This question asks you, broadly, to share (in 1-2 paragraphs) What insights

This question asks you, broadly, to share (in 1-2 paragraphs)

What insights about writing literature reviews and growing into this work that you found within this chapter 2. Give specific examples from Mason’s Chapter 2 to support your perspective.

In addition to sharing any insights, you are encouraged to reflect upon how you see your own work as a scholar unfolding.

Note: Annie Mason’s dissertation is likely very different academic writing than you imagined when you first entered a doctoral program. However, I want to highlight two things: 1) It is very rigorous academically, and her work is highly respected; and 2) the use of narrative and, in particular, the foregrounding of one’s positionality and experience with one’s topic is not only becoming more common within many kinds of social science research, it is often expected, particularly within qualitative work.

Chapter 2

Relevant literature

After a summer fellowship spent working among social workers at a homeless shelter, I returned for my senior year at Grinnell College with a backpack full of notes about theories and experiences that would lead to a senior paper connecting Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction to homelessness and education in the United States. In that context, the link between theory and practice seemed clear. Theories, as I understood them then and understand them now, are tools that help us explain the world to ourselves. There was a lapse in this understanding, though, when, several years later, I chose to become a teacher. After much deliberation, I had decided on teaching elementary school as the most intellectually rigorous and personally satisfying way I could do good in the world. It had been that way for my mother, who described herself as an “everyday activist” in her career as an elementary school teacher. Teaching had also been described that way during my education courses at Grinnell; there, professors encouraged me to teach because it was hard, but I would enjoy the challenge, and it could change things for the better.

A generation apart, my mother and I entered teaching with similar goals, yet had very different experiences. The climate around public education changed so quickly that my classmates and I, considering careers just before the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, hardly saw it coming. Thus, after beginning my teaching career with what I thought was an unshakeable commitment to a career in the classroom, I found myself shaken. Returning to the United States after teaching third

grade in Guatemala, I now had notebooks full of unanswered questions that my new position as an early childhood teacher was not affording me the time or intellectual space to explore. I was deeply troubled by how global and domestic injustices played out in classrooms and communities everywhere, yet it seemed no mechanism existed to help me explore answers to my questions. Meanwhile, I felt the popular shift in perceptions about teaching shape the ways we talked about ourselves as educators; I felt like I was among the last of a dying breed.

Looking back with new eyes, of course I can see the story differently. I left my teacher preparation program with a sense that I was ready for anything: so well prepared, in fact, that the arrogance of moving to work in a foreign country where I was only a beginner in the dominant language was lost on me. Armed with a social justice orientation and the “best practices” in fashion at the time, I felt certain I could meet the social and academic needs of twenty-six eight and nine-year-olds whose daily lives bore striking differences to my own. I was lucky that the school community was a forgiving one, or had seen my type enough times to know that eventually I would come around. As I see it today, guided by those teachers and families, I stumbled across some of the basic building blocks of culturally relevant pedagogy.

Acknowledging the inequitable patterns in how society shapes us with regard to dimensions of identity such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, culturally relevant pedagogy attempts to interrupt the reproduction of inequities via schooling by inviting educators to approach curriculum and teaching with students and their realities at the center. The need for such interruptions, particularly in the face of an overwhelmingly

monolingual, monocultural, white female teaching force entering an increasingly diverse school system, is exhaustively documented (e.g., Abbate-Vaughn, 2008; K. Au, et al., 2008; Nieto, 2009) and thus accepted as a given in this dissertation. This predominately white middle-class teaching force tends to share similar historical memories of white and middle-class school experiences that are no longer the norm in U.S. public schools.

My theoretical guides in the design and analysis of this dissertation research contribute to our understanding of contextual factors that can be missed in the study of discrete classroom practices. Beginning with my own intellectual roots in educational anthropology and sociology, I draw from a theoretical framework that helps me harness the particular to gain a clearer view of the general. Specifically, with support from sociologists concerned with culture (Bourdieu, 1977; 1984), educational anthropology has advanced deeper understandings of the relationships between culture and schooling (e.g., K. Au & Jordan, 1981; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1987). This work provides the foundation for discussions of how culturally relevant pedagogy (e.g., Ladson-Billings 1995a; Delpit, 1988; Gay, 2002), a theory that is unique in its efforts to engage with the space between theory and practice, can serve transformative goals through education. Thus, I begin the literature review with a description of CRP’s theoretical underpinnings in sociology and anthropology of education, followed by a description of CRP itself and then discussions of literature explicating (1) how teachers develop CRP and (2) the challenges faced by teachers as they engage with this work. This review establishes grounding for the interpretive work to come in the following chapters, in which CRP figures in two distinct ways: as the theoretical backdrop to Pioneer City’s

transformation and as the body of work I aim to push forward in teacher education and professional development.

What research says about culture and schools that led to the theory of CRP As I suggested in the introduction to this chapter, CRP is a way of thinking about teaching and learning that cannot be “discovered” or created in isolation. Aside from those basic building blocks I can see myself, in retrospect, having used in my Guatemalan classroom, CRP draws on, expands, and sometimes challenges a rich tradition of sociological and anthropological research on the relationship between culture and schooling. What follows are brief introductions to important concepts in the historical development of CRP.

