Cultural Diversity and Discourse Practices in Grade Nine

Lynne V Wiltse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138425071
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315431079
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the classroom, knowledge is widely distributed among the students and teacher, but is difficult to share across linguistic and cultural barriers. Seeking paths across these barriers, Lynne Wiltse meticulously explores the question: What is the discourse frame in which students and teachers work? Situated in a grade nine multilingual classroom, her work provides a rich description of the research process in the classroom. At the same time, she draws the reader sequentially through the analysis, revealing inferences in increasing levels of abstraction within a framework of "communities of practice." She highlights issues related to second language acquisition, students' immigration experiences, teaching, and learning, and points the way toward multi-vocal dialogues and practices that can forge a path across cultural and linguistic divides.

Chapter 1
Beginning The Story: Introduction

Qualitative researchers are interested in telling, and are often consumed by the need to present their stories of research as an ongoing journey. Their writings must, therefore reflect the process of research—the character and foundational beliefs of the original conceptual framework as well as the evolving one, considerations on the stumblings, in-progress victories, insights and puzzlements of the researcher as the research unfolds, disclosure of the researcher’s stance and limitations as well as descriptions of the successes and failures of the ongoing stories of multiple meaning making. So, the process is the product. (Ely et al., 1997, p. 52)

Introducing the Research

When I read this particular paragraph, I could not help but wonder if the authors knew me. As the reader can appreciate from the prologue, my research story includes original and evolving conceptions, doubts and hopes, successes and failures. My initial preoccupation with the ways in which the cracks in the process might ruin the product for a time obscured in-progress insights. When I accepted the inevitability of imperfection and surrendered to the process, the light got in, illuminating previously unseen meanings in my study. So begins the story of my research process. In this section, I begin to position myself in relation to my research, starting with an explanation of how I came to do this particular study.

My original doctoral proposal was entitled, A Sociocultural Perspective on ESL [English as a Second Language] Students in Mainstream Classes. My interest in ESL students began when I conducted my master’s thesis research on Native language loss and revival in an Edmonton inner city school Native awareness class. My study emphasized the significance of first language maintenance to students’ identity formation. While doing the research, I met students from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds and began to note some comparisons between the Native students and those from other language minority backgrounds. As well, much of the reading I was doing during that period pertained to students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. I experienced this literature, which was primarily ‘sociocultural’ in nature, with a passion that astonished me. I knew, however, that the seed of my interest in minority language learner’s had been planted long before I ever returned to graduate school, planted by the Native students I taught for years in reserve community schools in British Columbia. My master’s thesis research was an attempt to situate my newfound academic learning in an actual educational setting.

When I finished my master’s degree, I accepted a teaching position in northern Alberta. At the time I had no intention of doing doctoral work; however, my path eventually wound its way back to the University of Alberta and, in turn, graduate school. The summer before I began my doctoral program, I was employed as a research assistant in the area of second language learning. While conducting a review of the literature, I came across an article (1992) by Kelleen Toohey, “We Teach English as a Second Language to Bilingual Students.” When I wrote my master’s thesis, her articles on Native language education had been invaluable for my work. In this article, she maintained that the deficit approach to ESL education is all too common-there is a tendency to define ESL students in terms of deficiency. I found myself making comparisons, based on years spent working with Aboriginal students: the generalizations and stereotypes, the focus on performance rather than capability, the likelihood that English would replace, rather than be added to, the first language. I felt angry and frustrated, but at the same time inspired and motivated.

