“Verbal Ping Pong” as Culturally Congruent Communication: Maximizing African American Students' Access and Engagement as Socially Just Teaching

Abstract

African American youth have been disciplined and dismissed from classrooms for engaging in culturally-based communication practices that teachers misinterpret and perceive as disruptive. Teachers have significant power in how they communicate with their students. White teachers should be especially aware of this power because misunderstandings around communication often stem from cultural differences. This study illustrates the promising practice of a white teacher who integrated African American students' culturally-based literacy practice of “verbal ping pong” into English subject matter instruction. Ethnographic methods that foreground the perspectives of student participants illuminated the significance of this highly interactive discourse, while discourse analysis showed how it functioned as culturally congruent communication to promote students' access to classroom discourse and engagement in subject matter learning. By showing how culturally congruent communication can provide equitable access to learning opportunities for all students, this study renders a promising representation of socially just pedagogy.

Notes

1. To channel youths' voices, I try to represent their talk in ways that convey the sounds of black speech while keeping the focus on the content of their discourse rather than the form. Focus groups conducted in secluded spaces at lunchtime and after school allowed me to observe youth interacting outside the classroom learning environment and gave me a stronger sense of their everyday communication practices. In these focus groups, students' discourse was highly marked by dialect features.

2. As Gutierrez and Rogoff (2003) suggest, I refer to cultural practices in the past tense to convey their historical roots and acknowledge the disjuncture between how groups have practiced communication in the past and how they are now practiced.