Social reproduction. Anthropologists and sociologists of education are tasked with unraveling the complicated ways that cultures interact with schooling (Pollock, 2008). Concepts that are foundational to this discussion include social reproduction and cultural capital. A body of theory on social reproduction (e.g., Bourdieu, 1984) applied to educational settings makes the case that we are sorted through schooling according to a raced and classed taxonomy that is incompatible with notions of equal opportunity or schooling as a social equalizer. Cultural capital, one among four forms of capital that Bourdieu first described (the others include economic, social, and symbolic capital), can be described as resources people possess and can draw on to advance their contextualized status positions (Bourdieu, 1977). Schools offer a compelling setting to explore questions about the flow of cultural capital because of the school’s role as part of an institutional network “through which social groups are given legitimacy and through which social and

cultural ideologies are built, recreated, and maintained” (Apple & Weis, 1983, p. 5). Bourdieu’s descriptions focused specifically on the reproduction of social class, but the arguments fit smoothly into discussions of advantages based on race, as well. While all children come to school with vast knowledge that is valued in their home and community environments, the fact that white middle-class children are more likely to experience home lives that are congruent with the expectations of school results in what Lareau (2003) calls the “transmission of differential advantages” (p. 5). These advantages exist in society at large and are continually reinforced through schooling. In other words, students with cultural capital (Lareau, 1987) know how to navigate the unwritten codes and expectations for their conduct in school. This means that students who do not possess this cultural capital need to engage in an extra layer of learning, first mastering the rules of school in order to access academic content. Building on this work, Lewis (2003) describes social reproduction as “a set of interactions in which the racialized social system is reproduced at least partly through processes of schooling” (p.156).

However, school-based learning is only a piece of the whole picture of a child’s intellectual life. In her ethnography Unequal Childhoods, Lareau (2003) identified two “cultural logics of child rearing” (p. 3) that begin at home and impact how children might experience their relationships with institutions such as the school. Lareau’s work provides an example of how social reproduction can work in schools when the institution is not attentive to how its practices and policies are oriented toward the habitus, or typical ways of being and acting, of the dominant group.

The maps for understanding social life provided by theories of social reproduction

are incomplete, however. For example, resistance theories from educational anthropology (e.g., Fordham & Ogbu, 1986, discussed further below) have critiqued their social determinism. Indeed, if we accepted social reproduction at face value, structural constraints on individuals would inevitably stunt their growth. For example, a strict reading of Lareau’s (2003) work might lead one to frame a working-class third grader as irreversibly constrained by class status, and therefore unable to attain the cultural capital that her middle-class peers gathered via their upbringing. Such a deterministic stance would impede movement within social positions, and could cause or bolster teachers’ negative attitudes about marginalized students’ behaviors and potentials. Without the possibility of movement, education would serve as nothing but an instrument of the status quo.

Li’s work adds depth to the body of work on social reproduction through schooling because she recognizes that individuals and institutions interact in multidirectional relationships. In Culturally contested pedagogies (2008), Li explains her central assumption that access to cultural capital predicts a student’s ability to succeed in school, where middle and upper-middle class cultural values and behaviors are privileged. Thus, social inequality endures. Li’s work brings often unheard voices from the margin to the center by examining how literacies expressed in home life intersect with school experiences, and by exposing the role that powerful institutions (such as schools) play in shaping families’ choices and opportunities.

The failure to acknowledge that a growing number of students have to make cultural shifts to succeed in school devalues these students’ experiences and

communicates to them that it is their fault if they cannot devise a way to succeed in that system. Meanwhile, dominance becomes further entrenched as we continue to reproduce inequitable power relationships. As described later in this chapter, CRP’s view that school is often structured in a way that normalizes the rules and discourses of dominant society goes beyond just acknowledging the extra work marginalized students must undertake to negotiate a coherent identity among home, community, and school. Roots in anthropology of education. The work of educational anthropologists underpins CRP, beginning in the early 1980s with various studies of how educators might address “mismatches” between home and school culture (e.g., K. Au & Jordan, 1981; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1987). In what looks like a linguistic tornado, in retrospect, the key descriptors used in these anthropologists’ work shifted significantly, but the strategies themselves primarily and consistently focused on incorporating students’ home languages in academic instruction: Kathy Au and Jordan (1981) described their work with native Hawaiian students as culturally appropriate, while Mohatt and Erickson (1981) referred to similar strategies with Native American students as cultural congruence. All of these approaches have since been criticized for the way they privilege dominant perspectives and seem to imply that teachers must shift their work in the direction of difference only to a limited extent (Ladson-Billings, 1995b). Culturally compatible teaching (Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1987) works from a similar model, inviting educators to recognize students’ backgrounds in order to bring “culturally different” students closer to the mainstream. Stretching these ideas somewhat, Erickson and Mohatt (1982) introduced a new way of viewing the relationship between schooling and culture

with culturally responsive teaching, which implies that educators must at least position themselves in response to cultural messages they learn to recognize in their students. In another development in the “mismatch” theories of educational anthropology, the “funds of knowledge” approach challenges teachers of young culturally and linguistically diverse students to view themselves as students of their students’ backgrounds. By conducting home visits and interviews with family members, elementary teachers can learn about the knowledge their students bring from home to the classroom, and classroom activities can then be planned to create a better match between home and school learning (Moll, et. al, 1991). Dworin (2006) exemplifies this in his work with bilingual Latino fourth graders. He describes a shift in power that results when teachers give students space to begin with their own stories and use their native languages and cultures as a way to connect with, and contribute to, the expectations of school. A more complex view. Like Ladson-Billings (1995b), Villegas (1988), and Irvine (1990), I am concerned with the loss of contextualization when ethnographic work is limited to either micro or macro-level interactions only. As I discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, the simplest version of a story can be perilously incomplete. Similarly, in Pollock’s (2008) description of how popular descriptions of culture “dangerously oversimplify the social processes, interactions, and practices that create disparate outcomes for children” (p. 369), she emphasizes educational anthropology’s goal of avoiding generalized, concrete, or static descriptions of how certain categories of students typically approach school:

