Danny C. Martinez

Emerging Critical Meta-Awareness among Black and Latina/o Youth during Corrective Feedback Practices in Urban English Language Arts Classrooms.

This article addresses teachers’ uptake of Black and Latina/o youth linguistic repertoires within the official space of an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and how youth respond to corrective feedback that is focused on the form of their messages, rather than their function. Corrective feedback offered by one Latina teacher indexed larger standard language ideologies that circulate within urban Black and Latina/o schools. I argue that youth’s responses to corrective feedback point to their emerging critical meta-awareness, given their alignment against narrow conceptions of what counts as language for schooling and learning.

Toward a teacher solidarity lens: former teachers of color (re)envisioning educational research

Based on a two-year self-study by a group of early-career scholars of color, we explore and purposefully name our role, within the contemporary context of neoliberal reform, as educational researchers of color who are former K-12 teachers. We capture the insights that emerged from our self-study through a close reading of dominant neoliberal educational reform discourses, particularly through an examination of the writings of Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp. Along three dimensions of: (1) experience as teachers; (2) solidarity with teachers; and (3) analyses of racism in schooling, we characterize prominent discourses through which educators, researchers, and the public describe teachers and teaching. We name these discursive frames to make explicit the assumptions that are embedded in each and the intentional or inadvertent consequences of each. Finally, we propose a teacher solidarity lens through which we strive to approach our research and work with teachers.

Leveraging Students' Communicative Repertoires as a Tool for Equitable Learning.

Leveraging is often described as the process of using the home and community languages of children and youth as a tool to access the “academic” or “standard” varieties of languages valued in schools. In this vein, researchers have called on practitioners to leverage the stigmatized language practices of children and youth in schools for their academic development. In this review, we interrogate the notion of leveraging commonly used by language and literacy scholars. We consider what gets leveraged, whose practices get leveraged, when leveraging occurs, and whether or not leveraging leads to robust and transformative learning experiences that sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of children and youth in our schools, particularly for students of color. We review scholarship steeped in Vygotskian-inspired research on learning, culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and bilingual education research that forefront the notion that the language practices of children and youth are useful for mediating learning and development. We conclude with a discussion of classroom discourse analysis methods that we believe can provide documentation of transformative learning experiences that uncovers and examines the linguistic resources of students in our twenty-first-century classrooms, and to gain a common language around notions of leveraging in the field.

Self-Reflexive Inquiry Into Language Use and Beliefs: Toward More Expansive Language Ideologies

ABSTRACT The pedagogical innovation of this study is self-reflexive inquiry into language, culture, and identity. This work was conducted in a course on Cultural Diversity and Education serving 76 culturally and linguistically diverse undergraduate students, many of whom planned to become teachers. Through analysis of a Personal Language Inventory and other assignments and surveys, we surface the range of beliefs these diverse students hold about language, prompted by reflective activities, including the impact of their experiences with linguicism and the tensions and variations they report on dominant language ideologies. We highlight potential openings for transformation and argue that a deep understanding of the often-unexposed language ideologies of potential teachers before and as they enter teacher preparation programs is a necessary first step toward developing coursework and experiences that will help guide them toward more expansive views of language. Such expansive views may impact future teachers’ practices and student learning opportunities, particularly important in classrooms of linguistically diverse learners.

Toward Expanding What Counts as Language for Latina and Latino Youth in an Urban Middle School Classroom

In this article, we report findings from a yearlong design research project that worked to leverage the language brokering skills of Latina/Latino middle school youth in an urban school setting. We began the project by asking seventh-grade students to talk about the many languages they speak in their daily lives. Throughout the project, their teacher, Ms. Reyes, drew on youths’ tacit understandings of language to engage them, metalinguistically, in learning activities that went beyond classroom activities, with specific attention to the various ways language is used to persuade different audiences across contexts. We concluded with documenting their reflections on the project and their understandings of their language use. We share data of transcripts from focus group discussions between four students. Findings revealed that student’s tacit understandings about language fell into four categories, “language of respect,” “diverse ways of speaking,” “what they learned” about language, and an emerging sense of their “academic confidence.” We use these data to show how youth shared knowledge and understandings about language that they had not been asked to share before. We conclude with suggestions for how classroom teachers can work toward expanding what counts for language in English Language Arts classrooms.

