From the heart to the world and back again: Co-constructing school literacy practices with children from immigrant, migrant, and refugee backgrounds
Abstract
My dissertation is the product of my work as a fifth grade teacher researcher at a multi-ethnic neighborhood elementary school in California between the years 1998–2001. It examines how school literacy may be deeply inflected with the students' own culturally based values and commitments. I take a critical look at deficit models of instruction that homogenize classroom practice and devalue the rich experiential diversity of our school population. I also explore alternatives: for example, the role that memory and storytelling play in creating solidarity within the class; the way children use autobiography to work through the traumas bequeathed to them by history; the potential for school writing to enhance a child's understanding of her own membership in a diaspora community; and how the performance arts can become a vehicle for students to critically engage as well as understand their worlds. All my research is informed by a conception of literacy as embedded in history and culture and grounded in realist theories of experience and identity. ^ I simultaneously theorize classroom relationships and my own stance as a teacher researcher. I both argue for and illuminate an organic and dialectical methodology that braids the inquiries of the teacher with those of the students. In conclusion, I conceptualize the urban teacher researcher as an emergent social identity. ^
Subject Area
Education, Bilingual and Multicultural
Recommended Citation
Hans Gerald Campano,
"From the heart to the world and back again: Co-constructing school literacy practices with children from immigrant, migrant, and refugee backgrounds"
(January 1, 2003).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3095864.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3095864