Shallow analyses of ‘culture’ that purport to describe only how a ‘group’s’ parents

train its children blame a reduced set of actors, behaviors, and processes for educational outcomes, and they include a reduced set of actors and actions in a reduced set of projects for educational improvement” (Pollock, 2008, p. 369). Later, she continues:

Anthropologists of education know that patterns in the distribution of opportunity to children [in schools and classrooms] are human-made (and in that sense, cultural) rather than natural or random. We know too that the opportunities provided and denied in schools often align with existing inequalities in the surrounding society” (Pollock, 2008, p. 374).

Thus, studies concerned primarily with either schools or their contexts must be able to shift between and draw from observations at micro, meso, and macro levels. As the next sections will show, culturally relevant teachers see all students as possessing great potential, while acknowledging that society does not always reward marginalized people for their hard work. This view marks a step beyond explanations for racial variation in academic outcomes that either over-emphasize structural barriers (e.g., Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu, 1987) or focus too intently on the role of individuals in working around barriers without addressing the structure itself (e.g. K. Au, 1980). More recently, Darling-Hammond and Bransford (2005), among others, advocate “adaptive expertise,” which offers a construct of the flexible and responsive classroom teacher. This construct does not challenge the inequities upon which it relies; in other words, an adaptive expert is always ready to respond when a student deviates from the norm, but the norm is accepted as such in the form of “best practices” or a sense of the routine work

of teaching. Adaptive expertise may be a helpful move in this direction, but at present it fails to disrupt hegemony in teaching and teacher education, much in the way that early educational anthropology perspectives did before CRP.

Again, reflecting common assumptions about who and what is normal in school settings, there is still literature in the field that frames culture as something that white teachers must study in order to better connect with students of color. For example, Brown-Jeffy and Cooper (2011) continue pointing to “cultural discontinuity” (p. 66) between teachers and their students as the primary barrier to cultural competence. In this conception, cultural competence would matter less for a white teacher working with white students, because as a racial insider, the white teacher would already possess the cultural toolkit to connect with white students. In contrast, Kathy Au (2006), who conducts literacy research with native Hawaiian elementary school students, tells in her more recent work of white teachers making space for changes in the discursive style used in whole-class instruction. When they adapt to the conversation patterns from students’ home communities, Au argues, culturally relevant pedagogues combat cultural discontinuity by acknowledging differences between school and home cultures while also validating both. Au extends this notion to language use as a whole, suggesting that learning and language acquisition are enhanced if students receive native language support along with instruction in the second language (K. Au, 2006). CRP offers opportunities to acknowledge conceptions about cultural discontinuity such as these, but also moves beyond them by decentering dominant perspectives about, and attempting to disrupt socially reproductive processes through, schooling.

“Success” is key among the layers of school life that can be difficult for marginalized students to access. This notion is rooted in theories of social reproduction that describe a self-perpetuating cycle that continually regenerates patterns of dominance and marginalization (e.g., Bourdieu, 1984; Lareau, 1999). Disrupting this reproductive process by identifying strategies for supporting marginalized students is particularly important at the elementary school level, considering that the formative nature of school experiences at this stage can shape lifelong attitudes and trajectories (Li, 2005). Within this social and cultural context comes the basic fact that students who find their community norms and discourses underrepresented in school life are also unlikely to see their personal interests reflected in curriculum and pedagogy. In the following section, I describe how CRP grew from this research critiquing the ways that schools privilege dominant culture and thus deepen the marginalization of the cultures, voices, and experiences of students of color.

Culturally relevant pedagogy

Conceptions of social reproduction and cultural capital come into sharp relief when a marginalized child enters any institution of the dominant culture: in the case of this dissertation, school. To study school through these lenses, we need to be able to maneuver between the schooling process and its context, viewing school as embedded within the social structures surrounding it. Culturally relevant pedagogy offers one such framework. Following this introduction to the development of CRP itself, I provide brief illustrations of how its three components (academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness) have been addressed in literature related to elementary

schools, leading toward a discussion of successes and some challenges in developing CRP in schools and classrooms with young children.

Theorists of CRP, like their predecessors and colleagues in the previous section, acknowledge that generations of power imbalances have created constraints that marginalized3 children face every day. CRP, as described by Ladson-Billings and summarized above, has three aims: to “produce students who can achieve academically, produce students who demonstrate cultural competence, and develop students who can both understand and critique the existing social order” (Ladson-Billings, 1995b, p. 474). Educators who acknowledge the political nature of teaching are making pedagogical shifts toward granting students “the right to grapple with learning challenges from the point of strength and relevance found in their own cultural frames of references” (Gay, 2000, p. 114).

