Ruth Harman

All the School's A Stage: Critical Performative Pedagogy in Urban Teacher Education

The authors of this article investigate how a performance module was integrated into a graduate course on childrens literature to provide teachers with a space to re-enact and challenge the institutional tensions that were impacting their work as multicultural educators. Based on a combined ethnographic and systemic functional linguistics analysis, this study investigates how performance functioned in the context of this course. Did teachers co-construct a collaborative and transgressive space to challenge the top-down discourses informed by deficit views of diverse students and communities in the school district? Data collected for the study include videotapes of course sessions, field notes, teachers’ written critiques, and curriculum materials. Findings show that the use of this performance module helped expose and challenge institutional power dynamics. However, the invoked heteroglossia of voices and perspectives also maintained deficit discourses about students and parents. Implications about how theater and other arts-based approaches can be integrated into critical teacher education curricula in ways that promote broader social change are discussed.

Research and Praxis On Challenging Anti-immigration Discourses in School and Community Contexts

Recently, harsh immigration policies have made the lives of the new immigrant Diaspora in the southeastern United States extremely challenging. Disturbed by the impact of these sociopolitical changes on students, their families, and their teachers, as multicultural educators, we have turned for help to recent research and praxis from the U.S. and Europe that overtly challenges anti-immigration discourse. We examine two theoretical perspectives that can support educators in talking back and acting against anti-immigration discourses and practices in schools and communities. We provide cases of our own work in the southeastern United States to test the value of these theories

Critical SFL Praxis With Bilingual Youth: Disciplinary Instruction in a Third Space

ABSTRACT The authors explore the theoretical and pedagogical premises of their critical systemic functional linguistics approach, which they developed to challenge the deficit positioning of bilingual students in the Southeast of the United States. As multilingual educators from postcolonial Ireland and India, the theoretical framework has helped the authors conceptualize and design interventions that support the incorporation of the linguistic and cultural repertoires of students while acknowledging that disciplinary literacy needs an explicit form of linguistic instruction. Key tenets of this approach include fostering a third space where voices, languages, and registers of students and teachers interweave to make and challenge disciplinary knowledge domains. The authors’ pedagogical and professional work, which they illustrate through discussion of data from a larger ethnographic study, has encouraged their students to switch among registers and languages while appropriating academic discourses in a high-stakes testing culture. It has also supported bilingual students in challenging normative discourses about immigration and other issues related to social inequity.

Transforming Normative Discourses of Schooling: Critical Systemic Functional Linguistics Praxis

One of Halliday’s original purposes in developing Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was to address and redress equity questions such as how and why certain groups of people are discriminated against because of their language use. This chapter provides an overview of SFL theory and why and how it has been used in recent years in the United States and elsewhere to support the academic, linguistic and cultural repertoires of multilingual and multicultural students and teachers. It further outlines key concepts drawn on by the mostly U.S. contributors throughout this volume, highlighting the similarities and differences of contributors’ approaches to critical SFL. Finally, it provides an overview of each of the three sections in the volume: (1) Reflection Literacy and Critical Language Awareness; (2) Register Variation and Equity; and (3) Multimodal Designing as they relate to SFL.

Bringing It All Together: Critical Take(s) on Systemic Functional Linguistics

This chapter discusses the strengths and challenges of implementing the critical takes on SFL articulated in this volume. The major strengths across the studies relate to their shared focus on a systematic SFL metalanguage, critical orientation to teaching and researching and use of a robust pedagogical design that supports multilingual students and teachers in investigating and critiquing how semiotic choices realize knowledge for specific audiences, purposes and contexts. A common and significant challenge is the lack of institutional and systematic support for longitudinal implementations of SFL-based instruction and research. Implications include the need for administrators and policy makers to be invited into the discussion about critical SFL-informed disciplinary approaches; and for more studies to be conducted on dialogic SFL-informed classroom instruction across the curriculum and across institutions.

A Critical Performative Process: Supporting the Second-Language Literacies and Voices of Emergent Bilingual Learners

This article presents illustrations from a Boalian theatrical intervention in a Southeastern U.S. middle school designed to enable Latina students to enact experiential performances depicting common problems they face in their daily lives with discrimination and hostility as well as possible solutions to those challenges to their feelings of inclusion and well-being. The work relies on theories that emphasize the role of drama as personal and educational, particularly with regard to young people’s growing political awareness and understanding of the agency they have in contesting bigoted conduct toward them and their immigrant communities. The authors present data from an ongoing ethnographic study of a Southeastern U.S. middle school classroom and demonstrate the students’ use of various modalities—discussion, performance, art, and others—through which to mediate their growth into more socially aware and active citizens, as evidenced by their understanding of appropriate forms of resistance and their public performances for academic communities that embody their learning of new dispositions and strategies. Central to the argument is the need for teachers to learn about social conditions from their engagement with immigrant students and to develop intimate knowledge of how social institutions and practices work both for and against them. There is a consequent need for teachers to use this knowledge to inform their interpretation of academic standards concerned with taking a critical global perspective and to inform their pedagogy to include more performative opportunities through which youth may learn to depict and act on their worlds. The article concludes with suggestions for the role of theatre in youth education that dialectically informs teachers’ and researchers’ growth into more sensitive and nuanced educators.

Anthropologies of education: a global guide to ethnographic studies of learning and schooling, by Luciana C. de Oliveira, Charlotte, NC, Information Age, 2011, xviii + 152 pp., US

Throughout the volume, the many references to prominent scholars, past and present, with whom experienced anthropologists and ethnographers are familiar would pose another challenge for the newcomers. To appreciate these great scholars’ impact on ethnographic studies in anthropologies of education and their theoretical perspectives, newcomers who might not have much knowledge in this field might need to do further research concerning their background and their contributions to the field. So it appears that more homework needs to be done in order to participate in this world tour.