Gerald Campano

Coloniality and Education: Negotiating Discourses of Immigration in Schools and Communities Through Border Thinking

In this article, we examine the discursive construction of knowledge about immigration in two geographic spaces whose “border” many students navigate: a school context meant to support English Language Learners and an out-of-school faith based organization serving immigrant communities. We draw on the concept of “border thinking” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 18) to understand how colonial histories continue to influence contemporary educational contexts. Through examples from students’, community members’, and educators’ interactions with available discourses of immigration, we elaborate on the implications of community knowledge for revising school practices to represent a fuller complexity of immigration experiences.

Critical Inquiry Into Literacy Teacher Education

A common predicament among teacher educators concerns the deficit-views about students and communities that at times surface in the context of our courses. As literacy scholars of color who are also former schoolteachers ourselves, we often experience these perspectives with a particular sense of alarm and contradiction.

“American Hunger”: Challenging Epistemic Injustice Through Collaborative Teacher Inquiry

Teacher education for high-poverty schools is often understood as preparing teachers to master a set of best practices in order to hit the ground running and address the needs of students who are behind because of the achievement gap. Our own work has suggested that a necessary dimension of teacher learning across the lifespan involves interrogating and resisting the ideologies that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, conflate poverty with intellectual inferiority. We believe pre-service and in-service teachers ought to become better attuned to the rich resources already present in all communities, an undertaking that requires building relationships with students and families rather than learning strategies to “fix” them. This chapter is based on a 4-year partnership around literacy and engagement with teachers and students in a U.S. public school serving predominantly African American boys. We draw on the work of feminist theorists, in particular the related concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance, to analyze the impact of systemic inequalities on the school community as well as the teachers’ challenges to deficit views of students. Through their work as part of a teacher inquiry community, the educators in our research site identified the effects of a hyper-remedial curriculum geared towards testing and worked to design alternative curricular spaces that nurtured students’ capacities for critical and literary investigation.

Multimodality and Immigrant Children

This response to Marni Binder reflects upon two examples of (im)migrant childrens artwork and challenges the dominant notion that (im)migration experiences — and their subsequent portrayals — can be fit into neat slots. The authors position multimodal composing opportunities as affording children a vital instrument for deploying their full semiotic repertoires to defy stereotypes and capture the complexities of experience.

Young Children Demystifying and Remaking the University through Critical Play.

This article, part of a four-year research partnership with a multilingual faith community and its school, explores what happened when we invited young children in an aftercare program to inquire into the university from their perspectives. Through a sociocultural literacy framework and realist theories of identity and experience, we examine the childrens organic forms of sense making through what we describe as critical play. The children took up our invitation to represent their inquiries into college by using humour and imagination to demystify the university and make it their own. We conclude with some specific recommendations for colleges and universities interested in supporting access to higher education, especially for those young children who may not have the economic means or the entitlement of institutional legacy as part of their social habitus.

Some Thoughts on a “Beloved Community”

Hall and Campano echo Jones and Rainvilles call for compassion and humility in literacy coaching and argue that this is an urgent endeavor in an increasingly top-down educational climate. They offer collective analysis, through teacher inquiry communities and teacher activism, as a potential site of hope for making sense of the larger sociopolitical contexts of schooling and cite their own research and writing as resources for readers.