Ladson-Billings began with Hill Collins’ Black feminist epistemology (1990) as a lens through which to view effective teachers of African American elementary school students, and from there built the foundation for her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. Collins summarizes the four dimensions of black feminist epistemology as follows:

-Lived experience as criterion of meaning

-The use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims

-The ethics of caring

-The ethic of personal accountability

3 Because of the complexity of social life explored in this study, I chose the term “marginalized students” instead of “students of color,” or an explicitly racial term, to include the other dimensions of identity that can marginalize elementary school students.

(Collins, 1990, p. 275)

Both Ladson-Billings (1995a; 1995b) and Delpit (1988) were trained in anthropology and thus see race and culture as important factors in children’s school experiences. Ladson-Billings (1995a) argues that efforts toward culturally relevant pedagogy should be viewed as a way of being as opposed to a way of doing education. It is important, then, for culturally relevant pedagogues to resist the urge to “strategize” our way into CRP and instead take on CRP as an ethical position. This important distinction has often been missed in translation to research and practice. For example, one CRP study concludes with a 19-item checklist that describes helpful strategies for building community in elementary school classrooms (Sanchez, 2008). Other studies rely on rating scales or measurement instruments that purport to determine whether or how well a teacher is doing CRP (e.g., Mueller & O’Connor, 2007). While many educators will understand the allure of an easy-to-digest model, approaches like this miss the mark in framing a checklist as a replicable way to do CRP (see Sleeter, 2012, for a similar critique). In fact, coming to be culturally relevant is a far more personal, iterative, long term, and difficult-to-define process: “because of the centrality of context to culturally responsive pedagogy, researchers can not skip over the task of grounding what it means in the context being studied” (Sleeter, 2012, p. 15).

According to Ladson-Billings (1995a), suggesting that teachers use the same strategies regardless of cultural context is undemocratic, and we should prepare new teachers to address this injustice via culturally relevant pedagogy. Delpit (1988) agrees that society is antagonistic toward students of color, describing how a culture of power

maintains and reproduces this antagonism. These scholars illustrate that the status quo– teaching students that anyone can succeed if they work hard enough–reproduces a system that was already set up in ways that advantage white children and marginalize students of color. This is a particularly salient concern in a socially reproductive (Bourdieu, 1977) education system that continually confuses equality (providing identical resources regardless of context) with equity (providing particular resources depending upon context; Nieto, 2006). Meanwhile, these practices are subtractive, as they devalue students’ out-of-school selves (Valenzuela, 1999). Implied in each of these messages is a belief that teaching and learning are not politically neutral endeavors (Giroux, 1988). One way CRP moves beyond these critiques is by placing students’ interests, lives, histories, and cultures at the center of their school experiences, making school relevant while showing that all knowledges matter.

Academic achievement. Many CRP scholars acknowledge the flaws of using achievement test data to assess student learning. Ladson-Billings herself has lamented that she wishes she would have chosen student learning instead of academic achievement because of how, since her initial publications (1995a; 1995b), achievement has been taken up so narrowly and defined in relation to standardized test scores. Nevertheless, academic success is complicated to measure without straightforward data from achievement tests. CRP scholars, like our colleagues in critical pedagogy (e.g., Duncan Andrade & Morrell, 2008), thus face the difficult task of often having to rely on measures we know to be faulty in order to build the arguments we want to make (see Schultz, 2008 and Chapter 4 for further analysis). Thus, much of the literature on CRP that addresses

academic success takes a long-range view. Brown-Jeffy and Cooper (2011), for example, argue that CRP is about changing the learning environment to better reflect students’ cultural orientations, and that this will, in time, amount to increased academic achievement. They refer to “high expectations for all” (2011, p. 72), thus acknowledging a goal of academic success but not describing what it looks like for young children whose school experiences have been shaped by the education debt. Likewise, Howard (2003) suggests that CRP can be difficult to argue for in data-driven environments because its academic outcomes may not be immediate. This focus on the long term can make the specifics of academic achievement via CRP difficult to define, yet it is important for CRP to not get swept up by the achievement discourse that is so antithetical to its transformative aims.

Nonetheless, when researchers working with elementary school students and teachers focus on within-classroom measures, they can often attribute increases in marginalized students’ academic achievement to culturally relevant approaches to teaching and learning. For example, Kathy Au (2001) describes increases in native Hawaiian elementary school students’ literacy levels when their teachers devised activities that drew from students’ home values and activities. Schultz’s (2008) students scored considerably better on standardized achievement tests during a year of culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy, even though they spent no time at all preparing explicitly for those tests.

A deeper view of CRP encourages us to view academic achievement as the result of interactions between the individual student and his contexts. Also, since academic

rigor contributes to achievement, culturally relevant curriculum design is more than a series of single, disconnected lessons. As Ullucci writes, “potentially trite activities gain richness when they are embedded in extended studies of a topic, and that study goes beyond coverage and addresses issues of equity, fairness, justice, and/or bias” (Ullucci, 2011, p. 396).

