Do You Want to Tell Your Own Narrative?”: How One Teacher and Her Students Engage in Resistance by Leveraging Community Cultural Wealth

Abstract

This qualitative case study offers a window into one classroom in which one Latinx English language arts teacher and her newcomer high school students tapped into community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) as they engaged in literacy practices to resist oppression, denounce discrimination, and strive for social justice. We draw upon Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth (CCW) to understand how teachers can encourage resistance among historically marginalized students within the current racist and xenophobic political climate; and we examine how students respond to the teacher’s invitation to engage and develop their resistant capital through their writing. Data analyzed for this study include student letters, teacher interviews, and fieldnotes from one lesson, which was situated in a year-long ethnographic study. We found that the teacher cultivated resistant capital by tapping into students’ lived experiences to scrutinize oppressive rhetoric and persist in the face of adversity. Students seized the opportunity to resist the dominant anti-immigrant narrative by leveraging their resistant capital through counter-stories, assertions of experiential knowledge, and appeals to a moral imperative. Our study contributes to scholarship on CCW by exploring how CCW is utilized in a previously under-examined context and has implications for educators by offering examples of classroom practices that cultivate CCW and transform deficit discourses that threaten to impede academic success, especially among Latinx students.

Becoming advocates: Positioning immigrant youth to share, connect, and apply their stories as tools for social change

“…Although our university research team participated in these ILA workshops and club sessions, we were not involved directly in their design. Our initial partnership with NHS began with one of the school’s ELA teachers (a former student of the first author; see Martin‐Beltrán, Montoya‐Ávila, García, & Canales, 2018), who welcomed us into her classroom during the autobiographical narrative unit to observe literacy practices that expanded CLD students’ background. Because ILA and KIND had decided to also build on this curricular unit, our research team was invited to observe (and help facilitate) their workshops and club sessions.…”

The Counter-Deficit Lens in Educational Research: Interrogating Conceptions of Structural Oppression

“…Other research has highlighted how urban teachers -traditionally described as incompetent -can elevate students' cultural strengths toward academic achievement (e.g. Martin-Beltrán et al, 2018). Some research has even celebrated urban schools -framed as "dropout factories" -for their ability to enhance educational opportunity for marginalized youth (Harper, 2015b).…”

“…Scholars also, necessarily, refuted deficit-oriented narratives of Latinx people advanced by President Trump (Martin-Beltrán et al, 2018). There exist numerous examples of scholars aiming to complicate static understandings of a population in the counter-deficit literature.…”

“…Research has revealed how racially minoritized youth-traditionally viewed as academically helpless-overcome racist schooling to achieve educational success (e.g., Harper, 2010Harper, , 2015a. Other research has highlighted how urban teachers-traditionally described as incompetent-can elevate students' cultural strengths toward academic achievement (e.g., Martin-Beltrán et al, 2018). Some research has even celebrated urban schools-framed as "dropout factories"-for their ability to enhance educational opportunity for marginalized youth (Harper, 2015b).…”

Interaction in the Multilingual Classroom

“…Thus, we give interactional studies of bilingual classrooms in contexts where all participants share an L1 only a cursory review (see, e.g. Bonacina and Gafaranga 2011;Jakonen 2018;Martin-Beltra´n et al 2018). Three themes emerged as particularly rich in empirical findings; the first dealing more broadly with code-switching, which has principally been studied in bilingual interaction; the remaining two center on issues of participation, language policy, and identity in relation to language choice, and on particular interactional practices in multilingual classrooms.…”