Resistance to the infrastructure that governs local literacy and social practices in an English classroom

ABSTRACT

This work looks at how the infrastructure or conventions of practice and social arrangements govern local classroom literacy practices and how marginalized students resist the infrastructure and expose institutional change-making possibilities. Drawing from a longitudinal study, we analyzed five days of lessons that constituted a project in order to attend to aspects of instruction and activity that were indicative of the infrastructure and whether, and if so, how, students used language, body, silence, etc., to disrupt these guiding practices. The questions that guide this work are the following: What does student resistance reveal about the institutional infrastructure in this classroom? How did youth exploit the infrastructure’s fissures and what does it reveal about racial wisdom? Our findings demonstrate how students navigated, negotiated, and addressed the institutional complexities that shaped this assignment and offered limited ways to navigate it. This work offers a broader understanding of what students’ enactment of resistance disrupts and provides a clearer understanding of student racial wisdom.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth resistance
• racial wisdom
• institutional infrastructure
• literacy practices
• classroom interactions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This positioning of the project as pre-determined and unchangeable also precluded any involvement in the teaching or set-up of it by the researchers in the classroom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teresa Sosa

Teresa Sosa is an Associate Professor of Urban Teacher Education at Indiana University, Indianapolis. Her research captures the collective experiences of oppression that Black and Brown youth navigate and serves as a lens that details how within these experiences, youth manifest their literacy expertise, racial wisdom, and self-determination. Her work aims to broaden understandings of how literacy education can be leveraged to disrupt educational injustices by capturing youths’ experiences and responses to their day-to-day educational experiences.

Allison H. Hall is a Visiting Research Specialist at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work examines how teachers learn to design and enact instruction that supports the development of literary reading and reasoning practices and the ways that students make sense of literary texts in such learning environments.

Mark Latta is a Ph.D. candidate in the Urban Education Studies program at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis and an Assistant Professor of English at Marian University. His research and teaching focus on literacy, urban theory, and decolonizing and humanizing inquiry.