Cultural competence. CRP requires teachers to work with students as they cultivate abilities to navigate the culture of power without compromising their cultural identities (Delpit, 2002). This way of viewing cultural competence rejects static definitions of culture, acknowledges the fluid nature of both culture and identity, and welcomes differences as resources on which to capitalize in the classroom (Lee, 2010). Metzger (2011) remarks that, “culture is about experiences and community and therefore CRP begins with understanding what the experiences of our students are like and the communities from which they come” (p. 7). Building cultural competence via CRP, then, involves individual work on the part of the teacher as well as pedagogical work to be carried out in classrooms and communities. Buehler, Gore, Dallavis, and Haviland (2009) suggest that in order to keep students at the center of CRP, cultural competence requires much more attention in teacher preparation and professional development. Sociopolitical consciousness. Sociopolitical consciousness involves one’s awareness of the social injustices that pervade our lives because of unequal power relations. People who are sociopolitically conscious take a complicated view of life in society, recognizing the social and the political in every aspect. Freire’s work around sociopolitical

consciousness4 reminds us of two things: that the oppressors and the oppressed are engaged in the same struggle for liberation (1970), and that with sociopolitical consciousness comes the ability to transform the reality within which we all struggle (1974).

Sociopolitical consciousness offers a way for marginalized students to view themselves as thinkers and leaders, rather than only as future workers (Freire, 1974). Esposito and Swain (2009) define sociopolitical consciousness as an “awareness of the symbiotic relationship between the social and political factors that affect society” (p. 38). When we locate ourselves in those social and political contexts via CRP, sociopolitical consciousness carries with it a demand that we work beyond the too common approach of simply raising awareness about the unjust workings of the world (McKinley, 2006) and actually encourage students (and ourselves) to be agents of change. Sociopolitical consciousness is particularly complicated because it is an individual endeavor that also involves a deep engagement with other individuals and with society. CRP successes

A review of literature describing ways that individuals and groups of educators have developed culturally relevant pedagogy in their settings helps to situate this study. Specifically, I am interested in teachers’ successes and challenges in the process of bringing this theory to classrooms and schools. This section primarily includes studies that refer directly to CRP as the teachers’ goal, but also includes several that draw more broadly on critical approaches to teaching and learning. All of the studies reviewed here

4 Freire’s terminology is translated to English as critical consciousness. I do not take issue with this translation, but simply prefer the nods to social life and politics in the term used in this dissertation.

share a focus on critical, creative thinking by both the students and the teachers. Interestingly, while I wanted to review literature at both the micro (classroom) and meso (district) levels of interaction with CRP, very few studies have considered CRP at the district level (e.g., Patton, 2011).

Ladson-Billings (2001) states that, “In the classroom of a culturally relevant teacher, the students know exactly what success entails. They receive a variety of information from the teacher about what matters academically” (p. 75). From this angle, academic success can be measured in multiple ways, including work samples, exams, performance assessments, or informal assessments. For example, in a description of how culturally relevant teachers promote academic success for working class African American students in The Dreamkeepers (1994), Ladson-Billings tells of one second grade teacher who bookends the daily schedule with conversations about how each child was successful at school that day. Sometimes a student will share a social skill they felt good about that day, and another day the same child might tell about doing well on a math assignment. With support from their teacher, these young people learn to frame, and claim ownership of, their academic and nonacademic successes.

CRP can be viewed as a move toward conceiving of elementary school children as knowers who not only consume, but can also produce new knowledge. For example, the African American boys in Boutte and Hille’s (2006) study showed academic gains when their third grade teacher put them in charge of a long-term unit based on black barbershops. When success is viewed through the lens of academic autonomy, we can encourage students to more fully inhabit themselves by making choices about when and

how to take responsibility for their school learning (Ladson-Billings, 2001). Katrina Jocson (2008) documented June Jordan’s “Poetry for the People,” or “P4P,” after-school literacy program. P4P’s pedagogical strategies provided urban high school students with a venue to express and further develop social consciousness. The program’s practice-process-product framework allowed students to view what may have begun as personal revelations through poetry as something that, through publication and/or performance, might connect with others’ experiences. This extension of the personal to the social had varying effects; for some students it remained a private forum that reflected their engagements with the social world, while for others it became a medium through which they engaged outward. For one student in particular, social consciousness flowed through and beyond his poetry, and his performances became an avenue to invite others to join in a call to action. Whether it served as the reflection or the reflector, poetry through P4P seems to have activated the social consciousness of each of the focal students. While this work was conducted with high school students, the question of the best scenarios for developing sociopolitical consciousness is similarly relevant in elementary settings.

In their study of Canadian elementary and secondary teachers, Parhar and Sensoy (2011) found that those who were identified as culturally relevant “used the curriculum as an entry point to instilling a sense of critical awareness” (p. 198). They worked with the mandated curriculum to make it relevant to their students. This study sought to confirm and extend the original tenets of CRP, and determined that CRP demands that teachers allow for shared ownership of school-related decisions with families and other school

staff, and requires ongoing professional development to support teachers (Parhar & Sensoy, 2011).

Teachers in these studies framed critical thinking as a primary goal of activating their students’ sociopolitical consciousness, especially regarding how school curricula can reflect social injustices. In their profiles of elementary school teachers who self identified as social justice educators, Esposito and Swain (2009) describe a process of interrupting the messages of social reproduction that convince dominant and marginalized students of their rightful places in society. Silva (2010) found that a first grade teacher’s transgressive approach to teaching sociopolitical consciousness permitted her students to take on identity orientations aimed toward social change.

Siedl (2007) found that engaging preservice teachers in an intensive community experience contributed to their developing bicultural identities, which she determined is necessary for teachers to develop culturally relevant pedagogy. The preservice teachers’ immersion in an African-American community context was coupled with intensive and interactive reflection, through which the teacher educator and a small number of students

worked together to read, review, and revise their stories about working toward their personalized versions of culturally relevant pedagogy.

