Exploring Diversity through Multimodality, Narrative, and Dialogue

A Framework for Teacher Reflection

Mary B. McVee, Fenice B. Boyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317458470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Exploring Diversity through Multimodality, Narrative, and Dialogue awakens educators to the ways in which values, beliefs, language use, culture, identity, social class, race, and other factors filter approaches to teaching and expectations for students. Designed as a guide to help educators engage in dialogic interactions, the text articulates a theoretically grounded and research-based framework related to the use of personal narratives as learning tools. Educators are encouraged to consider their own positions, explore topics of diversity and social justice, and identify ways to better address student needs.

Drawing on theories from multiliteracies, multimodality, embodiment, and narrative, chapters are framed around book discussions and the use of personal narrative to define and provide examples of dialogic interactions. Unique to this book is its focus on

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• embodied learning and multimodality as well as myriad artifacts produced by educators;

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• listening, not just dialogic talk;

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• writing (both traditional print texts and multimodal composition) that supports dialogic interaction; and

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• not merely responding to literature but developing empathic responses to texts, students, and others whose opinions may differ from one's own viewpoints.

The specific techniques and approaches presented can be used within educational and professional development settings to help readers enhance their journey toward greater awareness of others and of their own beliefs and experiences that lead toward social justice for all.

1
Introduction

Narrative, Multimodality, and Dialogue in Teaching and Teacher Education

Teachers and teacher educators need opportunities to examine much of what is usually unexamined in the tightly braided relationships of language, culture, and power in schools and schooling. This kind of examination inevitably begins with our own histories as human beings and as educators; our own experiences as members of particular races, classes, and genders; and as children, parents, and teachers in the world.

(Cochran-Smith, 1995, p. 500)

“I never really thought there were poor White people in our city. I just assumed that poor people were Black.”

“My family is biracial, and we have people from different cultures in our family, so before this class, I ignored stuff about multiculturalism in my education classes. Because of my background I didn’t think I needed to reflect on how my cultural experiences affected my thinking about others or teaching. But it is important for all of us to talk about these issues, even me.

“I guess after all these readings about literacy and culture and multimodal projects, I am starting to really understand that race, gender, or economic class do not predict who you will be, but they can shape how people see you and the opportunities you sometimes get access to in the world.”

“It’s inspiring to hear stories from literacy teachers who really looked at their kids as people with identities and hopes for the future. I want to be that kind of teacher—the one who really listens and tries to understand my students as people and all of the things that students bring with them to school.”

These types of comments are typical of the insights that inservice and preservice teachers express during their university coursework as they engage in explorations of language, literacy, and culture in a course that we (Mary and Fenice) have each taught. In a globally connected world where images, music, video, news, and a host of real-time interactive social media vie for our attention, it may seem surprising that these students are not more aware of diverse cultural groups or how their own cultural lenses have shaped their perspectives. After all, any one of us can go online and chat with someone from India, play video games with someone in Australia, use the cloud to co-construct a project about education with someone in China, or watch a weekly podcast produced by African American youth. Yet, we have found in our teaching and research that often many teachers and teacher candidates have not had the opportunity to devote concentrated thought toward understanding various cultural groups and their literacies or even to their own cultural groups and literacies. The need for such explorations is one of the reasons why we wrote this book.

The Purpose of This Book

In this book we present a conceptual framework, along with activities and reflection points, to help teachers and various educational professionals engage in considerations of their own perspectives on literacy, language, and culture. The purpose is to assist all teachers in exploring their beliefs, values, questions, dispositions, and experiences related to diversities. Here, diversities refers generally to mother tongue, economic standing, social class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion and culture, and various forms of literacy.

A major goal of this book is to push readers to explore their own values, beliefs, and expectations for themselves as educators and to explore their expectations for children and youth in society at large and in their own classrooms. Readers will consider how personal beliefs and experiences can influence views of literacy, choice of pedagogical methods and assessments, and ultimately, how such positions affect the lives of children and youth in classrooms by limiting or enhancing learning opportunities.

