Students\u27 Critical Meta-awareness in a Figured World of Achievement: Toward a Culturally Sustaining Stance in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research

Students\u27 academic experiences are often shaped by normalized conceptions of literacy that do not honor the interrelatedness of multiple identities, languages, and literacies. This qualitative case study in an urban middle school highlights students\u27 critical meta-awareness of their identities-in-practice in the figured world of their classroom via a narrative analysis of students\u27 writing, interviews, and focus group discussions. The authors focuses on students\u27 internalization and/or resistance within/beyond the curriculum as the basis for developing culturally sustaining stances toward curriculum, pedagogy, and research that actively disrupt cultural, ethnic, racial and epistemological hierarchies of power in academic contexts and beyond

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Critical Epistemologies: Rethinking Educational Research

Knowledges from academic and professional research-based institutions have long been valued over the organic intellectualism of those who are most affected by educational and social inequities. Participatory research recognizes what Antonio Gramsci described as “the intellectual and political power of ‘organic intellectuals’ from whom counter-hegemonic notions derive,” which presents a “fundamental challenge to what ... John Gaventa called ‘official knowledge’ as the sole legitimate claim to truth” (Fine et al., 2004, p. 4). Unlike positivist and postpositivist epistemological traditions and research methods that rely on the objectivity and expertise of university-sanctioned researchers (Isenhart & Jurow, 2011; Noffke, 1997), participatory action research (PAR) projects are collective investigations that rely on local knowledge, combined with the desire to take individual and/or collective action (Fine et al., 2004; McIntyre, 2000). PAR with youth (YPAR) engages in rigorous research inquiries and represents a radical effort in educational research to take inquiry-based knowledge production out of the sole hands of academic institutions and include the youth who directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand. In this essay, we outline the foundations of YPAR and examine the distinct epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical contributions of an interdisciplinary corpus of YPAR studies and scholarship. We outline the origins and disciplines of YPAR and make a case for its role in educational research; discuss its contributions to the field and the tensions and possibilities of YPAR across disciplines; and close by proposing a YPAR critical-epistemological framework that centers youth and their communities, alongside practitioners, scholars, and researchers, as knowledge producers and change agents for social justice

Identities-in-Practice in a Figured World of Achievement: Toward Curriculum and Pedagogies of Hope

In the current high stakes context of standardization and accountability, deficit perspectives about minoritized students are perpetuated by discourses of achievement that reproduce dominant raced, classed, and gendered norms in society. Discourses about equity, effort, and colorblindness shape figured worlds of achievement in which certain academic identities become available and function to position students as “achievers” or “non-achievers.” Focusing primarily on an assemblage of narratives from and about a “failing” student who “passes,” this article examines the interrelatedness of multiple identities, experiences of curriculum, and academic achievement of minoritized students in a selective urban middle school and conceptualizes identities-in-practice in figured worlds as a lens that can foster curricula and pedagogies of hope

Interest Convergence in Intergroup Education and Beyond: Rethinking Agendas in Multicultural Education

Intergroup movements in the United States in the 1920s-50s provided leadership to schools and communities grappling with rising racial and ethnic unrest. C. A. M. Banks (1996, 2004, 2005) argues that the conceptual limitations of the movement’s scholarship and its decline yield important lessons for multicultural educators. Building upon her work, I use Bell’s (1980) interest-convergence principle to analyze the movement’s successes and failures given the interests and values of prominent political, socioeconomic, and educational constituencies of the time. As an analytic lens, the interest-convergence principle simultaneously clarifies and complicates future agendas in multicultural education research, pedagogy, and curriculum

Resonancias de El Chavo del 8 en la niñez, educación y sociedad latinoamericana

Resonancias de El Chavo del 8 indaga en las imágenes sobre escolarización y niñez, latinoamericanidad y afectividad, medios de comunicación y clase, que emergen de las experiencias de visionado de la serie creada por el popular comediante Roberto Gómez Bolaño. Al explorar las conexiones entre los estudios de cultura visual y de curriculum transcultural, los ensayos que integran este volumen navegan en un espacio poético transnacional de convivencia con la cultura pop, de la que surgen nuevas vías de interpretación y formas de acercamiento al estudio de uno de los fenómenos globales producidos por la televisión latinoamericana. En efecto, no existen demasiadas instancias en las que un producto cultural se haya expandido a lo largo de toda Latinoamérica y más allá (El Chavo del 8 llegó a transmitirse en continentes tan alejados como Asia y África), dejando una huella que perduró durante décadas y entre generaciones. Este libro invita a una reflexión desde una perspectiva internacional y en clave rizomática en torno a las lecturas e interpretaciones de El Chavo del 8