The power of such intensive and supportive relationships between teacher educators and teachers learning to develop CRP is clear in Hefflin’s (2002) work. Through conversation and study with Hefflin, a colleague finds new ways to engage students by making literature and discussion choices based on her students’ knowledges and experience as African-Americans. This study is also, however, an example of CRP

that does not attend to sociopolitical consciousness, but instead focuses more simply on increasing engagement and achievement by de-centering white and middle-class perspectives in school curricula.

Schultz and his fifth graders from the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago offer an illuminating example of CRP, where the drive for justice comes first and other goals fall into place as a result (Schultz, 2007; 2008). For this to happen, Schultz (2008) describes plainly, “the role of the teacher is to provide opportunity and space to students” (p. 4). In his case, this meant introducing his class to the idea that they could design a project aimed at improving something in their school community. After brainstorming, the class realized that many of their ideas were connected to a need to replace their dilapidated school building, and so this became the focus of an all-encompassing yearlong effort. As Schultz learned to step back and reconsider his role as a guide to his students, meaningfulness grew from students’ control and ownership of the curriculum (Schultz, 2008). The authenticity of the project’s tasks, rooted completely in the children’s lives, allowed them to progress beyond grade-level expectations. Test scores and attendance rates increased, and the need for discipline decreased (Schultz, 2008). Actual change was at the root of these students’ goals, not charity. It is important to note, as well, that Schultz drew from the intellectual and social resources provided to him as a graduate student while he and his students engaged in this project (Schultz, 2008); CRP requires time, commitment, reflection, and support.

Culturally relevant teachers also create space within standards and mandates to place students’ perspectives at the center of the curriculum. Schultz emphasizes that

viewing curricula and teaching this way requires teachers to see themselves as constantly theorizing their practice. Indeed, he notes that, as he took on this student-centered approach to teaching, he had to reconsider the role of lesson planning. While he went in to every lesson with countless ideas for how things might go, Schultz describes having to let go of the idea that his lesson plan would actually dictate how things would go. To be truly student-centered, he had to be prepared for any number of scenarios, and he wrote up detailed and reflective “lesson plans” to submit to school administration after the fact. By widening the available routes to academic achievement, his students developed a remarkable sense of ownership of their school experiences while still demonstrating formally-measurable achievement gains (Schultz, 2008). Sociopolitical consciousness was at the absolute root of this work.

Challenges in pursuit of CRP

CRP’s instrumental role in increasing academic outcomes for students of color is a slippery target, which may also help to explain the dearth of evidence linking CRP to measurable increases in elementary school student achievement. This is a primary challenge that educators seem to face in their efforts to develop CRP. The studies reviewed here tend to measure success by formative and informal assessment measures rather than by attempting to link the students’ experiences with CRP to standardized test scores. In addition, because CRP tends to be enacted on an individual classroom level and elementary school students tend to have the same teacher for only one year, it would be difficult to isolate the relationship between a culturally relevant approach to teaching and learning and increases in standardized student achievement.

When approached too shallowly, CRP can present dangers. For example, Abbate Vaughn (2008) describes a teacher education program that uses children’s literature to initiate discussions about the experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse students. While the preservice teachers do gain exposure to multicultural literature, the text choices feature individual success stories but fail to situate the individuals within a sociocultural context; thus, the message can be misconstrued as evidence that anyone can succeed, so our education system must be equitable.

The white elementary school teacher in Hyland’s (2009) study learned to frame knowledge in innovative ways and to diminish the fallacy of the omniscient teacher by acknowledging her own instances of not-knowing. She also, however, struggled to connect with black parents and became defensive of her attempts at making meaningful connections in the African-American community. While these authentic relationships in and with communities are more frequently described in CRP literature about high school and community settings (e.g., Duncan-Andrade, 2004; 2010), Schultz’s work is one notable exception. After one year of teaching fifth grade at an elementary school in Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects, Schultz, a white man, realized he was not connecting with his African American students or their families (Schultz, 2007; 2008). The project described in the previous section was initiated by Schultz’s realization that it was him and his approach to curriculum and pedagogy that needed to change. Dutro, Kazemi, Balf, and Lin (2008), a team comprised of researchers and an elementary school teacher, investigated how cultural relevance was pursued in one diverse classroom. These authors highlight an extended unit during which fourth and fifth

graders conducted interviews and other forms of research to create displays of their cultural identities. The assignment required students to identify themselves with a single cultural identity (if the student was both African-American and white, for example, she would choose to focus on either her African or European ancestry), which, the teacher noted later, led to the mistaken conflation of culture and country. Nonetheless, the authors defined the project as reinforcing cultural competence because “children were asked to bring their home experiences and cultural backgrounds explicitly into a classroom” (Dutro et al., 2008, p. 270). We must consider, though, what a lesson like this truly communicated to students about culture and what it means to be culturally competent. For example, choosing a single culture and representing it visually may reinforce messages that culture is unitary and fixed, or that one’s daily life is necessarily shaped by one’s historical ancestry.

CRP scholars frequently acknowledge the risks associated with developing CRP. Epstein and Oyler (2008) tell of a first grade teacher’s complicated work managing an accountability-focused mandated curriculum while working toward building sociopolitical consciousness among young children. This is promising because, despite being criticized for making what were construed as overly political moves in the classroom, the teacher acknowledges the limitations of the present system while working to change it. Further studies should look more deeply at how CRP can be both politically progressive and work from within to transform the mainstream.

