Search

Este artículo explora lo que significa “educación culturalmente sostenible” para las y los estudiantes latinxs. Basándose en el concepto de “latinidades”, las autoras sugieren que la educación culturalmente sostenible para las y los estudiantes latinxs requiere problematizar los límites de este término, y hacer visibles las tensiones y los múltiples ejes de opresión que existen en torno a lo que significa ser latinx. Esta investigación se inspira en estudiantes latinxs, incluida una de las autoras de este artículo, que desafían las nociones limitadas de cultura (como los “grupos de afinidad”) y, en cambio, levantan preguntas sobre prácticas equitativas en el contexto cotidiano de las escuelas.

Background This paper is part of the special issue “Reimagining Research and Practice at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education.” Early childhood initiatives have joined a nexus of educational reforms characterized by increased accountability and a focus on measurement as a marker of student and teacher learning, with early education being framed as an economic good necessary for competing in the global marketplace. Underlying the recent push for early childhood education is what we see as a “discourse of improvement”—depictions of school change that prioritize achievement as reflected in assessment scores, data collection on teacher effectiveness, and high-stakes evaluation. These characteristics, we argue, foster increasingly inequitable educational contexts and obscure the particularities of what it means to be a child in the world. Purpose We use the practice of philosophical meditation, as articulated in Pierre Hadot's examination of philosophy as a way of life, to inquire into the logics of educational improvement as instantiated in particular contexts, and for cultivating cross-disciplinary partnerships committed to fostering children's flourishing. We link this meditational focus with feminist and de-colonial theoretical perspectives to make visible the role of power in the characterization of children's learning as related to norms of development, minoritized identities, and hierarchies of knowledge. Research Design: In this collaborative inquiry, we compose a series of meditations on our experiences with the logics of improvement inspired by 12 months of systematic conversation. Our data sources include correspondence between the two authors, written reflections on specific practices in teacher education each author engages with, and a set of literary, philosophical, and teacher education texts. Conclusions/Recommendations Our meditations illuminate the value of collective inquiry about what constitutes improvement in schools. We raise questions about how the measurement of learning is entwined in historical and present-day relations of power and idealized formulations of the universal “child” or “teacher” and argue that we must work together to reimagine the framings that inform our work. Ultimately and most directly, these meditations can support dynamic attempts to cultivate meaningful and more equitable educational experiences for teachers and students. Philosophical meditations at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education thus extend beyond critique toward imagining and enacting a better world in our classrooms, even though (and especially when) this path is not clear.

In this article, we highlight the affordances of agency that is not merely individual, but rather emerges in and through collectivities. We take up these issues within the context of our own work i...

Drawing on the concept of transnational funds of knowledge, this article examines how a Cantonese-English emergent bilingual engaged in an after-school literacy program that centered on Latinx expe...

This article explores what culturally sustaining education means for Latinx students. Drawing on the concept of Latinidades, the authors suggest that culturally sustaining education for Latinx students necessitates problematizing the boundaries of this term altogether and making visible the tensions and multiple axes of oppression around what it means to be Latinx. They take inspiration from Latinx students—including one of the authors of this article—who are challenging bounded notions of culture (such as "affinity groups") and instead foregrounding questions about equitable practices in the day-to-day context of schools.

This article draws from a decade-long community-based research partnership oriented toward learning from and supporting immigrant youth and families as they advocate for themselves in the face of educational inequity. In particular, we focus on examining the trajectory and insights of the partnership in light of ongoing educational, health, and sociopolitical crises during the pandemic and the racial uprisings against police violence. We sought to understand how the work shifted in response to these global crises and also what sustained our collaboration during these times. As we showcase through representative examples of our inquiries, members of different immigrant communities in our partnership drew on their individual and collective experiences to engage in research as an act of care, to address pragmatic and immediate needs in their schooling, and to contend with traumatic legacies of oppression. Expanding networks of care and the intellectual legacy of the collaboration itself–what we refer to as an intellectual commons–created the foundation to sustain and amplify our work together during a time of social transformation.

Improvement initiatives in the field of education have historically aimed to reduce the gap between the aspirations of school reformers and the oppressive realities confronting students and families from non-dominant communities. Despite this ambition, scholars spearheading community-based research and practitioner inquiry suggest that such divides persist because the very groups underserved by educational systems are also marginalized by enduring power asymmetries between “the Academy” and “the field.” Consequently, their voices and perspectives remain under-represented in efforts to define, research, and pursue educational improvement. This bibliography presents a range of resources to help students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers re-theorize the relationship between community perspectives and educational reform, centering the ways of being and knowing of those historically undervalued in the research enterprise. We gather pieces that are essential to understanding the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of community-based research as well as key texts addressing the role of improvement in education. In addition, we feature a range of interdisciplinary examples of school and community-based research from around the world that illustrate how knowledge producers have navigated power dynamics vis-à-vis their contexts, their positionalities, and the other complexities inherent to conducting inquiries within and alongside minoritized communities. These examples variously erode the boundary between “the researcher” and the “researched,” indicating ways in which educational improvement strategies may be co-constructed in ethical collaboration with those most chronically underserved.

