” are fraught with tensions and discomforts that can limit their role as change agents, reducing their participation to a form of charity. 3 3 Teachers rarely reside in the inner-city communities in which they teach. This teacher candidate constructs teachers as commuters who drive into their urban work locations each day, returning to the suburbs at the end of their work day. Such nonresident status is used as a rationale for not participating in the life of the community in which she teaches.

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Wade (1997) described this ethic of charity as involving “a distance between the server and the served . . . one person is clearly doing something for someone else, usually with some feeling of pity” (p. 64). With service learning, however, she remarked, “Compassion should replace pity and separateness should be transformed into community. Instead of doing something one decides is needed for an ‘other,’ service involves working alongside people in ways that assist them in defining and helping to fulfil their own needs” (p. 64). The thinking that one must share the identities of the community to contribute or to effect change is inherent in the construction of the “outsider” as innocent and altruistic in orientation. According to Carniol (1995), “The paradox of such privilege-enhancing altruism is that it can lay claim to represent social progress as well” (p. 39). Some candidates have also expressed discomfort as they attempt to move from a charity orientation to a political orientation “inside” multiracial communities with unfamiliar socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Radest (1993) characterized this experience as an “encounter with strangers,” “an encounter with otherness,” and “dialogue across difference.” Boler and Zembylas (2003) argued that a “pedagogy of discomfort” invites educators to engage in critical thinking about the multitude of power relations that structure society and challenges “personal comfort zones,” making it both difficult and discomforting to think, feel, and act in ways to which they are accustomed. More importantly, a pedagogy of discomfort enables teacher candidates to problematize previous teachings and learnings about self and community.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION We have tried to explore how teacher candidates’ experiences in their placements can facilitate a developing self-awareness about the relationship among teachers, students, parents, and community members as “part of a complex ecological system of social and symbiotic relations . . . [where] what happens in one part of an interrelated system affects what occurs in other parts” (Wien & Dudley-Marling, 2001, p. 108). This awareness makes visible the heterogeneous communities in which teacher candidates work and helps them develop a sensitivity to difference that is heightened through reflective practices that “may stimulate the kinds of questions and insights that lead students to improved problem solving and new ways of looking at the world” (Eyler & Giles, 1999, p. 174). The program also encourages teacher candidates to explore how the community can function as “a curriculum resource” (Schecter, Solomon, & Kittmer, 2003), as a source of guidance about teaching, and as a mainspring


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for knowledge about the cultural backgrounds and realities of students’ lives. Through their community-based experiences, teacher candidates’ exposure to their students in community contexts provides awareness of important distinctions between the sort of learning they can engage within the confines of the classroom and that which they have the opportunity to explore within the informal settings of their field-based activities. The value of this range of contextual learning from students, parents, and community members—in terms that give novice teachers the opportunity to problematize their perceptions of their practicum communities and hence of themselves—is that if teachers become acquainted with cultural differences within the community, they begin to understand the effectiveness of service learning as a theoretical and practical “anti-prejudice tool” (Erickson & O’Connor, 2000, p. 59) that might work to impel movements of social justice and equity. The Kahne and Westheimer (1996) framework of service learning perspectives that we have used here provides a language with which to articulate the often contradictory and ambivalent responses that teachers have toward engaging the community. This framework provides us with a continuum that highlights the moral, political, and intellectual dimensions needed to move from a charitable focus to a more transformative perspective. By broadening Kahne and Westheimer’s model to include preservice teacher education, we begin to articulate the knowledge that teacher candidates engage as they struggle to move away from learning as an additive activity toward learning as an integrative experience. We recognize that movement along this charity–change continuum is often circuitous rather than linear. Moreover, movement is not guaranteed: Candidates might well continue to resist critiquing their preconceptions of communities, regardless of the experiences afforded by their placements. We also note that different factors, including questions of self-identity, experience with social difference, and personal assumptions, play a large role in the ways in which teacher candidates vacillate on this continuum, as do candidates’ own visions of where teacher education ought to be located and their resistance to community involvement as extended practicum. We hope that teacher candidates might develop insights into what it means to be “change agents,”4 and that the insights that they gain in their teacher preparation will later help them engage in social reconstruction in socially and economically oppressed communities. Teacher candidates’ emerging awareness of community involvement learning as an experiential 4

We are aware that teacher candidates are not only in a restricted position of power as novice teachers in a rigid school hierarchy, but also restricted programmatically by the limited time they have to spend in the community. As teacher candidates, their role as change agents during their preservice period can more appropriately be understood as becoming sensitized to the socioeconomic and cultural issues that face inner-city communities.

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endeavor that cannot be confined within the classroom walls, but rather must take into account the communities in which students are socialized and to which they turn to interpret their experiences, is compelling to us. What implications for teacher education emerge from this study? How do we as teacher educators approach questions of candidates’ perceptions of their placements and the social relations that they develop with their placement communities? How do we engage them as they vacillate between charity and change understandings of their roles? And finally, how do we open up opportunities so that they might continue to struggle with biases and dangerous stereotypes of inner-city communities, and possibly move beyond these biases to work for transformation? By exploring how candidates construct meanings from the two conceptions of experiential work in practicum communities—the learning aspect and the serving aspect—we begin to understand that university students’ experiences with community-based activities underscore the symbiotic relationship between the development of learning and serving. The challenge for teacher educators is to construct pedagogical frameworks that set up opportunities for service and learning simultaneously, while recognizing that different teacher candidates will undoubtedly have different relations to the nature of their field-based roles. In setting up such a pedagogical framework, teacher educators might begin by presenting community involvement as preparation for culturally relevant pedagogy, where teacher candidates are given opportunities to audit their practicum communities for resources as well as needs. This process might contribute to their sense that service learning is not merely an academic requirement for graduation, but rather an integral component of their preparation for careers in teaching. Praxis as a pedagogical approach informs the ways in which many community-based education programs address questions of learning in an experiential manner. We believe that a focus on praxis, articulated as a recursive experiential engagement in actual situations, might contribute to teacher candidates moving away from what Alfred North Whitehead called the inert knowledge problem—the conception and acquisition of bodies of knowledge that lose their effectiveness in new situations (Eyler & Giles, 1999, p. 8)—toward an openness to new co-constructions of meaning that reflect an expanded critical awareness, learning motivation, and civic responsibility (O’Grady, 2000, p. 8). The hope is, of course, that novice teachers will come to see themselves as lifelong learners who continue to struggle to develop critical forms of thinking about “fundamental questions about learning and about society and to a commitment to improve both” (Eyler & Giles, 1999, p. 14). Given that experience within inner-city communities provides universitybased teacher candidates with the possibility of examining the conditions of life in these locales, another implication of our research draws attention


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to the importance of providing teacher candidates with the necessary (formal and informal) critical space to challenge the ways in which schools address difference and diversity, divergent knowledge forms, and the dynamics of power relations within and outside the culture of schools. A critical space, in terms of formal courses, oral or written discussion, or written reflections, can enhance candidates’ interrogations of dangerous and pathologizing stereotypes and demystify unequal social relations between middleclass teachers and the inner-city children they serve. As we have argued in this chapter, sustained community involvement can provide critical insights into community social, cultural, political, and educational needs and an audit of resources that partners bring to the schooling process. It can also help promote positive and productive partnerships between schools and communities. But at the same time, these learnings can be conflated with notions about volunteerism, charity, and service that unproductively complicate teacher candidates’ perceptions of their roles. As teacher educators, we are left with the challenges of developing a teacher preparation praxis that propels candidates to conceptualize and engage in community involvement as political action for transformation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank Audrey Fairweather for her help in coding the data for this study. Also, we thank course directors Rupertia Minott-Bent, Arlene Campbell, and Kathy LeBlanc for facilitating the initiative, and teacher candidates enrolled in the Urban Diversity Program for their participation in this study.

REFERENCES Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding difference. In P. P. Trifona (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social change (pp. 110–136). New York: Routledge Falmer Press. Boyle-Baise, M. (1998). Community service learning for multicultural education: An exploratory study with pre-service teachers. Equity & Excellence in Education, 31(2), 52–60. Carniol, B. (1995). Case critical: Challenging social services in Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines. Dewey, J. (1900). The school and society: The child and the curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Erickson, J. A., & O’Connor, S. E. (2000). Service-learning: Does it promote or reduce prejudice? In C. R. O’Grady (Ed.), Integrating service learning and multicultural education in colleges and universities (pp. 59–70). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Eyler, J., & Giles, D. E., Jr. (1999). Where’s the learning in service-learning? San Francisco: JosseyBass. Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (rev. ed.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970)

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Guadarrama, I. (2000). The empowering role of service learning in the preparation of teachers. In C. R. O’Grady (Ed.), Integrating service learning and multicultural education in colleges and universities (pp. 227–243). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hollins, E. R. (1996). Culture and school learning: Revealing the deep meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Howard, J. (1998). Academic service learning: A counternormative pedagogy. In R. A. Rhoads & J. Howard (Eds.), Academic service learning: A pedagogy of action and reflection (pp. 21–29). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hunter, S., & Brisbin, R. A., Jr. (2000). The impact of service learning on democratic and civic values. Political Science & Politics, 33(3), 623–626. Irvine, J. J. (1989). Black students and school failure. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. James-Wilson, S. V. (2003). Toward a knowledge base for the preparation of urban and inner-city teachers: A social justice approach. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto. Kahne, J., & Westheimer, J. (1996, May). In the service of what?: The politics of service learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 593–599. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 465–491. Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 63–82). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Loughran, J., & Russell, T. (Eds.). (2002). Improving teacher education practices through self-study. London: Routledge-Falmer. Narode, R., Rennie-Hill, L., & Peterson, K. D. (1994). Urban community study by preservice teachers. Urban Education, 29(1), 5–21. O’Grady, C. R. (2000). Integrating service learning and multicultural education: An overview. In C. R. O’Grady (Ed.), Integrating service learning and multicultural education in colleges and universities (pp. 1–19). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Radest, H. (1993). Community service: Encounter with strangers. Westport, CT: Praeger. Schecter, S. R., Solomon, R. P., & Kittmer, L. (2003). Integrating teacher education in a community-situated school agenda. In S. R. Schecter & J. Cummings (Eds.), Multilingual education in practice: Using diversity as a resource (pp. 81–96). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Solomon, R. P., & Levine-Rasky, C. (2003). Teaching for equity and diversity: Research to practice. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Tellez, K., Hlebowitsh, P. S., Cohen, M., & Harwood, P. (1995). Social service field experiences and teacher education. In J. M. Larkin & C. E. Sleeter (Eds.), Developing multicultural teacher education curricula (pp. 65–78). Albany: State University of New York Press. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wade, R. C. (1997). Community service-learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wien, C. A., & Dudley-Marling, C. (2001). Limited vision: The Ontario curriculum and outcomesbased learning. In J. Portelli & R. P. Solomon (Eds.), Erosion of democracy in education: From critique to possibilities (pp. 99–116). Calgary, AB: Detselig. Zeichner, K., & Melnick, S. (1996). The role of community field experiences in preparing teachers for cultural diversity. In K. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reforms in preservice teacher education (pp. 176–196). New York: Teachers College Press.

C H A P T E R

10 Critical Dialogue: Transforming the Discourses of Educational Reform Jerri Willett Cynthia Rosenberger University of Massachusetts Amherst

It was an unprecedented moment in American educational history. The public, the state, schools, and universities seemed to be perfectly aligned behind a vision of educational reform encapsulated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. The force behind this alignment has been a powerful coalition of business leaders, politicians, and elite universities1 with the 1 The lineage of NCLB can be traced from the Governors’ Summit of 1989, when national educational goals were developed, through Goals 2000 to the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) (Rudalevige, 2002). The National Center for Educational Accountability and National Alliance of Business joined forces in 2002 to support increasing student achievement and improving the competitiveness of the workforce. Also, President Bush appointed a communications task force to make sure that the administration’s message about NCLB was being heard and to garner support from business leaders (Davis, 2003). Business associations throughout the United States have been working to support NCLB (the Michigan Chamber of Commerce is one example; see Sandy, 2003). NCLB draws on educational reform efforts initiated by the states (see Bolon, 2000, for a history of the conservative takeover of educational reform in Massachusetts). The participation of elite universities in NCLB has been through the Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) and scientific-based research (SBR) movements. CSR has its roots in the 1993 RAND Corporation evaluation of Title I and policy report (Rotberg, Harvey, & Warner, 1993), which encouraged the federal government to expand the funding to include schoolwide rather than selective programs. Their suggestions were taken up by Congress in 1997, with the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program, a blueprint for NCLB (National Clearinghouse for Comprehensive School Reform, n.d.). The SBR movement developed through the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board’s review of educational research, leading to the National Research Council’s activities and to the creation of the Center for Education’s Committee on Scientific Principles for Education Research. Elite universities are well represented on these boards and organizations; many of the university representatives have never worked or learned in the kinds of schools that they are targeting.

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money, expertise, and political power to force the nation’s schools to construct an accountability system designed to control the outcomes of education, and persuade the voting public to support it. From one perspective, this is an unholy alignment intended to increase worker production and serve the privileged without disrupting the unequal relations that undergird our inequitable society. From another perspective, the alignment has enabled educational reform to become a reality. Academia and business are providing their expertise in exchange for not having to provide remediation for their students and workers. Schools are aligning their curricula with standards and implementing high-stakes accountability practices in exchange for disciplined students and involved parents. The voting public is supporting reform in exchange for taxes going down, achievement going up, and all children following the rules so they too can benefit from the wealth generated by a productive workforce (Dobbs, 2004). As teacher educators and educational researchers, we take a third position—that NCLB provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to engage in critical dialogue about the consequences of policies and practices for all children in ways that were all too rare before the legislation. Although supporters of NCLB rightly claim that its principles have emerged from negotiation among stakeholders, we counter that theirs is a dialogue of the elite from which many educators have been excluded. Moreover, the products of this dialogue (e.g., NCLB mandates) are monologic texts designed to close down debate (“no excuses”) and discipline students—especially poor children—and their teachers and families. On the other hand, by disrupting previous policies and practices, NCLB mandates have made visible numerous children who had been rendered invisible in aggregated data. We believe that this provides an important starting point for critical dialogue. Our hope is that reforms emerging from a more inclusive conversation will enable diverse children to pursue their individual and collective dreams. In this chapter, we describe an initiative for bringing multiple stakeholders into sustained and inclusive dialogue about the ideologies and practices of educational reform. Our goal is to illuminate and interrupt the discourses that close down genuine dialogue and to open up spaces for creating transformative practices. With grants from both NCLB and the now defunct Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA), we designed a project in which faculty from the Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC) concentration in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst work with stakeholders in western Massachusetts to comply with NCLB regulations, documenting our endeavors as we go. Our partners include teachers and administrators in three school districts with large numbers of “low-performing students,” the families served by these schools,

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and activists in communities surrounding the schools. Our location enables us to create spaces across institutional structures and to collaborate with stakeholders to construct dialogic texts that can be heard by policymakers, while also critically examining our own positions and practices. Our goal is not alignment, but dialogue that draws on and learns from diverse visions of educational reform. Our hope is that criteria for evaluating practices, policies, and performances will emerge that take individual and collective needs and desires seriously and treat them fairly.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: CRITICAL DIALOGUE AS TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICE For a decade, our work has focused on transforming relationships among schools, communities, and universities through praxis-oriented dialogue and inquiry. Transforming extant relations through critical dialogue will engender partnerships strong enough to change institutional arrangements and material conditions shaping learning in our schools. This approach contrasts with the current monologic approach evident in NCLB, which assumes stakeholders must be forced to align with official best practices and authoritative meanings. A dialogic approach does not deny accountability or alignment, but rather insists that practices and meanings emerge from ongoing and inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders (Henderson & Hawthorne, 1995). For many, dialogue is collaborative talk about an issue or problem in preparation for taking action. Indeed, critics sometimes see it as a substitute for action. We see dialogue as acting directly on the social world. As with all language practices, people who interact with one another actively construct relations, identities, and ideologies. Whether they construct, reproduce, or transform existing relationships is an empirical question, but as long as participants are willing to remain in dialogic relationships, the possibility of transformation exists. Unlike other language practices, dialogue is a declared act of inquiry, not an act of persuasion with a view to achieving particular outcomes. This is not to say there can be no concrete outcomes, but just that participants do not assume the outcomes from the start. Moreover, critical dialogue implies that we reflect on the nature and consequences of the relations, ideologies, and identities that we construct in dialogue. Our goal, therefore, has been to maintain a dialogue with our partners, knowing that transforming relations and ideologies depends on continued interaction. Moreover, as relations and ideologies change, so do the questions on which our dialogue is focused.

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The Nature of Language Informing our concept of dialogue are theoretical ideas about the nature of language drawn from feminist poststructuralism (Luke & Gore, 1992), critical discourse analysis (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 1990, 1993; New London Group, 1996), interactional sociolinguistics (Castanheira, Crawford, Dixon, & Green, 2000; Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, 1993), postcolonial studies (Bhabha, 1996), social semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Lemke, 1995), and social construction of intertextuality and dialogicality (Bakhtin, 1981; Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Smagorinsky, 2001). We summarize these ideas briefly here. Language Practices Are Social and Dynamic. Language consists of social practices in which people act and interact to construct texts that index and construct their social identities, relations with others, and systems of knowledge and belief. Typically, stakeholders in education act and interact through mandates, news articles, movies, research reports, political speeches, and “war stories.” These heavily mediated and time-lagged interactions enable them to “make up” the kinds of people they imagine others to be, in ways that cut off dialogue. For example, teachers may be constructed as “incompetent,” parents as “incapable,” children as “disabled,” administrators as “authoritarian,” teacher educators as “clueless,” politicians as “untrustworthy.” We are devoted to creating structures in which collaborative dialogue among stakeholders can open up the possibility for negotiating different kinds of relations, identities, and ideologies. Language Practices Are Discursive and Political. Language practices are constituted within, and in turn constitute, discourses. Discourses are “socially acceptable association[s] among ways of using language, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing and acting” (Gee, 1990, p. 142). These associations, taken up unconsciously and assumed correct in society, are lenses for viewing the world. They operate as common sense, and thus justify and sustain social inequities. Discourses function ideologically—either maintaining the status quo of social relations or contesting existing social relations (Lemke, 1995). So, for example, constructing the “other” as incompetent or incapable enables politicians to get more votes, teachers to feel more competent, children to have more fun, parents to maintain their dreams, administrators to justify their policies, educational researchers to publish more articles, and the public to pay less in taxes. To maintain dialogic relations, stakeholders must recognize how social and political discourses function and how they influence understanding and possibility. Without this recognition, it is difficult to stay in a dialogic relationship.


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Language Practices Are Multiple and Contradictory. All instances of language use draw on the resources of multiple discourses and have multiple interpretations and outcomes. Competing ideologies constructed across and within discourses make conflicting claims about the social world. Although competing ideologies and conflicting claims are often represented as a problem for collaborative dialogue, Burbules and Rice (1991) suggested that difference is constitutive of genuine dialogue. If we claim to know the answers, then we are not engaging in dialogue and inquiry, but rather some other language practice. Dialogue Is a Transformative Language Practice. Creating a structure for dialogue does not guarantee that dialogue will occur, much less transform relations. However, Sidorkin (1999), following Bakhtin (1981), proposed three devices that favor dialogue occurring in a setting: “First there needs to be a device for polyphony, second a device for cohesion, and third a device for breaking free from all of organization” (p. 112). The carnivalesque nature of the context, acting to free the dialogue from the limits of routine time and space (and perhaps discourses), mirrors the unpredictable nature of the “third space.” Third space is a newly created culture characterized by hybridity or differing points of view, unpredictability, and negotiated agency. Within the “third space” construct, hybridity emerges from multiple voices bearing different perspectives. In this space (which can be a material moment rather than a physical space), no voice claims authority or ownership, although individuals’ unique expertise is recognized. Bakhtin’s (1981) theoretical insight was that “the . . . hybrid is . . . the collision between differing points of view . . . pregnant with potential for new world views” (p. 360). Bhabha (1996) further theorized that hybrid agencies can emerge even under conditions of unequal status among participants when the inability to comprehend one another leads to negotiation and “the emergence of an ‘interstitial’ agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism” (p. 58). Bhabha’s understanding of “third space” is suggestive of Freire’s (1970/ 1997) belief that dialogue consists of both reflection and action, leading participants “to name the world” and, hence, to change it (p. 69). Critical Dialogue and School–University–Community Partnerships In recent school–university partnerships, dialogue is a central component of transforming, building, and sustaining collaborative partnerships. Partnerships suffer, however, when partners fail to discuss conflicts, concerns, and differences and when they find that dialogue makes visible negative realities such as unequal power, inflexible positioning, and silencing of voices (see Le-

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vine & Trachtman, 1997). Despite difficulties, studies demonstrate that dialogue is possible when participants name perplexing issues, risk sharing and questioning individual commitments and beliefs, and maintain their stance as colearners in cogenerative dialogue (Eldredge, Ibom, Johnston, Maloney, & Thomas, 2000; Enciso, Kirschner, Rogers, & Seidl, 2000; Kerper & Johnston, 1997). Critical voices in this literature (Dickens, 2000; Murrell & Borunda, 1998; Valli, Cooper, & Frankes, 1997), question whether the concept of partnership that has emerged in response to the national reform agenda can support the goal of preparing teachers to teach all children to high standards, and whether the partnerships that have been created are sufficient to enact the critical inquiry needed to change educational outcomes. The literature suggests that the insularity of school–university partnerships and the lack of opportunities for preservice and inservice teachers to reflect on social inequities and cultural diversity detract from our ability to prepare teachers who are competent to teach diverse populations (Enciso et al., 2000). Some of the shortcomings are underdeveloped belief systems related to social issues and cultural differences, lack of political consciousness, and little experience in urban settings (Ladson-Billings, 2001). Murrell and Borunda (1998) suggested that partnerships easily become perpetuators of the racial and socioeconomic status quo and need to address the “underlying political questions that produce inequities in school” (p. 68). To avoid this, we must include families and community groups in partnerships and engage in dialogue that asks whether this is “the way we want things to be . . . [and what we are] going to do about it” (Sirotnik, 1991, p. 252). HISTORY OF OUR WORK IN LOCAL SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES In this section, we describe insights emerging from our ongoing work with local schools and communities that have positioned us to collaborate with them in responding to NCLB mandates. Although our work for the last decade might conventionally be described as discrete projects that engaged different players, time periods, institutions, and political conditions, the centrality and prominence of dialogic interaction in all these collaborations is the constant that shapes our current response to the challenges of NCLB. Constructing Multicultural Language Practices in Research and Pedagogy The initial project was undertaken in 1990 by Judith Solsken, Jo-Anne Wilson-Keenan, and Jerri Willett, an author of this chapter. This group worked together in Jo-Anne’s combined first- and second-grade classroom, which served a culturally diverse and largely low-income urban community, to


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construct and study classroom language practices that valued and built on the language practices and knowledge of the children’s families and communities. To achieve this goal, they collaborated with members of the school’s heterogeneous community by inviting students’ families into the classroom to talk about their lives. The researchers envisioned hybrid classroom practices, a “third space” that drew on the language practices of home and school and helped members learn about, and value, one another. They also envisioned their reflective-teaching/action-research as a conscious hybrid practice where they could negotiate the differences and commonalities of research and practice. Using ethnographic methods and textual microanalyses framed by sociolinguistic, critical, and poststructural conceptions of language, intertextuality, and hybridity, they systematically examined and reformulated classroom practices together. An important outcome of this work was making visible the tensions and complexities involved in the ongoing negotiation of new classroom language practices and the indeterminacy of outcomes, leading to improved understanding of the challenge of enacting a culturally sensitive, critical pedagogy. In particular, they found that discourse analysis provided crucial support to their own efforts and to those of other teacher researchers examining and transforming language practices in their classrooms (e.g., Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, 1993, 1999). Insights from their work2 provided the foundation for many different projects over the intervening decade, including the Springfield Learning Community Collaborative (SLCC), created in 1993. The SLCC was a collaboration among 21 educators from five elementary schools in Springfield, Massachusetts.3 The aim was to redefine the relations between teachers and their children’s families to support the development of children’s literacy. SLCC teachers earned master’s degrees through the project, critically examined their teaching practices, and developed partnerships with children’s families to construct culturally sensitive curriculum, pedagogical strategies, and assessments. One of the highlights of the project was a 2-week summer workshop, the ultimate “third space,” in which teachers, families, and children worked together to create and publish family stories for classroom libraries. In addition to working with families, the teachers also attended study groups to read and discuss books by Polakow (1993) and McCaleb (1995) to help them reflect critically on the meanings of their work with families. It was during this workshop that the teachers discovered firsthand the range of knowledge and skills that their 2

See Solsken, Willett, and Wilson-Keenan (2000); Solsken, Wilson-Keenan, and Willett (1993); Willett, Solsken, and Wilson-Keenan (1998); Willett, Wilson-Keenan, and Solsken (2001); WilsonKeenan, Solsken, and Willett (2001); Wilson-Keenan, Willett, and Solsken (1993). 3 The project was funded by the Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation (the Davises 3 are local businessmen) and the Federal Department of Education (through a F.I.R.S.T grant). 2

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“poor, undereducated, non-standard-English-speaking” parents offered, and parents began to understand that teachers also needed their help to do their jobs. The power of these experiences in changing home–school relations for these participants clearly supports Freire’s idea that reflection with action is the engine of transformation. Increased participation of families in SLCC schools was an indicator of project success in redefining relations among the teachers and families, and the teachers’ research projects suggested that they were able to critically examine and transform some of their classroom practices. Nevertheless, the SLCC had little visible impact on the schools themselves (many SLCC teachers were transferred to new schools and positions) or on the district, which was in the midst of changing superintendents. This lack of visible impact was ironic given the project’s recognition by the Annenberg Foundation as a Public Engagement Site, its commendation by the Davis Foundation, and its visibility through a Public Broadcasting System–Massachusetts Educational Television video aired on WGBY, a Massachusetts educational television station. With the threat of high-stakes testing programs looming on the horizon, it seemed doubtful that the teachers could sustain dialogic relations with their families, especially without the structure of the SLCC to support them. What was not evident at the time were the invisible rhizomes that would engender continued dialogue on home–school relations as SLCC participants became principals and cooperating teachers, wrote dissertations, and became part of various new institutional structures. School–University–Community Focus Group Inspired by the efforts just described, Cynthia Rosenberger, with a colleague from the university, initiated a focus group within a school–university partnership between Rodriguez Elementary School, a low-achieving school in Springfield, and the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The partnership was part of the Coalition for Teacher Quality and School Achievement, an umbrella organization funded by a Title II grant, supporting partnerships between six universities or colleges and public school districts in Massachusetts. One of the goals of the coalition was to create communities of inquiry and practice to inform teacher education. The focus group was a community of inquiry, creating a space for dialogue about the issues facing teachers and administrators in this particular urban setting. Eight teachers, three parents, two community outreach workers, two school administrators, and two university teacher educators participated in the group. As a dissertation study, Cynthia examined the challenges and possibilities of dialogue in the focus group. She hoped to illuminate the potential of dialogue to complicate understanding and create new ways of thinking and


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acting. Microanalysis of the dialogue uncovered the discourses, or social practices, that operated as taken-for-granted ways of viewing the world and illustrated how discourses operate as political texts, positioning people in relation to one another by assigning power and designating agency (Lemke, 1995). “Third space” served as a metaphor for the focus group and as a construct to explain how collisions of different points of view, or hybridity, have the potential to create new understanding and agency (Bhabha, 1996). We can picture “third space” as an arena in which multiple viewpoints, drawing on different discourses, collide. The potential for discourses to be negotiated and reshaped exists in the collisions. However, as the study showed, the outcome is not predictable and reformulating discourses is complicated. The mainstream discourses of home–school connections are well entrenched. Taking up these discourses feels natural and comfortable for teachers. Early in the dialogue, school participants identified “parent involvement [as] key to bringing up scores and very much a missing part of what is happening at Rodriguez.” How to increase family involvement became a continuous thread of inquiry. Discussions about family involvement in the focus group, however, were wrought with recurring tensions. Teachers’ professional commitment to reach out and engage parents in children’s schooling conflicted with the minimalist views they held concerning what parents were capable of doing and their own fear of the unknown. Three critical episodes from the study illustrate the resistance to and challenges of interrupting the mainstream discourses of home–school connections. The first episode is captured in an admonition from Marta, a social worker who participated in the focus group: “I always think . . . teachers have to go—they have to see the home environment ’cause that tells a lot about the family.” As an outreach health worker, Marta frequently visited homes in the neighborhood as she helped families connect with community service and health agencies. This kind of intimate involvement with families, commonly involving visits in the home, is integral to the discourse of social work (Poulin, 2000). Although visiting the homes of children has occurred and does occur in particular teaching contexts, the practice is not commonplace. Marta acknowledged that families would wonder why a teacher was visiting and might think, “Uh oh, something’s wrong, somebody’s called DSS [Department of Social Services] on me.” Hearing Marta’s perspective, teachers bristled, feeling that Marta failed to appreciate the time and energy demands of classroom teaching. They raised questions about their own safety and families’ levels of comfort were they to make home visits. They felt that Marta had positioned them as deficient, that is, not doing enough to cultivate family–school connections. In response, teachers constructed Marta and the other community agency worker as antagonists rather than allies.

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The episode illustrated how teachers situated their work within the context of the school. Although participating parents said they would not mind teachers visiting their homes, they also were wary of some of the neighborhoods teachers would be entering if they were to make home visits. The perspectives of parents who feared DSS’s intrusion in their lives might have further complicated the collision of discourses from social work and teaching, but these parents’ voices were not present. The discourses around home–school connections remained rooted in parents coming to school events and helping children with homework. These two social practices are the focus of the second and third episodes. The second episode involved participants’ conceptualizations of family evenings. Teachers recognized that it was important for a school to create venues for parents to interact with teachers around their children’s schooling. However, attendance at the annual fall open house was low. Teachers ascribed the lack of parent involvement to parents’ lives, not to school practices. A teacher participant summarized families as “hanging on by their fingertips to stay afloat,” having neither the time nor the additional stamina to come to family evenings at the school. Teachers defended the practice of posting signs, on the stairwell doors leading to the classrooms, that asked parents to leave their child there so that instruction could begin on time. Nevertheless, one teacher’s invitation to think about how to increase the number of family evenings evoked considerable discussion among participants. Participants suggested an array of possible events, including math and literacy nights, musical performances, and children’s art exhibits. Although acknowledging the value of curriculum evenings and children’s performances, Cynthia’s colleague, Elyse, introduced the notion of asking parents for their ideas of “what makes for a well prepared teacher to teach their kids.” Teachers’ responses reflected surprise and skepticism: “Ask [parents] what . . . they think?” They expressed concerns: Parents are not sophisticated enough to have responses; parents are too stressed to do anything but trust the school; asking parents to think about what they want for their children’s schooling undermines parents’ confidence and trust in the school. The dialogue reflected social scientists’ assessment that we are “a culture in the grips of deficit thinking” (Hull, Rose, Fraser, & Castellano, 1991). The only favorable trait attributed to parents was “trust,” which allows school personnel to feel comfortable maintaining the status quo and their hegemony over school practices. Elyse’s suggestion, however, positioned parents as knowledgeable people with ideas to contribute about their child’s schooling, drawing on the discourse in educational literature that positions families as subjects of their lives (Compton-Lily, 2003; Moll, Amnati, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Wilson-Keenan, Solsken, & Willett, 2001).