On the other hand, risk can also refer to the culturally relevant educator’s ability to interrogate his or her own work around sociopolitical consciousness. Young (2010)

found that several of the elementary educators in her study struggled to integrate sociopolitical consciousness into their understanding of a pedagogical framework that emphasizes academic achievement. One white teacher in particular demonstrated reluctance to discuss social injustice with her racially diverse elementary school students, citing what she perceived as young children’s limited ability to perceive oppression. Importantly, Howard (2003) makes a case for teacher education and professional development to do a better job addressing these issues throughout teachers’ careers; indeed, sociopolitical consciousness cannot be developed in students if their teachers have not done this work themselves.

Because of its local situatedness, we cannot rely on one success story to provide a road map for how to “do” CRP in other contexts (e.g., McKinley, 2006). Likewise, it is important to note that sociopolitical consciousness is going to have different faces in different communities. Epstein and Oyler (2008) describe the coming-to-consciousness of a group of middle-class, white elementary school students who learned big lessons about global injustice. In their case, the authors believed that unjust aspects of life in society had to be brought into the classroom to make them real for the students, who had not previously seen themselves in such struggles.

Sociopolitical consciousness tends to be the least-studied component of CRP (Morrison, Robbins, & Rose, 2008). Like CRP’s other two tenets, much of the work around CRP and sociopolitical consciousness frames it as something that students from the dominant society can develop in order to understand what life is like for marginalized people. For example, in Epstein and Oyler’s (2008) discussion of building solidarity

among first graders, a teacher and her students designed “social action” projects that grew organically from discussions about academic content. While the goal of this study is explicitly critical, the language around dominance so easily slips toward being focused primarily outward, from the benevolent toward the disenfranchised, and sociopolitical consciousness is positioned as only visible through social action. Certainly, building empathy for the plight of some “Other” can be an important component of CRP, and the study does demonstrate that empathy can be developed in young children through an awakening of sociopolitical consciousness via academic curriculum (Epstein & Oyler, 2008). However, a focus on the Other fails to engage with Freire’s (1970) claim that the oppressor and the oppressed are engaged in the same struggle for liberation. This notion of entangled struggles needs particular emphasis in predominately white settings where colorblind discourse dominates and community members may be suspicious of the relevance of race in the first place (Lewis, 2003).

Students of color and other marginalized students need to be walked through this stage of consciousness-raising less frequently, however. Milner (2010) shares one white teacher’s process of coming to know what his middle school students already knew about their positioning within dominant society. The teacher needed to rewrite his own scripts in order to honor his students’ lived experiences. Here again, CRP shows itself as difficult to both define and enact.

While the white teacher in Milner’s study made quick changes to become more culturally relevant, the challenge is not always so easily recognized in communities unaccustomed to racial and other forms of diversity. Describing how this can happen,

Garza and Crawford (2005) introduce the term hegemonic multiculturalism: The result of dissonance between a school’s desire to promote an inclusive and welcoming learning environment for their culturally and linguistically diverse students and the pervasive, yet persuasive, assimilation agenda that underlies instructional practices and programs designed to educate them. (p. 601)

In the prestigious suburban district they studied, Garza and Crawford determined that English learners there were “disciplined to emulate and internalize this [hegemonic multicultural] ideology” (p. 600). In other words, this study found dissonance between professed ideology and assimilationist practice among teachers.

Sleeter (2012) suggests that this agenda may be linked to broader trends in U.S. politics and education. Expressing concern with the role of neoliberal reforms in diminishing the presence and impact of culturally relevant approaches in United States schools, she suggests “political work to combat its marginalization due to persistent simplistic conceptions of what it means, and backlash prompted by fear of its potential to transform the existing social order” (p. 2).

Tying the educational process to the marketplace has implications that are antithetical to the aims of CRP. In particular, this leads us to value students based on their ability to contribute in a purely economic sense, which then ties curriculum and assessment too tightly to a way of thinking and being, with less space for creative problem solving or true engagement with the people, places, and ideas that make up our worlds. In addition, Sleeter (2012) argues that even when education reforms focus on reducing racial achievement gaps, the solutions they rely on still attempt to use a

“context-blind” (p. 4) approach to curriculum and instruction that was designed from a white, English-speaking perspective.

Ullucci (2011) investigated what she refers to as the translation process that occurs when new teachers attempt to draw on teacher education coursework in CRP. While I agree with her concern about engaging gaps between theory and practice, I argue that when this content is new to teachers (whether in-service or pre-service), the translation process may be premature. Just like we argue with CRP for younger students, teachers need a “hook” to place the tenets of CRP within their own understandings and experiences first, and then they can think about bringing those new understandings into their work in schools.

Finally, moving beyond the anthropological roots discussed above, Paris (2012) has most recently offered an astute critique of the terms relevant and responsive in these traditions, offering “culturally sustaining pedagogy” as a new development in the CRP literature:

The term culturally sustaining requires that our pedagogies be more than responsive of or relevant to the cultural experiences and practices of young people—it requires that they support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence. (p. 95)

Paris’ proposal, while not adequately attending to a critique of the social order, remains an important reminder that CRP’s ultimate goal is to decenter dominant narratives about what it means to succeed in school and society.