Figurative language in science teaching has recently been explored to inform how teachers can scaffold scientific advancement without excluding children's cultural conceptualizations. By deeming metaphorical language as a mediational artifact that agentively encodes culturally relevant aspects of experience, this study analyzed how bilingual children's metaphor initiations were followed up by teacher candidates to create hybrid spaces for learning alongside zones of proximal development. Our findings indicate three different patterns of how teachers reacted to bilingual children's metaphors during a science lesson on geomorphology, and how their differing responses may have facilitated or hindered children's scientific understandings. This study highlights the significance of cultivating opportunities for metaphorical associations initiated by bilingual children as opportunities for science teaching and learning.

Reconceiving relationships between universities, schools, and community organizations through research-practice partnerships, and building capacity for partnership work, necessarily entails rethinking the mentorship of graduate students. In this article, we describe our findings on what mentorship looks like in a now 9-year RPP focusing on educational equity through participatory approaches. The authors include the two project principal investigators and three doctoral students who participated at different stages of the project, one of whom is now a faculty member. In our analysis, we identify dimensions of a more horizontal form of mentorship, involving qualities and skills that extend beyond traditional practices of academic apprenticeship: universalizing who is an intellectual, cultivating community responsiveness, implementing collective structures and protocols, and constructing a shared vision. Our findings shift conceptions of mentorship from individual apprenticeship into a narrowly defined discipline to a collective undertaking that aims to democratize expertise and enact a new vision of the public scholar. American Educational Research Association

BackgroundThe learning of students from (im)migrant backgrounds has long been a consideration for the field of education. The “transnational” turn in research has brought to the forefront the need to account for students’ language and literacy practices as situated within multiple national affiliations, fluid migration histories, global technological networks, and plural identities. Understanding the global/local dynamics of young children's literacies across contexts can help us consider how the literacy curriculum specifically, and educational institutions more broadly, may be reimagined to be more attuned to their transnational experiences.FocusInformed by Chicana and transnational feminist theories, this study examines how first grade Latina/o emergent bilinguals interacted with a literacy curriculum that sought to value their transnational experiences and multilingual repertoires, specifically by integrating photography and writing as a platform for children to inquire into community experiences they identified as salient. The curricular invitations were designed as a Third Space hat unsettled the often-reified boundaries between what counts as academic literacy learning in school and the practices and experiences of Latina/o children in out-of-school contexts.Research DesignA total of 103 six- and seven-year-olds over the two years participated in this ethnographic and practitioner research study. One hundred and one identified as Latina/o, and all qualified for free and reduced lunch. Data sources (children's writings and photographs; audio recordings; interviews with the teachers and children; researcher reflective memos; and fieldnotes of participant observation in the school and community) were coded using thematic and visual analysis, with attention to how specific textual or discursive features functioned socioculturally.Findings/ConclusionsI focus on one of the prominent themes in the data—the community space of the Laundromat—to discuss how the children participated in literacies of interdependence that linked individual flourishing with community wellbeing through their care work in supporting their families. I use the term literacies of interdependence to refer to young children's multilingual and multimodal literacy practices that both reflected and enacted their cultural practices of mutuality. Through transactions with neighborhood spaces as texts, the children surfaced multiple and contrasting narratives of immigration and inquired into their transnational identities. Findings from this study point to how researchers and educators may be more attentive to Latina/o children's values and practices of interdependence and understand the “transnational local” as embodied in concrete spaces within their lived experiences.

Young children in diverse urban contexts bring to school transnational knowledges, complex multilingual literacies, and cultural practices which reflect global mobility and the blended nature of their social worlds. For children such as the Latino first graders we have been working with for the past three years, their lived experiences do not easily align with one language or national affiliation. Our qualitative practitioner research study examines how emergent bilinguals in transnational contexts engage in critical inquiry through photographing and writing about their communities. Drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory, we explore how children's experiences in global neighborhood spaces – including their dynamic translanguaging practices and transnational histories – were an epistemic resource and a means of enacting agency. We suggest that translanguaging, as a cultural historical artifact, can help mediate children's critical inquiries into global childhoods.