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Over time, this collision of discourses about how families are perceived resulted in two family evenings entitled “Let’s Eat! Let’s Talk!” At these evenings, families were invited to share their ideas about what worked and did not work for their children at the school. The invitation reversed the direction of communication between the school and families. Families were subjects and communicators, in contrast to the traditional positioning of families as recipients of information from the school. Parents demonstrated how capable they were of assuming subject positions, providing a plethora of feedback. One parent’s comment was illustrative of how many ideas parents had to contribute. In response to polite encouragement to be conscious of the time while reporting from a small group, this parent laughed, “Oh, I thought I was the keynote speaker. You mean I can’t have the mike for two hours?” (field notes, 11/30/00). The following day, a teacher who had often expressed deficit views of parents said, “I wouldn’t have believed it. It far exceeded my expectations” (field notes, 11/30/00). Later, another teacher exclaimed, “Wow, those parents had a lot to say!” (field notes, 1/25/01). In this episode, new agency emerged from the hybridity created in the dialogue group. The “Let’s Eat! Let’s Talk!” evenings emerged from the collision of views about family evenings and the degree to which parents of low socioeconomic and English-language status think critically about their children’s schooling. That the evenings included dinner and child care reflected an understanding of families’ cultural expectations and needs that had emerged in the focus group. Finally, parents showed that they did, indeed, reflect critically on their child’s school experience and had concerns and suggestions to offer. Still, participants in the focus group struggled with the differences they perceived between themselves and other families in the school. A third episode centered around the question, “Does school matter [to families who do not behave in ways teachers and schools expect]?” Although feedback from families at the “Let’s Eat! Let’s Talk!” evenings had strongly supported homework, teachers in the focus group expressed frustration with the low return of homework and what they perceived as families’ failure to monitor homework. Teacher participants questioned whether school mattered for many of the families in the school. Although parent participants in the group described monitoring their own children’s homework, they also validated teachers’ frustrations as they described other parents who “don’t care . . . my sister . . . leaves at 7 o’clock in the morning and she come back 7 o’clock in the night . . . ‘I can’t’—that’s all she say . . . she not gonna do anything” (focus group, 1/31/01). Differentiating herself from parents who fail to behave in expected ways, the parent participant substantiated teachers’ perceptions that families’ life circumstances prevent the kind of participation teachers expect. As a Latino parent, she has taken up dual aspects of the mainstream discourse. She is in-

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volved in expected ways with her children’s schooling, and she interprets other parents’ nonparticipation as their not caring. A discussion about whose responsibility it is to provide children with the supplies they need to do their homework drew on the discourses of selfreliance and responsibility for others that Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America. Drawing on the discourses of self-reliance and responsibility for self in this society, participants believed that if school matters, parents should make the necessary effort and sacrifices to buy the supplies their children need to do their homework. At the same time, the discourses of compassion and responsibility for others caused participants to consider supplying children with homework boxes, thus sending a message to parents that homework is important. However, participants also questioned the assumption that parents can’t provide supplies, which would be embedded in a decision to supply children with homework boxes. One participant suggested, “That could be a class thing too” (focus group, 1/31/01). The principal, who grew up in Puerto Rico, contrasted the ways of thinking and acting in Puerto Rico and the United States: “In Puerto Rico, even the poorest person [buys] good backpacks and pencils and crayons. It’s a show—who can get the best materials. . . . Yet we come here [United States], and . . . they have to be given everything” (focus group, 1/31/01). Through the use of they in the last sentence, Mr. Ortiz disassociated himself from those who “have to be given everything,” and illustrated the class distinctions between the student/family community and the teacher/administrator community even when ethnicity is shared. At the same time, however, he had shared cultural knowledge and complicated the discussion by suggesting that parents are accustomed to enacting different standards in Puerto Rico. In another instance, Mr. Ortiz said, “I and the majority of teachers in the building do not participate in the same socioeconomic class as families of students in the school. . . . By being Latino I have no better insight when it comes to parents.” Another teacher, struggling to figure out why children didn’t have what they needed at home to complete homework, said, “I know that most of these parents have the money. It’s a matter of what they value. They’re buying their kids Nintendo . . . I don’t think that they value education” (focus group, 1/31/00). Participants’ multiple viewpoints complicated a discussion about parents’ responsibilities toward supporting children’s homework. Questions were left unanswered. The only action that ensued was that homework folders were ordered for all students. Analysis of these episodes shows the striking absence of perspectives drawing on discourses outside middle-class ways of thinking. In the discussion of teachers’ making home visits, the perspectives of families that feared a government agency’s intrusion in their lives would have provided insights and perspectives not available to the existing participants. Like-


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wise, in the discussions about homework and who should be responsible for providing the supplies needed to do it, the perspectives of adults who do not enact the expectations of middle-class teachers was missing. Rather than being subjects in the dialogue, such families were positioned as “other” and became objects of the discussion rather than subjects. (The “Let’s Eat! Let’s Talk!” evenings were a notable exception.) Class is a construct that, in addition to indicating income, lifestyle, values, education, and ways of acting and speaking, mirrors the social power available to and attributed to people (Gilbert, 1998; Kadi, 1996; Shannon, 1998). Because social power is so linked with class, including people who construct themselves and are constructed by society as lower-class as participants in a dialogue group poses a significant challenge. Class appears to produce chasms that are disconcerting and difficult to bridge. Excluding non-middle-class participants occurred easily; including them was discussed but did not happen. Permission for middle-class participants to objectify poor and workingclass parents, or to “other” them, is part of the discourse of class, embedded in which is the privileging of middle-class knowledge and agency in relation to people of lower classes. Valerie Polakow (1993) described the distance and alienation represented by the terms other and otherness: “Otherness symbolizes the objectification-through-language and policy of those who are consigned to the margins of society” (p. 187). Reflecting on others situates participants in a position of power over others, in contrast to a position of power with others. Moreover, the discourses held in common by participants who share class membership fail to get deconstructed. Limited discourses create often inadequate collisions and perspectives from which to deconstruct and interrupt mainstream discourses. The expectations of children having homework and of parents being involved were not questioned. The potential for collision of middle-class and other-class discourses—and hence, deconstruction of mainstream discourses and a radically new consciousness from which novel action could emerge—were missing. This experience suggests that interaction across class boundaries creates discomfort for those with power and privilege. Although teachers argued that time and energy did not permit home visits, analysis of dialogue throughout the time the focus group met leads us to suggest that teachers were also drawing on the discomfort associated with interactions across class boundaries. Indeed, discomfort and vulnerability lie at the heart of our resistance to deconstructing discourses and disrupting the status quo. The partnership with Rodriguez would lead directly into the next project, and with it an opportunity to explore this resistance further. However, a number of concurrent events would shift the nature of the dialogue dramatically.

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REFORM IN THE TIME OF ACCOUNTABILITY: NCBL, QUESTION 2, MTEL, AND MCAS Before an audience of stunned Title VII (Bilingual Education) grant holders, Harry Logel, Program Officer for the newly instituted Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), waved a red booklet and said, “Just as Mao Tsetung ushered in the cultural revolution with his little red book, so this little red book will usher in a revolution in education.” The little red book was the publication of Title III of the NCLB Act: Language Instruction for Limited English Proficient and Immigrant Students. During this 2-day “National Training Institute,” held just 1 month after NCLB was passed, participants would hear that the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, OBEMLA, had become OELA; that Title III grants would replace Title VII grants; and that educators would be held accountable. During the NCLB unveiling, bilingual educators in Massachusetts battled Question 2, an English-Only ballot campaign funded by California millionaire and bilingual education opponent Ron Unz.4 Rosalie Porter, author of Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education (1990) and supporter of “structured English immersion,” stumped for Question 2 in a campaign mirroring the Proposition 227 battle in California. The slogan “Help Children to Learn English” persuaded Massachusetts voters to eliminate bilingual education in November 2002. Massachusetts educators were already suffering from battle fatigue as a result of the hijacking of their efforts for curriculum reform by conservatives in the Department of Education, appointed by Republican Governor William Weld. The Common Goals of Learning, a set of educational goals and interdisciplinary studies for all students assembled by committee with input from 50,000 educators and citizens, were adopted by the Board of Education in 1994 to guide curriculum framework development in all K–12 subject areas. Then, under Commissioner of Education David Driscoll, Deputy Commissioner Sandra Stotsky revised the Curriculum Frameworks for K–12 and Licensure Standards for Quality Teachers to incorporate more conservative values. Math educators saw a shift from constructivist math to skills-based math; the World Language curriculum reverted to a Foreign Language Curriculum; Language Arts educators saw phonics and the five-paragraph essay crowd out literature-based reading and writing; and the battle over what counted as history raged for 5 years (Massachusetts State Department of Education, 1997–1999, 1999–2004). Many teacher educators were 4 To get a flavor of this battle see http://www.umass.edu/education/languagerights, which archives some of the efforts made for and against Question 2 in Massachusetts.

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appalled at the licensure revisions. In place of equity standards focusing on social justice and student rights,5 the revisions introduced four standards with a stringent focus on individual achievement and assimilation.6 This is not to say that multicultural and bilingual educators were against achievement or American civic culture, but they saw these changes as a way of dismantling multicultural programs in schools, a position detailed explicitly in Sandra Stotsky’s book Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason (1999). The revisions were quickly aligned to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and the Massachusetts Test for Educators Licensure (MTEL), and the implementation of the assessment system was so swift that most could not prepare for these tests or even, as Education Secretary Rod Paige (2002) charged, “game the system.” The inevitable low scores of unprepared test takers led to a barrage of headlines that constructed student teachers and children—and by association teachers, teacher educators, and administrators—as failures. In addition to this, schools now faced the mandates of NCLB and structured English immersion (and the departure of many bilingual teachers who left in disgust and fear or were fired), draconian measures to punish schools with low MCAS scores, and crippling cuts in K–12 and university budgets, all of which led to massive reductions in services and increases in tuition and other costs. Newly elected Republican governor Mitt Romney supported Question 2, stringent accountability systems, and competitive education in the form of charter schools. It was as this climate was building that colleagues in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Concentration applied for, and received, a Title III National Professional Development grant to create the ACCELA Alliance, a postmodern acronym that could mean either “Achievement of Critical Content and English Language Acquisition” or “Access to Critical Content and Equitable Language Acquisition.” While this Title III proposal was being prepared, the new principal of Rodriguez asked, through Cynthia, for help in finding literature to support a proposal he was writing for state funding for a professional development program on English language learners (ELLs) for his teachers. We joined forces and the ACCELA Alliance germinated in the spring of 2002. 5

One standard was “Uses effective strategies within the classroom and other school settings to address discrimination based on each student’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic class or disability.” 6 These standards encourage 6 students to “believe that effort is a key to achievement” and to “see themselves as members of a local, state, national and international civic community.” 5

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ACCELA ALLIANCE: SPRINGFIELD/HOLYOKE/ AMHERST PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP With the support of Rodriguez in hand, the LLC faculty7 proposed the ACCELA Alliance concept to three school districts in western Massachusetts with linguistically and culturally diverse populations. ACCELA would collaborate in providing (a) a school-based master’s degree program for inservice teachers focusing on teaching English language learners (ELLs); (b) a community-based bachelor of general studies program for paraprofessionals; (c) district-based meetings for administrators to critically examine institutional policies and practices focused on ELLs; and (d) a university-based seminar to prepare teacher educators, researchers, and doctoral students to work collaboratively with schools and communities on English language learning and teaching. In our presentation, we stressed that many of the mandates and policies being imposed on the schools did not draw on current research on English language development, recognize the expertise of school practitioners, access community funds of knowledge, or address real challenges facing educators. We also emphasized that the mandated assessments did not provide practitioners with the kinds of data needed to support ELLs in the classroom. Moreover, the tactics used to gain political support for these mandates positioned educators, families, and learners as recalcitrants rather than agents of change. Therefore, all participants in ACCELA would collect and critically examine data through collaborative and dialogic inquiry to better understand how policies, practices, and discourses were shaping learning and teaching of ELLs in local schools and communities. Drawing on these data and the diverse expertise and perspectives of participants, we aimed to jointly propose and critically examine practices, policies, and discourses to better support equitable teaching and learning outcomes for ELLs. We would archive the alliance’s work on an ACCELA server, available to all participants. The superintendents of all three districts agreed to join the ACCELA Alliance. Their willingness to be part of a project with an explicit research agenda and activist stance surprised us. We had been warned by colleagues in California that classroom doors were slammed in researchers’ faces in the wake of Proposition 227, but we found the opposite. Not only did district administrators support our project, but more teachers than we could include wanted to participate. Community activists helped us recruit 7 7 The LLC faculty include Theresa Austin, Meg Gebhard, Sonia Nieto, Pat Paugh, Masha Rudman, and Jerri Willett.


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paraprofessionals and provided space in the community for classes. School of Education faculty agreed to teach off campus, follow the school districts’ calendar, and meet biweekly to revise syllabi to meet the needs of schools. Faculty in the colleges of Humanities, Behavioral Sciences, and Sciences volunteered to teach inquiry-based courses in the community for inservice or preservice paraprofessionals. Willingness to collaborate grew out of a need to comply with federal and state mandates, common frustration with losing a voice in policies and mandates that governed our work, and shared resistance to being targeted as solely accountable for the so-called poor performances of ELLs. Moreover, the rapidity with which districts and schools of education needed to transform institutional structures, prepare mainstream teachers to work with ELLs, and provide documentation for a new accountability structure was extraordinary (about 5 months). All this occurred during budget cutting so severe that the infrastructure appeared at risk. Many retired, changed jobs, or were fired, and those remaining found conditions intolerable. Accusations hurled at educators and the “no excuse” mantra chanted by politicians and government officials angered and cowed educators in western Massachusetts, but ultimately stirred them to action.8 Despite chaotic conditions challenging the ACCELA Alliance, its first year ended with the productive development of a conceptual framework and a collaborative infrastructure. We conceptualized ACCELA’s programs as “third spaces” having common features: (a) Participants would engage in a cyclical process of asking meaningful questions, collecting and critically analyzing data, and redesigning practices and assumptions; (b) multiple voices would be part of the inquiry; (c) institutional spaces would be located outside of normal spaces so as to achieve at least a partially carnivalesque quality; (d) local contexts and investments would be valued; (e) our jointly constructed tensions, discourses, negotiations, mutual listening, text productions, and practices would be examined critically; and (f) participants would construct and propose hybrid practices that interwove the multiple and often competing discourses circulating through the system, which in turn would be subject to critical dialogue and inquiry. At the time of writing (the spring of 2004), ACCELA is in the second of its 5 years and participants in all designated “third spaces” are moving forward with critical and dialogic inquiry projects. Inquiry in all these spaces includes examining and interweaving the “genres of power,” “funds of knowledge,” 8 8 Speaking at Lynch Middle School in Holyoke on January 10, 2004, Governor Romney claimed that educators had used poverty in Holyoke as the excuse for low performance and stated that from then on no excuses would be accepted. Though silent during the speech, many educators present heard that they were being blamed for what was beyond their control.

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and a critique of the varied discourses shaping teaching and learning. In what follows, we briefly summarize what we have accomplished so far.

Teachers in the MEd Program In their first course, teachers—half of the Springfield cohort from Rodriguez—developed research questions, using critical literacy analysis to unpack assumptions about learners and families. At the same time, they also unpacked the way that teachers and learners have been constructed by the media and politicians. Currently, teachers are analyzing classroom interactions and the oral and written text productions of their students, with datacollection help from doctoral students and the theoretical lenses and tools acquired in courses on second-language acquisition and literacy. They are also starting to explore the possibilities of permeable curriculum (Dyson, 1993) under the current constraints of mandated curriculum. In the coming summer, they will explore community funds of knowledge and work to weave this knowledge into their classrooms, while simultaneously attending to the genres of power that they have learned about in courses. Next fall, they will design and enact curriculum, and examine their students’ text productions to understand whether and how their weaving supports student learning and enables the construction of new practices that permit a greater range of subject positions for both students and teachers. Finally, they will present their findings to administrators and other educators.

Paraprofessionals in the Bachelor of General Studies Program In the program’s first three courses, paraprofessionals learned library skills, drew on personal narratives, and used presentation technology to author papers and presentations. They are currently creating narratives of their own experiences as bilingual language and literacy learners, which will be collected, published, and presented at an academic conference. As the courses progress, paraprofessionals will collect data in their communities to critically examine such issues as the digital divide, language use in the community and in families, and the impact of voting patterns on the lives of community members. At the same time, paraprofessionals will examine the genres of power shaping their lives (e.g., writing papers, taking literacy tests, writing job and graduate-school applications, preparing multimedia presentations), while using these genres to present their inquiry projects to multiple audiences, including teachers, parents, and administrators.


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University Seminars Through the same inquiry cycle, UMass faculty and doctoral students have been examining the practices and discourses shaping both their own research and teaching9 and the research and teaching of teachers. Currently, we are seeking ways to insert participant voices from across the multiple third spaces into our courses, unpack our representations of teachers, administrators, and ELLs in our teaching and research, and support participants in presenting their work to their communities and the educational establishment. In addition, we intend to create ways for the multiple inquiry projects to dialogue with one another so that we can transform the structures that have positioned all of us so negatively. District-Based Meetings Administrators connected with ACCELA—superintendents, principals, and administrators of professional development and English language learner programs—have been helping us understand the contexts shaping their policies and practices. We are examining districts’ strategic planning documents, which are also under state review because of their “low-performing” designation. Preliminary analyses have brought to the surface districts’ struggles to comply with contradictory mandates—districts must cite “scientific research” to justify plans (when there is no consensus on what is “scientific”),10 use mandated methods such as English immersion (when there is no supporting scientific research, however defined),11 and use only “licensed teachers” to teach these courses (when none are available who meet the new regulations, 9 9 Some of these genres include mandates, policies, and goals statements coming from the federal, state, district, and schools, such as MTEL Standards and Curriculum Frameworks, MCAS and MTEL high-stakes testing, International Technology Standards Institute (ITSI) Standards, ELL Benchmarks, and policy documents (e.g., NCLB, MASS DOE, District Strategic Plans, School Improvement Plans). Some genres come from disciplinary research and professional organizations, for example, “scientifically based research” principles summarized on DOE web site (U.S. Department of Education, 2002), AERA (American Education Research Association), TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), NAME (National Association of Multicultural Education), NABE (National Association of Bilingual Education), IRA (International Reading Association), and NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English). “Funds of knowledge” include their personal and collective funds, including their own past and ongoing research, as well as those of the teachers, their learners, and the communities. 10 Although there have always been debates about what is legitimate 10 research in the academy, Bush administration policy put regulations and funds behind one particular definition. The backlash is from those whose research has been designated “illegitimate” (see Cannella & Lincoln, 2004). The historical debate is summarized in Education Week (Viadero, 1999a, 1999b, 2000). 11 Cummins (1999) pointed out, “The academic debate lines up virtually all North American 11 applied linguists who have carried out research on language learning as advocates of bilingual programs against only a handful of academics who oppose bilingual education. None of those who oppose bilingual education has a background in the discipline of applied linguistics.”

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which are not yet in place). We will be tracing strategies that administrators use to comply with state policies and mandates, and examining how their policies and mandates are taken up, resisted, and transformed by teachers in the classroom. Drawing on inquiry projects throughout ACCELA, we will work with administrators to understand how their practices and policies constrain and support learning and teaching and to construct ways to present their analyses to Massachusetts policymakers. We also hope that our collaboration with administrators will mediate the presentations of teachers and paraprofessionals to administrators.

REFLECTIONS ON THE CHALLENGES AHEAD We end ACCELA’s second year with a sense of accomplishment but daunted by the challenges that remain. Institutional structures and chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1981) continue to make engagement in collaborative data sharing and problem solving difficult. Discourses continue to position educators and learners in negative ways and may eventually undermine the resolve that spurred us to collaborate in an open and dialogic way. Practices are oriented toward short-term fixes that are pressured by a “political timetable,” not a “transformative timetable.” Unless changes in performance as defined and measured by the ACCELA Alliance are paralleled by changes in performance as defined and measured by the current political order, it is doubtful that the long-term transformations envisioned by our alliance can survive. What gives us hope is looking back over a decade of sustained involvement in critical and dialogic inquiry among the university, schools, and communities in western Massachusetts. The relationships that have emerged out of sustained dialogue and inquiry have survived despite the lack of institutional structures to support them, and have even strengthened in the face of institutional structures working to suppress them. Ironically, if we succeed in joining the larger dialogue from which we have been excluded, it will be because NCLB succeeded in undoing education as we once knew it, which will be for the better.

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P A R T

III LEARNING IN COMMUNITY (AND COMMUNITY IN LEARNING)


C H A P T E R

11 Constructing Aspirations: The Significance of Community in the Schooling Lives of Children of Immigrants Carl E. James York University

Canadian research on the experiences and aspirations of children of immigrant parents consistently shows that they tend to have high educational and occupational aspirations (Anisef, Axelrod, Baichman-Anisef, James, & Turrittin, 2000; Dei, Muzzuca, McIsaac, & Zine, 1997; James, 1997; Lam, 1994; see also Schecter & Bayley, 2002). For many of these students, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, these educational aspirations reflect an optimism that seems to ignore the limitations and barriers related to their social, educational, and financial situation. In other words, in spite of their socioeconomic situations, many of these students expect to attend university or aspire to careers that require postsecondary education even though they are in educational streams or levels that do not necessarily qualify them to enter postsecondary institutions.1 Also, the schools some of these students attend typically send very few students to universities or colleges. But despite these limitations, some of these working-class immigrant students actually manage to overcome the social and educational barriers or hurdles and realize their aspiration of attending university. This chapter is interested in how racial-minority immigrant students draw on their experiences with and understanding of their community, class, and racial affiliations when constructing high educational and career aspirations. Significant to this discussion is how the children of working1 1 In Ontario, to qualify to enter university, students must be in an advanced or universitylevel high school program.

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class immigrant parents conceive of their opportunities and possibilities, and construct their educational aspirations in ways that counter the social and educational obstacles and limitations structured by social class, race, and immigrant status. Essentially, I wish to demonstrate that, contrary to the prevalent view that marginalized students often lack the experience, aspirations, and social and cultural capital needed to pursue postsecondary education, they can, with the support of their parents and community, develop the incentive, knowledge, determination, and commitment that make possible high educational and occupational goals. This analysis builds on the findings of two research undertakings. The first is a 1998 study of the experiences and aspirations of university students from a circumscribed, stigmatized, working-class area of Toronto known as “Jane-Finch” (James & Haig-Brown, 2001).2 Demographically, JaneFinch is characterized by diversity in ethnicity, race, and religion. The students we interviewed were part of a York University and North York (Toronto) Board of Education partnership program that provided them the opportunity to think about university education and also facilitated their access to the university.3 In this chapter, I focus on seven students, between the ages of 22 and 25 years. Two of the students were born in Canada, with immigrant parents from the Caribbean, whereas the others were born in Jamaica, Ghana, Vietnam, Cambodia, and India. All of them resided in Canada before they entered high school. Although my primary interest here is to explore the experiences and aspirations of respondents of African-Caribbean backgrounds, I include information from two respondents who were born in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively, and came to Canada as refugee children. In addition, using material from a more recent study of African Canadian youth who live in the wider Toronto area, I examine how these students’ aspirations and frames of reference were similarly and/or differently constructed as compared to those of respondents from the Jane-Finch area, generational differences notwithstanding (see Foner, 1997; Portes, 1995).4 Specifically, I analyze how in the absence of a sense of community circum2 2 The area, sometimes referred to as the “Jane-Finch Corridor” (see McLaren, 1998), gets its name from the two streets which form the main intersection. Jane-Finch is known as a reception area for new immigrants and refugees. A 2003 Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper article describes the community as “more notorious for gangs, drugs, and guns than for the abundance of hard-scrabble immigrants and second generation single mothers assigned to life on Canada’s bottom rung” (Philip, 2003). 3 Through the program, high 3 school students visited the university, enrolled in a university course that gave them an opportunity to experience a university class, participated in a “Future Teachers Club” that also involved working as a teaching assistant, and worked in the summers at the university with science professors on science projects. 4 Evidently, there is no typical immigrant experience for there 4 are significant differences in how generations of immigrant youth (e.g., second generation, generation-and-a-half, and first

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scribed in geographic space, race and notions of group membership were featured in respondents’ readings of the opportunity structures and possibilities of a university education. I use information from five respondents who are between 22 and 24 years of age, are from working-class backgrounds, and live in different parts of Toronto (two are generation-and-ahalf Canadians born in Jamaica, and three are second-generation Canadians whose parents were born in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados5). Before proceeding to discuss the findings, I review some of the theories that are germane to this analysis. THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: STRUCTURE, AGENCY, AND STUDENTS’ ASPIRATIONS Participating in and navigating an inequitable educational system tends to represent a daunting task for individuals lacking the cultural capital6 that would enable them to succeed in society (e.g., obtain a postsecondary education, get a good job, earn high salaries). Nevertheless, students’ ability to read, understand, and negotiate the system in relation to characteristics such as their geographic residence, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship can open up possibilities and opportunities. Further, individuals may draw on ideas and knowledge gained through the community or communities with which they identify ethnically or racially, and in which they participate. Hence, notwithstanding a lack of material resources, they can acquire important cultural resources that provide them with the ability and capacity to construct aspirations and access opportunities. In fact, in the case of first- and second-generation youth, their capacity to operate in the 5generation)

construct their educational and occupational aspirations. These differences are related in part to the socialization practices of parents; socioeconomic status in both the new country and the country of origin; place of residence; family composition or structure (one- or two-parent households); parents’ education, aspirations, and perception of possibilities for their children’s social mobility; region or country of origin; cultural traditions; acculturation process; attachment to cultural traditions, norms, and values; parents’ active involvement in their children’s lives; how the children view their parents’ (or their) homeland; the children’s schooling experiences; and the structural conditions in the new or host society (see Boyd & Grieco, 1998; Cummins, 1997; Foner, 1997; Gitlin et al., 2003; Kao & Tienda, 1995; Portes & MacLeod, 1999; Waters, 1999; Zhang, Ollila, & Harvey, 1998; Zhou, 1997). 5 Generation-and-a-half refers to those students born to foreign-born parents who arrived in Canada prior to high school, typically between the ages 10 and 12 years, indicating that their realm of experiences straddle the “old country,” where they received their early socialization, and the “new country.” Second generation refers to those students born in Canada to foreignborn parents and hence have received all their schooling in Canada (see Boyd & Grieco, 1998; Gibson, 1997; Zhou, 1997). 6 According to Pierre Bourdieu, 6 cultural capital is the set of usable resources and power that individuals derive from the social (including economic, political, and educational) structure of society (Anisef et al., 2000, p. 23).

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worlds, languages, cultures, and traditions of both their foreign-born parents and the society in which they live—that is, their capacity to be bicultural—can be considered a form of “social capital” (Portes & MacLeod, 1999; also see Boyd & Grieco, 1998). Their biculturality can serve to limit the possible marginalizing effects of their minority status, thereby enhancing their chances of success in society generally (see Gibson, 1997). Theories of assimilation suggest that for minority students and children of immigrants to participate fully and successfully in society, they must be assimilated or blend into “mainstream” structures, that is, abandon their “old” cultural practices and adopt those of the larger or host society (Gitlin, Buendia, Crosland, & Doumbia, 2003; Kao & Tienda, 1995; Zhou, 1997). The assumption here is that unless minority and immigrant members of the society can acquire and understand the cultural capital of the host society, which involves abandoning various cultural and ethnic practices such as language, traditions, and other “old” ways of living, they will continue to be marginalized. Accordingly, the extent to which individuals know where to seek out, and are able to access, the dominant cultural and social values and norms will influence their aspirations. This view of the path to full participation and educational and occupational mobility largely ignores the fundamentally important networks and social ties that ethnoracial minority and immigrant communities provide for their members. In fact, such ties may actually strengthen educational aspirations and occupational achievements (Portes & MacLeod, 1999; Zhou, 1997). Faced with problems and barriers as a result of racism and discrimination, such as lack of recognition or the devaluing of abilities and skills, minority-group members tend to develop a feeling of solidarity or closeness for which they are likely to obtain moral support from community and family members. This closeness not only helps individuals maintain the values, efficacy, and expectations of the minority community or, in the case of immigrants, to sustain values associated with the old country, but also helps young people cultivate high educational and occupational aspirations for upward social mobility (James, 1993; Portes & MacLeod, 1999). And, as Zhou (1997) pointed out, in the context of increasing pressures on immigrant minority youth to assimilate into the larger society, family and community support can make a considerable difference in providing resources that nourish young people’s aspirations. Moreover, with a strong affinity to community, the children of immigrant parents tend to gain access to community resources, such as educational and recreational programs, heritage classes, churches, and others. The character of a minority community and the level of cultural, racial, and ethnic support can operate as an incentive for young people to remain connected to that community, and cultivate attitudes, values, and behaviors that help them to break through barriers, resulting in upward social mobility (Zhou, 1997).


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Essentially, how young people read their particular communities has a significant influence on the aspirations they construct. The community serves not only as a context in which young people are able to establish cultural affiliation but also as a support for their family loyalty. In other words, young people’s educational aspirations are reflective of their sense of obligation to their family (especially to parents who expect them to become socially mobile even if the parents aren’t) and to their local community, and of how they read the value and potential of education—that is, their understanding of how education is able to contribute to their own needs and the needs of their family and community. For example, James (1997) found that Black students’ desires to become teachers were influenced by their interest in becoming positive role models not only for the Black students they would be teaching but also for their community. And, as discussed in the following section, in the Jane-Finch study, students’ motivations for obtaining a university education were based on their desires to challenge and change the negative stereotypes of their community. They felt that by giving back to their community they could help change its internal and external reputation.

