Liana’s learning in a democratized classroom

ABSTRACT

In usual understandings of learning, youths’ development in classrooms is portrayed as a move from being a novice to an expert. However, findings of the present anthropologically framed study support us to argue that learning, rather, can be characterized as youths’ simultaneous occupation of novice and expert roles. We refer to this simultaneous occupation as “mutual reliance”. We make this assertion within the context of a multilingual, transnational classroom, where the presence of heightened diversity led teachers to put in place a structure (“autonomous learning groups”) that supported youth to rely on one another to learn. In a video-based case study that tracks one group of students over 33 hours and engages micro-ethnographic analysis of a student named Liana, we found that autonomous learning groups created a democratization of the learning space – everyone contributed from his or her knowledge base because no single person, including the teachers, could ever be an expert.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning
• anthropology
• immigrant youth
• peer collaboration
• diversity

Acknowledgements

We thank “Liana”, “Fu Han”, “Yi Ming”, “Emilio” and “Grace”, five fierce young people languaging, learning and laughing their way through this great wave of global migration. You give us a glimpse in our futures. We thank Jordan and Katie for their generosity. We thank Dafney Blanca Dabach, Kofi Nat Turner, and Paola Lali Morales for reading and thinking with us. A warm thank you to two anonymous reviewers’ intensive and thorough reviews without which this work would not stand in its current form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the term “people of color” to describe students who are usually described as “racial minorities” in the research literature. The term POC is currently the preferred language of identification.

2. In order to provide confidentiality “consortium” level demographics are discussed only.

3. Teachers looped the same concepts over two years in extended, multi-week, inquiry-based projects. For instance, the science teacher taught relationships in food webs through Hemingway one year, and through a DNA project the next. This meant that experts who read more independently in English, or who were on their second year of the concept, could assist novices who were not yet able to access content in grade-level English given emergent bilingualism. Looping also prepared 10th graders to take the high-stakes state assessment in Biology.

4. All names are pseudonyms.

5. Teachers also worked in teams to design curriculum and make decisions about the running of the school that in some institutions is normally reserved for leadership.

6. Teachers thought deeply about which students should be grouped together, describing their process to Malsbary as a lengthy, intensive process during which they took into account language, national origin, student personality, prior schooling, grade point average, leadership ability, and many other factors in order to make effective groups that could autonomously support all students’ learning. Contrary to the leveled or tracked ESL classes available in many high schools, homogeneity was seen as an obstacle to learning. With youth directing each others’ learning, teachers were free to engage in intensive interventions with individual students, in what one teacher termed his “rounds” (Malsbary, 2015). Given the diversity of academic needs across myriad languages, it could take time for a teacher to clarify conceptual and linguistic difficulties and make pedagogical adjustments when necessary, time teachers don’t have when they are at the front of the classroom instructing or managing classroom flow.

7. Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway, p. 29.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Brigid Malsbary

Christine Malsbary is visiting assistant professor at Vassar College. Her research is on youth and teachers’ practices in hyper-diverse, transcultural, multilingual education contexts, and the implications of hyper-diversity for equity and public schooling. Malsbary is a recipient of a 2014–2015 NAEd Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Samantha Espinoza

Samantha Espinoza is a graduate student at the University of Denver – Graduate School of Social Work. Samantha’s research interests are socio-economic inequalities and the empowerment of marginalized youth.

Lisa Bales

Lisa Bales is a graduate student at University of Hawaii-Manoa - College of Education. Lisa’s research interests are focused on inequities within diverse classroom contexts with immigrant, English as a second language students. She is a third grade teacher in Oahu, HI. She holds a Master’s degree from University of Hawai’i at Manoa, with research interests in multimodal literacy, translanguaging, bilingual policy, and equitable appropriate instruction for English-language learners