Kris D. Gutiérrez

Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space

In this article we provide a perspective on hybridity both as a theoretical lens for understanding diversity and a method for organizing learning. We argue that the use of multiple, diverse, and even conflicting mediational tools promotes the emergence of Third Spaces, or zones of development, thus expanding learning. Using examples from our ethnographic study of the literacy practices of one dual immersion elementary school classroom, we illustrate through an analysis of the discourse and literacy practices of the teacher and students in this culture of collaboration, how hybrid activities, roles, and practices can lead to productive contexts of development.

Comment: Culture, Rigor, and Science in Educational Research:

In this article the authors argue that both the Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson article and the larger National Research Council (NRC) report on which it is based must be understood in the context of current federal discourse that focuses narrowly on experimentally derived causal explanations of educational program effectiveness. Although the authors concur with much of the Feuer et al. article and the NRC report, they are concerned that the NRC committee, by accepting uncritically its charge to define the scientific in educational research, produced a statement that risks being read as endorsing both the possibility and the desirability of taking an evidence-based social engineering approach to educational improvement nationwide. Finally, the authors review the consequences of not challenging the layperson’s “white coat” notion of science and replacing it with a more complicated and realistic view of what actual scientists do and the varied and complex methods and perspectives they employ in their inquiry.

Lifting off the Ground to Return Anew: Mediated Praxis, Transformative Learning, and Social Design Experiments.

This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especially for students from nondominant communities. The authors examine one long-standing social design experiment, the UCLA UC Links/ Las Redes partnership and the work of one exemplary novice teacher to illustrate the importance of mediated, reflective practices in helping apprentice teachers develop a coherent and orienting framework for teaching and learning that has both heuristic and explanatory power. The authors illustrate how cultural historical concepts of learning and development and situated practice become the means for university students to gain distance and reflect on the beliefs and practices that have informed their understandings of teaching and to “rise to the concrete” practices of learning jointly and resonantly.

Relevance to Practice as a Criterion for Rigor

The authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute of Education Sciences, they call for the formulation of collaborative research standards that must require researchers to provide evidence that they have engaged in a process to surface and negotiate the focus of their joint work, and to document the ways participation in this process was structured to include district and school leaders, teachers, parents, community stakeholders, and, wherever possible, children and youth. They close by describing how this new criterion—“relevance to practice”—can ensure the longevity and efficacy of educational research.

“English for the Children”: The New Literacy of the Old World Order, Language Policy and Educational Reform

Abstract Proposition 227 is perhaps the single most important language policy decision of this last century—one that may have profound consequences on schooling in the 21st century. Documenting the ways school districts, the local schools, teachers, and parents make sense of this new policy is central to understanding its short- and long-term effects on the education of English language learners (ELLs). Using qualitative approaches to inquiry, we have studied how three different school districts in Southern California interpreted and implemented the new law. A second concurrent strand of research examined how teachers interpreted and implemented the new law in classroom practice. Three case study classrooms were observed across the first academic year implementing Proposition 227: (a) one English immersion classroom, (b) one alternative bilingual classroom, and (c) one structured immersion classroom. Participant observation and interview methods were used to capture the evolution of classroom practices, literacy practices in particular.

Studying Cultural Practices in Urban Learning Communities

Educational practices are constituted through the junction of cultural artifacts, beliefs, values, and normative routines known as activity systems. Classroom activity is a particularly important nexus for understanding cultural processes in that thinking and doing are linked in social practice. An activity-based, problem-oriented approach to understand development in school contexts focuses analysis on the cultural practices of learning environments. Studying classrooms and other learning contexts as cultural activity reveals how different microcultures for teaching and learning emerge, and it links forms of participation to the kinds of cognitive forms individuals construct to accomplish cognitive and social functions. Ongoing studies of the literacy practices of formal and nonformal learning environments serve as the context for examining culture in educational activity.

Unpackaging Academic Discourse.

Studies of the social contexts of literacy learning in school contexts suggest that literacy development cannot be understood apart from the context in which it occurs. By studying the classroom contexts for literacy learning, the various ways in which students are socialized to use language and to “doing being student” are made evident. Some learning environments provide differential access to literacy activities in which using and participating in meaningful discourse is both the process and the product. This article argues that students must have opportunities to develop academic discourse, that is, both linguistic and sociocultural knowledge about what it means to be a member of a particular classroom community, in order to achieve academic competence. Students who participate in academic activities that provide few opportunities to co‐construct elaborated and meaningful oral and written texts and, instead, participate in activities whose knowledge exchange system is defined and directed by teachers w...

Advancing Early Literacy Learning for All Children: Implications of the NELP Report for Dual-Language Learners

The authors examine the implications and limitations of the National Early Literacy Panel report on the early care of young children who are dual-language learners (DLLs). They examine the relevance of the report for DLLs, particularly the practice in this and other national synthesis reports of extrapolating implications for the education of young DLLs based on a broader population of children. The article addresses the existing gaps in knowledge about literacy practices—knowledge that is central to the development of sound and appropriate educational policies and practices that support DLLs’ full development as language and literacy learners.

Polylingual and Polycultural Learning Ecologies: Mediating Emergent Academic Literacies for Dual Language Learners.

In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue that the social organization of learning should privilege participation in dynamic, hybrid literacy practices. Children are often more likely to experiment with English and academic genres, while also taking on powerful identities as learners and language users, when formal and informal modes of communication are leveraged, multimodality and language-crossing encouraged and the use of both home and academic vernaculars promoted within a context that values social relationships and the playful imagination. We argue that children’s literacy practices develop in particular social and ‘located’ relationships, and we examine one such after-school setting designed with these principles in mind, the long-standing UC Links/Las Redes partnership, where home languages and intercultural experiences are unmarked and necessarily integral to participating in the shared practices of the community. We highlight the affordance of one common practice of the community, children s communication with the mythical cyber wizard, El Maga (sic), and the ways this practice strategically draws on students full linguistic toolkits in order to invite them to integrate modes and genres of communication that challenge the divide between everyday and school-based literacies, stretching children beyond their current levels of literacy development.

Sounding American: The Consequences of New Reforms on English Language Learners.

The authors highlight the omission of English language learners and their unique needs from reports such as that of the U.S. National Reading Panel. Situating their conversation in a sociocultural and socioeconomic context, they discuss how schools can and should help all children.