Margaret R. Hawkins

Researching English Language and Literacy Development in Schools

There is a curious disjuncture in the current discourse(s) on the schooling of immigrant and minority students. The official discourse, as has been communicated through the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 rhetoric and the concomitant focus on standards and assessment, says that minority children, especially English language learners (ELLs) must gain “standard” English language skills in an unreasonably short time frame, while achieving on par with native English speaking students in academic content areas. Policy decisions at federal, state, and local levels are being made without input from educational researchers and professionals who have expertise in these areas. However, even within educational circles there is heated debate about how best to educate ELLs, and what “best practices” and “best programs” look like.

Becoming a Student: Identity Work and Academic Literacies in Early Schooling

In this article I argue that both sociocultural theories and those that address academic literacies must be invoked to adequately understand language and literacy development in schools. Through exploring the histories, school lives, and viewpoints of two kindergarten students, I show how identity work negotiated in classroom interactions can afford or deny access to the language and practices of school. My argument views language and literacy development as a socialization process and classrooms as complex ecological systems-spaces where multiple discourses and languages come into contact, interacting in complex ways. For children to acquire school-affiliated identities, they must acquire the language as well as the behaviors, attitudes, resources, and ways of engaging needed to recognizably display the identity of a successful student. The findings show that for these children, the ability to engage successfully with academic literacies was distinct from their ability to engage successfully in social interactions. Their language and literacy development was not necessarily determined by economic and cultural capital nor by their social status within the classroom. The study challenges researchers and teachers to re-envision viable classroom ecologies that provide access to school languages and literacies.

“Family Is Here”: Learning in Community-Based After-School Programs

This article examines the culture of community-based after-school programs that serve low-income Hmong immigrant youth. By drawing on knowledge of Hmong culture, history, and family structure, and knowledge of mainstream American culture, the staff at the community centers are able to connect to children and adolescents in ways that schools do not. Despite the success that community centers have in connecting to Hmong immigrant youth, they are less successful in providing youth with literacy-rich activities that promote school success. The authors argue that through collaboration, schools and community based after-school programs may be able to bridge the academic and cultural barriers that marginalize low-income immigrant youth.

Ontologies of Place, Creative Meaning Making and Critical Cosmopolitan Education.

Abstract Discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism, focusing on the rapid flows of people, resources, and knowledge around the globe and subsequent encounters between global citizens, present a binary between “global” and “local.” At the same time educational theories, perhaps especially in the areas of language and literacy studies, promote a view of learning as occurring through mediated interactions in local, situated practices. This article offers a lens to bridge perspectives between ever‐increasing global shifts and movements and situated human interactions through a theorization of the mediational nature of place. Following discussion of global and local as binaries across literatures, I offer a theory of ontologies of place, highlighting it as mediational in meaning making in human interactions. Locating learning within a sociocultural framework, I describe a project linking underresourced English‐learning youth transnationally through multimodal e‐communication, then present an analysis of data from the project to illuminate how place mediates the interactions through which understandings are negotiated and constructed. Findings point to not only the primacy of place in creative meaning making among global youth, but also to the necessity of paying adequate attention to a critical cosmopolitanism: a way forward that considers how to promote and support global encounters and engagements in a way that expands affiliations, openness, creativity, and caring with an imperative to create and sustain just and equitable relations.

Apprenticing Nonnative Speakers to New Discourse Communities

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Reflections on the Impact of Teacher‐Researcher Collaboration

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