As new standards require that teachers and schools move to incorporate argument writing beginning in the earliest grades, young children’s interactions with opportunities to formulate claims require further investigation. This article, part of a yearlong ethnographic study of a first-grade class, examines young children’s practices of argument writing during a 6-week unit that invited them to take a stance on issues in their lives they considered unfair. I utilize feminist epistemologies to understand the ways children drew on their embodied knowledge to make normative claims about the world and investigate social justice concerns. Analysis focuses on the teacher’s and students’ characterizations of writing arguments and the discursive negotiation of what writing comes to mean for differently situated participants, including areas of contestation. This study illuminates the interrelationship between specific features of argument, the premises of the genre, and children’s lived experiences, and proposes a ...

In this article Gerald Campano, María Paula Ghiso, and Bethany J. Welch explore the role of ethical and professional norms in community-based research, especially in fostering trust within contexts of cultural diversity, systemic inequity, and power asymmetry. The authors present and describe a set of guidelines for community-based research that were developed through collaborative inquiry into an ongoing research partnership with a multilingual and multiethnic Catholic parish and its school and community center. The norms emerged from investigating the reciprocal and recursive relationship between the authors' roles as scholars and practitioners. Campano, Ghiso, and Welch use this illustrative case to provide an example of how professional norms were conceptualized and enacted in an effort to nurture long-term research relationships across institutional and social boundaries. As research from university-community partnerships continues to grow, the authors emphasize the need to make explicit and to consider with greater specificity the ethical dimensions of our research.

In this article, we examine the discursive construction of knowledge about immigration in two geographic spaces whose “border” many students navigate: a school context meant to support English Language Learners and an out-of-school faith based organization serving immigrant communities. We draw on the concept of “border thinking” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 18) to understand how colonial histories continue to influence contemporary educational contexts. Through examples from students’, community members’, and educators’ interactions with available discourses of immigration, we elaborate on the implications of community knowledge for revising school practices to represent a fuller complexity of immigration experiences.

Language learning, bilingualism, and immigration have become more prevalent topics in children's literature. The manner in which these subjects are taken up and engaged across texts, however, is hardly uniform. This article examines the range and variation of how multilingualism is represented in U.S. children's literature. We bring together an array of texts that reflect a continuum of ideological stances and language formats to argue that issues of language must be situated within social, cultural, and political contexts.

Teacher education for high-poverty schools is often understood as preparing teachers to master a set of best practices in order to hit the ground running and address the needs of students who are behind because of the achievement gap. Our own work has suggested that a necessary dimension of teacher learning across the lifespan involves interrogating and resisting the ideologies that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, conflate poverty with intellectual inferiority. We believe pre-service and in-service teachers ought to become better attuned to the rich resources already present in all communities, an undertaking that requires building relationships with students and families rather than learning strategies to “fix” them. This chapter is based on a 4-year partnership around literacy and engagement with teachers and students in a U.S. public school serving predominantly African American boys. We draw on the work of feminist theorists, in particular the related concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance, to analyze the impact of systemic inequalities on the school community as well as the teachers’ challenges to deficit views of students. Through their work as part of a teacher inquiry community, the educators in our research site identified the effects of a hyper-remedial curriculum geared towards testing and worked to design alternative curricular spaces that nurtured students’ capacities for critical and literary investigation.

This article explores how immigrant students in the United States utilise multimodal literacy practices to complicate dominant narratives of American national identity – narratives of facile assimilation, meritocracy and linear trajectories. Such ideologies can be explicitly evident in curricular materials or can be woven more implicitly into school literacy practices that privilege individual achievement, devalue cultural ways of knowing, and operate on a paradigm of remediation. Within this educational backdrop, we report on a practitioner research study that invited students in a summer school programme for English Language Learners to share their experiences in multiple formats and media, including comics, and to draw on their cultural and linguistic heritages as sources of knowledge. We feature comics created by two students in the programme (an 8-year-old girl of Indian heritage and a 16-year-old boy from Vietnam) to understand the potential of visual texts to articulate micronarratives of immigration. We emphasise how students blend semiotic resources in order to represent the complexity of their experiences, convey cultural hybridity and resist singular narratives.

Research documents the benefits of implementing pedagogical practices that foster creativity in order to prepare students for a changing future and to meet the needs of emergent bilingual learners. Designing pedagogical invitations that make room for creativity is especially urgent given educational policies in the United States which privilege decontextualized, standardized learning aimed at "testable" skills, often in opposition to more expansive multilingual and multimodal learning opportunities. The current study explores how multimodal literacy experiences grounded in bilingual learners’ sociocultural realities stimulated creativity and allowed students to demonstrate and practice their creative abilities.