The present study within CRP literature

To engage with CRP among elementary school students, their teachers need to be able to take risks, as the white, female teacher in Hyland’s (2009) study did by acknowledging her need to understand her own racial identity better as she tried to improve her relationships with families of color. Perhaps more importantly, this fourth grade teacher reflected that teachers who want to ignite their students’ sociopolitical consciousness must be prepared and willing to take risks in the sense that CRP in general, and sociopolitical consciousness in particular, consists of transgressive acts toward dominant school culture. Novice teachers like the one in Hyland’s study may have the belief and motivation to build sociopolitical consciousness, but they may not feel they can take professional risks by modifying their curriculum and pedagogy. As a whole, the present literature on developing CRP in elementary settings is clear about the risks of engaging with CRP, but less clear on how these struggles play out in real settings, particularly in contexts where teachers in more than one classroom are trying to develop CRP at the same time. Perhaps this is because it is simply too hard a task to manage in the present educational climate, as Young (2010) suggests in her statement that sociopolitical consciousness can be raised in individual classrooms, but not on a systemic level when the education system already operates from what could be considered a sociopolitically dysconscious paradigm. Indeed, this concept undergirds the step that Pioneer City Schools took when they attempted to make aspects of CRP a part of their organizing framework for policy and practice. However, they reached an impasse in the process of institutionalizing something that is critical of institutions. This leaves

two options: Change the institution in response to the critique offered by CRP, or soften the critique so it fits within the constraints of the institution.

This dissertation makes contributions that address two key needs for additional scholarship around CRP in elementary school settings. First, on a broad and basic level, we need more studies that consider the relationship between CRP as a theoretical model and CRP as conceived and developed in real elementary school classrooms. Second, the theoretical model remains incomplete without a more robust consideration of what happens in the process of translation when a transformative theory meets a reproductive institution. Thus, I have paid particular attention to what may have contributed to this missing, critical element of CRP literature. I argue that a genuine culturally relevant pedagogy eluded them from the beginning because of the irresolvable tension between ideologies of excellence and equity, rooted in an unchanging notion of what success is and can be in public schooling and aided by an incomplete process of teacher education that addresses the contexts of school and society. In response, I see two primary areas of need: additional and deeper work toward helping teachers understand how oppression works in society, followed by work among educators at all levels toward making curriculum and teaching decisions that are informed by those understandings (Ullucci, 2011).

The perspective that U.S. society offers a level playing field for academic and other forms of success tends to hold tightly to its conception of democracy as dependent upon a shared set of information. In this view, education can be a great equalizer (e.g., Hirsch, 1987). Those of us who succeed have only ourselves to thank, and those who fail

have only themselves to blame. Such a claim, pervasive in the meritocratic structure and functioning of U.S. schooling, is dismissive of the ever-present effects of the systematic and systemic racism that have been part of the United States since its beginning. Culturally relevant pedagogy can and should be positioned as a transformative effort to reshape the role of education in society toward one that is liberatory for all students. As I discuss in Chapter 5, the need for these transformative efforts is just as great in predominately dominant communities as it is in predominately marginalized ones. Conclusion

Culturally relevant pedagogy is about power. Acknowledging and seeking to dismantle the many ways that power relationships structure life in school and society flies in the face of much public discourse around education, where success is marked by scores, and relationships rendered virtually irrelevant. While this makes CRP difficult to argue for and enact in schools, it is also what makes CRP worthwhile.

Along with power, CRP is about hope for equitable education. Borrowing from Duncan-Andrade (2010), my hope is a critical hope, or one to which I hold tightly as I recognize the struggle ahead. I take as my own point of hope a conversation I had with a faculty member in May 2011. At a curriculum development meeting for teacher education programs, I sat at a table with a group of faculty members. My task was to respond to their questions about proposed curriculum changes that would require teacher education candidates to engage in intensive writing and discussion to investigate several dimensions of their identities. This faculty member, with whom I had enjoyed a friendly, hello-in-the mailroom sort of relationship for several years, seemed to clam up the moment I started

talking about race and justice. When I asked about how his program area curriculum addresses race, he said that there is one textbook devoted to “multiculturalism” that some people use, but that he has never come across himself. Near the end of what had felt, until then, like a stunted conversation about addressing race and justice in teacher preparation, he suddenly opened up and said something along the lines of, “you know, we just need you to help us do this. I’m a [content area] person, and this hasn’t been part of my training or experience. It’s hard to give up what you know you’re good at to try something new, even when you know it will help us teach all students better.”

This conversation flooded my memory at a surprising moment later that summer on a woodsy drive with my husband and sons. To our left, the forest was hauntingly decimated, aside from some low-lying new growth hardly visible through the car windows. From the passenger’s side, though, was a verdant view of a storybook forest: a thick canopy teasing us with near-views of wildlife and purple, yellow, and red flora dotting the forest floor. The contrast confused and delighted our sons. Soon enough, my husband and I found ourselves stumbling to respond to some very detailed questions about the differences between forest fires and controlled burning, and why you would ever have to burn something down to make it come back stronger. After some fits and starts, I finally landed on a response. It is confusing, I told the boys, but when we want the whole forest to look strong, fresh, and green, it actually needs to be carefully burned down, unlocking the good nutrients that will find their way back into the soil while the others burn or float away in the air. We have to temporarily give up some of the beauty and life above the surface in order to gain something even better and deeper. Giving up

what you know “works,” whether it be the visual appeal of a lush forest or the automaticity of a tried-and-true approach to pedagogy, is never easy. But nothing worthwhile ever is.

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