Considering community literacies in the secondary classroom: a collaborative teacher and researcher study group

Abstract

A year long study group brought teachers and researchers working in urban contexts in US public schools together to examine literacy practices incorporating students’ community literacies into schooled tasks. The goal was to provide teacher development in making connections across their students’ community literacies and the academic literacy they focused on in their classrooms. Most of the teachers initially had narrowly defined concepts of literacy, equating it with traditional school tasks. Researchers prompted identification of students’ community literacies, discussed pedagogical implications related to the inclusion of these literacies in the classroom, and collaborated in developing pedagogical orientations. Results indicate that development of teachers’ constructs of community literacies and literacy practices fostered changes in understanding students’ participation with literacy and resulting competencies. Collaboration resulted in agentic choice to counter institutional constraints threatening instructional mediation of community literacies. These results promote teacher development in literacy using collaborative models, with potential for transfer internationally.

Keywords:

• community literacies
• teacher development
• teachers’ agentic choice

Notes

1. We purposefully avoid capitalizing the word ‘standard’ in ‘standard English’ to avoid appearance of endorsing a hierarchical concept of language varieties.

2. The term ‘low performing’ is assigned by the state based on performance on each school’s Adequate Performance Index (API) score, calculated by the state. For information see: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/.

3. Please note that names of participants have been changed in order to ensure anonymity.

4. In a follow-up interview, Barbara noted that her response to students’ reading levels was primarily frustration and anger. Frustration that ‘I’m not especially clear on how to move them ahead’ and anger that ‘kids in this grade just shouldn’t be passed on without knowing fluency, it just isn’t right, what has happened that they can graduate elementary and not get the reading skills they need?’

5. Street (2003) discusses autonomous literacy as separate from any context, and viewed as a technical, neutral skill.

6. There is a growing literature on rhetorical space, with a focus on the specific geography of communicative action; e.g., see Michel Foucault and Roxanne Mountford.

7. Areceli was assigned to a year-round school, where students attended in staggered ‘tracks’ to alleviate over-crowding.

8. High priority schools in California are provided additional resources targeted specifically at academic achievement and student performance.