Assisting teachers in explorations of their own beliefs is critical because many decades of research demonstrates that expectations and attitudes held by educators about what learners can achieve profoundly affects learning in K–12 settings and beyond (cf. Anyon, 1980; Rist, 1970; Scribner, Scribner, & Reyes, 1999; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 1991; Weis, Cipollone, & Jenkins, 2014). At the same time, there is also research that demonstrates that teacher educators can intervene to positively affect teacher expectations or biases (e.g., Florio-Ruane, 2001; Kumar & Hamer, 2013; Timperley & Phillips, 2003).

Teachers have a pivotal role to play in attempting to address some of the persistent challenges in education. For example, while there has been progress in many countries related to literacy achievement, schooling, and equity, the achievement gap—or what Hilliard (2003) has referred to as the “opportunity gap”—has stubbornly persisted across time, across multiple educational contexts and countries, and disproportionately across particular groups of people (e.g., indigenous peoples, involuntary immigrants, people of color). For democratic societies concerned about social equity and access to equal opportunity, these opportunity gaps are troubling. It is clear that no one solution exists to best create sustained change with regard to the opportunity gap, but regardless of the approach chosen, teachers’ beliefs about learners or positions toward them can never be factored out.

One of the key challenges we face in the US, and one that is shared by many other English-speaking countries, is that the demographics of children attending schools have shown a persistent trend. Children entering schools speak many languages other than English, come from multiple economic backgrounds, represent many shades of brown or black, and practice many religions and cultural traditions. At the same time, the cohort of classroom teachers remains white more than brown, more monolingual than multilingual, predominantly middle class, and more female than male. These demographic differences have led teacher educators to consider how to support the development of appropriate pedagogical practices, but also how to help teachers position learners as individuals with rich “funds of knowledge,” rather than deficiencies that need to be fixed (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). This challenge is at the heart of this book.

Just as teachers are admonished to view children as willing and eager learners possessing specific funds of knowledge, in this text we attempt to present teachers and teacher candidates in a parallel manner. Teachers and teacher candidates are predominantly “competent learners who bring rich resources to their learning” (Lowenstein, 2009, p. 197). At times in this book, readers will see examples of these educators’ struggle to connect, to engage, or to explore, but we believe that in all but the rarest exceptions, teachers come to their university classrooms or professional development experiences willing to learn and to build upon whatever funds of knowledge they possess. This book is our attempt to work with teachers in the same respectful but challenging manner in which we would work with children or youth.

We develop our conceptual framework within the Book Club model of adult peer discussion following the work of Florio-Ruane (2001) and Raphael (e. g., Raphael & McMahon, 1994; McMahon, Raphael, Goatley, & Pardo, 1997; Raphael, Pardo, & Highfield, 2002). Book Club serves as a context for dialogic interactions to address what we are most concerned about in the literacy and teacher education fields—empowering preservice and inservice teachers to examine and to be better informed about the nexus between literacy, language, and culture. Book Club also provides a framework to enact other practices that are essential to explorations of teaching and learning: personal narrative, dialogic interaction, and multimodal response.

Within our teaching and within this book, personal narratives—both published and students’ own stories—are valued not only as important but as an essential part of the learning process. Stories are ways in which we create and reshape ourselves (Bruner, 1986, 1990). Stories also defy limiting storylines or what Chimamanda Adichie (2009) refers to as the “danger of a single story” by introducing us to multiple viewpoints. Stories can engage us in dialogic interaction with our peers, characters in texts or even narrators (face-to-face or virtually). These narrators, for example, do not merely rely upon words to convey knowledge, but use multiple modes such as image, sound, gesture, and color (among other modes) to help create meaning. Using multiple modes (i.e., multimodality) to respond to texts within a Book Club setting is essential to provide multiple avenues for meaning making and to open up opportunities for exploration and engagement.

The Framework of This Book

Personal Narrative and Dialogic Interaction

In her book Language, Culture, and Teaching, Sonia Nieto (2002) noted that it was only recently that language, literacy, and culture became linked in the educational literature. While reviewing the scholarly literature and her own influential work, Nieto described how critical perspectives had often been absent in teacher education, noting:

…until recently, critical perspectives were almost entirely missing from treatments of reading, writing, language acquisition and use, and an in-depth understanding of race, culture, and ethnicity. If broached at all, differences were “celebrated,” typically in shallow ways…. But discussions of stratification and inequality were largely absent until recently in most teacher education courses. Despite their invisibility questions about equity and social justice are at the core of education. (p. 1)

Nieto used a reflective process similar to the process we hope our students will use. That is, Nieto grounded her introduction to these themes of language, culture, and teaching in her own personal narrative, using her story to illustrate tenets of sociocultural theories of language and learning.