The Development of a Community of Practice for Educators Working with Newcomer, Spanish-speaking Students

Drawing on 3 years of observational, survey, and interview data, this article highlights the importance of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) for school staff members supporting Spanish-speaking, newcomer students in large, comprehensive high schools that often lack the resources to directly support this population. We highlight how a research project focused on the implementation and development of a bilingual math and science curriculum across 4 schools in urban and rural California provided teachers, counselors and school leaders the necessary space and community to know what and how to best serve immigrant, Spanish-dominant students. The article demonstrates how these school staff people leveraged the research project meetings and check-ins with research assistants to share best practices and common challenges across schools and roles when working with newcomer students.

Exploring Linguistic Diversity From the Inside Out: Implications of Self-Reflexive Inquiry for Teacher Education

With a burgeoning U.S. population of emergent bilingual learners and others who use nondominant language forms, the need for language knowledge among teachers is acute. Beginning from the inside out by examining one’s own complex language uses may be a first step toward envisioning and later developing classroom cultures that support diverse language forms for diverse purposes. In all, 262 undergraduate education students used self-reflexive inquiry, documenting ways they and others use language, through language inventories, surveys, and essays. Participants were majority students of color, half bilingual. Students reported awareness of rich diversity and nuances of language uses, purposes, and fluidity across contexts. Although students often used a formal/informal contrast to describe language uses, this distinction was complicated. Understandings of language surfaced in writing as students engaged with linguistically diverse peers and situated their linguistic repertoires in sociopolitical context. Drawing on results and students’ reflections on the writings as tools, we offer implications for teacher education.

Language across difference: ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools, by Django Paris

As a former teacher and current researcher in urban secondary schools, I have searched the academic literature to understand the linguistic realities of the Black and Latina/o youth with whom I have worked. These are youth who attend schools together and often speak in ways that suggest that they are socializing one another. I have heard Black and Latina/o youth speak in ways that do not neatly fit into notions of bilingualism and bi-dialectalism; these specific ways do not necessarily capture the linguistic flexibility of these youth. In the book, Paris delves into the complex and multi-layered linguistic realities of Latina/o, Black, and Pacific Islander youth at South Vista High School (SVHS), a small charter school in a West Coast city in the United States. He argues for a shift in the ways in which the educators and the researchers understand the language practices of non-dominant youth, particularly given the demographic shifts that bring youth from diverse ethnic backgrounds together in contact zones (Pratt, 1991). Paris’ work demonstrates the powerful socialization that can occur in these zones. Through a rich ethnographic account, Paris details the linguistic dexterity of eight youth participants whose identities do not limit them to the languages of their respective community. Paris’ research contributes to language research in education that complicates our understanding of language through an examination of language crossing and what he calls language sharing. Language crossings (Rampton, 1995) are communicative events, where an individual speaks a language associated with a racial/ethnic group other than their own. At SVHS, however, Paris found that the youth who cross into another language often found their utterances ratified by traditional speakers of a language. In Chapters 2–4, Paris demonstrates how youth use language associated with their own ethnic group to sustain the cultural and linguistic practices associated with their respective racial/ethnic communities. For example, he suggests that Latina/o youth used Spanish and Pacific Islander youth used their varying languages as a means of solidarity with other speakers of their languages. Paris also accounts for the ways in which each group’s language practices may also alienate a group, a feeling most experienced by Black youth whose language practices were shared across multi-ethnic youth spaces. These are spaces where “youth challenge and reinforce notions of difference and division through language choice and attitudes” (p. 16). In Chapter 4, Paris breaks ground in his examination of the language practices that most unify Latina/o, Pacific Islander and Black youth at SVHS – the use of African American Language (AAL). He demonstrates how AAL is the most crossed and shared language among SVHS youth. Paris argues that AAL is often ratified by Black youth, when Latina/o or Pacific Islander youth speak AAL, and the language that Latina/o and Pacific Islander youth describe as a necessary language in SVHS and the community. While demonstrating the ease and flexibility in which SVHS youth of all ethnicities cross and share AAL,