John Ippolito

Ethics and teacher practices in linguistic minority classrooms

This paper draws on a theoretical framework informed by the philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas to examine pedagogical responsibility for minority language students in elementary school classrooms. After making the case that ethics is extant in the literature around minority languages and mainstream education, the paper elaborates the Levinasian-informed ethical framework and suggests a point of analysis for examining pedagogical practices in minority language classrooms, namely, the extent to which teacher practices break with the sameness of a dominant language formal learning context and open to the alterity of minority languages. This point of analysis guides the interpretation of findings of an empirical inquiry into the pedagogical practices of eight teachers in their publicly-funded, mainstream Anglophone school. A corpus of in-depth interviews with and extended observations of the teachers in their teaching contexts reveals five core pedagogically relevant phenomena into which ethics can be read. The article concludes with an ethics-informed litmus test for present and possible educational practices in linguistic minority classrooms.

Reading Interventionist Research in Two Urban Elementary Schools Through a Discursive Lens

In this study, I reframe the debate on minority parents and their children’s educators by moving beyond concerns around student academic achievement and toward the quality of relationships among adult stakeholders. Using an interpretive lens based on Foucault’s notion of discourse, I examine three research vignettes drawn from an interventionist research project in two urban elementary schools. This examination identifies and responds to interpersonal, inter-institutional, and inter-epistemological dysfunctions. I make a concluding case for the transformative potential in the interplay of discourses: When inequalities and exclusions are redressed in the research, the project realizes a discursive and ethical possibility.

Using Institutional Structures to Promote Educational Equity

This article traces diverging trajectories in a situated, participatory research project in 2 public schools in Ontario. While the project operated within a consistent set of objectives to promote educational equity for immigrant, linguistically diverse students and their families, it generated 2 substantially different models of educational provision at each of the 2 schools: one corresponding to the enrichment approach the project envisioned and the second to a remediation strategy grounded in an institutional discourse of deficit. The problematic we elucidate here is how such diverging outcomes could have been engendered. We begin by describing the conceptual bases for the activist research agenda; we then outline the interventionist, literacy enrichment framework of the project; next, we describe how the project took shape at the 2 research sites; and, finally, our reflective turn at the conclusion of this article represents our best effort to make sense of these contradictory experienced realities.

Learning in Schools and Homes: Successes and Complications in Bringing Minority Parents into Conversation with Their Children’s School

This paper reports on a university/school board collaborative outreach program hosted by a linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse elementary school in Toronto, Canada. The program facilitates a forum where the school’s families—in conversation with in-service and pre-service teachers, the school’s administration, a local university’s faculty of education and community agencies—discuss issues the families deem important to their experience of public schooling. In addition to a detailed program overview, I present two tiers of participant feedback on the program, the first-tier gleaned from parent surveys and the second tier derived from a series of interviews conducted by parent researchers. Based on a consideration of the qualitative data emerging from this feedback, I offer three readings of the program: the first reading tells a story of how the program is empowering parents and caregivers and bringing them closer to their children’s schooling; the second reading draws four implications that complicate the apparent successes of the program; and the third reading takes shape as a broader epistemic and ethical caution for action-oriented research of this sort.