Florio-Ruane (2001) took up this challenge of using narrative to make the less visible trappings of culture visible and to assist teachers in enacting a critical and deep engagement. She described work from a number of research studies in which she conceptualized, implemented, and studied the use of personal narrative and autobiography in Book Club discussions. Teacher participants considered these complex issues of culture, ethnicity, and equity from an ethnographic stance. Through these “ethnographic stories of self” (p. 3), Florio-Ruane found that participants began to explore identities, both their own and others, and to “probe more deeply their own formations and their relationships with others” (p. 5). Florio-Ruane boldly asserted that when “Viewed this way, telling and reading of stories of culture is not an educational frill. It is activity central to identifying the sources of our identities as Americans and, in the process, of identifying the sources of American inequality” (p. 26).

While this quote speaks directly to the American context, teacher educators and scholars from multiple countries continue to wrestle with how to explore these issues of identity and inequality. For example, consider the following range of studies from traditionally English-speaking countries: Australia (e.g., Allard & Santoro, 2006; Santoro, Kamler, & Reid, 2001), Canada (e.g., Strong-Wilson, 2007), England (e.g., Lander, 2011; Pearce, 2003), Ireland (e.g., Hagan & McGlynn, 2004) and the United States (e.g., McVee, Brock, & Glazier, 2011; Garratt & Segall, 2013).

Unfortunately, more than a decade after these powerful works by Nieto and Florio-Ruane were written, we find that the field of teacher education continues to struggle with how to assist teachers and other educational professionals in dialogic explorations around diversity. Despite the rich array of work that has been conducted in this area of teacher education (cf. Boyd & Brock, 2004; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2004; Fishman & McCarthy, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Lowenstein, 2009; Phillon, He, & Connelly, 2005; Rogers, Marshall, & Tyson, 2006), many of our students, even those who have already obtained initial teacher certification, report that they have not been provided with opportunities to deeply explore these inequities at any level of their education journeys. Those who indicate they have been exposed to some notions of multiculturalism suggest that their multicultural curricula were either the shallow celebrations of differences such as festivals, food, and traditions that Florio-Ruane, Nieto, and other scholars caution against, or generalized versions of multiculturalism to which these teacher candidates often found no personal connection.

While these multicultural explorations are perhaps most crucial to White teachers who are working with children from social, economic, linguistic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds that are not considered mainstream, scholars have found that all teachers, regardless of their background, need to explore the ties between their views, schooling, and literacy (e.g., Glazier, 2009; Santoro, 2007).

It is clear that many teacher educators—ourselves included—are still wrestling with how to implement the ideas so eloquently proposed by Nieto, Florio-Ruane, and other scholars. In this text we take up their work by employing personal narratives (Chapter 2) and dialogic interaction (Chapter 5).

Peer-Led Book Clubs for Educators

Although there are many feasible frameworks for exploring considerations of literacy and diversity, we have implemented a Book Club framework as developed by Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael & McMahon, 1994; McMahon et al., 1997) and as adapted by Florio-Ruane and Raphael in explorations of teachers learning about culture through autobiography (e.g., Florio-Ruane, 2001; Florio-Ruane, Raphael, Glazier, McVee, & Wallace, 1997). Chapter 3, coauthored with Taffy Raphael, provides a conceptual and structural overview of elements of Book Club.

Peer-led Book Clubs can be a powerful structure for learning. They allow time and space for students to engage in authentic dialogue and explorations around meaningful texts—their own and others. Texts can easily be adapted for context (e.g., working with teachers in an urban school with a high proportion of new immigrants and refugees; working with teacher candidates in a university-based literacy course; working with administrators and curriculum coaches seeking to lead a district initiative around diversity). More importantly, Book Club allows for dialogic engagement (Chapter 3), personal narrative and reflection (Chapter 2), and multimodal meaning making (Chapter 4). Book Club structures allow teacher educators to guide learning rather tha...