This article examines the relationship between literacy and play in six- and seven-year-olds’ engagement with non-fiction writing. I draw from a year-long ethnographic study (Erickson, 1986) of a US classroom's ‘writing time’, intentionally structured on children’s own interests and enquiries. Rather than strict adherence to monolithic models described in the school region’s mandated curriculum and assessments, the children treated genres as porous and used writing as a tool for multi-modal play. In authoring and interacting with non-fiction texts, they blended ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ worlds as they communed with historical figures on their own terms. Children used play to enquire into and manipulate the parameters of non-fiction, authoring their relationships with knowledge in the process. Through their exchanges with one another, children became familiar with non-fiction topics. At the same time, their play positioned conventional academic discourses as being open to transformation. This article makes an argument for a more synergistic conception of ‘serious’ and ‘playful’ authoring practices, and for the role of play as a component of critical literacy.

The current context of increased accountability and the proliferation of skills-based literacy mandates at the early childhood level pose particular tensions for multilingual children and educators. In this article, we draw on data from two ethnographic studies to examine how educators and children negotiate the constraints of early childhood curricular mandates within two New York City schools with multilingual populations and long traditions of attending to their linguistic, cultural, and social resources. Our data documents how educators sought to understand, grapple with, and (re)form early literacy policies to make spaces for student languages, collaboration, and inquiry. We found that young children distinguished between scripted practices and authentic literacy learning, and despite constraints found openings to bend the curriculum to suit their linguistic, intellectual, and social repertoires. The studies also emphasized the role of administrators and teachers in navigating—and mitigating—curricular mandates that were often contradictory to the bilingual missions and practices of their schools and at times conflicting and confusing in and of themselves. We argue that while policy is very much a participant in today’s early literacy contexts, it is not deterministic. All members of the school community have an impact on mediating how policy is enacted and creating alternative opportunities for learning. The findings of these complementary studies illustrate how multilingual children and educators negotiated policy mandates in order to affirm the intellectual and cultural traditions of their schools.

Picturebook readalouds have been promoted as a rich resource for strengthening literacy development in young children and discussions of picturebooks have become a common ‐ if threatened — practice in the primary grades. One subset of the diverse body of children's literature teachers can draw from is picturebooks with sparse verbal text. Such picturebooks may place additional demands on both teacher and student during whole class readalouds, who in their responses must attend even more closely to the print that is there as well as to the illustrations and other visual features of the books. The present study explores the particular “affordances” (Gibson, 1950) of such texts and how one teacher maximizes these potentials as she orchestrates three readaloud experiences in an urban kindergarten classroom.

This chapter draws from a primarily qualitative study with two first grade dual language classrooms over the course of a semester. The authors detail how multimodal writing engagements provide an avenue for Latino young children, whose language and knowledge is often devalued in schools, to reframe their community experiences at the center of academic inquiry. Through the medium of photography, children are able to enact agency to position the multiple contexts they navigate—marked by linguistic dynamism and diverse transnational experiences—as resources that could expand conceptions of school-based literacy practices.

This chapter describes a series of integrated curricular invitations that sought to unsettle hierarchies of power by creating hybrid spaces that leverage students' cultural and linguistic resources in the form of multilingual community-based knowledge. The project involved participation from a total of 138 bilingual first graders in two dual language public elementary schools and was implemented, investigated, and revised over a two-year period. The curricular invitations were informed by a conceptual framework that brought together Nieto's (2009) elements of culture with theories of Expansive Learning. This dual framework assists us in articulating the theoretical underpinnings of each step of the proposed sequence. Teaching implications and future research directions are presented.

This two-year predominantly qualitative study engaged 103 bilingual first graders in a literacy curriculum that sought to blend in- and out-of-school experiences, with particular emphasis on using photography and other multimodal texts as semiotic resources. Drawing on critical pedagogy and cultural historical activity theory, we supported students in interrogating epistemologies resulting from dominant hegemonic perspectives. As part of the curricular invitations, children photographed their everyday family and community experiences, and employed these images for oral storytelling and multimodal composing. Data sources analyzed for this article include children’s audio-recorded dialogic small group discussions and their multimodal texts. We analyzed the data thematically and discursively, identifying patterns across children’s engagements with their photos in the literacy curriculum. We found that young emergent bilinguals enacted agency by bringing often-silenced social issues and community knowledge to the forefront of school-based learning. We examine turning points in the dialogic discussions that helped create openings to voice topics often excluded from classroom contexts, and argue that such pedagogical spaces can support children in de-stabilizing historically rooted double binds that reinforce cultures of silence. Through illustrative examples of students’ talk and texts, we explore how a specific focus on blending oral storytelling-stimulated dialogue with technology can become a platform for critical inquiry that engages, rather than suppresses, the double binds children experience by virtue of their immigration histories and cultural and linguistic identities. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.5.3

A common predicament among teacher educators concerns the deficit-views about students and communities that at times surface in the context of our courses. As literacy scholars of color who are also former schoolteachers ourselves, we often experience these perspectives with a particular sense of alarm and contradiction.