The various strands of this story then came together, and I enrolled in a doctoral program in Language Arts education, intent on making the education of language minority students my focus. I was drawn to this topic because of the similarities to my work in Native language education, as well as to the differences. During my master’s program, I had agonized over whether I should, as a non-Native person, conduct research in a First Nations context. While I had reconciled that struggle enough to proceed, the discomfort remained. Although, in many respects, that is where my heart lay, I made a decision not to pursue further studies in the area of Aboriginal languages/education.¹

I began the program knowing that my research project would, in some way, highlight the learning experiences of ESL students. Two factors in particular helped me to refine my focus. During the first term of my doctoral program I was hired to work on a collaborative school-university action research project as a research facilitator to Coalfield School, an urban school often classified as inner city with a large number of ESL students.² The project had a double focus: 1) working with partner schools that were attempting to respond to very diverse local communities and student populations, and 2) the preparation of beginning teachers for culturally diverse classrooms. My experience with the project helped me to contextualize some of the literature I was reading at the time. For example, having taught primarily in rural Aboriginal communities, I was initially surprised by the title of Cummins and Camerons (1994) article, “The ESL IS the Mainstream” and the following excerpt from the Toronto Star: “Large numbers of non-English-speaking children make it impossible for most schools to withdraw students from regular programs to learn English. Try it, and as one board administrator said, it would be like withdrawing three-quarters of the population. Today, Metro teachers have become, by necessity, English-as-a-second-language teachers” (Ainsworth, 1988, B1).

At Coalfield School I was able to see for myself the veracity of these comments. Given the demographic trends, teacher education facilities have not adequately prepared mainstream classroom teachers who are now largely responsible for the education of ESL students. Having found myself to be ill prepared for my first teaching position in an isolated Native community, I strongly identified with this aspect of the project.

It was at this point that Kelleen Toohey made another appearance in my ongoing exploration, in the form of her article, “Learning English as a second language in kindergarten: A community of practice perspective” (1996). I had been introduced to ‘communities of practice’ near the end of my master’s program, through Lave and Wengers (1991) book, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. I had written briefly about communities of practice’ in the last chapter of my thesis, using the concept as a new way to think about ‘common ground’ between the school community and the home community of Native students. Toohey (1996) had used Lave and Wenger’s theoretical framework in an educational context of interest to me with mainstreamed ESL students. She writes: “Despite the fact that the majority of ESL students in Canadian schools are mainstreamed, …we have little Canadian research that describes in any detailed way the experiences of children who are undergoing integration, or the classes into which they are integrating” (p. 550).

Although in a different context, I had long been concerned with the challenges of ‘mainstreaming.’ My observations of the decreasing success of many of my Native students when they left the community school on the reserve to attend junior high in the public system left me wondering how to best integrate ‘non-mainstream’ students into mainstream environments. Toohey’s (1996) study set out to examine how students who began kindergarten not speaking English learned to be participants there, and how the presence of second language learner’s affected other participants in the school community. I had my dissertation topic—I would explore the integration of ESL students, using a community of practice framework. Toohey’s groundbreaking work in the area would serve as a model.

Research Purpose

I agree with Cummins (1996) that

human relationships are at the heart of schooling. The interactions that take place between students and teachers and among students are more central to student success than any method for teaching literacy, or science or math. (pp. 1-2)

Given that, the purpose of my study was to investigate student-student and student-teacher relationships in a culturally and linguistically diverse junior high classroom, using a ‘community of practice’ perspective (Lave & Wenger, 1991). More specifically, the theoretical intention of my research was to determine what contribution a ‘community of practice’ framework, which focuses on the situated and social nature of learning, could make to the study of social interaction in a classroom setting. The pedagogical intention was to consider what an ideal community of practice would be for the students in one particular Grade 9 language arts class and to provide direction in making teacher education programs more responsive to issues of cultural and linguistic diversity. The methodological intention was to bring to light some of the challenges associated with conducting classroom research.

