Students’ Critical Meta-Awareness in a Figured World of Achievement: Toward a Culturally Sustaining Stance in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research

Abstract

Students' academic experiences are often shaped by normalized conceptions of literacy that do not honor the interrelatedness of multiple identities, languages, and literacies. This qualitative case study in an urban middle school highlights students' critical meta-awareness of their identities-in-practice in the figured world of their classroom via a narrative analysis of students' writing, interviews, and focus group discussions. The author focuses on students' internalization and/or resistance of the curriculum as a basis for developing culturally sustaining stances toward curriculum, pedagogy, and research that actively disrupt cultural, ethnic, racial, and epistemological hierarchies of power in academic contexts and beyond.

Healing-Informed Social Justice Mathematics: Promoting Students’ Sociopolitical Consciousness and Well-Being in Mathematics Class

“…These findings contribute to the growing research base of effective instructional strategies that are intentional about ensuring success for historically marginalized students, such as culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy (Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally sustaining pedagogy (Caraballo, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2014), cogenerative dialogues 8 (Beltramo, 2017), and social justice pedagogy (Ayers, 2009). While Ms. Charles was a Black woman, born and raised in Goldenview, this does not suggest that only teachers of similar backgrounds can engage in this pedagogical approach.…”

Being “Loud”: Identities-in-Practice in a Figured World of Achievement

“…In the wake of the Common Core and college readiness (Common Core State Standards, 2013), amid reforms that seek to standardize what all students should know and be able to do, it is even more important to increase educators’ capacity to develop a more complex and contextual understanding of how students are experiencing increasingly restrictive academic spaces. For example, an identities-in-practice lens fosters discursive spaces and sites of possibility in which educators may, even while implementing state and district mandates, use critical texts and participatory pedagogies to actively challenge historically constructed and propagated power relations typically obscured in their own classrooms (Caraballo, 2014, 2016; Kinloch, 2010). For Laura, negotiating a self-proclaimed, as well as ascribed, identity-in-practice as a loud Dominican presented a layer of complexity with which White students in her class and grade need not contend.…”

Authoring Selves in School: Adolescent Writing Identity

“…These particular genres have been linked to disengagement with writing (Emig, 1971; Newell et al, 2014; Whitney, 2011) yet remain dominant in high school writing instruction and thus an influential force in shaping identity. Prompts for these genres may be teacher composed, as Bawarshi (2003) analyzes in the context of college writing, or more often externally imposed by an authoritative other and assessed by standardized rubrics (Caraballo, 2017; Schunn, Godley, & DeMartino, 2016). However, there is evidence from extracurricular contexts (Johnson, 2017; Muhammad, 2015) and remedial classes (Skerrett & Bomer, 2013), indicating teachers can provide experiences in other genres—memoir, poetry, and short fiction—that allow students to draw upon a more full and complex representation of their various identities (Moje & Luke, 2009) as writers.…”

“…Despite frequent calls for emphasis on writing instruction in policy and theory, students in contemporary ELA classes do not generally have opportunities to compose texts across time or in genres other than literary analysis. This study explores this highly regulated space of ELA classrooms (Brauer & Clark, 2008) in Midgard High (a pseudonym), a school where teachers changed their writing pedagogy to be more student centered, heeding Caraballo’s (2017) call for “curriculum that supports students’ construction and leveraging of multiple identities” (p. 587).…”