Tasha Tropp Laman

Seeing the strange in the familiar: unpacking racialized practices in early childhood settings

In this article, three educators share case studies describing racial biases and segregationist practices in early schooling. The authors draw upon critical race theory as a lens and employ critical discourse analysis to uncover classed and raced biases within and across three early childhood contexts. While the cases are situated in specific public school settings – a parent teacher association (PTA) fundraiser, a mandated literacy program, and a read‐aloud – they shed light onto a variety of contexts as these are all common phenomena in many American elementary schools. Together, the cases illustrate how racism has been normalized through familiar practices in early childhood settings. Through description and reflection, the authors suggest ways to start seeing the strange in the familiar, unpacking racialized practices across three settings, and advocating new ways of thinking about these common practices leading to change and transformation.

Supporting Critical Dialogue Across Educational Contexts

We dedicate this article to our good friend and colleague, Jennifer Wilson, a person with whom we loved to think and laugh and write. Through an act of violence, her life was taken away from us on August 28th, 2011. This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class adults in a culture circle in Brazil interrogating systems of poverty, and teens in youth organizations discussing their photo-essays that challenge negative stereotypes of youth. In this paper, we analyze discursive practices that fostered critical dialogue across these settings. In doing so, we seek to describe practices that can support practitioners as they facilitate critical dialogue with learners and one another in order to become more critically engaged participants in their own communities.

Learning About Language: Written Conversations and Elementary Language Learners

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay attention to the parts of language without direct instruction. In this article, the authors examine how children in a first- through third-grade and a fourth- through sixth-grade classroom used written conversations as a communicative forum to explore writing and their surrounding social worlds. Through written conversations, children explored grammatical features of texts, genres, spelling, and language. Children also used written conversations as a forum to explore cultural identity, linguistic resources, and gain cultural capital within peer worlds. Findings from this study suggest the need for classroom curricular structures that encourage inquiry into language and learning.