STUDENTS’ ASPIRATIONS AS INFORMED BY THE GEOGRAPHICAL COMMUNITY The study of Jane-Finch found that community played a significant role in the ways that the seven students—Rebecca, Nancy, Akaos, Sumita, Nguyen, Catherine, and Vivian—talked about their schooling experiences (university and high school) and the careers to which they aspired. Their discourses about the community included not only their respective personal and family histories and educational and community experiences within the context of their ethnic, racial, and immigrant backgrounds but also their attempts to contest the media’s images of the area as crime-ridden and of their school as a bad school. Their conversations revealed their varied understandings and constructions of the geographic area in which they lived, and demonstrated the extent to which their educational and career aspirations—social work, teaching, politics, law—were shaped by their reading of the community’s needs, by how they saw themselves responding to these needs, and by the opportunity structures afforded by their schools and community institutions. While some youths were growing up, their parents and teachers communicated to them that the Jane-Finch community was a place to get away from. Rebecca recalled that her Guyanese mother initially sent her to a high school out of the school district rather than to the local high school, Westview. And although Nancy’s Jamaican-born mother did not raise ques-

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tions about Nancy’s decision to attend Westview, her elementary school teachers did, suggesting that Nancy should attend a school outside of the district. With their actions and questions, parents and teachers conveyed a negative perception of the local high school and accordingly reinscribed the media’s bad image. But in resistance to the negative characterization of their community and its schools (as producing, according to Akaos, a 22year-old Ghanaian-born male, “below-average” students), respondents such as Sumita, a political science major of South Asian background, put forward a vision of their community as “dynamic,” with resources able to provide young people with chances and opportunities. Although in some cases the media images of the community might have contributed to the students’ doubts about their chances of realizing their educational aspirations, there are those who resembled Akaos, who by seeing his school “differently” was able to conceptualize his school and community in a way that made him feel confident that he could indeed attend university and acquire the education to which he aspired. Importantly, high school teachers’ perceptions of the present and future roles of the students within their classes were also a significant factor in the aspirations that many students constructed. For instance, those identified as “high-achieving students,” that is, students who got good grades and actively participated in community activities, were expected and encouraged by their teachers to pursue university education so that they might “give back” to the community. The perception was, according to Sumita, that these were individuals “who’ll be social movers and shakers, who’ll agitate for change.” Rebecca reported that her teachers “pushed” her to go to university. Asked why, she responded: Because I’ve always been involved with the community, and I’ve always, since I was 12 years old, I’ve always been doing something at the community center, and like when they spoke to me on that individual level they found out that stuff, and they helped me to further my dreams, to better help my community, and so forth, and I think, too, they truly believed that I would be someone to come back and help the community, not just go off and just forget where I came from, which is something I’ve always stressed.

The students’ aspirations to attain a university education and their wish “to give back” to their communities were supported not only by the expectations of their teachers and parents but also by the encouragements of friends with whom they shared a similar sense of community. For example, when asked how her friends reacted to her decision to go to university, Rebecca replied: Actually, they’re proud of me. A lot of them see me as their opportunity, you know what I mean, so it’s like, I’m kinda the breakthrough, for some of them,


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you know what I mean, so I get pushed a lot from them, they understand when I can’t hang out and they actually push me not to hang out and say, “Go pick up your book” or something.

The support that Rebecca received from her peers was reflective of the vicarious relationships among the members of the community—a community characterized by both distinct geographic boundaries and racial affiliation. Seemingly, Rebecca’s peers nurtured her educational ambition—and, she hoped, “breakthrough”—because this scenario also represented their own ambitions, and specifically their belief that young people like themselves were capable of attaining a university education. Although not always articulated, it seemed to be an expectation of peer-group members that people like Rebecca would return to contribute to their community, an expectation that echoed that of her teachers. Whether influenced by their teachers and peers, or simply driven by their own desire to change the negative images of their community, respondents articulated educational and career aspirations that were inextricably linked not only to what their parents, teachers, and peers expected of them but also to notions of “paying back” a debt to their community. In other words, pursuing a university education was not merely an opportunity to fulfill their personal educational and career goals but also a means of gaining the necessary knowledge and skills to work in and for the community (James & Haig-Brown, 2001). In fact, as the respondents talked about becoming teachers, community workers, lawyers, and politicians, they seemed to be less concerned with making money or having prestigious jobs than with being able to contribute productively to their community. When asked about his aspiration to become a teacher instead of a businessman as his parents had expected, Nguyen said, “Business is not for me . . . I think you’re in business for yourself . . . not the community or the country.”7 Sumita, who was active in student government while in high school, planned to pursue a career in politics. She reasoned that a career in politics would give her “an outlet, access to a resource base, people and knowledge, the ability to change things I don’t like in the community.” She felt she was suited to reversing attitudes of hopelessness on the part of many people in her community because “I grew up there and I know what it needs.” The “community” of which these students spoke and in which they aspired to work and contribute was represented not only by the geographical 7 It is worth pointing out that Nguyen’s history as a refugee from Vietnam played an important role in the deep sense of appreciation and commitment he feels toward his community and the country, and hence the kind of occupation that he feels will best enable him to “pay back” the community. This notion is further captured in his statement: “I came from Vietnam and I know in a way that I was thankful to be here.” This thankfulness was further understood to be “good motivation when I was growing up” (James & Haig-Brown, 2001, p. 239).

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area of Jane-Finch in which they lived, but also by an ideational construct with which they identified. For most of the respondents this construct took the form of a working-class, marginalized (in terms of race/ethnicity) group with ties to the region from which their parents had emigrated. In this manner, Jane-Finch was conceptualized not as a homogeneous community but rather as a geographical area made up of several ethnoracial groups. It was to this geographical area and a specific ethnoracial group that respondents referred when they spoke about their allegiance to their community. In the case of Catherine, who self-identified as “Cambodian,” the people who made up her referential community were other Cambodians living in the area with whom she shared the “same or common interests, ethnic background and race.” About her interest in working with her community, Catherine stated: I get more experience working with my community, I feel the interest to serve my community, to help them through the problems that they’re having now so that’s how my interest in becoming a social worker has played a part in my life because I’ve been so interactive with my community that I know the issue that’s been affecting them and I, as a Cambodian worker, would like to serve my community as much as I could, as much as I want to be a teacher, but, you know I think it’s more of me to serve my community, that’s why I chose the field of social work.

This connection to a particular raced and classed community with specific geographical boundaries resonated in many of the students’ discourses. For example, Jamaican-born Vivian, who grew up and went to the schools in the Jane-Finch area, explained that she aspired to become a teacher rather than a nurse (her initial career choice) because she “could offer more as a teacher, set an example as a role model, counsel, offer advice, [and] steer someone in the right direction.” She believed that as a teacher she could authoritatively model: “I’ve been there and you can too.” Similarly, Rebecca, who at the time of the study was pursuing teaching instead of law at a university, suggested that for her “law school is a longterm goal.” She believed that as a lawyer she would be able to defend the young members of her community who, in her words, “will be involved with the law.” But here Rebecca was referring not to the young people of JaneFinch generally, but rather to Black youth, the ones with whom she hung out in high school—“the worst set of kids in school . . . the ones that didn’t go to class.” Indeed, research on Black youth, particularly males, residing in working-class communities like Jane-Finch, attests that they tend to be constructed as troublemakers and criminals, and therefore are often targeted by police (F. Henry, 1994; James, 1998, 2002). Hence Rebecca’s perception of their need for the services of lawyers.


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Citing the prohibitive cost of university schooling, Rebecca, in the meantime, opted to become a high school teacher for, as she put it, “I can still prepare them [the students] and better help them and give them the push to go on which a lot of them don’t get.” She believed that as a teacher she would be able to address the schooling situation that precipitates Black students’ loss of interest in, and dropping out of, school. She believed that in her role as a concerned and involved teacher she would be able to change students’ “bad attitude toward teachers,” which resulted from the fact that they’re just used to teachers that don’t care, or are used to seeing teachers that aren’t them, that don’t live in the community, you know what I mean? So it’s like when I say it would be beneficial if there were more, I guess, teachers of color, or teachers that actually lived in their neighborhood, do you know I mean, and, because Jane and Finch is a community kind of area where things get done by, I guess, people working together and like, me talking to your mother to help you out, kind of thing, so, more of that basically.

The proximity of Jane-Finch to York University—the university is to the immediate east of the community—was significant to these students’ decisions to pursue postsecondary education. The proximity of the students’ homes to the university meant that those admitted could live at home while attending university, alleviating costs associated with room and board. However, perhaps even more significant was the special board–university partnership program, which exposed the students to university activities and culture and helped to create a sense in them that their aspirations were achievable. But beyond proximity to the university and the school–university partnership, the students’ aspirations were influenced by the complex relationship of geography to race and ethnic identifiers associated with their immigrant status and national origin. This relationship allowed them to construct a sense of community around a perceived set of common social, cultural, economic, linguistic, and educational experiences and connections. An exception to this pattern was Nguyen, whose understanding of community was represented somewhat differently. Unlike the others, when he spoke of his future plans he did not reference his own or any specific ethnic group. He tended to view the community mainly in geographical and social terms—a view that may have been influenced by the fact that the teachers who made it possible for him to realize his aspiration of attending university were not members of his ethnic group (Vietnamese). He felt a great sense of loyalty and obligation to these teachers, and a responsibility to do as they had encouraged—to return to the geographically delimited community and pass on what he had learned at university. In the section that follows, I compare the findings of this first study of Jane-Finch youth to those of the study of Black students in the wider To-

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ronto area, focusing on the interface of educational aspirations and notions of community.

STUDENTS’ ASPIRATIONS AS RELATED TO CULTURAL CONNECTIONS VIEWED AS COMMUNITY Research has shown that the high educational aspirations of many Toronto Black students of immigrant backgrounds are influenced by their interest in working for, and on behalf of, the “Black community.” The expectation is that in attaining their goals they will have demonstrated that racism need not be a barrier to high achievement, thus acting as inspirations and models for Black youth (Dei et al., 1997; James, 1993; see also Waters, 1999). These studies also point to the significant role that community—in this case, a raced and marginalized community—plays in Black youths’ constructions of their aspirations. This racial conceptualization of the community, and students’ educational aspirations embedded in a desire to “give back,” were reflected in my recent study of the educational experiences of generation-and-a-half and second-generation African Canadians living in different areas of Toronto. However, in this case, unlike with the Jane-Finch study, respondents did not act out of a sense of community circumscribed by geography and negative stereotypes. Rather, it was clear through their comments that their referential group was the wider Black community of Toronto. Like the students who resided in Jane-Finch, these students too explained their aspirations in terms of their raced experiences and immigrant backgrounds. However, unlike the students in Jane-Finch, they attributed these experiences to broader structural conditions affecting the network of African Canadians in Toronto (as opposed to phenomena related to a bounded geographical area). As with the Jane-Finch group, this group of respondents constructed high educational aspirations as a strategy for resisting their racialization and marginalization and benefiting both themselves and their community. Take, for example, the case of Jamaican-born Milbert, who immigrated to Toronto at age 14 and is now a student at a university west of Toronto. He plans to major in finance and hopes to “get a job in the financial sector in the business world.” When asked about his occupational aspirations, Milbert mentioned that he was interested in doing a job through which he could help his community. In the following excerpt we see that his reasoning applies to a generic category of people needing help, as opposed to a group residing within a specific geographical area: Mental and emotional support can only take you so much. I can’t feed a starving person mental and emotional feelings or support, they need money and


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money will give you whatever. Emotional support can come with certain things and you have to have money to give better support. Right now the money is important but you never know. I’ll do it for a couple of years and I’ll probably end up doing some social work.

Like Nguyen, Rebecca, and Vivian, Roxanne, a Canadian-born young woman, and Alex, a Jamaica-born young man who immigrated to Canada at age 13, pointed to their experiences in physical education and their cultural connections as playing a significant role in their decision to become teachers. Although both were good athletes and did well in the physical education program at university, Alex chose to become a physical education teacher, whereas Roxanne did not. Roxanne reasoned that because she is “young-looking [23 years old] right now,” she would likely be mistaken for a student. She perceived this combination as making life difficult for her as a physical education teacher, especially if she were to teach in schools where there were large numbers of Black students. Roxanne also pointed out that she did not “want to be a phys-ed teacher [since] it’s like that [is] what would be expected of me—that I am Black and so naturally I am going to teach sports.” When it was pointed out to her that there were, in fact, few Black physical education teachers in Toronto, Roxanne nevertheless resisted the idea of joining a physical education high school staff. She reasoned, “I don’t think there is anything that I alone could do. If I could multiply myself, if I could clone myself perhaps, but it’s too overpowering.” We see that although, on the one hand, Roxanne resisted the idea of race ascribing what and where she should teach, on the other hand, race was very much a factor in informing her educational aspirations. As she stated, “I went into kinesiology because I like the science side of sports and I thought about majoring in science. . . . But I thought about doing math or something where you didn’t see a lot of Black people, just for that reason.” So, aware of the stereotypes and the scarcity of Black students majoring in maths and sciences, and informed by her reading of the needs of the Black community, Roxanne sought to challenge the stereotypes, but not at the expense of her own personal comfort. In contrast, Alex, who majored in kinesiology at the same university as Roxanne, accepted the challenge of becoming a physical education teacher because he wanted to “influence a lot of people [Black students] and what they do.” He explained, with reference to his own high school and practiceteaching experiences with Black students, that “kids are just lost; they need someone to kind of help them along . . . someone who can relate to them.” Borrowing from his own experience, he related that in high school his football and basketball coach was “the first Black teacher I have ever had in Canada,” and he considered him to be more “like my father instead of like my coach.” This experience evidently had a lot to do with Alex’s aspiration

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to become a physical education teacher—a teacher like the one he had whom Black students could model. Like Alex, Roxanne had a teacher-coach (although not Black) who encouraged her in school, but she did not take from that experience the same aspirations as Alex. What factors might account for this difference—immigrant experience, race, gender, community? Although from a working-class, single-parent family like Alex, Roxanne grew up in Canada and lived and attended school in a mainly White, middleclass suburban area of Toronto. And although most of her friends during high school were Black, like many of them she was influenced by the middle-class values of individuality and meritocracy that are embedded in the educational curriculum. The notion of individuality is evident in Roxanne’s unwillingness to consider the expectations and interests of the community (i.e., to increase the ranks of Black physical education teachers) at the expense of her own interests and satisfaction. Alex, on the other hand, attended a school that was racially and ethnically mixed, with students—a significant proportion of them Black—from working-class backgrounds. He had more experiences with Black peers and teachers who contributed to his development of a commitment to community and hence his willingness to work as a physical education teacher to help students. Also, arguably, gender played a role in structuring the opportunities and informing the differences in Alex’s and Roxanne’s perceptions of what they could effectively accomplish as teachers. As a former university football player and, at the time, a volunteer university coach, as well as someone who had done his practice teaching in a high school with a large Black student population, Alex talked quite confidently of his ability to control any teaching situation he might encounter. Further, Alex benefited from the support that male student athletes tend to get from the community and their school, and specifically from coaches and teachers. For example, in his final year of high school, Alex was offered “half scholarships” to play football at two American division-one universities. (One of the scholarships would be converted into a full scholarship if he performed well in the first year.) However, Alex recognized the prohibitive cost of pursuing studies in the two universities, and followed the advice of his coach, who also discouraged him from going to division-two and -three schools even if he received full scholarships. Instead of accepting the offers, he went to his local university, having been advised by the people around him to get a “good education instead of going somewhere and taking like lawn care for your classes and getting a diploma and then you have nothing.” Aside from having a Black coach, Alex’s experiences and achievements are similar to those of many Black Caribbean Canadian working-class male students who are able to use sports to negotiate school, build self-confidence, gain recognition, establish a sense of belonging through cultural connections, and acquire opportunities to develop their leadership skills


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(see James, 1995; Solomon, 1992; Spence, 1999). As Alex stated, “At school, if you are a good athlete and you are someone that stands out in your surroundings, then people are going to accept you more. . . . So I never really had to worry about ever having friends or being that outsider type of guy that everyone is conscious of what he is doing.” In this manner, the gendered support and opportunities provided by excelling in sports benefited Alex much more than Roxanne (see James, 2005, chapter 4). Indeed, research evidence indicates that gender figures prominently in shaping students’ school experiences, expectations, and achievements, as well as their identities (Gibson, 1997; Grant, 1984, 1992; A. Henry, 1998). In her research on African American girls, Annette Henry (1998) demonstrated that the politics of gender, even in institutions dedicated to working with students to build leadership in the wider Black community, operated “to disallow a place for [girls] to express themselves, to feel that they could participate, [or] to even bother” (p. 163). In the case of the children of immigrant Caribbean parents, for whom education is viewed as a means of upward mobility, research indicates that females tend to do better educationally than their male counterparts (Waters, 1999). Relatedly, Gibson (1997) asserted that the differing school adaptation patterns of males and females highlight the influence of family and community “on the decisions that girls make with respect to their course of study and the effort they invest in their studies” (p. 443). With regard to Roxanne, it is possible that she chose not to become a physical education teacher because she wished to avoid these implications of the politics of gender in the schools, the masculinity of the gym space and physical education classroom, and the place, and sometimes the prominence, of Black male students in sports (James, 2005). Given this context, it is conceivable that Roxanne was opting for a subject area that would provide her with a safe space within the vocation of teaching to which both she and Alex aspired. In contrast to the respondents from the Jane-Finch area, those living in other areas of Toronto did not have organizations in their geographic communities that provided supports as they constructed and negotiated their aspirations. Nevertheless, some turned to organizations that served the larger ethnoracial community. For example, Kara, who came to Canada when she was 13, was unfamiliar with the Toronto high school system, so turned to the Jamaican Canadian Association, which helped her adjust to education in Canada. Similarly, as a member of a Roman Catholic church with a large Caribbean membership, as well as the youth wing of a political party with which her father worked and other youth organizations, Kisha developed the skills, knowledge, and social networks that were significant to the development of her educational and vocational aspirations. Through her many youth activities she became widely known and received a number of awards, making her an attractive target of opportunity for Ontario

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universities. These cases underscore the important role that community organizations play in the lives of marginalized students. The organizations not only assist in the cultural adjustment process of some immigrant youths and their parents but also often provide the information, support, encouragement, possibilities, and idealism that many students need in constructing high aspirations and in coping with the various discouraging experiences that they have in schools (Cummins, 1997; Gitlin et al., 2003; A. Henry, 1998; F. Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, 2000; Portelli & Solomon, 2001; Waters, 1997). In this manner, opportunities and experiences provided by and within community structures and associations help create in minority students an understanding and appreciation of the service, professional, business, and other needs of the community. As a result, they foster aspirations to “give back” to the community, that is, work to better the opportunities of other Black students. I conclude this section with a quote from Kisha, who at the time of the interview was planning to enter the master’s program in education at a Toronto university. Kisha’s comments, which are typical of many of the students we interviewed, are reflective of her position that mainstream notions of diversity may not be as responsive to community needs as the understandings that she could bring as a minority educator and activist: I’d like to start some programs in my area with Black youth and maybe go back to my high school and do some teaching . . . I’d like to do some programming in the community. . . . There is a mainstream struggle to get curriculum that’s more reflective of the diverse student bodies, and there is also another space for community-based education and education to liberate. I think that’s the direction that I am moving toward as opposed to mainstream stuff.

CONCLUSION In societies that are stratified by race, ethnicity, class, and immigrant/citizenship status, marginalized students face barriers to social mobility because of economic, political, and social hardship. The barriers have the effect of thwarting these students’ high educational and career aspirations, which can only be sustained in a supportive environment. And yet, we can still find many marginalized students in postsecondary institutions pursuing their educational and occupational goals. It is important to study the routes by which the students get to these institutions, and the ways in which their aspirations get formed, developed, and nurtured, because this kind of knowledge will help us understand how schools and educators can work with families and communities to facilitate learning and allow students to realize their aspirations. Knowing how marginalized students un-


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derstand, navigate, and negotiate the educational, cultural, social, economic, and political structures of their schools and society to become successful university students provides important insights for the work of teachers, teacher educators, parents, and community members. The educational and occupational aspirations of the African Canadian students in these two studies—both those living in the stigmatized geographical community of Jane-Finch and those living in the wider Toronto area—were constructed, sustained, and encouraged through supportive networks and resources and, importantly, through these students’ own readings of the opportunity structures that were available to them. The findings of both studies reveal how these students factored into their decisions the support that they received from their parents, peers, and teachers as they negotiated the educational, cultural, and social structures, and their understandings of the possible benefits that would accrue to them and the community if they pursued their aspirations. In complex and varying ways, notions of community played a significant role in how respondents in both studies thought about their educational and occupational aspirations and the avenues they pursued. Both groups of respondents saw their education and eventual occupation as equipping them with the resources to “give back” to their community, thereby enhancing the opportunities of its younger disenfranchised members. However, I have found that in the wider Toronto study the community was defined in ethnoracial terms, whereas in the case of the Jane-Finch study, respondents further envisioned their community as a geographically defined entity with fixed physical coordinates. In the Jane-Finch study, although respondents felt a responsibility to help a new generation of young people coming of age in Jane-Finch, they felt equally compelled to dispel the unfair negative stereotypes of their community advanced by the media (and, one might note, academicians). Indeed, their oral testimonies are especially poignant in their commendations of supportive teachers and community members who went out of their way to encourage them in their studies and to advance their careers, calling into question a commonly held assumption that economically disadvantaged neighborhoods get the worst teachers. Notwithstanding these findings, it is certain that many marginalized youth who have high educational aspirations will not attain their goals. Indeed, stereotyping, ethnocentrism, racism, and inequitable policies systemically operate as barriers to their achievement (Dei et al., 1997; Gitlin et al., 2003; James, 1997; Waters, 1997). The second-generation and generationand-a-half students who managed to maintain their aspirations and eventually enter university did not necessarily avoid these barriers or have less experience with them. Rather, they were able to develop their social capital in the form of bicultural skills and abilities and, with the support of their

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communities, peers, families, and teachers, work through these obstacles. Clearly, having access to good schools, safe neighborhoods, and families with secure incomes—as opposed to circumstances structured by violence, drugs, and poverty—is a preferred situation for constructing high educational aspirations. Nevertheless, when immigrant minority students are presented with opportunity structures and supportive teachers who recognize their abilities and make access to and the possibilities of a university education visible for them, they will see the feasibility of their aspirations and work toward their own demarginalization.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Sandra Schecter and Cindy Pease-Alvarez for their feedback on an earlier version of this chapter; thanks again to Sandra for the editorial suggestions she provided.

REFERENCES Anisef, P., Axelrod, P., Baichman-Anisef, E., James, C. E., & Turrittin, A. (2000). Opportunity and uncertainty: Life course experiences of the class of ’73. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Boyd, M., & Grieco, E. M. (1998). Triumphant transitions: Socioeconomic achievements of the second generation in Canada. International Migration Review, 32(4), 853–876. Cummins, J. (1997). Minority status and schooling in Canada. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 28(3), 411–430. Dei, G. J. S., Muzzuca, J., McIsaac, E., & Zine, J. (1997). Reconstructing drop-out: A critical ethnography of the dynamics of Black students’ disengagement from school. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Foner, N. (1997). The immigrant family: Cultural legacies and cultural changes. International Migration Review, 31(4), 961–974. Gibson, M. A. (1997). Complicating the immigrant/involuntary minority typology. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 28(3), 431–454. Gitlin, A., Buendia, E., Crosland, K., & Doumbia, F. (2003). The production of margin and center: Welcoming-unwelcoming of immigrant students. American Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 91–122. Grant, L. (1984). Black females’ “place” in desegregated classrooms. Sociology of Education, 57(2), 98–111. Grant, L. (1992). Race and the schooling of young girls. In J. Wrigley (Ed.), Education and gender equality (pp. 91–113). London: Falmer Press. Henry, A. (1998). “Invisible” and “womanish”: Black girls negotiating their lives in an Africancentered school in the USA. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 1(2), 151–169. Henry, F. (1994). The Caribbean diaspora in Toronto: Learning to live with racism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Henry, F., Tator, C., Mattis, W., & Rees, T. (2000). The colour of democracy: Racism in Canadian society. Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada.


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James, C. E. (1993). Getting there and staying there: Blacks’ employment experience. In P. Anisef & P. Axelrod (Eds.), Transitions: Schooling and employment in Canada (pp. 3–20). Toronto: Thomson Educational Publishing. James, C. E. (1995). Negotiating school through sport: African Canadian youth strive for academic success. Avente, 1(1), 20–36. James, C. E. (1997). Contradictory tensions in the experiences of African Canadians in a faculty of education with an access program. Canadian Journal of Education, 22(2), 158–174. James, C. E. (1998). “Up to no good”: Black on the streets and encountering police. In V. Satzewich (Ed.), Racism and social inequality in Canada: Concepts, controversies and strategies of resistance (pp. 158–176). Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing. James, C. E. (2002). Armed and dangerous: Racing suspects, suspecting race. In B. Schissel & C. Brooks (Eds.), Marginality and condemnation: An introduction to critical criminology (pp. 289–307). Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. James, C. E. (2005). Race in play: Understanding the socio-cultural worlds of student athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. James, C. E., & Haig-Brown, C. (2001). “Returning the dues”: Community and the personal in a university–school partnership. Urban Education, 36(2), 226–255. Kao, G., & Tienda, M. (1995). Optimism and achievement: The educational performance of immigrant youth. Social Science Quarterly, 76(1), 1–19. Lam, L. (1994). Immigrant students. In P. Anisef (Ed.), Learning and sociological profiles of Canadian high school students (pp. 121–130). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. McLaren, P. (1998). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations. New York: Longman. Philip, M. (2003, June 26). Starting life poor. Toronto Globe and Mail, p. A6. Portelli, J. P., & Solomon, R. P. (Eds.). (2001). The erosion of democracy in education: From critique to possibilities. Calgary, AB: Deselig Enterprises Ltd. Portes, A. (1995). Children of immigrants: Segmented assimilation and its determinants. In A. Portes (Ed.), The economic sociology of immigration (pp. 248–279). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Portes, A., & MacLeod, D. (1999). Educating the second generation: Determinants of academic achievement among children of immigrants in the United States. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 25(3), 373–396. Schecter, S. R., & Bayley, R. (2002). Language as cultural practice: Mexicanos en el norte. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Solomon, R. P. (1992). Black resistance in high school: Forging a separatist culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Spence, C. M. (1999). The skin I’m in: Racism, sports and education. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Waters, M. C. (1997). Immigrant families at risk: Factors that undermine chances for success. In A. Booth, A. C. Crouter, & N. Landale (Eds.), Immigration and the family: Research and policy in U.S. immigration (pp. 79–89). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Waters, M. C. (1999). Black identities: West Indian immigrant dreams and American realities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zhang, C., Ollila, L. O., & Harvey, B. (1998). Chinese parents’ perceptions of their children’s literacy and schooling in Canada. Canadian Journal of Education, 23(2), 182–190. Zhou, M. (1997). Growing up American: The challenge confronting immigrant children and children of immigrants. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 63–95.


C H A P T E R

12 Lengua Latina: Latina Canadians (Re)constructing Identity Through a Community of Practice Karleen Pendleton Jiménez York University

Education, in its deepest sense and at whatever age it takes place, concerns the opening of identities—exploring new ways of being that lie beyond our current state . . . education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of the self. —Wenger (1998, p. 263)

“You’re used to being in a space with Latinas1 . . . that’s how the world is for you. And for me it’s not. Like for me, my family is the closest that I come to being in a Latino space.” When another member of our Latina writing group pointed this out to me 3 years after our group’s inception, I was shocked. Although I was aware that there are far fewer Latina/os in Canada than in the United States, the extreme isolation of Latina/os had still not impressed itself on me. When I casually wrote a flyer calling for Latinas to form a writing group, I was acting from the perspective of a California Chicana (with mixed Mexican and Anglo roots) accustomed to rooms full of Latinas. I did not know that ambivalence existed around the term Latina, nor that members 1

English translations of Latino or Latina, found in the dictionary, all center on relationships to the Latin language (American Heritage Dictionary, 1982, p. 423). Latino Canadian performance artist Guillermo Verdecchia (1993) defines Latino as “inaccurate because [it] lump[s] a whole lot of different people into one category . . . could include people as different as right-wing Cubans living in Miami, exiled Salvadorean leftists, Mexican speakers of Nahuatl, Brazilian speakers of Portuguese, lunfardo-speaking Koreans in Buenos Aires, Nuyoricans (dat’s a Puerto Rican who lives in New York) and den dere’s de Uruguayans—I mean dey’re practically European” (p. 27).

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chanced coming, wondering if the identity held any water for them. I could not know the extent to which this group would design Latina Canadian identities, as well as foster an unusual opportunity for learning. In this chapter I bring together critical literacy and Chicana/o studies in an exploration of identity transformation. I focus my research on the identities and writing of Latina Canadians within Lengua Latina, a creative writing group for Latinas in Toronto. Using Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice (1998) as my primary theory, I consider how participation in Lengua Latina influences the movement and understanding of identity and community for one of its members. Here I am thinking of more than a sense of “Latina-ness/Latinidad,” for as Wenger (1998) noted, “The very notion of identity . . . entails an experience of multimembership” (p. 158). Through janet romero’s poetry and interviews, I explore the flux of four of her significant identities—writer, lesbian, translator, and Latina—during her time in Lengua Latina. How have these identities been shaped, uncovered, recovered, and strengthened, or just remained the same? What is the impact of these shifts on janet’s confidence and learning? In Lengua Latina, she writes about the identity changes resulting from her experiences of immigration from Chile to Canada. I explore the relationship between identity change for Latina/o Canadian immigrants and identity change as discussed in education. Finally, through janet’s experiences as an immigrant and as a member of Lengua Latina, I offer some ideas for how identity transformation within communal contexts might be explored in the designing of education. The decision to focus on janet romero’s writings and interviews is based on the format of Heller’s (1997) text, Until We Are Strong Together: Women Writers in the Tenderloin. The mission of Lengua Latina is to provide a place to share our lives and stories. I believe I can provide the most textured image of a life by concentrating on a single member, even if quite different responses to my questions will emerge depending on which member I choose to focus on. In this way I also hope to heed Rosaldo’s (1993) warning for ethnographers not to get so caught up in elaborating the social structures that they lose sight of human “intense emotions” and the “untidiness of everyday life” (p. 12). Theorists (Freire, 1970/1993; Heller, 1997; Wilson, 2000) argue that critical literacy, especially when performed by marginalized peoples, carries an array of promises and hopes for personal and political change. In relation to identity, writing in particular offers (a) a way of becoming “visible” (Heller, 1997, p. 19; Moraga, 1993), (b) a response to clichéd dominant representations with “real” and “complex” and “contradictory” representations (Allison, 1994, p. 165; Brodkey, 1996, p. 21), (c) “empowerment” and a “change of consciousness” (Kevane & Heredia, 2000, p. 101), and (d) the strengthening of an identity of membership in a community (Maybin, 2000). Each of the

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possible outcomes suggests a movement in the construction, understanding, or expression of identity. In Chicana and Chicano studies,2 theorists also consider the movement of identity as a broader social phenomenon. Chicano writer José Antonio Burciaga (1995) described Chicanos as “chameleon. As we move from one world to the other we exchange colors, ideas, symbols and words in order to fit, to relate and to survive. The result is a prismatic iridescence when difference of colors play on each other, like a rainbow after a rainstorm in the desert” (p. 101). Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed (2000) presents a more elaborate system of change, a type of identity gearshift, whereby U.S. women of color shift to desired “ideological positionings (the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of oppositional consciousness). . . . The differential mode of consciousness functions like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power” (p. 58). In two other studies (one historical and the other ethnographic) encompassing approximately eight Mexican American3 women’s groups spanning 80 years (Pardo, 1998; Perez, 1999), members maneuver understandings and representations of identity to survive, confront U.S. racism, and build richer communities. These examples show the necessity and even potential benefits of identity transformation. However, especially during times of cultural conflict, when Mexican American identities have been under siege, such transformations do not occur without emotional, cultural, or political costs. Wenger’s Communities of Practice (1998) addresses identity transformations shaped by both shared practice and cultural “alignment.” Lengua Latina is suited to his use of a “community of practice” as the “primary unit of analysis” for a “social account of learning [which] . . . explores in a systematic way the intersection of issues of community, social practice, meaning, and identity” (inside cover). Wenger offered an extensive, intricate web of the dynamics of identity as experienced in community. He located identity as a central component of learning, arguing that “issues of education should be addressed first and foremost in terms of identities and modes of 2

Although there are differences between Chicana/os and Latina/o Canadians, I have chosen to incorporate Chicana and Chicano studies because of its relative closeness to the experiences of Latina/o Canadians and its evolution at this point in time, just as Black Canadians have turned to African American Studies as a comparative approach to understanding Black Canadian experiences (Walcott, 2000). 3 Mexican American mostly 3 refers to people of Mexican descent living in the United States. There are numerous terms for this definition (see “A Word About the Great Terminology Question,” Martínez, 1998, pp. 1–3 for elaboration). I have used Mexican American here because it is the term chosen in both of these studies. 2

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belonging . . . and only secondarily in terms of skills and information” (p. 263). His argument guided me in considering what type of learning may be possible when the “classroom,” in this case an informal group meeting at a community center, is specifically created around an assumption or hope of identity. To ground the theories and janet’s words in the context of Lengua Latina, I begin with a description of the workings of our writing group.