Research Questions

Original

Recent studies of ESL have focused on the social contexts in which a second language is learned; in these contexts, the learner’s’ relations with other participants in their community are of importance (Donato, 1994; Haneda, 1997; Kanno & Applebaum, 1995;Toohey, 1996, 1998). With this in mind, my original study was grounded in a theoretical framework based on Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Bain, 1996; Moll, 1990; Vygotsky, 1987) and Lave and Wenger’s concepts of community of practice and legitimate peripheral participation (1991). Second language learner’s are seen as newcomers beginning to participate in the practices of a particular community. Given that the “social structure of the community of practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning (i.e. for legitimate peripheral participation)” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p.98), I wanted to study how ESL students learn to be participants in a classroom community. My intention was to investigate English as a second language learning as the legitimate peripheral participation of newcomers in specific communities, by focusing on the following questions:

• 1) How do peers and teacher enable/constrain ESL learner’s in increasing the range of their language participation in the classroom community?
• 2) How does the social structure of the classroom facilitate/hinder ESL students’ access to the mainstream culture while allowing for the maintenance of their ‘out-of-school’ cultural identities and first languages?
• 3) What is the role of the teacher in promoting integration among students of all language proficiency levels?

Revised

When I began my research project, I soon realized that there were significant differences between the hypothetical classroom of my proposal and my actual research site. The more time I spent in the classroom, the more I realized that I could not pursue (unchanged) my original questions. The reasons for this will be explained in more detail in Chapter 3. While I could still explore the social structure of the classroom community using sociocultural theory/communities of practice, I needed to revise my research questions so that there was less emphasis on second language learning/learner’s. Consequently the following revised questions were developed:

• 1) How do social relations facilitate or constrain participation of classroom members?
• 2) How does the social structure of the classroom community, its power relations and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for student and teacher learning?
• 3) What is the role of the teacher in disrupting classroom practices that limit and marginalize students?

Endnotes

1 This is not to say that the area I had chosen instead was not awkward in similar ways; the challenges of researching other people’s children (Delpit, 1995) will be problematized throughout this book.

2 All people and places mentioned in this book have been given pseudonyms.

Chapter 2
Forget Your Perfect Offering: Theoretical Framework

The value of theory is that it allows one to see the previously invisible and to see the previously visible in new ways. The danger of theory is that it can function like a set of blinders, restricting what one sees and how one sees it… Theory, then, is a tool that both supports and constrains research. It provides a perspective on the world, but that perspective can preclude others. (Graue & Walsh, 1998, p. 26)

In their discussion of theoretical frameworks, Ely et al. (1997) suggest that an initial review of literature not be too extensive-rather, the researcher will return to that as well as different literature throughout data collection and during the final writing in order to “talk to the emergent findings” (p. 235). I had many such conversations. I thought I had planned the ‘perfect’ theoretical framework (in theory), only to learn that it was far from perfect (in practice). Given the ‘cracks’ in my research project, I knew my framework needed reshaping. However, I appeared to be having difficulty with the ‘trick.’

The trick here is to compare where information fits, where it does not, and what is called for in reshaping a theoretical rationale or creating a new one. Too many researchers see the beginning theoretical frame as a structure into which they must shoehorn findings and somehow misplace those that do not make sense in that structure… (Ely et al., 1997, p. 235)

As will be made clear throughout the course of the book, in many respects my findings did not match the literature well. This was due in part to the shift in the focus of my research project, but also to the particular nature of the research site. It was not that I was unwilling to look elsewhere-once the light began to get in the cracks, I was excited to pursue new directions. Initially, though, I was reluctant to let go of a body of literature that I had found compelling. As it turned out, despite the shift in my project, much of the literature that informed my research proposal also spoke to my study findings.

Interested in exploring the social nature of learning, I chose a theoretical framework grounded in sociocultural literature. I had framed, to a considerable degree, my candidacy proposal in terms of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) community of practice analysis. However, my literature review had also included an introduction to a sociocultural perspective, as well as sections on Vygotsky, Bakhtin, dialogue and issues of identity and power. These perspectives have endured, although they appear in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Beginning The Story: Introduction
• 2 Forget Your Perfect Offering: Theoretical Framework
• 3 There Is a Crack In Everything: Methods
• 4 That’s How The Light Gets In: Illuminating Community Practices
• 5 Let The Light Shine In: Disrupting Community Practices
• 6 Ringing The Bells: Accept My Imperfect Offering
• Epilogue
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index