Shoptalk: Teaching and Learning in an African American Hair Salon

Abstract

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.

“Vygotsky’s Neglected Legacy”: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

“…Instead, differences in ability are attributed to learners' participation in specific cultural-historically situated activity systems rather than being blamed on disadvantage and deficits (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) or narrow conceptions of competence (Gipps, 1999). For example, there has been ongoing research with Bakhtinian forms of discursive practices, or what is called "third spaces" (e.g., Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, Alvarez & Chiu, 1999;Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larsen, 1995), while others who work with African American communities have capitalized on the normally undervalued funds of knowledge that these learners embody (e.g., C. D. Lee, 2001; C. D. Lee & Majors, 2003; C. D. Lee, Spencer, & Harpalani, 2003;Majors, 2003). Alternatively, research in technology-intensive learning environments allows students to interact in model activity systems such as Michael Cole's Fifth Dimension (Cole, 1995(Cole, , 1996Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993), Kris Gutiérrez's Las Redes (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999), and Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantic program (Barab, Hay, Barnett, & Squire, 2001).…”

Racial Storylines and Implications for Learning

“…There is a significant body of research that highlights the ways that learning is inherently cultural, that learning is fundamentally tied to one's culturally rooted perception of the context, and that being positioned as having valid knowledge in a learning setting is important [Bang, 2010;Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003;Lee, 2007;Majors, 2003;Nasir, 2002;Taylor, 2009].…”

“…In doing so, these studies make salient that learning takes place in culturally and socially organized settings, occurs in relation to social others, and is guided by culturally defined goals. Seminal work in this area included work on alternative counting systems in New Guinea that highlighted the cultural construction of number systems and their use [Saxe, 1999;Saxe & Esmonde, 2005], research on alternative ways of understanding and expressing literacy in blue-collar work settings [Majors, 2003;Rose, 2004], and research on the cultural construction of learning in classrooms [Yackel & Cobb, 1996]. Studies have also found that the way cultural groups engage learning activities (e.g., the way they are socialized to learn -for instance, learning by observation) can organize access to learning content and can be consequential for the skill set one gains through activities with different participation structures .…”

Narrations of cross-cultural encounters as interpretative frames for reading word and world

“…This study seeks to address issues of identity that impact teaching and learning with regards to cultural minority group members in particular, and African Americans specifically (Majors, 1998(Majors, , 2003(Majors, , 2004). Yet, as a researcher, teacher, community member and advocate for social justice, I believe that this work invites an awareness of a kind of engagement that constitutes a critical hybrid space in the salon where participants appear to reject prescribed formats for determining what is the problem, socially speaking, in light of improvised ways of determining and dealing with these problems.…”

“…Thus, it may be argued that such readings of social relations are tools of literacy 2 (and in many cases, of survival) that call on skills of revision, improvisation, recounting, inferencing, and making/fathoming the social and moral meanings of events (Ochs and Capps, 2001). They are part of the psychological (Wertsch, 1985), communal (Bruner, 1990), cultural (Swidler, 2001) and linguistic (Moll, 1992) 'tool kits' that all individuals draw upon to reason through problem-solving activities (Majors, 2003).…”