THE STRUCTURES OF LENGUA LATINA For 3 years, Lengua Latina has met in the same space. While each session has delivered varying themes, discussions, and ideas, and we rotate who will take up the role of “teacher” for the night, the basic structures of the location and agenda are consistent. Setting We4 chose a community center instead of a coffeehouse or other nonregulated public space to house our group. We wanted to ensure that we could close the door so that members might feel safer about writing and sharing personal stories. In addition, the community center, funded by both the government and private donations, is free of charge. This has meant that membership in our group is free, and there are none of the bureaucratic hassles that can arise when money is handled. We also chose a specific community center, the 519 Church Street Community Centre (“the 519”), located on the gay bar and restaurant strip, so that group members might feel comfortable if they were queer,5 and so that heterosexual members would probably come only if they felt comfortable with queer sexualities. Five of the six founding members, including myself, identify as queer, and consequently finding a queer-positive space was a significant concern. A look inside reveals a small room with high ceilings on the third floor of the 519 Church Street Community Centre, downtown Toronto, Aztlán,6 a closed door, new windows that slide open overlooking Church Street, a faint smell of paint, one long wooden table that must be constructed and dismantled for each session, a stack of hard plastic chairs, somewhere be4

“We” includes myself and one other member. I am using queer here to signify people who identify 5 as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or who are questioning their sexuality. 6 As a Chicana forming this group, I imagine 6 it as a piece of Aztlán, a piece of safety for our Latina bodies. Aztlán is a “mythic homeland” for Chicana/o people (see Perez, 1999, pp. 78–79, for a discussion of its possible configurations). This is Chicana mythology. It is a metaphor with limitations in that it may or may not appeal to other Latinas. 4

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tween one and ten self-identifying Latinas sitting around the table, notebooks and pens of various sizes and shapes lying in front of their owners. At the center of the table, sometimes there are candles burning, sometimes a bag of cookies lies open, sometimes homemade tostadas are spread and handed out. It is a Wednesday evening, during the first or third week of the month. There are two hours available. Lighting changes significantly with the seasons. Action Our usual routine is as follows: Arrive and greet. Facilitator presents the writing activity for the evening. Write together at the table (usually in our own notebooks, occasionally in pairs or as a group). Read our pieces aloud and offer one another supportive7 critiques. Depart. On occasion go for coffee and continue our discussions. I have also assembled a list of descriptive verbs of our activities: Greeting. Gossiping. Teaching. Writing. Remembering. Imagining. Editing. Reading Aloud. Performing. Risking. Fearing. Disturbing. Loving. Crying. Laughing. Listening. Spacing out. Critiquing. Embracing. Parting.

In addition, once or twice a year we read our poetry aloud for audiences at organized community events such as lesbian art openings, antiwar rallies, bookstore celebrations, and, simply, Latina poetry readings. Membership We range in age from mid-twenties to mid-thirties and our roots lie across the Americas. We are a testament to Latina mestizaje8; the colors and shapes of our bodies vary considerably. Most of the long-term members have obtained some degree of postsecondary education. Some of the members are working-class or have working-class origins; some are members of the middle class. Our sexualities include heterosexual and bisexual, but most of us are lesbian. Our genders include woman, femme, butch, and transgender. Some of us immigrated to Canada as children, some as adults, two via the United States, most directly from Latin America. None of us were born in Canada. All of us have ancestors from Latin America. We have 7 7 Because these are “free writes,” detailed or harsh critiques are not suitable or, I would imagine, desired. We point the author to appealing images or language, vague or confusing passages, and possibilities for future directions of the piece. We also offer a range of emotional responses, empathy, and connections to experience, including anger, sadness, care, pleasure, joy, pride. 8 Mestizaje refers to the broad range of racial and ethnic “mixing” (European, Native Ameri8 can, African, Chinese) that are the roots of Latina/o peoples (Martínez, 1998, p. 1).

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written together now for over 3 years. At present, there are three members who have participated since the group’s inception. Another member has been involved for at least 2 years, and three more joined 6 months ago. These numbers are an approximation because there is no explicit commitment required for membership. Members come and go, choosing to write with us some Wednesdays, to perform with us on other occasions, or at times simply to attend our performances and provide encouragement. My Involvement I am a member of Lengua Latina. The women of Lengua Latina are my friends. I have lived most of my life in California cities filled with Latinas, where it has always been easy to find Latina communities. In Toronto you cannot simply walk out the door and bump into dozens of Latinas on your way to anywhere. In Toronto you must create ways to purposely bump into one another, or you could walk alone for a long time. I helped found the group in May 2000 fundamentally because I was lonely. I know that I am happier and less crazy if there are Latinas in my life, and our group has continued to prove this true for me. I began my research on Lengua Latina when the group first formed. I have written field notes and collected writings. This year, after 3 years, I have begun to interview members. The following discussion of janet romero and her work is primarily based on collected poetry and a recent interview. janet romero janet romero9 describes herself as follows: janet romero is a visual artist dedicated to creating a space and place for Latino experience in Canada. Creating positive images of women in our queerness, brownness, feminism, and activism.10

janet is a founding member of Lengua Latina. I have known her for 3½ years, during which time we have talked, written, and performed together. She has consistently participated in the group, and on a couple of occasions just the two of us have presented our poetry and stories at local cultural events. Selections of janet’s biography are conveyed here through excerpts from two of her poems, and an interview I conducted with her on February 24, 2003. The poems I include were both written during Lengua Latina Wednesday-night sessions. 9

janet elected to use her real name in this research. A “bio” janet wrote for herself for a reading she performed 10 at “Mayworks” (May 2001), a union-sponsored, cultural arts series in Toronto.

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Writer Field notes, February 24, 2003 It is a cold, snowy evening in Toronto. I arrive at janet’s downtown apartment with my backpack full of books and tapes. She has just moved in. The walls are white and the carpet is speckled gray . . . Behind us is a row of five or six green plants. Their color and life contrast with the newness of the apartment and the city covered in white. Before we begin the interview, I dump out my books and show her some of my new finds from the library. I show her Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers (Kevane & Heredia, 2000). janet flips open the pages, and reads aloud a line which catches her eye, and appeals to her. In an interview with Cherríe Moraga, in reference to teaching a women’s writing group, Moraga explains, “If you live up to your writing, your life changes. It was not therapy. It was always focused on the writing. You never say to writers, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you.’ That is never the goal. You ask the writer, How can you make the best art from your pain?” (p. 101)

I resisted the sentiment of Moraga’s words while janet read them and later while writing this chapter. I debated leaving out the therapy portion. I have often turned to writing for therapy, and have written with other women who are doing the same. Why not create a beautiful metaphor and feel better about ourselves in the same breath? I know the dichotomy has been used to distinguish so-called real “writers” from those who use writing “simply” as an outlet for their feelings, but I think that the line between them is blurred. After reading through the transcripts of janet’s interview, however, I’ve come to understand her selection more clearly. The (re)conception of writing as art instead of therapy represents one shift she has undergone through her participation in Lengua Latina. Her work is no longer an expression that emerges and then fades away based on a surge of emotions; rather, it has become a reliable tool for clarifying thoughts and emotions, and for developing ideas: I used to . . . write only when I was upset, but that’s changed over time, especially going to the writing group, cuz regardless of what mode I’m in when I go to the writing group, I write. So whether I’m upset or I’m happy or I’m anxious or I’m like whatever I will write from that place.

Writing has become a consistent instrument, not separate from emotions, but one that keeps functioning through the range of their possibilities. Developing a closer relationship to writing can aid in stabilizing identities. Davis, Sumara, and Luce-Kapler (2000) described “alphabetic writing”

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as “an important tool, particularly as it enables us to record various details, interpretations, and narrative that contribute a certain stability to senses of personal and collective identity” (p. 171). janet has found that such “stability” strengthens her confidence: Karleen: janet:

Do you feel like it changed you by writing . . . It made me more confident that a lot of times the things that I was writing about were not just things in my head, that they were real . . . the reason I have that confidence is because I can read back on things that I wrote.

Evidence of what’s “real” is especially helpful when one’s identity is not readily accepted or reflected back in popular culture. janet discussed how writing helped her to come out as a lesbian and to work through some difficult experiences as an immigrant. She has created “discoursal space which might be the difference between keeping or losing your mind” (Wilson, 2000, p. 68). Although writing has become an important tool for janet, as well as the primary explicit reason for Lengua Latina gathering together, janet does not identify as a writer and in fact clearly states that she is not one. Like the women in Rebecca O’Rourke’s study “Living the Writing: Gendering Local Cultures of Writing” (2002), janet’s reasons for writing are personal, rather than fulfillment of a need to become, or be perceived as, a professional writer. I believe her experience supports Wenger’s (1998) view that acquiring a skill, writing, does not need to be central to one’s learning the way an identity does. Also, the skill does not necessarily correspond to the identity of one who possesses the skill. In other words, janet did not attempt to embrace an identity as a writer to enable her to write. Instead, she has adopted writing to facilitate other identities (as translator, lesbian, Latina, and so on), as she indicated when I asked her specifically if she feels that she has changed in any way because of participation in Lengua Latina: I think in general it has made me more confident in all my identities: woman, Latina, you know queer, activist, artist, like whatever, you know, all those different pieces that I identify with.

Lesbian One of those significant identities is “queer” or “lesbian.” I include lesbianism as an integral element in Lengua Latina, because janet highlights it. When I asked her why she came to Lengua Latina and what her early experiences with the group were like, she mentioned three times how the idea of being in a “queer-positive space” was central to her desire to come:

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I remember it was May so it’s the time of year that I really like, because it’s starting to get really warm. And I had just come out, so that was really exciting for me to be in a group where there were other lesbians.

janet joined a writing group at the very point in her life when she consciously decided to live as a lesbian. In her study, O’Rourke (2002) found that identity transformation was a common catalyst for those who joined writing groups. Participants had often experienced “shifts in identity and self-esteem which prompted the self-explorations and need for expression which writing offers” (p. 241). Although queer is not explicitly stated as an identity for group members in the way that Latina and writing are, the association and assumption of queerness with the group follow from the meeting place in a community center that mostly offers programs for queer people. The large percentage of queer members in our group is evidence of a need to seek others out who may be like you. It supports Wenger’s (1998) notion that our desire to participate is linked to how we identify. Identity corresponds to “what we attempt to know and understand and what we choose to ignore . . . with whom we seek connections and whom we avoid . . . how we engage and direct our energies” (p. 168). Lesbian identity has continued to play an important role in the learning that janet values as a member of Lengua Latina. janet expresses how the opportunity to write in a room with other lesbians offers her ideas about how to conduct her relationship: When things are not good in my relationship, going to the writing group can be a trigger, because I hear everybody else talk about what’s going on for them.

Writing and gossiping about lesbian love are the shared “enterprises,” which help us in learning how to “tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly” (Wenger, 1998, p. 45). Because lesbian identity remains mostly hidden in the public and media, Lengua Latina provides opportunities to develop this identity. In this case janet is not necessarily seeking “visibility” for her life through a writing group (Heller, 1997); she comes to the writing group seeking the visibility of lesbian identities. Coming to our group means learning some strategies for how to be a lesbian. Translator Perhaps the most conflicted identity that janet explores is the role of translator. During our conversation and in her writing janet often emphasizes her identity as a translator. It is an identity loaded with trauma and promise: a child’s hurt and loss, a woman’s pride, her measure of competence,

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and possibility for powerful communication. It is an identity that profoundly shapes janet’s writing, art, political work, family obligations, and perspective. It is the lens through which she perceives “the world as she knows it.” It is also an identity that shapes her involvement in Lengua Latina. I have excerpted portions of her poem “the world according to a ten year old girl” (2004), describing the conditions under which she began translating. It is a story of a young girl immigrating from Chile to Canada: the world according to a ten year old girl the world as i know it consists of my sister never really talking to me because she is embarrassed and i’m not sure of what but i know she doesn’t want to speak spanish [. . .] the world as i know it consists of mi hermanito struggling with numbers and letters and everyone saying he needs testing testing para que? i don’t understand but i know they’ve hurt him killed his spirit and i like to tickle him see his eyes sparkle see if maybe i can revive him so i do his homework for him because mi mami can’t porque no habla ingles y mi papi well . . . he’s still a stranger so i turn his book upside down and trace numbers and letters in secret and deep down i know this isn’t helping but it’s the only way i know to love him the world as i know it leaves me with little hope as i watch las manos de mi mama rip and bleed after sewing dozens of shoes all to have her independence pero she depends on me to translate words i do not know nor wish to to clear things up for her that are not clear to me to fix things i cannot fix because i don’t understand but i pretend to because she expects me to [. . .] the world as i know it is unsure nothing is for sure except for the fact that i can do a cartwheel and a back walkover and my hair is past my shoulders and i like to wear skirts [. . .] no one asks me if i am happy here if i can or want to translate

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if i understand what my mouth speaks no one asks me how i feel what hurts me no one tells me i am ok as i am that i am beautiful no one assures me that my abuelita will be okay that my mother’s hands will stop bleeding that mi hermanito will learn to add and spell that mi hermana will stop coloring and straightening her hair that my father wants to have us here no one because they know nothing of my world

janet’s poem illustrates the intimate losing and saving tied to acts of translation. It shapes her familial relationships, her childhood, her confidence, and her power. Her capacity to translate altered her relationship with each member of her family. janet did not choose to be the translator for her family: “no one asks me . . . if I can or want to translate.” It was a daughter’s duty to her mother. She could not save her mother’s hands from the toll of hard labor, but she could help her by explaining English words to her. Translation was also the “only way” she knew to “love” her brother and protect him from his teachers. It was a skill which might save his happiness. These were very powerful capabilities for a 10-year-old girl to have accessed. However, learning to translate did not save her relationship with her sister. Her sister could translate if she was called on to do so, but it was a task she shied away from. Because janet was more willing, her sister would allow janet to take the role of translator whenever there was a choice. Although they shared the two languages in common, perhaps janet’s “world” as translator was too distant from her sister’s move toward English, resulting in the loss of communication. This might also explain why “no one,” none of the other members of her family, who were primarily monolingual during that time, knew of janet’s world. In addition, she did not seem to connect with her father, who had immigrated earlier to Canada. In other words, she learned that acquiring languages did not necessarily fix problems of communication, or save relationships. There were more losses. On some level she lost her childhood. She was the one who explained the world to her mother, instead of the expectation of a mother explaining it to her child. janet comments on the discomfort of a child moving into this position: I just think it’s wrong for the child to be translating. Like it’s just, there’s something really messed up about that because it puts you as a child in a very, it’s not even a vulnerable place, but just like, you don’t get what’s going on in the adult world, and you’re made to like understand things that you don’t.

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janet was translating between Spanish and English of the adult world, words that did not belong to her. Using such unfamiliar words placed her in a position to “pretend,” and to potentially lose a sense of her identity, of who that little girl was. It produced a feeling of uncertainty, where “nothing [was] for sure.” I find “the world according to a ten year old girl” to be quite a painful read. I am struck by the isolation of the girl’s world, with such mature labor for her to accomplish (as a translator) to care for her family members, and ultimately her anger at the loss of care from these same family members as a result of their inability to speak English. I also see the power that this girl acquires through translation. Her family may depend on her work as a translator, but it becomes a skill she possesses. She develops and wields it in order to make her way through the world. Another glimpse of janet’s power is revealed when she notes that despite her uncertainty with the world, she does know that she “can do a cartwheel and a back walkover and [her] hair is past her shoulders and [she] like[s] to wear skirts.” She is a girl who is confident in her body, acknowledging strength, playfulness, and beauty in the midst of crisis. This body is what carries her through thousands of miles into a new language and culture. I believe it is this same body that now takes the stage before a hundred people, translating her life into intimate poetry for them. Wenger (1998) acknowledged the power and possibilities of a translator, whom I think he would call a “broker across boundaries” (p. 225), who should be valued for his or her capability of “coordinating multiple perspectives” (p. 274). In this way she or he is “able to have effects on the world” (p. 274). As a woman, janet translates this story of an immigrant girl for audiences who do not understand this experience but hold positions where such understandings are crucial. She once performed “the world according to a ten year old girl” for a large room full of Toronto educators. When I asked her why she decided to take the stage with her words, she responded: Whether it be a teacher, a counselor, like whomever it is that kids sort of come into contact with on a daily basis, that’s who I feel I want to hear this. So that there’ll be more compassion and understanding for those kids. . . . If you haven’t had the experience of being an immigrant as a child, you understand it completely different than those that like have been in that place, right, and you don’t understand sometimes like why kids may do what they do or why, you know, you don’t get it.

Her reasons for performing this translation are not so different from those she learned as a girl. She is still using her skills with language and confidence in body to protect the people she values. I asked her if her public readings are a type of continuation of her role as translator:

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janet: Karleen: janet:

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When you’re talking about, ok, I can bring this experience and explain it to this teacher, so they’ll get it, cuz they don’t have that connection right? They need a translator. Mhm So maybe some of your writing will bring that work Which I feel is something that I have to do because I don’t want other kids to have to do that. . . . It’s like the first generation went through that, so I want us to deal with that in a way that will be helpful, and that way it doesn’t have to keep repeating itself.

Lengua Latina, through which she writes and performs her poetry, is a mechanism for her current translation. During our workshops she writes and edits the stories of her life that she may eventually take to a broader audience. However, the appeal of Lengua Latina is also the possibility of a location where translation is not necessary: Karleen: janet:

Karleen: janet:

You came because you enjoyed doing the writing . . . it made you feel good, cuz? Mhm . . . the idea of being in a space that was queer positive first of all, and . . . I felt comfortable writing in like Spanglish because people would understand and I wouldn’t have to explain that I could just— Time not to have to be a translator? Yes, to just say it like I felt it or like I wanted to say it for a long time and not worry that someone’s going to say, oh, I don’t understand that.

Lengua Latina provides relief from one of janet’s most burdensome identities. Her response echoes the frustration of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua (1987): Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. (p. 59)

Lengua Latina is a space where Anzaldua’s “tongue” may some day find legitimacy and where janet has finally located a comfortable place for her “Spanglish.” Lengua Latina is a place where the 10-year-old immigrant girl is finally asked to describe her world—where she speaks, and an audience listens.

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LATINIDAD EN CANADÁ Karleen: janet:

What’s it like to sit in a room with other Latinas and write? . . . For me it’s weird because this is the most contact I’ve had with Latinas my whole life.

Language is not the only material for translation. Canada offers dramatically different cultures and social structures from those janet encountered as a child in Chile. Wenger (1998) insisted that an exploration of identity in practice must include an examination of the larger hegemonic structure: “Our identities, even in the context of a specific practice, are not just a matter internal to that practice but also a matter of our position and the position of our communities within broader social structures” (p. 148). How the identity of Latina operates for janet within Lengua Latina depends on her position as a Latina in Canada. In Toronto there are Latina/o restaurants, cultural festivals, a TV station, salsa nights at clubs, political organizations, a newspaper, small markets where imported staples can be purchased, a community center, and a film and theater festival. There are Mexican farm workers being exploited by the Canadian government, and Latina/o Canadian activists fighting on their behalf for human rights (King-Chigbo & Lee, 2003). Latina/os definitely have a presence in Canada, but in contrast to the United States, they do not constitute a large percentage of the Canadian population.11 More than one third of Greater Toronto’s 4,647,955 residents identify as visible minorities, but only 75,910 of these residents identify as being Latino (Statistics Canada, 2001b). In these excerpts from her poem “Canadá” (2000), janet articulates the Canada she encountered upon her arrival: Canadá It’s how we spoke about it, Canadá, tierra de oportunidad land of opportunity oportunidades muchas, muchas oportunidades come the opportunity at ridicule ridicule Blue jeans Ridicule Lots of amigitas And ridicule [. . .] Porque una niña de nueve años, no tiene las palabras for discrimination 11 According to the 2001 census, 245,495 residents identified as having Spanish as their mother tongue out of 29,639,035 residents of Canada (Statistics Canada, 2001a).

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and racism but she feels it, cada vez que la profesora talks down to her mother raises her voice at her mother como que si fuera sorda cada vez que tiene que traducir y no encuentra las palabras cannot explain to her Mamá que the saleswoman doesn’t deserve her money because money cannot buy you respect [. . .] Canadá Land of opportunity The opportunity to always be in between aquí y allá The opportunity to forever, never be at home Canadá Sí, fué el principio de nuestras vidas a beginning we did not seek, for we had no idea there was anything new to begin We already had a home, a land, an identity were not in search of something new or different had no desire, need to leave home

For janet, being a Latina in Canada has meant money, material goods, and vulnerability. There are job opportunities and racism. It is where expectations and dreams are crushed. There is a lack of respect for her mother and ridicule for her. Her Latina identity became something to hide from attack, to deny, a piece of herself for which to feel shame. As a mixed-race “brown” person, janet left a country where she was part of a dominant majority and landed in one where she would be the object of racist attacks. Similar experiences have been expressed by Latina/o Canadian writers Guillermo Verdecchia (1993) and Carmen Rodríguez (1997), and documented by scholar Magali San Martín (1996). This means Latina/os in Canada face at least three simultaneous adjustments: in language, culture, and racial status. Such transitions, or ruptures, have devastating effects on an individual’s sense of identity. For janet, it has meant “learning how to feel like less.” Verdecchia (1993) described it as living with a “very bad border wound” (p. 70). Although he believed such conflicting identities are difficult to inhabit, Wenger (1998) suggested that individuals who dwell simultaneously in two or more distinct worlds might “incorporate boundaries into an identity, and the work of reconciliation involved produces a kind of lived resolution of the boundary” (p. 255). Gloria Anzaldua (1987) named such a compromise as the capacity to find a home on the “borderlands.” In his play Fronteras Americanas: American Borders (1993), Verdecchia spoke to a similar hope for resolution. Despite the pain endured as a Latino Canadian, he concluded, “I am a hyphenated person but I am not falling apart, I am putting together. I am building a house on the border” (p. 77). The immediate work

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of “putting together” and “building a house” are the script and performance of his play, precisely the same words that document the hurt. Fronteras Americanas is a testament to how rigorous identity formation can be, as well as the possibility of artistic expression as a tool in that formation. Discussing the women writers group in the Tenderloin, Heller (1997) noted that the writing they do makes meaningful connections to their lives, whether or not their actual material conditions change. It is my hope that Lengua Latina aids in making such intimate connections. It might exist for janet as a type of “borderlands,” to work through both joyful and agonizing Latina Canadian experiences, away from the “Canadá” that fails to respect her. I believe that the poetry she produces is evidence of such work. When Lengua Latina calls for Latinas in Toronto to come and write, we are in effect asking to write in the context of an identity. However, this identity is not static or singular. We find ourselves in a Canadian room together, each one of us born in different regions of the Americas: Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the United States, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and Venezuela. When we begin to talk, write, read our stories aloud, critique, or joke around, our notions of what it means to be Latina, to share a Latina identity, change. Even our opening greeting, one kiss or two, how much hug to include, standing or remaining seated, becomes an event of uncertainty and negotiation. Our sense of being Latina “inherits the texture of practice” (Wenger, 1998, p. 162). “The work of identity is always going on” (p. 154), Wenger argued, and “learning in practice is negotiating an identity” (p. 157). Such heterogeneity of Latina identities has offered janet room to move from stereotypical notions of what a Latina could mean— The Latinas that I knew for the most part in high school wore a lot of makeup, had very very short kilts, um, always looked like they spent a good hour in the morning getting themselves together to go to school, um their hair was always perfect, they were always around boys, they didn’t do very well in school, um were somewhat . . . what the teachers would call like disruptive.

—to diverse possibilities: Karleen: janet:

And what do Latinas look like now? Latinas look like me, Latinas look like that, Latinas look like everybody else in a sense like in terms of yes a Latina could be disruptive or yes a Latina could be really quiet and it could be really nice and could be really shy and can be really loud and obnoxious or can be like, anything.

janet’s experience of encountering diverse meanings of Latina through her participation in Lengua Latina, through reading Chicana Lesbians by Carla Trujillo (1991), and through accomplishing political work has made

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the idea of claiming the identity of Latina more desirable and possible. When I asked janet how her relationship to the word Latina had changed, she linked the learning to a shedding of the stereotypical image of a Latina: “It changed mainly because I’ve realized that I don’t have to be that [the stereotypical image], for people to see me as a Latina.” C. Alejandra Elenes (2001) expressed a similar embracing of the term Chicana after a Chicano identity imagined and constructed during the Chicano movement moved “from a static definition to one that is characterized by plurality and flexibility” (p. 692). Through this movement, janet has developed a certain “security” with the term Latina: I don’t think when I started coming to the group—I think I did identify as Latina, but I wasn’t as [pause] I don’t know what the word is, I wasn’t as maybe secure in that identity as I am now.

At first glance, achieving “an identity of participation” and “competence” (Wenger, 1998, p. 4) in a Latina writing group might seem to correspond with the specific practice of the group, the engagement in writing, one’s ability to write. However, although janet’s use of writing changed, she did not put any emphasis on achieving this skill. Instead, she feels she has achieved a certain confidence in her identity as a Latina. Maybe learning here is not exactly identity transformation, or creation, but instead the strengthening of those identities that we struggle to own.

CONCLUSION: POSSIBILITIES FOR PEDAGOGY If learning is a matter of identity, then identity is itself an educational resource. (Wenger, 1998, p. 277)

I approach Wenger’s (1998) emphasis on identity as education with both enthusiasm and hesitation. janet’s experiences with identity development both as an immigrant and as a member of our writing group speak to Wenger’s theory, offering possibilities and cautions for pedagogical design. janet’s identities have played a central role in her participation in Lengua Latina. She describes writing as a practice that brings her confidence in who she is, and in the identities important to her life. The group itself, which calls Latinas into a queer community center, targets two of her central identities. Knowing the room was full of lesbian bodies instigated her arrival and has kept her coming. The fact that these lesbians are Latinas offers her the opportunity to understand the complexity and diversity of what a Latina can be. Finally, the bilingual capability of most members offers janet a place to rest her role as translator, as well as an audi-

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ence that understands the joys and frustrations of a translator’s life. Lengua Latina is a pedagogical space, created through and continually immersed in assumptions of shared identities and instantiated community, in which janet has thrived. It is an excellent example for showing how the use of “the human predisposition to identify with groups” can be a “key” component in designing pedagogy (Davis et al., 2000, p. 176). Perhaps more pedagogical spaces can be created based on the basis of assumption of identities. In addition, janet’s learning in Lengua Latina supports Wenger’s belief that identity is more central to learning than skills and training. When I ask her if anything has changed for her as a result of coming to Lengua Latina, she responds that she has achieved more confidence in her many identities. Through writing more and visualizing stories, she has acquired a more “concrete” sense of herself. Although I believe that the depth of her subject matter, the complexity of her written ideas, and the precision of her imagery have also developed through the last 3 years, it is through a focus on meaningful events in her life and elements of her sense of self that they have been transformed. janet’s perspectives lead me to the following questions for writing pedagogy: What is it that writing teachers imagine they are teaching when they ask students to write? Do writing curricula need to be based on competence of grammar and form?12 What would a writing curriculum based on explorations of personal struggle and identity look like? Although janet’s words affirm that a concentration on identities has led to her high level of participation in writing, I believe she also offers a warning of the consequences of tampering with identities. Her poetry and comments regarding her immigration to Canada reveal how rough identity transformation can be. janet writes, “We already had a home, a land, an identity / were not in search of something new or different / had no desire, / need to leave home.” Her unwelcome encounter with learning a new Canadian culture and desire to return to Chile hardly correspond to Wenger’s (1998) positive discussion of learning as “deep transformative experiences that involve new dimensions of identification and negotiability, new forms of membership, multimembership, and ownership of meaning” (p. 268). In contrast, janet describes her transition from Chilena to Latina Canadian as riddled with ridicule and shame. Maybe my hesitation with educational theory invested in identity transformation rests in a problem of language or metaphor. I do not see identity transformation as such a positive activity. I do not see fluidity in identities (Davis et al., 2000). There is no clear liquid flowing quickly from point A to point B. I cannot imagine “creating identities” (Davis et al., 2000, pp. 183–194). I do not mean to suggest that learners never change, or that they 12

12

See, for example, Ontario Ministry of Education and Training (1999).

