This study examines ways of speaking, performing, and reasoning within an urban, African American hair salon. I argue here that participants within the salon, through participation, collaboration, and negotiation, construct and transmit their understandings of the world within systems of activity. By identifying how members of the community hair salon use cultural resources and institutional technologies, co-construct knowledge, and change and develop through their participation in activity, my aim is to draw a better understanding of how learning takes place outside of the classroom. By identifying the labor-related activities within the hair salon, the participation structures which support these activities, and the socially shared, cultural funds of knowledge, I hope to make visible certain mediating structures that support culturally relevant learning and teaching in the African American community.
This article describes how a group of African-American women read social relations as socially constructed texts. Such reading, I think, is a literacy skill, rehearsed and developed within classrooms and communities that cultural border crossers1 develop through their participation within specific discourses communities, as well as through their movement across different kinds of communities (Majors and Orellana, 2003). I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in an African-American hair salon to both illuminate and challenge notions of texts, literacy, literate contexts, and the permeability of such contexts with regards to skills acquisition and use. The study focuses on the public performances and social discourse of the women as well as their readings of these performances. Researchers of language and learning have argued that success and failure in school is contingent upon one's ability to successfully navigate processes of meaning-making through discourses (Cazden, 2001; Cole, 1996; Delpit, 1995; Gee, 1992; Lee and Majors, 2003). I want to ask what role, then, do the processes and skills of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues play in facilitating this navigation? In what ways does an acknowledgment of these as reading skills illuminate the complexities involved in the social and arguably academic work participants do in constructing identities? And in what ways can such an acknowledgement help us to identify ways to develop school-based literacy skills?
Before I could begin the process of making cultural meanings visible through notes, on the page, to an audience and in Iowa, I first had to face the inner voice that told a realistic story about itself, its history, its power. This realization came early, on day one of what was intended to be a straightforward field study beginning in one particular place, a hair salon in rural Iowa, leading to a more extensive study involving other urban, community-based salons. Beginning in Iowa, I was to employ the most obvious and specific of ethnographic techniques available to a budding researcher, participant observation. My intentions were simple: to observe and, while doing so, to zero in on forms of talk that were characteristic of the African American cultural ethos to use in my dissertation. Ultimately, my greater goal became a comparative analysis between talk in community hair salons and the talk of users of African American English who make use of culturally relevant discourse in classrooms while reasoning about literature.Why a hair salon as a source for data? Hair salons for women, like barbershops for men, are traditionally places where co-constructed, community forms of talk-stories, personal narratives, jokes, folklore, and folktales-can be found. They are also sites in which these genres and African American English interactional norms are used as resources for the construction of arguments. This hypothesis is based on the contributions of linguists, sociocultural theorists, and anthropologists who have hypothesized that the genres of discourse and related communicative norms one might find in the hair salon typify norms across institutions in the black community, such as the traditional African American church, and literary and music genres such as jazz, hip-hop, and rap. Within the hair salon, I sought to identify the communicative characteristics and discourse structures, that is, interaction patterns, the role and structure of personal narratives, and other genres of talk drawn from the sociolinguistic literature on African American English discourses. Early on in this quest, however, I came to realize that every moment in one particular salon was informed not only by the literature before me but also by the subjective position of myself as the researcher, a key instrument in the research process. Every moment in "pursuit of indigenous meanings," according to Emerson and associates (1995:12), becomes a moment in the process of self-discovery. Through it, the Anthrupology & Education Quarterly 32(l):116-130. 116 Majors Passing Mirrors 117researcher comes to realize (1) that she is shaped by that which begins long before she ever even enters the field and (2) that she is altered by self-interrogations that persist long after mental pictures fade. What I discovered was that to this initial site I brought to my gaze my own "life history and personal experiences which directly affected the research" (Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein 1997). My stance as a researcher and my methodology for gathering data within the ...
This article describes how a group of black women read culture, class, and other social relations, analyzing the process and skill of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues in allowing individuals to navigate across multiple discourses. I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in a Midwestern hair salon. Such research seeks to strengthen ties between the disciplines of anthropology and education, and relatedly between those who work within universities, classrooms, and everyday settings.
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