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never desire to change, or that I reject the use of critical literacy practices to engage marginalized identities, to make them more visible and real. I recognize how the “carving” of identities has proved powerful for Mexican American women (Perez, 1999). However, change is no easy venture even if it is a chosen one. I want to make a distinction between a pedagogy that supports the exploration of vulnerable identities and one that advocates identity transformation. janet did not move from one identity to another; rather, she strengthened those identities that were precarious to claim. Ultimately, the work involves deeply emotional memories and challenges. Wenger (1998) did recognize the double marginalization for “children of immigrants . . . when they are torn between . . . conflicting values” (p. 168). He acknowledged that such acts of “brokering borders” can be devalued by parties on both sides of one’s dual memberships, and/or they can lead to learning and the power to communicate across boundaries. The range of janet’s uses of translation indicates both the positive and the negative consequences of acquiring the ability to negotiate between two worlds. Wenger, however, seemed to be more impressed with the possibilities of learning through the possession of multiple—and at times conflicting—identities, and the resulting brokering of borders, than with the consequences of marginalization. In a sense, those who broker borders embody the hopes of his theory of education as identity transformation: They are where unexpected can be expected, where innovative or unorthodox solutions are found, where serendipity is likely, and where old ideas find new life and new ideas propagate. (pp. 254–255)

janet’s insights about children’s immigration experiences, and her perspective on how racism functions in Canada, are two of many valuable pieces of knowledge she has gained from her experience as a border broker. It is knowledge, however, that has come at the cost of pain. Of course the degree of transitioning required of a learner influences the resulting experience, and immigrants probably endure the largest leaps. If educators do follow Wenger’s theory and attempt to incorporate “border brokering” as a pedagogical tool, perhaps they could turn to immigrant knowledges for guidance. Immigrants and others who live on and between borders are experts in the challenges of constructing and reconstructing identity. Their experiences can contribute a wealth of information to the work of educational theorists. In closing, I turn to two questions posed to me as I constructed this chapter. First, should education be in the business of attempting to change identities (Haig-Brown, personal communication, March 13, 2003)? Although identity transformations are risky ventures, because such struggles are so central to people’s lives, they could be a focus in education. As Wenger

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(1998) argued, one’s identity is loaded with meaning: It is “the vehicle that carries our experience from context to context” (p. 268). However, students’ identities need to be handled with great care. Most of us face challenges of identity transformation, or at least attempt to negotiate conflicting parts of ourselves. It is, on the most fundamental level, a struggle to be okay with our complicated bodies. It is an ambivalent process, where identity and learning are intertwined (Schecter & Cummins, 2003, p. 10). Engaging in an educational model driven by investments of identity could just as easily lead to the weakening as to the strengthening of an identity. It is an invitation for students to gamble with intimate pieces of their lives. Although such vulnerability might appear to inhibit students, Schecter and Cummins (2003) found that educators who “affirm students’ cultural, linguistic, and personal identities . . . create classroom conditions for maximum identity investment in the learning process” (p. 10). Successful affirmation of identities means that students’ identities would play a central role in how and what learning takes place. There is, however, no single or guaranteed strategy for affirming students’ identities. The work may be a teacher’s recognition and openness to each student’s individual interests, and to the customization of curricular goals that respond to them. Lengua Latina, on the other hand, is a somewhat elaborate extension of the premise of identity investment, where the actual group and location for learning are designed through assumptions of shared identities. This brings me to my second and final question: Should education be in the business of fashioning group identities (Schecter, personal communication, December 8, 2003)? I cannot think of any type of grouping of peoples that does not in some way attempt to fashion a group identity, consciously or otherwise. Education similarly has a history of identity work, shaping local and national allegiances (Dewey, 1916/1998). Even if it were determined that education should not fashion group identities, I hardly believe it capable of withholding such imposition. Lengua Latina brings to this question a particular style of collecting and forming. Drawn from a vastly multiethnic region of Canada, a type of person is called for: a gender, a general geographic route of immigration, a probable combination of languages, a probable target of U.S. and Canadian racist discourse and policy, a probable mixture of racial backgrounds, a probable sexuality. Such a call has made this community education experience a combination of critical literacy and multilayered identity politics. It is a controversial pedagogical design. It touches on the thoroughly argued danger of possible “essentializing,” arising from assumptions of shared social identities (McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993). However, it is still true that many people are drawn to others whom they perceive to be like them in some way, and that valuable learning is possible through these types of relations. For janet, it was before joining a Latina group that she saw Latina as a list of

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stereotypical essences, from which she felt alienated. Lengua Latina has offered her an understanding of the flesh-and-blood complexity of identity, and within these real bodies, she has embraced Latina and queer identities while developing strength in her writing and performance. Lengua Latina offers a model of identity-based education through limited Latina gatherings rather than inclusive multiethnic classes. This opportunity for Latina-only space has created and maintained a welcoming environment for women who may have felt stifled in mainstream educational settings that did not acknowledge diverse ethnic values (Schecter & Cummins, 2003). In this manner, Lengua Latina provides one more strategy for addressing the democratic ideal of preparing educational spaces that encourage every student’s voice.

REFERENCES Allison, D. (1994). Believing in literature. In D. Allison, Skin: Talking about sex, class & literature (pp. 165–181). Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. American Heritage Dictionary (2nd ed.). (1982). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Brodkey, L. (1996). Writing permitted in designated areas only. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burciaga, J. A. (1995). Spilling the beans. Santa Barbara, CA: Joshua Odell Editions. Davis, B., Sumara, D., & Luce-Kapler, R. (2000). Engaging minds: Learning and teaching in a complex world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dewey, J. (1998). Nationalizing education. In L. A. Hickman & T. M. Alexander (Eds.), The essential Dewey: Vol. 1. Pragmatism, education, democracy (pp. 265–269). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1916) Elenes, C. A. (2001). Transformando fronteras: Chicana feminist transformative pedagogies. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(5), 689–705. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. ed.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970) Heller, C. E. (1997). Until we are strong together: Women writers in the Tenderloin. New York: Teachers College Press. Kevane, B. A., & Heredia, J. (Eds.). (2000). City of desire: An interview with Cherríe Moraga. In Latina self-portraits: Interviews with contemporary women writers (pp. 97–108). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. King-Chigbo, K. (Producer), & Lee, M. S. (Director). (2003). El Contrato [Motion picture]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada. Martínez, E. S. (1998). De colores means all of us: Latina views for a multi-colored century. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Maybin, J. (2000). The new literacy studies: Context, intertextuality and discourse. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 197–209). London: Routledge. McCarthy, C., & Crichlow, W. (1993). Introduction: Theories of identity, theories of representation, theories of race. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education (pp. xiii–xxix). New York: Routledge. Moraga, C. (1993). The last generation. Boston: South End Press.

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Ontario Ministry of Education and Training. (1999). The Ontario curriculum—Exemplars: Grades 1–8 writing. Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario. O’Rourke, R. (2002). Living the writing: Gendering local cultures of writing. Women’s Studies International Forum, 25(2), 235–246. Pardo, M. (1998). Mexican American women activists: Identity and resistance in two Los Angeles communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Perez, E. (1999). Tejanas: Diasporic subjectivities and post-revolution identities. In E. Perez, The decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanas into history (pp. 75–100). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rodríguez, C. (1997). And a body to remember with. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. romero, j. (2000). Canadá. Unpublished poem. romero, j. (2004). The world according to a ten year old girl. Vox Feminarum, 3(3), 42–43. Rosaldo, R. (1993). Introduction: Grief and a headhunter’s rage. In R. Rosaldo, Culture & truth: The remaking of social analysis (2nd ed., pp. 1–21). Boston: Beacon Press. Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. San Martín, R. M. (1996). To bring forth a voice: The Latin American Women’s Collective in Toronto. Fireweed, 54, 8–28. Schecter, S. R., & Cummins, J. (2003). Introduction: School-based language policy in culturally diverse contexts. In S. R. Schecter & J. Cummins (Eds.), Multilingual education in practice: Using diversity as a resource (pp. 1–16). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Statistics Canada. (2001a). Population by mother tongue, provinces and territories. 2001 Census. Retrieved October 4, 2003, from www.statscan.ca/english/Pgdb/demo18a.htm Statistics Canada. (2001b). Total visible minority population, metropolitan areas. 2001 Census. Retrieved October 4, 2003, from www.statscan.ca/english/Pgdb/demo40g.htm Trujillo, C. (Ed.). (1991). Chicana lesbians: The girls our mothers warned us about. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Verdecchia, G. (1993). Fronteras Americanas: American borders. Toronto: Coach House Press. Walcott, R. (2000). “Who is she and what is she to you?”: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and the (im)possibility of Black/Canadian studies. In R. Walcott (Ed.), Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian cultural criticism (pp. 27–47). Toronto: Insomniac Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, A. (2000). There is no escape from third-space theory. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 197–209). London: Routledge.

C H A P T E R

13 Veronica’s Story: Reflections on the Limitations of “Support Systems” Rosemary C. Henze San José State University

From childhood, we have been socialized to believe that schools are the great equalizers in American society. We are told that schools “level the playing field,” providing opportunity for all, regardless of social background, by serving as the impartial grounds on which individuals freely prove their merit. —Villegas and Lucas (2002, p. 30)

As educators, most of us would like to believe that education is a key to mobility and economic attainment in the United States. This belief is what draws many of us into education in the first place. We want to be change agents. We want to help children grow up and achieve their fullest potential as human beings and as educated citizens, both global and local. We want to do our part, and teaching is a pathway toward making the world a better place. Yet at some point, all educators are faced with the realities of social inequities based on class, race, gender, language, or other factors. Schools are not islands apart from the rest of society; rather, they are very much a part of that society, including its injustices. According to Villegas and Lucas (2002), “Aspiring teachers must come to see that, as typically organized, schools help to reproduce existing social inequalities while giving the illusion that such inequalities are natural and fair” (p. 30). Sociologists such as Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) have long grappled with this dilemma of structure versus agency. That is, to what degree are 257

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our lives determined by social structures that reproduce existing relations of dominance and subordination, and to what degree can we exercise individual agency, resisting or changing the structures imposed by the dominant culture? If teachers are to retain hope for themselves as agents of change, and hope for the children they serve, they need to gain an understanding of both the limits and the potential of their agency and to develop a practical theory of social change that is not utopian, but rather grounded in the realities of larger social structures beyond the school. In other words, they need to be mindful of the ways in which children’s future lives are to some extent shaped by their class, race, gender, and other properties. At the same time, they need to gain knowledge of how they can exercise their own agency to resist or change the tendency of schools to reproduce the larger social structure and its class, race, and gender relations. This article presents the case of Veronica, a girl I have mentored since 2000 through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program in Oakland, California.1 My involvement with Veronica has forced me to struggle with these notions of structure and agency in a very particular, concrete way. This article addresses the question of why, in Veronica’s case, the efforts of many social institutions and individuals, including the schools, do not seem to be able to change the basic pattern of her academic failure. This question has troubled me, not only because I want Veronica to have the opportunity to reach her fullest potential, but also because I have been frustrated by the unresponsive, incoherent nature of the systems of support that surround her. Situating her educational progress in the larger context of her environment and the many people and institutions that shape her daily life has helped me to understand why she has so much trouble in school. A situated perspective on education is one that views the activity of learners as nested within the context of practice, rather than analyzed as if it were context free. As Rogoff (1990) wrote, “Individuals’ attempts to solve problems are intrinsically related to social and societal values and goals, tools, and institutions in the definition of the problems and the practice of their solution” (p. 61). Many analyses of education assume that the most relevant dimensions of analysis are the individual and the school, or the individual and the classroom. Some studies, many of them ethnographic, reach out and explore the relationships among individuals, schools, and family or community. For example, in their study of students’ multiple worlds, Phelan, Davidson, and Yu (1993) included the dimensions of family, peers, and school. My analysis of Veronica’s case will show that a situated perspective needs to probe even further than these dimensions. 1

All individuals referred to in this chapter have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy. 1

13. VERONICA’S STORY

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METHODS In this chapter, I examine the out-of-school life of Veronica through the lens of the mentoring relationship. At the time this article is written, the relationship has lasted for 4½ years and is still ongoing. However, in order to bound my discussion here, I limit my analysis to the 2-year period between September 2000 and September 2002.2 During this time, I saw her weekly, for approximately 6 to 8 hours each time. Usually these visits also involved a short time with Veronica’s mother, Celia, and her little sister, when I picked Veronica up at home or dropped her off. Sometimes other family members, friends, or neighbors were also present, and sometimes, as I explain, I also interacted with her schools and her social workers. I entered the relationship strictly as a mentor with no intention of turning it into “research,” or Veronica into a “subject.” To maintain the primacy of the mentoring relationship, I have resisted collecting “data” in any formal sense. However, through my weekly contact with her, I have amassed a great deal of information about the conditions of her life—from Veronica herself, as well as from her mother, grandmother, teachers and principals, and social workers. I have observed her interactions with adults and other children in a variety of contexts, from her home and my home, to local cultural events and school. Participating in her life has caused me to rethink a number of commonplace assumptions about inequality, schooling, and the world beyond schooling. Because I believe sharing these shifts in my own thinking might be of value to other educators, I decided to deviate from my original decision to focus exclusively on mentoring. INTRODUCING VERONICA Veronica was 9 when I first met her in September 2000 at McDonald’s with her mother and two social workers from Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the agency that arranged the match. Celia, Veronica’s mother, identifies herself as Mexican American, and Veronica’s father, who had left the family about a year earlier, is European American. Veronica has two siblings—a half-brother who is 3 years older than she is, and a little sister named Sophia who is 7 years younger. The brother lives with Veronica’s maternal grandmother in San Francisco. This constitutes the immediate and nuclear family with which she has most frequent contact. There are many aunts, uncles, and cousins, but 2 2 As I revised this chapter several times before publication, I had to confront each time whether to include new data based on my continuing contact with Veronica. Unlike a bounded research project, this relationship has no evident end point. However, I realized that a constantly morphing chapter would not be manageable, and therefore I decided to artificially bound the period about which I wrote.

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contact with them is sporadic. Home for Veronica is East Oakland, in a small two-bedroom rental house set back from a main thoroughfare, with larger houses and apartments in front. The neighborhood is almost entirely African American, and her playmates when she is at home are African American children, ranging in age from 4 to 13, who live in the neighboring apartments. Veronica is extremely outgoing and readily engages in conversation with any adult or child who is in the vicinity. She loves animals, music, dance, singing, swimming, cooking, and especially eating. In fact, she is hungry for almost any new experience that seems positive. I have been particularly struck by several aspects of her personality. One is that she tends to gravitate toward things that other children might consider “yucky.” When we went to a fish store to buy what I thought would be a goldfish, she quickly moved away from the brightly colored fish and zeroed in on a lone, gray, unmoving octopus as her first choice. Unfortunately, we learned from the salesman that octopuses are very hard to care for and die easily, so Veronica eventually settled for a Chinese fighting fish. Another striking aspect of her personality is that her tastes in food are incredibly wide-ranging for her age—she devours almost anything edible, including all kinds of vegetables, squid, and other things middle-class European American children usually avoid. She has also struck me as far more socially capable in some ways than I was at a comparable age. When Veronica was 9 and 10 years old, she would immediately seek help from a salesperson or waiter upon entering a store or restaurant, not wanting to waste precious time looking for things down several aisles. Although this was almost certainly related to her inability to read, as well as her general outgoing and impulsive nature, it amazed me that a girl her age could be so confident. I recall being terrified of strangers at her age. Veronica’s academic skills are very low for her age. When I first met her, she was beginning third grade for the second time, and she was not able to decode simple reading books for that level. Her math skills were equally low. By the beginning of fifth grade, her reading had improved a lot, but she was still trying to learn her multiplication tables beyond the 2s, 5s, and 10s. My sense from working with her, however, is that there is no cognitive problem that hampers her learning. Her problem is that life outside of school has been far too unstable to allow her to concentrate on school, or school to concentrate on her.

INSTABILITY AND TRAUMA AS A WAY OF LIFE Veronica’s past life was a series of upheavals and uprootings, and that pattern has continued throughout my relationship with her. In Table 13.1, I present a timeline showing approximate years when various moves, changes, and traumas occurred across home and school.

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4–5

?

V.’s age Residences

Schools Traumas

1996

1998

1999

?

? V. raped by a 17year-old boy

? Father left family

5–6 6–7 7–8 Homeless for 4 years: living in shelters, motels, and a van.

1997

Year 2000 8–9 Apartment with mother and sister ? DES Car accident Great-grandfather died Burglary

TABLE 13.1 Timeline of Veronica’s Residences, Schools, and Traumas

9–10 Six different foster homes BES LES V. and sister removed from mother’s home

2001

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Residences As Table 13.1 shows, between 1996 and 2001 Veronica had only one brief period of residential stability. Before January 2000, the family was homeless for 4 years, moving between shelters, motels, and a van. During much of this time both parents were unemployed, and during some or all of it both were using drugs. In 1999, the father left the family and Celia was finally able to enter a drug rehabilitation program and find a rental they could afford with their Section 8 funding. She managed to get donated furniture from a church to make the place into a home for herself and the two girls. It was, however, a classic example of slumlord negligence: The floor furnace smoked and got so hot that it was unsafe, and the landlady would not fix it. They used the gas burners and the oven for heat instead. The roof leaked, and mildew grew everywhere during the rainy season, aggravating Veronica’s asthma. Relations between Celia and the African American neighbors on one side were extremely tense, racialized, and at times violent. The other neighbors seemed to keep to themselves and have little contact with Celia or the girls. On June 7, 2001, however, this tenuous stability was interrupted when Child Protection Services (CPS) took Veronica and her sister away from their mother and into CPS custody, having responded to a call from a neighbor who said she suspected the children were being hit because she saw “bruises” on the baby’s legs.3 The so-called bruises turned out to be smeared lipstick from the mother’s makeup bag the baby had been playing with. Later, the charges were changed to drug abuse. The children were placed in foster care and remained there for 6 months, during which time they were moved six times, to six different foster homes. Some foster parents kept them for a month or more; others requested that CPS transfer the children after only a few days. During this time, the children were allowed to have one supervised visit with their mother per week. In December 2001 “family reunification” began, during which the children were allowed to stay overnight with their mother on weekends. These visits were then extended to a 30-day trial period based on the mother’s clean drug tests, and in March 2002 the children were allowed to return permanently.

3 3 The California Child Protection Services (CPS) provide “services for abused and neglected children and their families. The CPS goal is to keep the child in his or her own home when it is safe, and when the child is at risk, to develop an alternate plan as quickly as possible” (California Department of Social Services, 2004). The CPS services in each state are authorized through the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Enforcement Act (HR 764), which was first enacted in 1987 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999).


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Schools Paralleling the family’s residential instability is Veronica’s schooling. No one in the family can tell me how many schools Veronica has attended in her life—they lost count long ago. When I first met Veronica in September 2000, she had just started at Dolores Huerta, a new charter school designed to promote Spanish-English bilingualism through a quasi-two-way immersion program. She was placed in a classroom of English-dominant children, and she liked the school and her teacher and began to develop a positive sense of identity as a Latina. However, she frequently got in trouble for talking in class when she wasn’t supposed to, not paying attention, and fighting. She also missed almost as many school days as she attended (40 days tardy or absent between September and December). The school was located two bus transfers from their home, and Celia frequently had difficulty getting both girls up, dressed, and fed in time to catch the bus and arrive at school by 7:30. Veronica also missed school when the family was in a car accident (the car was driven by Celia’s friend), when her great-grandfather died, when their apartment was burglarized, and when she had asthma attacks. Because Dolores Huerta was a small school of only 120 students, there was a great deal of personalized attention from the teacher and from the principal. When I would go to pick Veronica up on Friday afternoons at the school, the teacher would tell me how she was doing and show great concern for her. Nonetheless, as Christmas break approached, the principal and teacher decided that they must ask Celia to find another school—one that was closer and easier to get to. The attendance problem was so entrenched that they felt unable to make any positive impact on Veronica’s school learning. After Christmas, it took two weeks before Veronica was finally registered at her new school, Burbank, just two blocks from her home. She could walk to school with her neighborhood peers, and as a result her attendance improved dramatically. Burbank had about 450 students, 95% of whom were African American, reflecting the neighborhood demographics. Although it was larger and less personalized than Dolores Huerta, it also offered more services. Veronica was placed in an after-school tutoring program 4 days a week, which continued up until the SAT 9 testing in late March. After that, there was no more money for tutoring. The timing suggests that tutoring was provided not to help students learn, but rather to enable the school to show better test scores. She did benefit, however, from the additional “time on task” during those 2 months, beginning to show improved fluency in reading and grasping some basic math skills. She also liked her classroom teacher, but as before she got in trouble frequently for her behavior. One week before the end of the school year, she was taken into CPS custody, so

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she never had the satisfaction of finishing the year with her classmates or getting any kind of closure. Around the time when Veronica was removed from her mother, I was beginning to investigate possible summer programs that would help her develop her academic and social skills. However, once she was in foster care none of that was possible, as CPS kept a tight rein on any contact outside the foster home. Thus, Veronica lost another 3 months of potential academic catching up. When September came and school started, she was in transit from one foster home to another. Two weeks passed before she was registered in yet another new school, close to the new foster mother’s home. This school was also within walking distance. However, my connection with her school ended here because I was not authorized by CPS to pick Veronica up from school. When Veronica was finally allowed to return to her mother in March 2002, she continued to attend the same school until the end of the year, although she had to get there by bus or be dropped off and picked up by her 20-year-old cousin, if he was available. Her mother also enrolled her in summer school there, but Veronica was asked to leave because of bad behavior. By the fall of 2002, Celia had acquired a car from a local charity, and she enrolled Veronica in another school, this one with a more “mixed” population, on the assumption that Veronica was having trouble partly because the African American students in the other school teased her, bullied her, and insulted her using racial slurs. Everyone acknowledges, however, that Veronica responds in kind and often resorts to hitting and physical attacks. As she grows into puberty, she is increasingly taunted for her size (she is quite overweight). Traumas Veronica experienced three major traumas between 1998 and 2002, and these are only the ones I know about. There may be others. It took several months before her mother felt comfortable enough with me to tell me about the rape. It happened when the family (including the father) was living in a van and parking it in various places in Oakland. For a while, they had it parked on a block where a woman had befriended them and told them they could use the shower in her house when they needed to. One afternoon, Celia was in the house with the woman, and 6-year-old Veronica and another little girl were playing in the backyard when they lost sight of a dog they were playing with. A 17-year-old boy who was a friend of the woman’s son went down to the yard, supposedly to help them find it. He raped both girls between the sheets that were drying on the laundry line outside. A neighbor must have heard something and saw the commotion and called the


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police. Celia didn’t know what had happened until the police arrived. The girls were taken to the hospital, and the boy was eventually apprehended. Veronica has never talked directly to me about the rape, but her attitudes toward men are definitely more reserved than they are toward women. With boys her own age, however, she is very friendly. She is already interested in particular boyfriends, and is often in competition with other girls over boys she likes. Her father left the family the year following the rape. When Veronica speaks of him, she alternates between furious anger and deep longing. She was very attached to him, and although the things they did together were hardly positive (he would take her with him to panhandle), there seems to have been a strong father–daughter bond. He left to be with another woman, but from Celia’s account he was also doing drugs and spent some time in jail. Veronica has not seen or heard from him since 1999. In the fall of 2000, there were several less traumatic but nonetheless awful events, starting in October with a car accident. Celia’s friend was driving the family home after visiting another friend at night, and crashed into the guardrail at about 30 mph on a street close to Celia’s home. Nobody was seriously hurt, but everyone had black eyes and cuts, and the car was totaled. For months afterward, Veronica would cringe when we drove past the point where the accident had taken place. I was never able to ascertain if drinking or drugs were involved. A month later, Big Brothers/Big Sisters donated a computer to Veronica and her family. Within two weeks, the place was burglarized and the computer, along with the TV and phone, was gone. The burglar had come in through the girls’ bedroom window. Not long after the burglary, Veronica’s great-grandfather died. He had apparently been a strong, positive presence in her life. In the spring of 2001, things seemed to settle down. There began to be a predictable order in Veronica’s life, and I was able to see her for 4 to 5 hours every Friday after school. The CPS removal on June 7 came as a shock to everyone. The police came to Veronica’s school, took her out of class, and drove her with her little sister to the first of the foster homes. The trauma of this event will no doubt have many repercussions for both girls. Celia, despite a history of drug addiction, has been the only constant in Veronica’s life and clearly loves both her daughters very much. Veronica adores her mother and stands ready to defend her against anyone who threatens or speaks badly of her. THE ROLE OF A MENTOR Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BBBS) is an international organization started in 1904 by Ernest Coulter, a New York newspaperman. It has the longest track record of any mentoring organization. Local offices now exist in almost ev-

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ery major city in the United States; there are 483 affiliates in 41 states, matching some 70,000 children with adult mentors (Freedman, 1999). (This number does not include children on waiting lists.) Because of its long history, it also has more infrastructure than other organizations, and policies that have stood the test of time and experience. BBBS is the only mentoring organization that has undergone a long-term impact evaluation, with results that were largely positive. The study (Tierney & Grossman, 1995) found: Little Brothers and Little Sisters were less likely to have started using drugs or alcohol, felt more competent about doing schoolwork, attended school more, got better grades, and had better relationships with their parents and peers than they would have if they had not participated in the program. (p. 19)

These findings were based on 959 youths, half of whom participated in the program. The treatment youths who were selected met on average 3 to 4 times a month with their mentors, for an average of 4 hours each time. Thus, there was a certain threshold of time/intensity of contact that was built in to the study sample. Many matches fall short of this threshold, but they were not included in the study. The First Stage To become a “big sister,” I had to go through an orientation, a screening interview, a home visit, fingerprinting, and a training session. Once a match has been made, each mentor is assigned to a case worker, who has a load of some 80 to 90 cases and is supposed to check in with each one (both mentor and mentee) on a monthly basis. In the training session and in follow-up with the case workers, BBBS stresses that the mentoring relationship should be primarily between the mentor and the child, not between the mentor and the child’s family or other people in the child’s life. They discourage mentors from becoming involved in the parents’ issues or from trying to “save” the whole family, because this will not only prove overwhelming but also distract from the focus on the individual child. For the most part, this was good advice, as I could easily have become absorbed in trying to address the many issues affecting Veronica’s family. BBBS has a number of policies regarding parents as well. Particularly relevant here is the one that tells parents not to use the mentoring relationship as a privilege contingent on good behavior. Children should be allowed to see their mentors regardless of their behavior. BBBS also stresses that mentors should be realistic in their aspirations, and should seek to establish a trusting relationship with the child, first and foremost, and to be an adult friend. Mentors are discouraged from focusing only on school-


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work; the pair should do activities that both child and adult enjoy, including outdoor activities, making art and music, cooking, gardening, and housecleaning, and going to local museums and events. I was fortunate that Veronica slipped easily into an active role as mentee; she made my role easy because she always took part in the decision making about where we would go and what we would do. I also checked in regularly with her mother and her teachers, and I tried to incorporate reading and math no matter what we did (reading signs at the zoo, counting money). However, during the CPS takeover, I found it necessary to shift in my role from mentor to mentor-advocate. Had I not made this shift, I would have essentially lost Veronica in a maze of bureaucracy. The Second Stage Originally conceived as a dyadic relationship between an adult mentor and a child, this particular mentoring relationship became a nexus—a space of ongoing activity that brought together many individuals and institutions, from Veronica, her mother, her grandmother, and me, to her teachers, her schools, the Child Protective Services social workers, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the foster care system and foster parents, and the legal system. To track where Veronica was at any given time during the CPS custody, I had to establish myself with the new authorities as a legitimate player in her life. Often her mother did not know, for several days at a time, where she was. Her mother and I began to work together to inform each other of the girls’ most recent whereabouts and phone number, name of the foster parent, and so on. However, the CPS workers, foster care agencies, and foster parents did not recognize me as a legitimate figure. To gain legitimacy, I spoke with the public defender assigned to the girls, who then advocated in court for the judge to rule that CPS must allow Veronica to see me. Once this was done, I was technically allowed to see Veronica and take her out, but the translation from policy to practice proved an almost insurmountable chasm. No sooner was the translation finally made to the foster mother of the moment than the girls would be moved again, and we would start all over. To complicate matters further, there were two foster care agencies involved, and in the transfer from one to the other, the judge’s order somehow never made it into the file in the new agency. Even when foster parents did recognize Veronica’s right to see me, they often withheld it as a privilege conditional on good behavior. I would call, expecting to make plans to see her, only to be told, “She’s been acting out a lot, so she can’t see you. Not this weekend. Maybe next weekend, if she’s good.” This would set me into motion making a chain of phone calls—first to the foster care agency worker, then to the CPS worker, and then to the case worker for BBBS, trying to make links in the broken chain of policies from

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different agencies with different functions and assumptions. None of this ever made much difference, and I believe many of my phone calls and messages were ignored. The only real difference was the attitude of the foster mothers, some of whom were more punitive, some less. The Third Stage After Veronica and her sister returned to their mother in March 2002, my role changed again. At the time of writing I am again able to see her regularly every weekend, though I no longer have any interaction with her school because my own work has changed and I am not free on Fridays anymore. Thus I am somewhat out of touch with the everyday reality of her schooling experiences, and I do not have any contact with her teacher or the principal of the school. BBBS has moved to a background role because we long ago exceeded the desired “match time” of 1 year and BBBS does little to track or monitor matches after that point. At this point, my relationship with Veronica and her family is more like that of an old friend or an aunt. I often wonder whether and to what degree my mentoring and all the social services of the past few years have had any positive impact on Veronica’s life, her ability to succeed in school, and her possible futures. There is no tangible evidence that her life is better as a result of all this intervention. She is still struggling with math. She still has “behavior problems” in school and has been placed in Special Education. Her mother is having a harder time with her at home as Veronica is frequently defiant and unwilling to cooperate with her. Puberty has begun, and Veronica is overweight and moody. The other kids at school continue to taunt her for being overweight, and she continues to lash back at them, sometimes physically. Although she used to like going to school, she now dreads it. If the additional support over the past few years has made a difference, it’s hard to see what that difference is, unless one counts as evidence the fact that Veronica is still alive and still, at times, hopeful about her future.

THE LIMITATIONS OF SUPPORT Why is it that all the supports in Veronica’s life have not added up to a positive, tangible impact? In this section, I discuss several possible explanations. Lack of Agency Throughout my involvement with Veronica and her family, I have noticed that Celia’s life is not her own. McIntosh (1989) pointed out that “keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there just for a


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small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already” (p. 12). When I first met Celia, I was struck by how much of her life was controlled by outside agencies—primarily, at that time, the welfare system and the drug rehabilitation program she is in. Her right to make independent decisions about her own life and her children’s lives was, even then, quite limited. During the CPS custody period there was a dramatic escalation of external control and greatly reduced ability or right to act from her own sense of agency. This lack of ability to act as an agent of one’s own future is almost certainly being transferred to her children, who were moved from home to home with absolutely no input, and had no power to effect any change in the current conditions of their lives. Some of this lack of agency is part of being a child, but there are many children in more privileged families who have some degree of agency to participate in family decisions about choice of home and school, especially from the time they reach the age of 10 years. Celia wanted to sue CPS for damages because she believed that the children were taken from her wrongly. She had good evidence to back up her case, not least the fact that the initial records of removal were never dated and the original police report was missing from the files. The two girls, who supposedly had been physically abused, were never taken to a doctor to be examined for signs of abuse, and the charges of physical abuse were eventually changed to charges of drug abuse once the mother tested positive for drugs in her urine. However, Celia had no money to hire a lawyer, and even though her mother (Veronica’s grandmother) was willing to help financially, neither of them wanted to do anything until the girls were returned to either Celia or the grandmother. They saw any move to expose the corruption and mismanagement of the CPS and foster care systems as potentially threatening their ability to get the girls back. Nor did they want me to try to get a newspaper or TV reporter to hear the story. Their hands were firmly tied behind their backs, and their freedom of choice and confident action was almost nil. One way to look at Veronica’s situation is to ask why, with all the support services that she and her family have, the dominant theme is that other people or agencies control their lives. If the support services for Veronica and her family were really working, wouldn’t there be a gradual move toward greater self-control and less control by outside agencies? How can Celia develop autonomy as a mother? How can Veronica learn to develop her own sense of agency when she does not see it in her mother? A Structural View Another way to look at this case is through a structuralist lens, in which the lives of Veronica and her family are largely determined by preexisting social structures—poverty, welfare dependency, a history of drug problems,

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inferior schooling, to name a few. These structures can be viewed as replicating society’s structures of inequality, placing Veronica and her family at or near the bottom of the social hierarchy. Yet structural explanations fail to tell us about the incongruities, the nuances, the gray areas. In addition to the polar opposites of the haves and have-nots, there are other pictures to look at, and this is what ethnography (if we read ethnography as “being there for a year or more”) can help us see. Structuralism has been critiqued as “too distant from the intentionality and experience of social actors” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 29), as well as “incapable of dealing with those who oppose social establishments actively and struggle to change its rules and membership requirements” (Gouldner, 1970, p. 427). A Poststructural View: Mentoring as a “Bridge” Over Inequality In contrast to the structuralist view just outlined, mentoring programs assume that individual agency can make a difference in promoting a more egalitarian society. Mentoring has been promoted as a vehicle for dealing with “inner-city problems” by addressing the need for children to have consistent, caring relationships with adults. Mentoring is one of the means by which our society tries to bridge economic, racial, and educational divides. On one side there is a child, the mentee, from a low-income home, often a child of color. She may already have several additional strikes against her that put her at risk for failure in school—drug abuse in the home, rape, homelessness. On the other side, there is the adult mentor, usually middleor upper-middle-class, well educated, and most often White. It is a classic unequal equation consisting of opposite pairs—poor/rich, uneducated/educated, child/adult. Through mentoring, it is assumed, individual children can gain access to some of the “habitus”4 of a more middle-class lifestyle. Despite the bridge metaphor, however, no mentoring program worth its salt will try to argue that mentoring is a panacea for inner-city problems, or that it can make equal what is fundamentally unequal. Freedman (1999) warned of many factors that can impede mentoring programs and the people who participate in them. For example, many mentors have trouble forging a connection with their mentees because of limited time and social distance. In addition, many mentees have forgotten, or never learned, how to reach out for support. Mentors may have unrealistic expectations, which 4

Habitus is a concept coined by Bourdieu (1974). “For Bourdieu, habitus is the way a culture is embodied in the individual. Habitus comprises, in effect, all the social and cultural experiences that shape us as a person. . . . Bourdieu relates this concept directly to schooling by suggesting that some habitus are recognized as cultural capital by the school, and are reinforced with success, while others are not” (May, 1994, p. 24).

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can contribute to a sense of inefficacy and cause them to slack off on their commitment because they believe it isn’t doing any good anyway. As Freedman wrote, “Even mentors in strong relationships discover that they are only one influence among many; these young lives are not easily transformed” (p. 85). The lack of infrastructure to support mentoring programs is cited as another major factor in their limited success. Particularly absent, according to Freedman, is follow-up: “Mentors find themselves matched, then abandoned” (p. 87). He cautioned further that overblowing the potential of mentoring can be dangerous at the policy level, because it plays into the unfortunate tendency to lunge at new and glossy strategies . . . more disturbing is the way fervor without infrastructure feeds the recurring appetite for voluntarist panaceas, idealized in isolation from institutions, proposed as quick, cheap, and easy. As such, mentoring serves to distract attention from deep-seated problems that cannot simply be marketed away. (p. 93)

Certainly this is true in my experience with Veronica and her family. Although I remain hopeful about the potential influence I may have on Veronica as an individual, it is obvious that structures and conditions much larger than any of us have far greater control over her life. It appears, then, that mentoring’s view of individual human agency as an antidote to overdetermination by the structural elements in our lives is not going to lead us toward any real progress in addressing educational as well as other kinds of inequities. School-Based Efforts Elsewhere, I have expressed some cautious hope that proactive school leaders can make a positive difference in race relations, based on a study of 21 schools across the United States (Henze, Katz, Norte, Sather, & Walker, 2002). That is, even though schools are also implicated as reproducers of social inequity (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), I see evidence that proactive leaders in schools can take actions that begin to interrupt the cycle of social reproduction. However, the potential positive effect of schooling does not extend to cases like Veronica’s, for the simple reason that she is not in any one school consistently enough for it to make a difference. Before we can even begin to hope that school-based programs and reform efforts will do any good, the children who are the supposed beneficiaries have to be in a single school for a long enough time to benefit from these programs. School is far less relevant in Veronica’s case than it would be for a child who attended regularly and stayed in the same school over a longer period of time. And although her case may be extreme, I suspect there are many more children, both in and out of the foster care system, for whom the transiency she experiences is normal. These are children who cannot be

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touched by any of the current school reform efforts aimed at closing the achievement gap. Tapia (1998) made a similar claim, stating that “family stability, which is greatly influenced by economic stability, is the most important factor influencing poor students’ school performance” (p. 319). Community-Based Efforts Fine, Weis, Centrie, and Roberts (2000) offered the image of communitybased “free spaces—spaces of deep, sustained community-based educative work, outside the borders of formal schooling” (p. 132). Drawing on earlier work by Heath and McLaughlin (1993), which called attention to a “rich underground to community life that is vibrant, alive, and fundamentally selfcreated” (Fine et al., 2000, p. 133), the authors provided examples of a neighborhood arts center and a heterogeneous spiritual community that create for young people possibilities of resistance in which they “work to disengage from the stratification and commodifications of daily life, to protect themselves from capitalist and racist hegemony” (pp. 148–149). Unfortunately, although I too see hope in such spaces, again they presume a certain stability as well as age among their participants. Youths who avail themselves of such spaces are both older than Veronica and residentially stable enough to participate. Preteen children are not yet old enough to travel to and engage with such communities. “Street-Level Bureaucrats” and Loose Coupling in Systems If, as I have suggested, individualized efforts such as mentoring, schoolbased reforms, and community-based “free spaces” are all unequal to the task of making a tangible difference in cases like Veronica’s, what else is left? Should educators simply throw up their hands and give in, allowing children like Veronica to continue to collect what Goffman (1983) called “cumulative baggage”? One would think that with the plethora of individuals and institutions looking out for Veronica’s welfare, there would be a cumulative effect that would be positive. However, this assumes that these institutions and individuals work together, with common purposes, good communication, and smooth implementation from policies to practice. In Veronica’s case, nothing could be further from the truth. I cannot speculate on how generalized this lack of communication and coordination is, but Veronica’s case is certainly alarming. The lack of communication among the many individuals and institutions involved—Celia and other family members, myself, CPS, schools, foster care agencies, BBBS, and foster parents—became evident when I attempted to


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communicate across all of them. Lost or misplaced records, frequent changes of social workers, lags in training new social workers to take on existing cases, enormous caseloads, and lack of policy understanding by those responsible for implementing it—all of these factors and more contributed to one hand rarely knowing what the other was doing, or why. Even between two institutions that are supposed to work together—CPS and the foster care system—there was a failure to communicate. CPS exists purportedly to protect children from dangers located in the home and family, but by placing Veronica and her sister with six different foster homes in 6 months, it also contributed to a worsening of conditions for the very same children it was trying to protect. In effect, CPS protected Veronica from one danger, drugs, while simultaneously exposing her to others: further instability and isolation from meaningful connections with school and family. It also, I might add, exposed her to more drugs because in picking her up and dropping her off at various foster homes, Veronica and I frequently passed by neighbors who were using drugs on the street. Vanderputten (1983) affirmed that schools and other social service agencies are generally typed as “loosely coupled,” and that there is much “slippage” between what policymakers intend and what actually happens on the ground. One of the reasons for this slippage is linked to “street-level bureaucrats”—the social workers, teachers, and health care providers who are responsible for the day-to-day provision of services to clients. They are, in Lipsky’s (1976) view, policymakers on the ground whose individual subgoals can be influenced by self-interest, job protection, and power drives, as well as more positive goals. To influence and improve communication within and among the many institutions and individuals involved in Veronica’s life would clearly require structural change involving all the institutions, and it is unclear where such a change would come from and how it, too, could avoid falling victim to slippage and loose coupling.

CONCLUSION This chapter has highlighted the dualism of individual agency, on the one hand, and structural forces, on the other. It has also highlighted the different layers of context that may be involved in a child’s life, and how certain brokers such as CPS or foster care agencies may make crucial decisions about individuals’ lives. This view from the inside of Veronica’s life teaches us that it may not be enough to consider home, school, peers, and community as the relevant contexts influencing children’s lives. When considering children from very poor and troubled families, educators need to extend their notion of the relevant contexts and situate their learning about these

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children in an even wider circle, one that includes the institutions that regulate and control the parents’ and children’s lives. Teachers who have grown up in middle-class communities may find it difficult, as I did, to conceive of these added layers of institutional context because they have never experienced them directly. Most of us assume that outside of school, all children are influenced by family, peers, and community, but our analysis stops there. Veronica’s case shows us the inadequacy of these assumptions. It seems clear that for an effort to have any positive impact at all on the potential for children like Veronica to succeed in school, it has to encompass both individual, personalized connection and structural change. As an individual agent in this complex interplay of structures and individuals, I see one pathway that could lead, if not to more positive outcomes for Veronica, at least to a lessening of the damage for her and others in similar situations of great instability. The pathway I suggest involves a reconceptualization of the boundaries between different institutions and individuals. Currently, each institution— CPS, BBBS, public defenders, the foster care agency—behaves as if it were a bounded culture, not unlike the way anthropologists used to conceive of cultures as homogeneous entities, different and separate from other cultures. There is little communication between these institutions, and efforts to coordinate services are met with the kinds of obstacles I encountered as I tried to serve as an advocate and intermediary while Veronica was under CPS custody. The concept of cultural borderlands as hybrid spaces where cultures meet and interact, blend, and borrow (Bhabha, 1994; Rosaldo, 1989) might be fruitfully applied to the landscape of services rendered to children like Veronica. Perhaps if we thought of services as different “cultures” that meet, communicate, and share knowledge over borders that are no longer so distinct, for purposes that have the child’s best interests in common, it might be possible to create what social service agencies like to call a more “seamless continuum” of services. What is missing, I believe, and what could make a difference for children like Veronica, is more connectivity and coherence among the different individuals and institutions involved with her case. To develop such connectivity and coherence, however, would require changes in the way institutions such as schools, CPS, and foster care operate. The borders between them would have to become less rigid. They would have to share information more, and individuals would have to take responsibility to monitor the flow of information across institutional boundaries. Similarly, individuals such as myself, who play mentoring roles, and teachers, who are responsible for daily educational contact, would also have to change their understanding of


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their roles. We should not assume, for example, that because a child is “receiving” various supports that they are actually working to the child’s benefit. If a child has been referred for counseling, or placed in CPS custody, or given a tutor or a mentor, this in itself is not enough. Teachers, parents, and other concerned adults need to make sure that these services are actually benefiting the child, rather than contributing even further to the child’s disempowerment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, Sandra Schecter, and Gilberto Arriaza for their comments and suggestions regarding this chapter.

REFERENCES Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1974). The school as a conservative force: Scholastic and cultural inequalities. In J. Eggleston (Ed.), Contemporary research in the sociology of education (pp. 32–46). London: Methuen. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society, and culture (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. California Department of Social Services. (2004). Child Protection Services. Retrieved March 30, 2004, from http://www.dss.cahwnet.gov/cdssweb/Protective_186.htm Fine, M., Weis, L., Centrie, C., & Roberts, R. (2000). Educating beyond the borders of schooling. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 31(20), 131–151. Freedman, M. (1999). The kindness of strangers: Adult mentors, urban youth, and the new voluntarism (Rev. ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Review, 48, 1–17. Gouldner, A. (1970). The coming crisis of Western sociology. New York: Basic Books. Heath, S. B., & McLaughlin, M. (Eds.). (1993). Identity and inner-city youth: Beyond ethnicity and gender. New York: Teachers College Press. Henze, R., Katz, A., Norte, E., Sather, S., & Walker, E. (2002). Leading for diversity: How school leaders promote positive interethnic relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Lipsky, M. (1976). Toward a theory of street level bureaucracy. In W. Hawley (Ed.), Theoretical perspectives on urban politics (pp. 196–213). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Marcus, G., & Fischer, M. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McIntosh, P. (1989, July/August). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom Magazine, pp. 10–12. Phelan, P. K., Davidson, A. L., & Yu, H. (1993). Students’ multiple worlds: Navigating the borders of family, peer, and school cultures. In P. Phelan & A. L. Davidson (Eds.), Renegotiating cultural diversity in American schools (pp. 52–88). New York: Teachers College Press. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon.

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Tapia, J. (1998). The schooling of Puerto Ricans: Philadelphia’s most impoverished community. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 29(3), 297–323. Tierney, J. P., & Grossman, J. (1995). Making a difference: An impact study of BBBS. Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1999). Statement for the record on HR 764, “The child abuse and prevention act,” by Carol W. Williams. Retrieved January 22, 2004, from http://www.hhs.gov/asl/testify/t990512a.html Vanderputten, E. (1983). Toward a theory of loosely coupled systems: The implementation of federal youth employment policies. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, Washington, DC. Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002). Educating culturally responsive teachers: A coherent approach. Albany: State University of New York Press.

C H A P T E R

14 Who’s Got the Norm?: Community and the New Work Order Sylvie Roy University of Calgary

Modern institutions differ from preceding forms of social order in their dynamism, their undercutting of traditional habits and customs, and their global impact (Giddens, 1991). In the workplace, the “new” enterprise culture imposes sets of attributes, values, and behaviors that enable people to succeed in difficult undertakings. A company’s employees are expected to share a common vision and to work toward common goals so that their company can thrive in a competitive world (Cameron, 2000). For Wenger (1998), there is a mutual engagement in institutions that bind members together into a social entity, and members also develop a shared repertoire of communal resources over time. Communication is essential in the new work order, given that how to converse more effectively with others has become a key element in the “pure relationship” with another individual that is contracted and valued (Cameron, 2000; Giddens, 1991). This new era also brings linguistic competencies into the spotlight. Bilingualism and multilingualism are valued for the purpose of attracting and gaining access to important markets. For language minorities, bilingualism is of value both as a societal resource and as a means of access to workplaces of the new economy such as call centers and the tourism sector (Roy, 2002; Roy & Gélinas, 2004). People from language minorities who have access to these new work sites abandon the old politics of identity in favor of a pragmatic stance that allows them to enter the global workplace (Heller, 1999a).

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This chapter provides insight into how the political economy of the workplace counters societal policies intended to uphold and possibly extend the resources and interests of minority communities. Specifically, I look at how the new globalized rules in the workplace have brought challenges to one francophone minority1 in Ontario, Canada. I examine the measures introduced to bring about standardization of communication in a call center and the ways in which francophone employees faced the ensuing challenges. Members of the francophone minority in this little industrial town, I argue, are now facing a different definition of what it means to be “bilingual” in the workplace. It no longer connotes being part of a traditional (ethnic) community, but rather being able to learn new sets of skills (linguistic and nonlinguistic) and to exchange them as a commodity. In this manner, the corporate world and a new work culture are changing the way in which minorities define themselves in their specific contexts.2

LANGUAGE POLICIES AND SCHOOLING IN CANADA Anglophones and francophones in Canada share a long history of struggles over access to linguistic, social, and political resources. At the beginning of the 20th century, French Canadians lived in all parts of Canada. They assembled in associations and institutions for the purpose of keeping and promoting their francophone identity. These social, economic, and religious institutions provided a power base for the French Canadian elite. They also served as venues from which francophones in Canada could advocate for language rights and access to schooling and government opportunities. After 1960, nationalism among the francophone majority in the province of Quebec became increasingly focused on Quebec itself, and less on Canada as a whole. Seeing themselves as Québécois, Quebec’s francophones wanted to gain power in their own province and avoid Anglo domination. They demanded an autonomous territory where the French language would be used and spoken, and where the francophone majority could play the major role in the political, economic, and social determination of their collective future. The Québécois vision had little appeal for the elites of the francophone minorities outside Quebec, which needed their own provincial governments and the federal government to protect their minority rights, including funding for separate (Catholic) schools. However, even if franco1

A francophone minority is a group of people who speak French (or used to speak French) in their community within an overall English-speaking (anglophone) environment. 2 For an overview of other Canadian examples of how francophones are adapting 2 themselves to the new economy and culture, see Heller and Labrie (2003). 1

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phones outside Quebec did not share the political stance of the Québécois, Quebec’s political mobilization made possible the development of an ideology of language and state that placed increased value on bilingualism in the country as a whole (Heller, 1999b; Martel, 1997). In 1969, the federal Official Languages Act declared that French and English were the two official languages of Canada. This legislation provided opportunities for francophones (mostly those who were bilingual) to access jobs in the federal government. However, notwithstanding their access to employment as bilinguals at the federal level, francophone minorities outside Quebec continued to struggle for rights and services in French. In particular, in the province of Ontario, which is adjacent to Quebec and contains the federal capital with a large francophone minority, schooling in French has presented a challenge over the years. From 1912 to 1927, the provincial government severely restricted access to French schooling through the vehicle of Regulation 17. Although some francophones continued to struggle through their associations, and the francophone clergy opened private colleges to serve the francophone population (mainly for those who had money to pay the tuition), for a long time francophones in Ontario did not have access to public schooling in their mother tongue (Heller, 1994; Welsh, 1988). This intensified the challenges involved in using and maintaining the French language. Even after 1927, full education in French was not available to the French minority, leaving Franco-Ontarians with three choices: leave school early to go to work; attend English school where they would more than likely struggle and drop out; or become English-dominant and lose their heritage language. As the movement for bilingualism at the federal level gained strength, schooling in French became available in Ontario. In the late 1960s, the Ontario provincial government introduced changes in francophone education, allowing curriculum to be delivered wholly in the mother tongue. The federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which became part of the Canadian constitution in 1982, includes a provision (Article 23) that grants officiallanguage minorities the right to be educated in their own language everywhere in Canada. For francophone minorities outside Quebec, however, education in French was often delivered in schools shared with Englishspeaking students. In theory, these mixtes or “bilingual” schools provided teaching in both languages; however, only a few courses were taught in French, whereas most were taught in English. Working-class parents favored mixtes schools, because they knew the importance of speaking English in the workplace. However, for parents of the francophone elite, who had struggled for years and gained some power at social, political, and economic levels, mixtes schools contained the threat of assimilation (Cardinal, Lapointe, & Thériault, 1988; Heller, 1994). The situation today provides evidence of the fierce struggle on the part of Franco-

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Ontarians to assert their rights and take back their schools. In 1998, 11 francophone school boards (7 in the Catholic sector and 4 in the public sector3) controlled and managed all francophone schools in Ontario. The language of instruction is now French only, even if the students use English or other languages intensively during recess and in talking among themselves (Heller, 1994).

BILINGUALISM AND THE NEW WORK ORDER For years, wherever francophone minorities lived in Ontario, bilingualism was a phenomenon that could be observed at the community level, at school, and in the home. Few francophones could work in French only; they had to know English to make a living. More recently, with the emergence of new sectors of communication and technology and the opening of borders (Giddens, 1994), bilingualism is being valued in some of Ontario’s workplaces (e.g., the tourism sector, call centers, companies with international contracts). Those who possess linguistic competencies in two or more languages have easy access to these sectors, as positions within them require diverse linguistic skills to serve the Canadian and international markets. The enterprise culture associated with this new work order requires companies to revise their linguistic and social practices to stay competitive in the global economy (Cameron, 2000; Gadrey, 2000; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996). These practices promote a shared vision for all employees in terms of working toward similar goals. Employees are expected to participate actively in the workplace, assuming a role in decision making. Employees also have to acquire a number of skills to work efficiently and adapt to changing workplace conditions. As Gee et al. (1996) noted: In the hypercompetitive, fast-changing environment workers must be “eager to stay,” but also “ready to leave” if the business is failing or even if it must innovate new projects that no longer require the core competencies of the current workers. (p. 19)

To keep employees subservient to changing workplace demands, employers must create a vision and a culture of empowerment for their employees (Gadrey, 2000). Each employee should feel that they are part of a big family and that their successes are everyone’s successes. Another important aspect of the new work order entails being responsive to customers’ needs: 3

3

Catholic as well as public schools are provincially funded in Ontario.


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If you cannot compete on the price or the basic quality of the product (because it can be made just as well, and cheaper, in Mexico or Thailand) then you have to compete on service. (Cameron, 2000, p. 9)

In a call center, communication is the most important skill for a company’s capacity to attract and retain customers. It is said that if one sounds professional on the phone, customers will stay on the line. Communication and languages become forms of expertise that have to be controlled, supervised, and rewarded (Cameron, 2000; Roy, 2003a, 2003b). In my study, standardization of the way employees talk to customers was the main goal for building a workplace community where each employee learned a set of practices that brought them closer to the shared vision and goals of the enterprise. For bilinguals, this meant not just speaking French and English, but speaking in a manner that satisfied the workplace’s goals and standards.

THE STUDY Overview of the Minority and the Call Center Traditionally, francophone minorities in English-speaking Canada have lived in strong communities grounded in church, school, community, and family life. The small town in southern Ontario where the call center that is the focus of this study is located is no exception. Its francophone residents have lived as francophones but worked in English-speaking environments since francophones first came here looking for work opportunities in the early 20th century. Francophone couples from Quebec, New Brunswick, and northern Ontario settled in the town, working in the textile and steel industries, and second-generation (G2) francophones were born to francophone parents. The G2s used French at home and/or at school. Many married anglophones or members of other language groups (e.g., Italian, Polish). Some of their children lost the French language because of home socialization practices that did not include use of the minority language and lack of schooling in French. However, even “the assimilated,” those who did not speak French, continued to send their children to French-language schools. They considered French important for travel or access to jobs, and essential for recovering their “lost” identity. Nowadays, for the most part, youngsters speak English with their peers. Some speak French at school. Some use French only at home and during special occasions, such as celebrations in the community. However, the trend is that young people are more and more seeing bilingualism as an asset with respect to job opportunities (Lamoureux, Lozon, & Roy, 2003; Roy, 2002).

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In the late 1980s, the French language became valuable in the new service industries in the small town. After a decade of economic stagnation, a number of call center businesses came to establish themselves in the region because of the bilingual and multilingual population and the geographical location of the town, close to the United States border and to big cities such as Toronto. These call centers expanded rapidly, and one became a large and important employer in the region, bringing new hope for the francophone minority and its mostly bilingual members. Call centers were workplaces that hired bilingual staff because they served a Canada-wide market. This welcome change represented a vehicle for the survival of the francophone community. Initially, elders of the community saw call centers as additional venues in which local francophones could obtain jobs using their bilingual skills. The reality was not as they expected, as we show later. A financial institution that had been established in the little town in the early 1960s was transformed into a major call center. When I was there, it was one of the most popular workplaces for young people and women. In the call center, telephone representatives provide services to customers who have credit cards from a number of retail outlets and other companies. The center is both an inbound and outbound workplace, where customers call for information about their accounts and payments and employees call customers to remind them of their overdue accounts. The call center also provides road assistance services: A customer facing an emergency involving his or her vehicle calls a telephone representative and the center arranges for the appropriate service, such as towing. In 1998, during my ethnographic work, new rules were introduced in different sectors of the company. The company wanted to follow the trend of workplaces building a culture around their employees and customers. They also represented themselves as building a “community of practice” where every employee would learn how to speak, act, and improvise in ways that made sense and contributed to the workplace (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The workplace slogan was “Clients forever,”4 and every action taken or training session done involved this slogan. For this Canadian company that competed with larger U.S. companies, the slogan reminded employees of the need to retain customers they already had and to search for new ones who would stay with the company for years (“forever”). Also, in promoting itself, the company placed great emphasis on its historical relationship with Canadians, stressing that it had been one of Canada’s most important companies since the early 1920s.5 One of the training sessions that I participated in while studying this workplace was entitled “Working Together.” This training was offered to all 4

All names were changed to protect the confidentiality of the workplace. The financial division was established in the 1960s, but its parent company5 is a major Canadian enterprise that dates back to the 1920s. 4

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employees, from vice-president to telephone representative. It was based on a skill-building approach, where each employee had to be an active participant, build on his or her own personal experiences, be practical, and internalize the notion that the end of the class was just the beginning of his or her learning. Training sessions were conducted to provide employees with skills with which to work together and with customers “listening to understand, being persuasive, giving feedback, and addressing conflict” (company’s training text, Working Together, 1998). In combination with this intensive training, a second change in procedure became important in the call center. This change involved a standardization policy that included evaluation of the ways in which employees spoke on the telephone. Telephone representatives now had to follow a script when talking with clients. Employees were required to include all steps and nuances in completing a telephone conversation, from a standard opening (“Hello [the company’s name]. This is [the employee’s name]. How may I help you?”) to protocols for voice inflection in handling difficult calls. Each employee was to be “coached” by peers in order to learn and gain practice in the ways in which calls were to be received and handled. In the next section, I examine the process of standardization in greater detail. There were other changes in the company. The company itself assumed responsibility for hiring, which previously had been done by an external firm, and management personnel introduced a policy of testing bilingual workers. In the past, francophones who mentioned that they were French-speaking or who knew another francophone from the community were hired as bilinguals. In other words, as a member of the francophone community, one could automatically get a job as a bilingual employee through a verbal referral from another French-speaking employee. Starting in 1998, however, prospective employees had to achieve a grade of 80% on a test to be considered bilingual. Here it is important to note that the company does not test the English-speaking candidates, only the French-speaking ones. Moreover, prospective francophone employees need to demonstrate that they are able to communicate well in English first, and then they are tested in French. Another change had to do with the allocation of wages. The wage system was converted into a knowledge-based pay system where the wage for each employee would be determined according to the linguistic knowledge that he or she was deemed to possess. Telephone representatives who were designated as bilingual employees received higher wages. In addition, employees received a twice-yearly bonus if they followed the script for responding to phone calls and inquiries faithfully. Their performance on phone calls, as evaluated by company coaches, counted for 20% of their overall performance as established by the company. It was therefore important for bilingual employees to follow the prescribed script; if they did not, they would lose their bonuses.

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Thus, two processes involving standardization occurred simultaneously: Employees had to demonstrate that they had mastered the French forms suggested by the company to be designated bilingual employees (and receive additional remuneration); and they had to follow the script to receive their twice-yearly bonuses. These changes were not without consequences for the francophone minority of this small southern Ontario town. One of these consequences—and we return to this point at the end of the chapter— was that the ethnic dimension of “la francophonie” was replaced by a definition of “bilingual” following the company’s assessment of an employee’s performance of spoken French over the phone in the workplace. Standardization of Communication in the Call Center Standardization is part of the new work culture in the call center. Since 1998, every employee has had to follow guidelines when they are on the phone. Standardization for telephone representatives means that employees are coached in a certain way to ensure that everyone will answer the phone using the same protocols. By standardizing the ways in which employees talk, the company can get a flexible and manageable workforce. Even if employees have to change their position in the workplace, they will know how to respond to the needs of customers. This is a company that has 1,000 employees, more than half of them telephone representatives. The following excerpt from an interview with David, a human resources representative, provides insight into how and why the company made the changes outlined earlier: Sylvie: David:

Sylvie: David: Sylvie: David:

Sylvie: David:

. . . what are you doing exactly? sure sure hm? well hm? for about the past year I’ve been in a project manager role hm? the projects that we have been euh? the primary one has been implementing the knowledge pay system in a call center re ok so for the “Clients forever” representative hm? and where does that come from? where does this idea came from and? who do you work with and? ok well I think the idea probably came from a few different voices hm? overall feeling I guess was that there needed to be more integrated approach to the way would work in the call center hm? the euh? pre I guess if you look back a few you would find that the call center was hm? more segmented and than it is now ok and there’s still there’s some work to do but it’s improved quite a bit I think


Sylvie: David: Sylvie: David:

Sylvie: David:

Sylvie: David: Sylvie: David: Sylvie: David:

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segmented in terms of everybody does their own job and? yeah yeah departments were basically aligned according to a specific function? ok hm and euh so rather than having hm? a pool of resources of three or four five hundred people you had a bunch of department of you know ten or fifteen or twenty some were bitter hm? but hm? so basically it was an inefficiency hm? issues hm? now in improving the euh? the efficiency actually it wasn’t only efficiency I think it’s flexibility ok hm? and they can be two different things hm? in in a call center I think euh? so basically the project was about standardizing hm? it was a few things standardizing hm? service? ok growing people’s capability or putting a system in place that would allow people to grow and reward their capability hm hm hm? supporting that with training and euh? and some other things like peer peer coaches and stuff like that hm so really the project was about bringing flexibility into the call center and the big part of it was standards around the way calls are taking standards around the way training is done and standards around euh? skill

In the preceding conversation, the newly arrived employee emphasizes that flexibility is the key to improved work in the call center. An additional goal of standardization is to demonstrate an ethic of professionalism to customers. It is believed that if employees use “perfect” terminology and appropriate sequences in their communication, the customer will be motivated to complete the transaction. Another goal of standardization is employee accountability. If employees are expected to use the same openings and closings for telephone conversations, it will be easy to evaluate and measure their performances on the phone. When I asked one of the vice-presidents of the company about language varieties, she volunteered that because they were now paying for languages, they felt entitled to establish standards for the way people speak. This vice-president did not mention language varieties that could be useful in conversation. Yet employees reported having to consider using an alternate variety of French when phone customers did not understand specific lexical items. These words generally referred to specific financial concepts. Thus, languages are now being seen and sold as a commodity. In the standardization process, languages are being paid for and evaluated like

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other skills such as computer skills and specific automobile knowledge. When I asked questions about standardization of communication, most employees responded that communicating well entailed not using slang and being able to ensure that customers understood them. Employees agreed that in this new workplace culture they all needed to be able to communicate in the same way so as to satisfy customers’ needs. Also, they associated standardization with looking professional. All employees understood that, for the employer, communication had become a skill that people could be trained in, evaluated on, and paid for. However, there were employees who found the new standardization process challenging, to say the least. Some found that this new way of communicating with customers affected the spontaneity of their conversations. The following excerpt is from an employee who speaks French, English, and Spanish6: hm? je pense que le client veut être euh? veut veut savoir que t’es intéressé que (hm? I think the customer wants to be euh? wants to know that you are interested that) that you give a damn they want to know that hm? and /2 sec/ I I feel that if you’re on the phone it’s your it’s your job to make them feel that way and I I agree with a lot of the “Clients forever” things criteria I just hope that the company doesn’t euh? doesn’t forget that we’re people (laugh) on the phone euh? we don’t I don’t want to become a robot and just you don’t enjoy your job they have to take that into considerations that when you’re on the phone and you’re having to think about I did not meet my criteria but yet you feel like the customer feels pretty happy but when you go in to your coaching session and the coach tells you you didn’t say this therefore you don’t meet you know you’re pretty damn disappointed

During my observations in the call center, I noted that it could be difficult for employees to remember all the criteria from the coaching sessions. Some employees forgot the criteria, even though doing so could mean that they would lose their bonus at the end of the year. For bilingual employees, the challenge was even greater. First, training was mostly in English. Only during coaching sessions could they speak French, and here their French was evaluated. This created a high-stress situation, because being designated a “bilingual” employee had direct consequences for job retention. Bilingual employees had little chance of being laid off because the need for their dual language skills was so great. In the next section, I elaborate on how the employees were trained during the standardization process. I also show how English- and French-speaking francophone employees from the town are viewed in the workplace, in terms of satisfying or not satisfying the company’s workplace standard. 6

6

Spanish was also a language needed in the call center, but only for 5% of the calls.


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Who Decides the Norm?: Peer Coaching and Linguistic Minorities To standardize the ways in which employees speak on the phone, the employer provides a peer coach review of how employees should talk. The goal of peer coaching is to provide employees with the appropriate tools to communicate effectively with customers. There is a list of about 40 items to take into account when employees are on the phone. This list was put together by a team of fewer than five people working in the training department of the company. The list is in English, and coaches have to translate each item for the French evaluation. Employees receive coaching every 6 weeks. Peer coaches (telephone representative employees who were chosen to do the job) make sure that every employee follows the rules for each call. Bilingual employees are evaluated on their performance in both French and English. If they follow every step in the telephone protocol in their performance, they will receive a 20% increase in pay. Coaches will listen to calls a few times before they give the scores for each employee. They take note of every detail in a phone call, scrutinizing every moment in a conversation. They check to ensure that the customer has the best and clearest information in the shortest amount of time—for business (profit) purposes, the call should not be too long. For francophone workers this means that all aspects of their use of the French language are evaluated. Employees will lose points for small details, as illustrated in the next excerpt, from an interview with Nancy, a peer coach: Nancy: Sylvie: Nancy:

Sylvie: Nancy: Sylvie: Nancy: [. . .] Nancy:

là Sylvie là a dit ça c’est échu y a plusieurs achats // parce qu’a nommé je pense qu’a nommé trois quatre achats ok pis là j’écoute son vocabulaire pis a vient a vient de nous dire ça c’est échu je pense que un vocabulaire un plus élevé aurait été des achats seront échus ou ils seront échus ah ok parce que j’écoute à son vocabulaire pis là elle aurait dû au pluriel mais j’ai pas euh j’ai pas remarqué ça [XX] c’est difficile j’écoute à un appel au moins une vingtaine de fois

de dire singulier ici c’est pluriel parce que peut-être le client plus bien compris y aurait pas questionner ça parce que quand quand on le dit comme il faut ça peut causer beaucoup de questions au niveau du client (Nancy: there Sylvie there she said “c’est échu” (it falls due) // because she named I think she named three four purchases Sylvie: ok

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Sylvie: Nancy: Sylvie: Nancy: [. . .] Nancy:

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so there I listen to her vocabulary and she is saying this falls due I think that a higher vocabulary she should have said purchases will fall due or they will fall due ah ok because I listen to her vocabulary there she should have used plural but I didn’t notice that [XX] it’s difficult I listen to a phone call at least 20 times to say in singular here it is plural because maybe the customer if he understood better he wouldn’t have questioned this because when we don’t say it right it could occasion a lot of questions from the customer)

Peer coaches play an important role in the process of standardization in the workplace. They are the ones who evaluate and judge others on their linguistic capacities. Yet their own abilities to speak French vary widely. Through my observations in the call center, I noticed that coaches have different ways of evaluating depending on their understanding of the language and the value they accord to specific skills. Another interesting dimension of peer coaching is that many coaches say they do not possess adequate skills to judge others, especially on the quality of their French. Often coaches are chosen for their educational background and their ability to use the language. However, competencies vary from one coach to another, and there is little consistency in the criteria by which employees are evaluated. Standardization and peer coaching show how languages are seen as skills to be used to achieve goals in the company. This new way to look at languages is proving problematic for francophone inhabitants of the town. In the past, all who said that they spoke French or that they were part of the francophone community would have had access to the workplace. With the new workplace standards, francophones are not necessarily seen as the best speakers of French. Often I was told that francophone employees spoke “broken” French, used slang too often, and code-switched with English. Following is another excerpt from a training session where discussion centered around the use of a “proper” term in French. At the beginning, the discussion is about the use of the expression frais d’intérêt (interest costs) instead of taux d’intérêt (interest rates). For Nancy, employees should use the appropriate term, which is taux d’intérêt: Nancy:

Sylvie:

s’y disent frais d’intérêt j’y eux j’y eux donne quand même j’y eux donne un masters quand même mais j’y eux dis le mot vraiment c’est taux d’intérêt [. . .] pourtant moi je comprends qu’est-ce que ça veut dire frais intérêt


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Nancy:

il y en a beaucoup qui comprennent mais? // si on si on veut vraiment élever notre français et parler proprement aux clients c’est taux d’intérêt [. . .] c’est vraiment les bilingues seulement quelqu’un qui est vraiment bilingue comprend frais d’intérêt Sylvie: ok Nancy: parce que c’est un anglicisme (Nancy: if they say “frais d’intérêt” I will give it to them I will give them a master anyway but I tell them that the real term is “taux d’intérêt” [. . .] Sylvie: I understand what “frais d’intérêt” means Nancy: a lot of people understand but? if we want to raise our French and speak properly to customers it is “taux d’intérêt” [. . .] it’s really bilinguals only someone who is a real bilingual that will understand “frais d’intérêt” Sylvie: ok Nancy: because it is an anglicism)

Having lived among an anglophone majority for years, francophones have their own varieties of French that are not considered good enough for the company’s new standard. Interestingly, Nancy’s comment that frais d’intérêt is an anglicism is not accurate, because taux d’intérêt corresponds more directly to the standard English term interest rates. It can be difficult for a bilingual person to know whether or not a word is an anglicism. In effect, francophone employees are expected to speak French and English in a monolingual manner (Dabène, 1994; Roy, 2003b). That is, francophone employees have to demonstrate that they speak French well enough, while at the same time they have to master English perfectly. Ironically, many francophone employees do not speak well enough to meet the company’s standard, even though their phone customers generally also use slang and are unlikely to get upset if the representative does the same. During the period of my fieldwork, I noticed that there was a lot of discussion at the call center about what was the best variety of French to speak. One commonly expressed view on the part of employees was that the best French was the French spoken by their customers. Because Québécois were their main French-speaking market, it therefore followed that employees should use Québécois language varieties. However, peer coaches were of the view that the best French was French from the dictionary or from textbooks on French “for business purposes.” The only point on which everyone seemed to agree was that there was an absence of clarity on what the standard was. Indeed, each coach used their own interpretation of best practices as a basis for their evaluation of the telephone performances of francophone employees.7 7 7 When I left, the company intended to improve standardization of the coaching process. However, this intention was expressed for English, not French.

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COMMUNITY AND BILINGUALISM The francophone minority studied here used to live in a tight-knit “community,” in the traditional sense: centered around the church, francophone associations, school, and family. But years of unemployment, population mobility, and working in an anglophone environment brought about some changes. The establishment of a call center could have been an opportunity for the francophone minority to revitalize itself. However, as we have seen, this was not the case, and the changes introduced in the workplace that had to do with the assessment of linguistic competencies were not ones that promoted “ethnolinguistic vitality” among francophone residents of this small Ontario town (Allard & Landry, 1992). The call center studied here built a workplace community where the established goals were to serve customers optimally using a “professional” business register. As we have seen, to achieve a community of employees with specific communication abilities, standardization was used to identify the knowledge and skills that employees and trainers needed. Although a process standard was also needed to delineate the delivery that facilitated the successful change and to create an impression of fairness, at the time of my fieldwork there was little evidence that this process standard was in place. Notwithstanding, for the town’s francophone minority, the considerable changes in how the company went about its business had a major effect on people’s self-identities as bilinguals. Giddens (1991) talked about transformations in self-identity and globalization as two poles of the dialectic of the local and the global in conditions of high modernity. For this author, changes in intimate aspects of personal life are directly tied to the establishment of social connections of very wide scope. Giddens (1991) described this process as follows: Modernity, it might be said, breaks down the protective framework of the small community and of tradition, replacing these with much larger, impersonal organizations. (p. 33)

In the call center, the French language is not seen as an important dimension of a community with additive linguistic abilities and resources. With the new standard, francophones are not even necessarily considered the best speakers of French. In the workplace, speaking and using French is seen as a skill. If francophones cannot demonstrate the French skills that are expected, they will not be considered bilinguals. To become an accepted member of the workplace community, they have to follow the rules. Being part of the global community of service-oriented companies, bilingual employees have to learn to speak a certain way, putting aside other aspects of language and identity. Some employees did face the workplace chal-


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lenges presented by the new order. Some were evaluated poorly on their French and English language skills and failed to meet the standard. And two francophone women were asked to work only in English, as the quality of their French was judged not good enough for the workplace.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I sought to show how a francophone minority in Canada entered the globalized work world and how this process contributed to problematizing the identifying features of their community. Specifically, I wanted to examine how the workplace community that evolved out of a call center has redefined what it means to be bilingual. I also wanted to contrast this new definition with the traditional one that had been an integral component of the francophone minority’s self-identity for generations. For years, francophones in this little town had formed a group where Catholic values, embedded in the social and cultural aspects of their lives, contributed to a close-knit community. Together, francophones struggled for recognition of their right to be educated in French. When bilingualism received some value at the federal level, francophone minorities had new opportunities to access jobs that required their bilingual skills. However, for years, in settings such as this small town, anglophones have managed industries and controlled employment opportunities. With the new sectors of the economy such as call centers, linguistic competences are more and more in demand. To stay competitive, the workplace followed new rules such as standardizing the way in which employees speak on the phone with customers. This process created a culture where employees were asked to accept that they were part of a bigger vision where their individual needs were less important than group goals. But the mutual engagement to work toward a common goal is not without its ironies. On one hand, the company wants to empower its employees to make decisions regarding their role in the company; on the other hand, those with power assume greater control of productivity in the workplace. In addition to sales, employees now have to produce language following a script in order to be highly valued. They cannot use their own French varieties unless they must do so to complete a transaction, and then they will not get a positive evaluation. For years, language policies in Canada have helped francophone minorities acquire rights relating to using and receiving services in their mother tongue. Francophone minorities used their bilingualism to access jobs in the federal government or workplaces where their skills were needed. In this case study, one sees how the Anglo-dominated corporate sector is controlling where the French language is used, what variety is used, and by

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whom. In the new globalized economy, the culture, identity, and language of one specific group are put on hold while the new work order determines which linguistic skills are in demand. In 2003, the federal government released a document that showed its understanding of how larger market forces are influencing the importance of language skills. According to this document: At the beginning of this new century, in this era of globalization where communications are increasingly important, and where the economy is more and more knowledge- and innovation-oriented, Canada must build on its linguistic duality and the international nature of its two official languages more than ever. That gives it a substantial competitive edge. Access to two of the most vital international languages is an asset for labour markets and enhances mobility of individuals. (Government of Canada, 2003)

The case study presented here contributes to our understanding of the important role that language skills and abilities play in the workplace of the new economy. It also allows us to see how the larger context influences local practices and redefines who possesses commodities of value in different work settings. Of course, the corporate world often participates in the debate over what is important and has value from an economic, political, and social perspective, and the narrative recounted in this chapter does not point to an isolated phenomenon. Other francophone minorities living in English Canada are facing and will face the same challenges. The next step is to watch carefully to see the extent to which they control, confront, or are consumed by them.

REFERENCES Allard, R., & Landry, R. (1992). Ethnolinguistic vitality beliefs and language maintenance and loss. In W. Fase, K. Jaspaert, & S. Kroon (Eds.), Maintenance and loss of minority languages (pp. 171–195). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk?: Living and working in a communication culture. London: Sage. Cardinal, L., Lapointe, J., & Thériault, J.-Y. (1988). La communauté francophone de Welland, la minorité francophone de Welland et ses rapports avec les institutions. Study presented to the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. Ottawa: University of Ottawa, Sociology Department. Dabène, L. (1994). Repères sociolinguistiques pour l’enseignement des langues: Les situations plurilingues. Paris: Hachette. Gadrey, J. (2000). Nouvelle économie, nouveau mythe? Paris: Flammarion. Gee, J. P., Hull, G., & Lankshear, C. (1996). The new work order: Behind the language of the new capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1994). Les conséquences de la modernité. Paris: L’Harmattan.


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Government of Canada. (2003). The next Act: New momentum for Canada’s linguistic duality: The action plan for official languages. Ottawa: National Library of Canada. Heller, M. (1994). Crosswords: Language, education and ethnicity in French Ontario. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Heller, M. (1999a). Alternative ideologies of la francophonie. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(3), 336–359. Heller, M. (1999b). Linguistic minorities and modernity: A sociolinguistic ethnography. London: Longman. Heller, M., & Labrie, N. (Eds.). (2003). Discours et identités: la francité canadienne entre modernité et mondialisation. Cordil-Wodon, Belgium: Éditions modulaires européennes. Lamoureux, S., Lozon, R., & Roy, S. (2003). Bilinguisme et accès des jeunes au monde du travail. In N. Labrie & S. Lamoureux (Eds.), L’éducation de langue française en Ontario: Enjeux et processus sociaux (pp. 187–202). Sudbury, ON: Prise de Parole. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Martel, M. (1997). Le deuil d’un pays imaginé: Rêves, luttes et déroute du Canada français: Les rapports entre le Québec et la francophonie canadienne, 1867–1975. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa. Roy, S. (2002). Valeurs et pratiques langagières dans la nouvelle économie: Une étude de cas. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Roy, S. (2003a). Discours et enjeux d’une normalisation linguistique dans un milieu de travail. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(2), 171–186. Roy, S. (2003b). Bilingualism and standardization in a Canadian call centre: Challenges for a linguistic minority community. In R. Bayley & S. R. Schecter (Eds.), Language socialization in bilingual and multilingual societies (pp. 269–285). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Roy, S., & Gélinas, C. (2004). Le tourisme pour les Franco-Albertains, porte d’entrée dans le monde. Francophonies d’Amérique, 17, 131–140. Welsh, D. (1988). The social construction of Franco-Ontarian interests towards French-language schooling. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


Author Index Note. Italic numbers indicate page on which full reference appears. Numbered footnotes follow both their page numbers and the letter n, e.g. 90n3, 223n7.

A A’Court, S., 90n3, 107 Alasuutari, P., 75, 84 Allard, R., 290, 292 Allison, D., 236, 255 Amanti, C., 8, 17, 25, 200, 212 Andrews, L., 18n13, 24 Angelillo, C., 134n4, 150, 154, 168 Anisef, P., 217, 219n6, 232 Anzaldua, G., 145, 149, 247, 249, 255 Au, K., 27, 44 Axelrod, P., 217, 219n6, 232

B Bachman, L. F., 19, 24 Bahruth, R., 65, 67 Baichman-Anisef, E., 217, 219n6, 232 Bailer, D., 38, 44 Bakhtin, M. M., 126, 130, 194, 195, 210, 210 Ballenger, C., xvi, xix, 138, 149 Barber, B. S., 133, 134, 149 Barr, J., 74, 84 Bartlett, L., 132, 135, 147, 150, 152, 165, 166, 168

Bayles-Martin, D., 20, 24 Bayley, R., 217, 233 Becker, M., 20, 24 Behar, R., 98, 108 Bejínez, L. F., 48, 50n4, 51, 66, 67 Benham, M. K., 4, 24 Berg, B., 76, 84 Bethune, M., 75n5, 84 Betts, J. R., 49, 66 Bhabha, H. K., 9, 24, 194, 195, 199, 210, 274, 275 Bielenberg, B., 152, 154, 165, 167 Bird, G., 93, 108 Birke, L., 74, 84 Blair, K. L., 20, 24 Blanc, J., 80, 84 Blanton, W. E., 151, 152, 154, 155, 165, 167 Bloodgood, A., 125, 130 Bloome, D., 194, 210 Boggs, S. T., 27, 44 Boler, M., 186, 189 Bolon, C., 191n1, 211 Boomer, G., 112, 130 Borunda, M., 196, 212 Bourdieu, P., 6, 24, 257, 270n4, 271, 275 Boyce Davies, C., 69, 73, 74, 84 Boyd, M., 219n4, 219n5, 220, 232

295

296 Boyle-Baise, M., 172, 189 Brisbin, R. A., Jr., 172, 190 Brodkey, L., 236, 255 Brodwin, P., 41, 44 Brooke, H., 90n3, 107 Brown, A. L., 132, 147, 149, 152, 165, 167 Brown, D., 80, 84 Brown, K., 151, 152n1, 167 Brown, R., 75n5, 84 Buendia, E., 219n4, 220, 230, 231, 232 Bunkers, S., 74, 84 Burbules, N. C., 195, 211 Burciaga, J. A., 237, 255

C Cajete, G., 93, 108 Cameron, D., 74, 84, 277, 280, 281, 292 Campione, J. C., 132, 147, 149, 152, 165, 167 Canarajah, A.S., 6, 24 Cannella, G. S., 209n10, 211 Cardinal, L., 279, 292 Carniol, B., 186, 189 Carroll, R., 74, 84 Carter, S., 73, 74, 84 Casareno, A., 113, 120, 130 Castanheira, M. L., 194, 211 Castellano, M., 200, 211 Cazden, C. B., 27, 44, 154, 167 Centrie, C., 272, 275 Chaskin, R. J., 65, 66 Chavajay, P., 166, 167 Chomsky, N., 73, 84 Chouliaraki, L., 194, 211 Christensen, L., 9n8, 24 Christman, J., 80, 84 Clary, E. G., Jr., 155, 169 Claxton, G., 71, 87 Clifford, J., 97n9, 108 Clift, R., 76, 84 Cochran-Smith, M., xii, xiii, 112, 127, 128, 130 Cohen, J., 80, 84 Cohen, M., 173, 190 Cole, M., xv, xix, 151, 152, 152n1, 154, 167, 168 Collins, P., 74, 85 Compton-Lily, C., 200, 211 Cook-Gumperz, J., 72, 85 Cooper, D., 196, 213 Cooper, H., 132, 133, 133n1, 134n3, 149

AUTHOR INDEX Correa-Chávez, M., 154, 168 Crawford, T., 194, 211 Crichlow, W., 254, 255 Crosland, K., 219n4, 220, 230, 231, 232 Cummins, J., xvi, xix, 209n11, 211, 219n4, 230, 232, 254, 255, 256

D Dabène, L., 289, 292 Dannenmann, K., 89, 98, 99, 108 Davidson, A. L., 258, 276 Davidson, R. A., 155, 165, 167 Davies, B., 73, 74, 85 Davis, B., 241, 252, 255 Davis, D., xii, xiii Davis, M. R., 191n1, 211 de Castell, S., 72, 85 DeBoer, G., 144, 149 Dei, G. J. S., 217, 231, 232 Delamont, S., 75, 85 Delgado-Gaitan, C., 154, 168 Delpit, L., 13, 24, 71, 85, 115, 130, 148, 149 Dewey, J., 131, 132, 134, 149, 172, 189, 254, 255 Dickens, C., 196, 211 Dickson, P., 133, 133n1, 149 Dixon, C. N., 194, 211 Dobbs, M., 192, 211 Donato, R., 54n9, 66 Dornbusch, S. M., 49, 67 Doumbia, F., 219n4, 220, 230, 231, 232 Doyle, M. E., 133, 134, 149 Dreuth, L., 155, 165, 168 Dreuth-Fewell, M., 155, 165, 168 Drumgoold, K., 75n5, 85 Dudley-Marling, C., 186, 190 Duran, R., 151, 168 Duranti, A., 72, 85 Dyson, A. H., 208, 211

E Egan-Robertson, A., 9, 24, 76, 85, 194, 210 Eisenberg, A. R., 145, 149 Eldredge, F., 196, 211 Elenes, C. A., 251, 255 Elias, R., 155, 165, 168 Enciso, P., 196, 211

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AUTHOR INDEX Epps, M., 132, 133, 133n1, 149 Erickson, F., 154, 168 Erickson, J. A., 180, 187, 189 Evans, G., 74, 77, 85 Eyler, J., 155, 165, 168, 179, 186, 188, 189

F Fairclough, N., 11, 24, 194, 211 Fauconnier, G., 128, 130 Figueroa, R. A., 18, 25 Finders, M., 83, 85 Fine, M., 49, 64, 65, 66, 66, 272, 275 Finn, J. D., 48, 66 Fischer, M., 270, 275 Flood, J., 20, 24 Foner, N., 218, 219n4, 232 Fordham, S., 73, 74, 77, 85 Foster, G. A., 83, 85 Foster, M., 27, 45 Frankes, L., 196, 213 Fraser, K., 200, 211 Freebody, P., 73, 86 Freedman, M., 266, 270, 271, 275 Freedman, S. W., 113, 120, 130 Freire, P., 73, 85, 173, 189, 195, 211, 236, 255 Fries, K., xii, xiii

G Gack, V., 152, 154, 168 Gadrey, J., 280, 292 Gagliano, K., 22, 24 Gándara, P., 48, 49, 67 Garcia, E. E., xii, xiii Garner, R., 8, 24 Gay, G., xii, xiii Gee, J. P., 6, 8, 24, 27, 45, 194, 211, 280, 292 Gélinas, C., 277, 293 Gibson, M. A., 48, 50n4, 51, 54, 67, 219n5, 220, 229, 232 Giddens, A., 277, 280, 290, 292 Gilbert, D., 203, 211 Giles, D. E., Jr., 179, 186, 188, 189 Gitlin, A., 219n4, 220, 230, 231, 232 Goffman, E., 272, 275 Golden, J., 76, 85 Goldman, S. V., 133, 134, 149 González, N., 8, 17, 25, 70, 86, 200, 212

Goodenow, C., 48, 67 Goodman Turkanis, C., 132, 135, 140, 147, 149, 150, 152, 165, 166, 168 Gore, J., 194, 212 Goswami, D., 112, 130 Gouldner, A., 270, 275 Grady, K. E., 48, 67 Graff, G., 73, 85 Grant, C. A., xiii, xiii Grant, L., 229, 232 Graveline, F. J., 96, 108 Greathouse, S., 134n3, 149 Green, J. L., 194, 211 Grieco, E. M., 219n4, 219n5, 220, 232 Grossman, J., 266, 276 Guadarrama, I., 180, 190 Gumperz, J., 72, 85 Gutiérrez, D., 49, 67 Gutiérrez, K. D., 166, 168

H Haig-Brown, C., 92, 98, 99, 108, 218, 223, 223n7, 233 Hammett, R., 22, 25 Handloff, E., 76, 85 Harjo, J., 93, 108 Harvey, B., 219n4, 233 Harvey, J., 191n1, 212 Harwood, P., 173, 190 Hawthorne, R. D., 193, 211 Hayes, B. A., 151, 167 Hayes, R., 155, 168 Hays, C. W., 65, 67 He, A. W., 19, 25 Heath, S. B., 27, 45, 65, 138, 140, 147, 149, 272, 275 Heck, R. H., 4, 24 Heller, C. E., 236, 243, 250, 255 Heller, M., 277, 278n2, 279, 293 Henderson, J. D., 193, 211 Henry, A., 70, 70n2, 71, 73, 74, 77, 85, 229, 230, 232 Henry, F., 224, 230, 232 Henze, R., 271, 275 Heredia, J., 236, 241, 255 Hidalgo, N., 48, 51, 67 Hinton, L., 5, 25 Hlebowitsh, P. S., 173, 190 Hodgson-Smith, K., 91, 108

298 Holland, P., 76, 84 Hollins, E. R., 172, 190 hooks, b., 73, 85 Howard, J., 173, 190 Hubbard, L., 49, 67 Hubbard, R., 112, 130 Hudicourt-Barnes, J., 41, 45 Huff, C., 74, 84 Hull, G., 200, 211, 280, 292 Hunter, S., 172, 190 Hurd, C. A., 54n9, 67

I Ibom, K., 196, 211 Imai, S., 97n9, 108 Irvine, J. J., 173, 190

J Jackson, J., 73, 85 James, C. E., xv, xix, 217, 218, 219n6, 220, 221, 223, 223n7, 224, 229, 231, 232, 233 James-Wilson, S. V., 178, 190 Johnson, M., 76, 84 Johnston, M., 196, 211 Joseph, G., 73, 74, 85

K Kadi, J., 203, 211 Kadooka, J., 7, 25 Kahne, J., 171, 173, 174, 187, 190 Kalnin, J. S., 113, 117, 126, 127, 130 Kao, G., 219n4, 220, 233 Katz, A., 271, 275 Kelly, U., 73, 86 Kerper, R. M., 196, 211 Kessler, C., 65, 67 Kevane, B. A., 236, 241, 255 Kilgour Dowdy, J., 71, 85 King, T., 89n1, 108 King-Chigbo, K., 248, 255 Kirschner, B., 196, 211 Kittmer, L., 186, 190 Klinger, T., 155, 165, 168 Koyama, J. P., 48, 54, 67 Kress, G., 194, 211

AUTHOR INDEX

L Labov, W., 27, 45 Labrie, N., 278n2, 293 LaConte, R. T., 133, 134, 149 Ladson-Billings, G., 71, 86, 172, 173, 190, 196, 212 Lam, L., 217, 233 Lamoureux, S., 281, 293 Landry, R., 290, 292 Lankshear, C., 280, 292 Lapointe, J., 279, 292 Lapp, D., 20, 24 Lather, P., 75, 86 Lave, J., 47, 67, 70, 86, 131, 132, 135, 149, 152, 155, 165, 168, 173, 190, 282, 293 Lavezzo, A., 151, 168 Lee, C. D., xvi, xix, 27, 45, 81, 86 Lee, M. S., 248, 255 Lei, J. L., xiii, xiii Lemke, J. L., 194, 199, 212 Lensmire, T., 70, 86 Levine, M. L., 196, 212 Levine-Rasky, C., 178, 190 Lincoln, Y. S., 209n10, 211 Lindsay, J. J., 134n3, 149 Lintz, A., 49, 67 Lipsky, M., 273, 275 Lipton, M., 65, 66, 67 Loughran, J., 178, 190 Lozon, R., 281, 293 Lucas, T., 257, 276 Luce-Kapler, R., 241, 252, 255 Luke, A., 73, 86 Luke, C., 194, 212 Lytle, S. L., 112, 127, 128, 130

M Macedo, D., 73, 85 MacLean, M., 112, 114, 130 MacLeod, D., 219n4, 220, 233 Maher, F., 73, 86 Maloney, L., 196, 211 Marcus, G., 270, 275 Martel, M., 279, 293 Martínez, E. S., 237n3, 239n8, 255 Matthews, M. R., 133, 149 Mattis, W., 230, 232

299

AUTHOR INDEX Matusov, E., 132, 135, 138, 150, 154, 155, 165, 168 Maybin, J., 236, 255 Mayer, R. E., 151, 168 McCaleb, S. P., 197, 212 McCarthy, C., 254, 255 McCarthy, J., 76, 84 McCollum, P., 154, 168 McComiskey, B., 13, 14, 25 McDermott, R. P., 133, 134, 149, 150 McElroy-Johnson, B., 73, 86 McIntosh, P., 268, 275 McIsaac, E., 217, 231, 232 McKillop, A. M., 22, 25 McLain, V. P., 146, 149 McLaren, P., 218n2, 233 M-CLASS teams, 113, 120, 130 McLaughlin, M. W., 138, 140, 147, 149, 272, 275 McTaggart, R., 112, 130 Mehan, H., 49, 65, 67, 68, 154, 168 Mejia Arauz, R., 154, 168 Melnick, S., 180, 190 Michaels, S., 27, 45 Millard, E., 73, 86 Miller, B., 112, 130 Mirza, M., 75, 86 Mlynarczyk, R. W., 77, 80, 86 Mohatt, G., 154, 168 Mohr, M., 112, 114, 130 Moje, E. B., 83, 86, 149 Moll, L. C., 8, 17, 25, 28, 45, 70, 86, 138, 145, 149, 166, 168, 200, 212 Moorman, G. B., 151, 167 Moraga, C., 236, 255 Moreno, R., 151, 168 Murrell, P., 196, 212 Muspratt, S., 73, 86 Muzzuca, J., 217, 231, 232 Myers, J., 22, 25

N Narode, R., 173, 190 Neff, D., 8, 17, 25, 200, 212 Noddings, N., 65, 67 Norte, E., 271, 275 Norton, B., 6, 25 Nye, B., 134n3, 149

O O’Connor, S. E., 180, 187, 189 O’Grady, C. R., 175, 183, 188, 190 O’Hara, S., 49, 67 O’Rourke, R., 242, 243, 256 Oakes, J., 49, 65, 66, 67 Okazawa-Rey, M., 74, 86 Ollila, L. O., 219n4, 233 Olt, A., 152, 154, 168 Omolade, B., 72, 73, 74, 82, 86 Orellana, M. F., xvi, xix Osterman, K. F., 47, 48, 67

P Paige, R., 205, 212 Paley, V., 42, 44, 45 Palmer, A. S., 19, 24 Paradise, R., 154, 168 Pardo, M., 237, 256 Passeron, J. C., 257, 271, 275 Pease-Alvarez, L., xvi, xix, 27, 45, 145, 150 Pennell, J., 75, 86 Perez, E., 237, 238n6, 253, 256 Perry, J. D., 59, 67 Peterson, K. D., 173, 190 Phelan, P. K., 258, 276 Philip, M., 218n2, 233 Philips, S., 27, 45, 154, 168 Polakow, V., 197, 203, 212 Portelli, J. P., 230, 233 Porter, R., 204, 212 Portes, A., 218, 219n4, 220, 233 Poulin, J., 199, 212 Powell, L. C. 64, 65, 66, 66

Q Quartz, K., 65, 66, 67 Quilici, J., 151, 168 Quiroz, P., 74, 86

R Radest, H., 186, 190 Raley, J., 65, 67 Rauner, D. M., 65, 66

300 Rees, T., 230, 232 Reinharz, S., 75, 86 Rennie-Hill, L., 173, 190 Rice, L. A., 49, 66 Rice, S., 195, 211 Richards, A., 43, 45 Richardson, L., 74, 86 Riggenbach, H., 19, 25 Ristock, J., 75, 86 Roberts, R., 272, 275 Robinson, T., 74, 86 Rodríguez, C., 249, 256 Rogers, A., 73, 86 Rogers, T., 196, 211 Rogoff, B., xv, xix, 47, 67, 132, 134n4, 135, 138, 147, 150, 152, 154, 165, 166, 167, 168, 258, 276 Rolón, C., 48, 51, 67 romero, j., 244, 248, 256 Rosaldo, R., 236, 256, 274, 276 Roschelle, A. R., 155, 165, 168 Rose, M., 200, 211 Rosenberger, C., 166 Rotberg, I. C., 191n1, 212 Roy, S., 277, 281n4, 289, 293 Rudalevige, A., 191n1, 212 Russell, T., 178, 190 Ryan, S., 65, 66, 67

S Sadker, D., 73, 86 Sadker, M., 73, 86 San Martín, R. M., 249, 256 Sanchez, D., 151, 168 Sandoval, C., 237, 256 Sandy, J., 191n1, 212 Sather, S., 271, 275 Schecter, S. R., xv, xvi, xix, 186, 190, 217, 233, 254, 255, 256 Schustack, M. W., 151, 168 Seidl, B., 196, 211 Shakur, T., 14, 25 Shannon, P., 203, 212 Shannon, S. M., xvi, xix, 27, 45, 145, 150 Sidorkin, A. M., 195, 212 Silman, J., 97n9, 108 Simmons, E., 152, 154, 155, 165, 167 Simon, R., 151, 168 Simons, E. R., 113, 120, 130

AUTHOR INDEX Sims, M., 80, 84 Sioui, G., 91, 92, 93, 104, 105n12, 108 Sirotnik, K. A., 196, 212 Sleeter, C. E., xii, xiii Smagorinsky, P., 81, 86, 194, 212 Snyder, M., 155, 169 Solomon, R. P., 178, 186, 190, 229, 230, 233 Solsken, J., 9, 25, 197n2, 200, 213 Spence, C. M., 229, 233 Spender, D., 74, 86 Spina, S. U., 48, 68 Stanton-Salazar, R. D., 48, 49, 65, 67, 68 Staton, J., 76, 77, 86 Stillman, P., 112, 130 Stotsky, S., 205, 213 Strauss, R., 151, 168 Stukas, A. A., 155, 169 Sumara, D., 241, 252, 255 Swiatek, L., 22, 24

T Takayoshi, P., 20, 24 Talmy, S., 5, 6, 25 Tapia, J., 138, 149, 166, 168, 272, 276 Tator, C., 230, 232 Tellez, K., 173, 190 Tetreault, M., 73, 86 Thériault, J.-Y., 279, 292 Theroux, P., 11, 25 Thomas, M., 196, 211 Thomas, T., 75, 79, 86 Tienda, M., 219n4, 220, 233 Tierney, J. P., 266, 276 Tierney, R., 76, 86 Tillman, L., 71, 87 Tonouchi, L., 11, 12, 25 Toohey, K., 7, 25 Trachtman, R., 196, 212 Trueba, H. T., 154, 168 Trujillo, C., 250, 256 Turner, M., 128, 130 Turpin, J., 155, 165, 168 Turrittin, A., 217, 219n6, 232

V Valdés, G., 3n1, 18, 25 Valenzuela, A., xv, xix, 49, 65, 68

301

AUTHOR INDEX Valli, L., 196, 213 Vamos, Inc., 48, 68 van Leeuwen, T., 194, 211 Vanderputten, E., 273, 276 Varenne, H., 133, 134, 149, 150 Vásquez, O. A., xvi, xix, 27, 45, 49, 65, 68, 145, 150 Veal, M., 76, 84 Verdecchia, G., 235n1, 249, 256 Viadero, D., 209n10, 213 Villanueva, I., 49, 67 Villegas, A. M., 257, 276 Vygotsky, L. S., 71, 87, 126, 130, 151, 165, 169, 173, 190

W Wade, R. C., 186, 190 Walcott, R., 237n2, 256 Walker, E., 271, 275 Walkerdine, V., 74, 87 Ward, J., 74, 86 Warner, K. E., 191n1, 212 Warner, M. L., 151, 152, 154, 155, 165, 167 Waters, M. C., 219n4, 229, 230, 231, 233 Webb, M., 75n5, 84 Weedon, C., 74, 87 Weis, L., 49, 64, 65, 66, 66, 272, 275 Wells, G., 71, 81, 87 Welsh, D., 279, 293

Wenger, E., xv, xix, 6, 25, 47, 67, 68, 70, 86, 113, 114, 130, 132, 135, 149, 155, 165, 168, 169, 173, 190, 235n1, 236, 237, 242, 243, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 256, 277, 282, 293 Westheimer, J., 171, 173, 174, 187, 190 White, C., 132, 135, 138, 150, 154, 168 Whitmore, K. F., 138, 149, 166, 168 Wien, C. A., 186, 190 Willett, J., 9, 24, 25, 166, 197n2, 200, 213 Wilson, A., 236, 256 Wilson-Keenan, J., 9, 25, 197n2, 200, 213 Wing, J. Y., 49, 68 Winter, R., 112, 130 Wolpert, L., 43, 45 Woodbridge, S., 151, 168 Worden, P. E., 151, 168

Y, Z Young, R., 19, 25 Yu, H., 258, 276 Zau, A. C., 49, 66 Zavella, P., 70, 87 Zeichner, K., 180, 190 Zembylas, M., 186, 189 Zentella, A. C., 19, 25 Zhang, C., 219n4, 233 Zhou, M., 219n4, 219n5, 220, 233 Zine, J., 217, 231, 232


Subject Index Note. Numbered footnotes follow both their page numbers and the letter n, e.g. 72n3, 136n7.

A Aboriginal peoples, see First Nations Academic achievement, associated with migrants, 63, 65 Academic Language and Literacies (academic English) course, Hawai’i, 8–9, 11, 13, 15–16, 20 ACCELA Alliance, 205–207, 209–210 Access to Critical Content and Equitable Language Acquisition, see ACCELA Alliance Achievement of Critical Content and English Language Acquisition, see ACCELA Alliance Action, reflection with (Freire), 195, 198 Action research, 75, 128 reflective teaching and, 197 Additive experience, in charity approach to service learning, 173, 177 Adult-run approach to learning/teaching, 163–164 African Americans, see Blacks African Canadians, see Blacks After-school programs, xii, 135–136, 138, 140, 142–146, 148, 151–166, 263 Latino students in, xvii, 132, 134, 137, 139, 147, 155, 164

Agency contrasted with structure, 257–258, 268–269, 271, 273–274 dialogue journals and, 82 of students, xii American Heritage Dictionary, 235n1, 255 Amerindians, see First Nations Anglophones, in Canada, 278, 289–291 Anishinaapemowin (language), 94–95, 97 Anishinaape people, 98–99 Antiracism education, xiii Aoki, Ted, 100 Asian students, in Boston, 115–117 Assembly of First Nations, 94 Assimilation francophone minorities in Canada and, 279, 281 theories of, 220 Aztlán, 238

B Barbadians, in Toronto, 219 BBBS, see Big Brothers/Big Sisters program (BBBS) Belizeans, in United States, 72, 76–77

303

304 Bible, 35 fiction and, 29–30, 32, 39 Big Brothers/Big Sisters program (BBBS), 258, 265–268, 274 Bilingual education, xv–xvi Haitian Americans and, 32 in Massachusetts, 204–205 in Ontario, 279 Bilingual Studies, in Hawai’i, 23 Bilingualism in Canada, xviii, 279, 289, 291 circumstantial, 18–19 in Dolores Huerta School, 263 in Hawai’i, 11 identity and, 290 of Lengua Latina members, 251 in new work order, 277, 280, 282–284, 286–287, 291 testing of, in workplace, 283, 287, 290 Bill C-31 (amendments to Indian Act; Canada, 1985), 97 Black, Sir James, 42–43 Blacks teachers, 70, 116 in Toronto, 218, 221, 225–231 in United States, 71, 84, 121–122, 260, 262–264 women and girls, 72–75, 77, 84, 229 silencing of, 72, 74, 83–84 subjectivity of, 83 young adolescent girls, 69, 76–77, 82, 84 Blended space, 128–129 Board of Education, Massachusetts, 204 Boston, teacher research in, 115–118 Bourdieu, Pierre, 219 Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar (BTRS), 28–31, 44 Brown identity, 240, 249 Burbank School, Oakland, California, 263 Burglary, 261, 265 Bush, George W., 191n1, 209n10, 274

C Call centers, 277 in Ontario, xviii, 278, 280–291 California, 57, 206 Latinas in, 235, 240 migrant farmworkers in, 49, 52 California Achievement Test, 83

SUBJECT INDEX California Department of Social Services, 262n3, 275 California, University of, see University of California Cambodians, in Toronto, 218, 224 Capital, social and cultural, see social and cultural capital Caribbean, immigrants from in Toronto, xviii, 218, 228–229 in United States, xvii, 69, 71, 76–77, 79, 83 Carnegie Mellon University, Cyert Center for Early Education, 90n3, 108 Center for Education, Committee on Scientific Principles for Education Research, 191n1 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada, 1982), 279 Chicago, 70–71 teacher research in, 111, 114, 118–120 Chicanas and Chicanos, 235–237, 238n6 Child Protection Services (CPS), California, 262–265, 273–275 Chileans, in Canada, 236, 244–245, 248, 250–252 Class, social basis for inequity, 257–258 discourse of, 203 issues of, 118, 176 Jane-Finch neighborhood and, 224 social power and, 203, see also middle class, working class Coalition for Teacher Quality and School Achievement, 198 Code switching between French and English, 288 in Hawai’i, 8, 19 between Spanish and English, 56, 247 Collaborative approaches to learning/ teaching, 166, 180, 182 Collaborative learning communities, xvi Collaborative partnerships, dialogue in, 195 College, see postsecondary education Common Goals of Learning, Massachusetts, 204 Communication in new work order, 277, 280, 286, 292 standardization of, in call center, 278, 281, 283–288, 290–291 Communicative practice, literacy as, 72 Community aspirations of minority youth and, 221, 231

305

SUBJECT INDEX contribution of racial-minority students to, 222–223, 226, 230 as curriculum resource, 186 francophone, in Ontario, 281, 290–291 identity and, 236–237 workplace, 281–282, 290–291 Community-based activities and experiences, 171, 179, 183, 187–188 Community-based learning, xii Community-based organizations, xviii Community-based teacher education, 175 Community field experience, 171n1 Community funds of knowledge, 11n10, 17, 206, 208 Community involvement, 171n1, 173, 175–178, 180, 182, 184, 187, 189 as political engagement, 184, 189 Community of difference, 182, 185 Community of inquiry, in teacher education, 198 Community of learners, 132, 135–136, 147–148, 152, 165 Community of practice, xviii, 172 Lengua Latina as, 237 students in Hawai’i and, 7 in teacher education, 198 teacher research networks and, 113–114, 126, 129 workplace as, 282 Community-referenced education, xi, 171n1 Community-situated learning, 171n1 Competition, xviii Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) movement, 191n1 Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program, 191n1 Conceptual blending, 128–129 Coulter, Ernest, 265 CPS, see Child Protection Services (CPS), California Creole English-based Caribbean, 71, 72n3 Haitian, 31–32, 38, 71 Hawai’i, English, see Hawai’i Creole English (Pidgin) Critical awareness, 188 Critical dialogue, xviii, 192–195 in ACCELA, 207 in collaborative partnerships, 195–196 Critical discourse analysis, 194 Critical inquiry, 172, 174, 207

Critical literacy, 73, 76, 236, 253–254 Critical literacy analysis, 208 Critical participatory approach to education, 22–24 Critical reflection and thinking, 197, 201 in service learning programs, 155, 172, 174–175, 183, 186 Critical space, 189 Critical theory, 73, 197 Culturally affirmative teaching, 71, 82–84 Culturally affirming learning practices, xvii Culturally relevant pedagogy, 171–173, 175, 182 Culturally responsive teaching, xii, xv Culturally sensitive curriculum, 197 Cultural borderlands, 274 Cultural capital, 220, 270n4 defined, 219, see also social and cultural capital Cultural practices, 41, 138 academic literature on, 27 in classrooms, 28 Cultural synchronization, 173 Curriculum Frameworks for K–12, Massachusetts, 204

D Delaware Nation, 97 Dene Nation, 91 Department of Education, Massachusetts, 204 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 202 Dialogue, 70, 210 in focus group, 198–200, 203, see also critical dialogue Dialogue journals, xii, 76–82 Diaries, see journals Discourse, 8–9, 12–13, 16, 24, 84, 210 academic, 93 in ACCELA programs, 207 of class, 203 defined, 8, 194 feminism and, 74 in focus group, 199–203 home-school connections and, 200 hybridity and, 9, 19 ideology and, 194–195 Jane-Finch neighborhood and, 221, 224 language practices and, 194–195

306 Discourse (cont.) of literacy, 73 primary, 8–9 racist, 254 in schools, 16, 78 secondary, 8–9 in teacher education, 209 Discrimination, against minorities, 220 Discursive analysis, 14 Diversity, xvi, xix, 167, 189, 230 of Jane-Finch neighborhood, 218 of meanings of Latina, 250, 255 of undergraduates in UCSC-Links, 135, 156 Dolores Huerta School, Oakland, California, 263 Dominican Republic, 38 Driscoll, David, 204 Drugs, 262, 265, 269–270, 273

E Educational equity, xv Educational reform, 192–193 in Massachusetts, 191n1 Efficiency, xviii Elder, First Nations, 95 Electronic portfolios, see portfolios, electronic English as a Second Language (ESL) in Chicago, 69, 71, 72n3 in Hawai’i, 23 in Toronto, 176–177 English immersion, see immersion, English English language francophones in Ontario and, 279–280 Latina/os and, 135, 137, 139, 141, 146, 148, 156, 244–247 as official language in Canada, 279 standard, in Hawai’i, 8–9, 13, 19 workplace and, 279, 283, 286–287, 289, 291 English language learners (ELLs) in California, 55, 136 in Massachusetts, 205–207, 209 English-Only campaign, in Massachusetts, 204 Epistomologies, indigenous, 106–107 Equitable access, xvi Ethnicity, issues of, 118–119, 126 Ethnography, xi, 258, 270 feminism and, 75

SUBJECT INDEX Europeans, see Whites Experiential education, 172

F Family and community support, as factor in youth aspirations, 220 Family involvement, in school, 199–203 Farrington High School, Hawai’i, 5–6 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Enforcement Act (HR 764, United States), 262n3 Feminist poststructuralism, 194 Feminism, 72, 74, 240 Blacks and, 75 discourse and, 74 ethnography and, 75 Fiction, 30, 33 Bible and, 29–30, 32, 39 science and, 32 Field-based engagement, 172 “Fifth Dimension,” see “University/ Community Links” After-School Programs (UC-Links) Filipinos, in Hawai’i, xvi, 3, 5–6, 10, 21 First Nations, xii–xiii, xvii, 89, 91, 93, 95–100, 102, 105 Christianity, civilization and, 101 values of, 104–105 519 Church Street Community Centre, Toronto, 238 Focus group, in school-university partnership, 198–203 Foster care, 261–262, 264, 271, 274 Francophones in Canada, xviii, 278–279, 291–292 elite of, 278–279 in Ontario, 279–284, 288, 290–291 Free spaces, 272 Freire, Paulo, 97, 198 Friendship in Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, 266, 268 between migrant teachers and students, 61, 65 between undergraduates and students in after-school program, 157, 159 French Canadians, see francophones, in Canada

307

SUBJECT INDEX French language as official language in Canada, 279 in Quebec, 278, 289 in Ontario, 279–280, 282 spoken by Haitians, 32 workplace and, 282–291 Funds of knowledge, 207, 209n9 community, 11n10, 17, 206, 208

G Gender education and, 73, 229 dynamics of, in classroom, 79, 83 inequities, 82, 257–258 issues of, 119, 176 of Lengua Latina members, 239, 254 physical education and, 228 Ghanaians, in Toronto, 218, 222 Girls, see women and girls Globalization, xviii, 277, 290–292 Government of Canada, 292, 293 Governors’ Summit (1989), 191n1 Guyanese, in Toronto, 221

H Habitus (Bourdieu), 270 Haisla nation, 93 Haiti, 29 whales and, 38–41 Haitian Creole, see Creole, Haitian Haitians, in United States, xvii, 28–29, 31–32, 41, 71, 78–80 Hawai’i, 3–5 schooling in, 6, 22–23 literature about, by outsiders, 11 Filipinos in, 18 Hawai’i Council on Language Planning and Policy, 10, 25 Hawai’i Creole English (Pidgin), 3–13, 17, 19 Hawai’i Department of Education, 5, 25 Hawai’i, University of, see University of Hawai’i Hawaiian immersion schools, see immersion, Hawaiian Hawaiian language, 4, 11 Hawaiians, xvi, 3

Heritage languages defined, 3 in Hawai’i, 8, 10, 13, 19 courses, 16–18, 20 Hierarchical structures, in school interactions, 153–154 History, teaching of, 204 Homelessness, 270 Homework, xii, xvii, 13, 58, 80–81, 121, 123, 137, 139–141, 148, 176, 178, 200–203, 244 in after-school program, 131–132, 134, 136–138, 140, 142–147 boxes, 202 history of, 132–134 Huron people, 92 Hybridity, 9–10, 12, 18 ACCELA and, 207 in classroom practice, 197 cultural borderlands and, 274 discourse and, 9, 19 identity and, 16 in third space, 195

I Identity, 242, 246, 248–255 affirmation of, 254 bilingualism and, 290 boundaries and, 249 brown, 240, 249 Chicana/o, 251 community and, 236–237 constructed in dialogue, 193–194 dialogue journals and, 79 education and, 235, 251, 255 francophones in Ontario and, 281, 291 globalization and, 292 group, 254 hybridity and, 16 immigrant, 251, 253 investment, 254 Latina, 236, 242–243, 248–252, 254–255 in learning, xviii, 6, 9, 237, 251–252 lesbian, 236, 242–243 marginalized, 253 Mexican American, 237 middle-class, 185 migrant students in California and, 56 multidimensional, 18 of participation, 251

308 Identity (cont.) politics, 254, 277 queer, 238, 240, 242–243, 247, 251, 255 students in Hawai’i and, 7–8, 22 of teacher candidates, 185, 187 transformation of, 236–237, 243, 251–254, 290 as translator, 236, 242–247, 251–253 as woman, 242 writing and, 236, 241–243, 252, 255 Ideology constructed in dialogue, 193–194 discourse and, 194–195 of language and state, in Canada, 279 Ilokano language, xvi, 3–5, 10, 11n10, 16–20, 23n15 Imagination of Haitian American students, 29, 35–43 science and, 42–43 Immersion English, 209 structured, 205 Hawaiian, 5 Spanish-English, quasi-two-way, 263 Immigrant children assimilation and, 220 educational aspirations of, 217, 232 marginalization of, 253 in Toronto, 176 Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), 191n1 India, immigrants from, in Toronto, 218, 222 Indian Act (Canada), 97n8 Indians, North American, see First Nations Indigenous knowledge, xvii, 89, 92–99, 101–107 Indigenous Knowledge Instructors’ Program (IKIP), xvii, 89–90, 92–104, 106–107 Indigenous languages, in Hawai’i, 5 Indigenous peoples, 91 Inequity, 119, 257 in mentoring relationship, 270 schools and, 271 Inert knowledge problem, 188 Inquiry community, 127–128 Inner-city communities, xvii, 172, 180–183, 185n3, 187n4, 188–189 problems of, 270 Interactional sociolinguistics, 194 Internet private class web on, 136n7, 139, 143, 158 student research on, 15, 58, 135, 156, 160

SUBJECT INDEX Intertextuality, 197 social construction of, 194

J Jamaican Canadian Association, 229 Jamaicans in Toronto, 218, 221, 224, 226–227 in United States, 70, 76–77, 80 Jane-Finch neighborhood, Toronto, 218, 221, 224–226, 229, 231 proximity to York University, 225 Jesuits, 116 Journals, 69, 83, 128 dialogue, see dialogue journals women and girls and, 74

K Kapiolani Community College, Hawai’i, 12 Knowledge-of-practice, 127 Kuleana, 3

L Land as first teacher, 90 pedagogy of, 90, 106 Language as basis for inequity, 257 as commodity, 285 new work order and, 277, 285, 292 policies in Canada, 291–292 Language Arts, 204 “Language as problem,” 24 “Language as resource,” 24 Language practice dialogue as, 193, 195 discourse and, 194–195 multiple and contradictory, 195 social and dynamic, 194 Latin America, immigrants from, in Canada, 239 Latinas and Latinos, 238n6 in California, 63, 148, 235, 263 in Canada, 235–236, 237n2, 248–249–250 identity of, 236, 242–243, 248–252, 254–255

SUBJECT INDEX children in after-school program, xvii, 132, 134, 147, 155–156, 164, 166 defined, 235 parents in focus group, 201–202 in Toronto, xviii, 236, 239–240, 248, 250 in U.S. schools, 145 Learning as a cultural process, 138 Learning communities, 66 Lengua Latina (writing group), xviii, 236, 238–244, 247–248, 250–252, 254–255 Lesbians, 236, 238n5, 239, 242–243, 251 “Let’s Eat! Let’s Talk!” program, 201, 203 Licensure Standards for Quality Teachers, Massachusetts, 204 Lifelong learners, teachers as, 188 Literacy, 115 activities, 176 as communicative practice, 72 discourse of, 73, see also critical literacy Local culture, Hawai’i, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 18

M Marginalization of Black community in Toronto, 226 critical literacy and, 236, 253 of immigrants, 253 of migrant students, 54, 56, 64 of Jane-Finch neighborhood, 224 of racial-minority immigrant students, 218, 220, 230–231 Massachusetts, 192, 206–207, 210 educational reform in, 191n1, 204 English-Only campaign in, 204 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), 205, 209n9 Massachusetts State Department of Education, 204, 212 Massachusetts Test for Educators Licensure (MTEL), 205, 209n9 Massachusetts, University of, see University of Massachusetts Amherst Mathematics, 141, 260, 263, 268 achievement scores, 151 constructivist, 204 effect of Sputnik on teaching of, 133 skills-based, 204 M-CLASS, see Multicultural Collaborative for Literacy and Secondary Schools (MCLASS)

309 M-CLASS Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE), 113, 115, 124, 127 M-CLASS Site Based Network (SBN), 113, 120, 129 Mentoring, 259, 265–268, 270, 275 Mestizaje, Latina, defined, 239 Metalinguistic awareness, 7, 18 Mexicans in Canada, 248, 250 in United States, xii, xvii, 48–51, 54–56, 63–65, 145, 235, 237, 253, 259 Mexico, 51–53, 57 Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 191n1 Middle class, 239 biases and ways of thinking of, 172, 178, 182, 185, 202–203, 228, 260 mentors from, 270 teachers from, 189, 274 Migrant Education Program (MEP), 49–52, 56–66 Migrant farmworkers, 48, 50, 52, 59 Migrant Student Association (MSA), 49–51, 55–58, 60, 62–66 Migrant students, xii, xvii, 49, 51, 53, 55–57, 59–60, 63 Migrant teachers, 57–62, 64–65 Minorities, xvi, xix, 64 francophone, in Ontario, 278–280, 289–291 immigrant racial, 217, 220, 230, 232 language in Hawai’i, 5 in new work order, 277–278 official, in Canada, 279, 291–292 racism and, 220 upward social mobility of, 220 in U.S. schools, 145 visible, in Toronto, 248 Multicultural Collaborative for Literacy and Secondary Schools (M-CLASS), 112, 128–129 in Boston, 115–118 in Chicago, 111, 114, 118–120 in New Orleans, 121–124 in San Francisco, 111–112 Multicultural education, xi, xiii, xv of teachers, xii in Hawai’i, 12 in Massachusetts, 205 Multiculturalism, 115 in Canada, 175 Multifaith, in Canada, 175

310 Multilingualism in Canada, 175 in Hawai’i, 11–12 in new work order, 277, 282 Multimedia projects, xii MUSE, see M-CLASS Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE)

N Namekosiipiiwanishinaapek people, 89, 99 Namekosipiink, 95, 100, 103, 106 National Alliance of Business (United States), 191n1 National Center for Educational Accountability (United States), 191n1 National Clearinghouse for Comprehensive School Reform, 191n1, 212 National Commission on Excellence in Education, 133n2, 150 National Council of Teachers of English (United States), 44 National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board (United States), 191n1 National Research Council (United States), 191n1 NCLB, see No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; United States, 2001) New Brunswick, 281 New London Group, 194, 212 New Orleans, teacher research in, 121–124 New work order, 277, 280, 291–292 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; United States, 2001), 191–193, 196, 204–205, 210 North York (Toronto) Board of Education, 218

O Oakland, California, 113, 258, 260 Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA; United States), 192, 204 Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA; United States), 204 Official Languages Act (Canada, 1969), 279 Ontario, francophones in, 278–284, 288, 290–291

SUBJECT INDEX Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 252n12, 256

P Paraprofessionals, in ACCELA programs, 207–208 Participatory learning, xv–xvi, xvii Partnerships school–community, 189 school–university, 195–196, 198, 206, 225 university–community, 132 Patriarchy, 73 Permeable curriculum, 208 Phonics, 139–140, 204 Physical education gender and, 228–229 race and, 227–229 Pidgin, see Hawai’i Creole English (Pidgin) “Pidgin Guerrilla,” 11 Political engagement, community involvement as, 184–186, 189 Portfolios dialogue journals as, 81 electronic, 8, 19–22 Postcolonial studies, 194 Postsecondary education, 50, 239 as goal for immigrant students, 217–219, 222–223, 225, 230–232 as goal for migrant students, xii, 51–53, 57–59, 62, 64–65 Poststructuralism, 197 feminist, 194 mentoring and, 270–271 Poverty, 176 Power relations, 189 Prejudice, 178, 180 President’s Science Advisory Committee Panel on Youth, 131, 150 Problems, discussion of, in teacher research, 114–118, 126, 129 Progressive movement in education, 172 Public defenders, 267, 274 Puerto Rico, 202 Puzzling moments, in classroom, 28–30, 41, 43–44

SUBJECT INDEX

Q Quebec, 281 nationalism in, 278–279 Québécois, 278–279, 289 Queer identity, 238, 240, 242–243, 247, 251, 255

R Race as basis for inequity, 257–258 Blacks in Toronto and, 224, 226, 231 issues of, 118–120, 126, 176, 178 Jane-Finch neighborhood and, 224 Lengua Latina members and, 249, 254 physical education and, 227–228 possibilities of postsecondary education and, 219 school-based programs and, 271 Racism, 220, 226, 231, 237, 249, 253–254, 272 RAND Corporation, 191n1 Rape, 261, 264–265, 270 Reading, 260, 263 achievement scores, 151 to children, 146 literature-based, 204 phonics and, 139–140, 204 Red Lake, Ontario, 89, 103 Reflection with action (Freire), 195, 198 Reflective practices, 175–176, 178, 186, 189 Reflective teaching, action research and, 197 Reggio Emilia, Italy, 90 Regulation 17 (restriction on French schooling, Ontario, 1912), 279 Residential schools, 101 Rhetorical analysis, 13 Rice and Peas (film), 77 Risk-taking, in teacher research, 118–121, 126, 129 Rodriguez Elementary School, Springfield, Massachusetts, 198–199, 203 ACCELA Alliance and, 205–206, 208 Romney, Mitt, 205, 207n8

S Sacred Circle of Life, 104 Samoan language, 4, 10, 11n10, 16, 18–20, 23n15

311 Samoans, in Hawai’i, xvi, 3, 5–6, 14, 21 San Francisco, teacher research in, 111–113 Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, 194, 197, 212 Santa Cruz, California, 156 SBN, see M-CLASS Site Based Network (SBN) School-based programs, and cycle of social reproduction, 271–272 Schools, francophone, in Ontario, 278–281 Science, 35, 37–39, 42 fiction and, 32 imagination and, 42–43 effect of Sputnik on teaching of, 133 Scientific-based research (SBR) movement, 191n1, 209n9 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 92 Semiotics, social, 194 Service learning, xvii, 155, 165, 171n1, 172–173, 180–181, 183–184, 186–187 change orientation to, 173, 182, 184–187, 189 charity orientation to, 173, 182–187, 189 Service work, 173 Sexuality dialogue journals and, 79 Lengua Latina and, 254 Sexual orientation, 176, see also lesbians, queer identity Silence Trilogy, 74 Silencing, 9 of migrant students, 64 of Black women and girls, 72, 74, 83–84 Situated learning, xv–xvi, xvii, 172, 258 Situated social practices, 173 Situated research, 126 Skepticism, of Haitian American students, 29, 33, 38, 41–43 Social and cultural capital, 218 Social construction of intertextuality and dialogicality, 194 Social interaction, 126 Social semiotics, 194 Social service agencies, xviii Sociocultural theory and analysis, 132, 135–136, 138, 148, 155–156, 165, 179 Sociolinguistics, 197 interactional, 194 Soviet Union, 133 Spanglish, 247 Spanish language, 53, 55–56, 58, 135, 139–140, 146, 156, 246–247, 248n11, 286 Special Education, 268 Springfield, Massachusetts, 197–198, 208

312 Springfield Learning Community Collaborative, 197–198 Sputnik, launch of, 133 Standardization of communication, 278, 281, 283–288, 290–291 State University of New York Oneonta Migrant Programs, 48, 68 Statistics Canada, 248, 248n11, 256 Stotsky, Sandra, 204 “Street-level bureaucrats,” 273 Structure, contrasted with agency, 257–258, 269–271, 273–274 Student as ethnographer, 7 Student as researcher, 16 Student teachers, see teacher candidates Studies of Heritage and Academic Languages and Literacies (SHALL), 5, 11n10, 18–21, 23–24 Subjectivity Black female, 83 dialogue journals and, 82

T Tagalog language, 10–11, 13 Teacher candidates, 171–189 constructed as failures, 205 expansion of self-awareness of, 178, 186 identity of, 185, 187 learning about communities, 181 learning about students, 179 learning from students, 179 Teacher education, xii, 188–189, 192, 194, 204–206, 209 communities of inquiry and practice in, 198 community-based, 175 discourse in, 209 multicultural, xii service learning and, 183 Teacher research, xvii, 28, 43–44, 111–115, 117, 121, 124–129, 176, 198, 208–209 Technology, effect of Sputnik on teaching of, 133 Textual analysis, 13 Third space, 9–10, 195, 199 in ACCELA programs, 207, 209 hybridity in, 195, 197 Toronto, xvii, 174, 230, 238, 246, 282 Blacks in, 218–219, 225–229, 231

SUBJECT INDEX Latinas in, xviii, 236, 240, 248, 250 Traditional knowledge, see indigenous knowledge Transformation change orientation to service learning and, 174, 177, 182, 184, 188–189 dialogue and, 195 of identity, 236–237, 243, 251–254, 290 reflection with action as engine of, 198 Transgressive speech, 69, 77–78 Translator as broker across boundaries, 246, 253 identity as, 236, 242–248, 251–253 Trinidadians, in Toronto, 219 Trout Lake, Ontario, 89, 94, 96, 98–99, 101 Trust attributed to parents, 200 in Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, 266 First Nations people and, 99 between migrant students and teachers, 61, 65

U UC-Links, see “University/Community Links” After-School Programs (UC-Links) UCSC-Links, 132, 134–136, 146–147, 152–159, 162, 164–166 Undergraduates, as participants in afterschool program, xvii, 132, 134–148, 151–167 as friends, 157, 159 as mentors, 162–164 as teachers, 159, 162, 164 Understanding students, in teacher research, 121–126, 129 “University/Community Links” After-School Programs (UC-Links), 151–152, 154–155, see also UCSC-Links University of California, 62, 134 at Berkeley, 112–113, 116 at San Diego, 151 at Santa Cruz, 135, 152 University of Hawai’i, 6 University of Massachusetts Amherst, 209 School of Education, 198, 207 Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) concentration, 192, 206 Unz, Ron, 204 Upward social mobility, of minorities, 220

313

SUBJECT INDEX Urban Diversity Program, see York University, Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program U.S. Census Bureau, 4, 25, 50, 51n5, 68 U.S. Department of Education, 209n9, 213 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 262n3, 276

V Vietnam, 117 Vietnamese, in Toronto, 218, 223n7, 225 Virgin Islands, 116 Voice, 73–74, 77, 82 Volunteerism, 182, 189

W Weld, William, 204 Whales categories of, 34, 37 classroom study of, 29, 32–43 Haiti and, 38–41 as mammals, 34, 36 “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” (computer game), 159–160 Whitehead, Alfred North, 188 Whites in Canada, 89–90, 98, 185, 228 in United States, 50–51, 54–56, 121–122, 259–260, 270 Women and girls Black, 72–75, 77 silencing of, 72, 74, 83–84 subjectivity of, 83 teachers, 70

young adolescent, 69, 76–77, 82, 84 of color, 73, 237 identity of, 242 journals and, 74–75 Mexican American, 253 Working class, 49–50, 64, 71–72, 134, 181, 203, 239 bilingual schools and, in Ontario, 279 immigrants and, 217–219, 224, 228 Workplace, 280, 292 bilingualism in, 278, 283–284, 286–287 community of practice and, 282 culture of empowerment in, 280, 291 English in, 279, 283, 286–287, 289, 291 flexibility in, 284–285 French in, 282–291 global, 277 political economy of, 278 professionalism in, 285–286, 290 Spanish in, 286 World Language curriculum, 204 Writer, identity as, 236, 241–243, 252, 255

Y York University, Toronto, 218 Indigenous Knowledge Instructors’ Program and, 94–96, 98 proximity to Jane-Finch, 225 Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program, 174–177, 183–184

Z Zone of proximal development (Vygotsky), 126, 151

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