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Article
Publication date: 11 August 2020

Vaughn W.M. Watson and Robert Petrone

410

Abstract

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Article
Publication date: 14 May 2020

Emery Petchauer

This paper aims to explore how sounds and attunements to particular organizations of sound collide across an English language community learning space. The activities in the paper…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to explore how sounds and attunements to particular organizations of sound collide across an English language community learning space. The activities in the paper come from a six-week summer initiative that connected middle school youth with community artists for writing songs and rap lyrics, making beats and hip-hop DJing.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper draws from the interdisciplinary field of sound studies and, specifically, the concept of aural imaginary to explore the collisions alive and in-motion across the learning space. The paper uses qualitative and ethnographic approaches to explore the research questions.

Findings

The findings focus on how youth hear certain sounds and organizations of sound in music as “old” and “new,” and how these shifting listening entangle talk, claims and interactions in the learning space. The findings also trace the ways that youth use sound as an active, aural resource to make competing distinctions between rapping, singing and talking.

Originality/value

This paper reasserts the role of sound in multiliteracies, hip-hop and English education work, keying into the ways it collides with other aspect of the learning space. The paper raises questions about what educators might attune themselves to by considering English education as already taking place in a youth aural imaginary.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 July 2020

Keisha L. Green, Daniel Morales Morales, Chrystal George Mwangi and Genia M. Bettencourt

This paper aims to focus on the construction of a third space within a high school. Specifically, the authors consider how youth of color engage the educational context of an 11th…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to focus on the construction of a third space within a high school. Specifically, the authors consider how youth of color engage the educational context of an 11th grade English language arts (ELA) class as a basis for (re)imagining their history, culture and themselves to construct counter-narratives away from framing their lived educational experiences as failures, deficient and depicted in “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) ways. The research engages the process and challenges of creating this type of space within a school setting, as well as examining the ways in which students envision these locations.

Design/methodology/approach

Critical ethnography centered the emphasis on youth engagement for social change, as well as the inquiry on how the classroom space was constructed, shared and navigated by the students and ourselves (Madison, 2005). In addition, the research design reflects critical ethnography through the use of prolonged participation in the field (nine and half months), a focus on culture (specifically school and classroom culture/climate) and a critical theory-based framework [hybridity, third space and youth participatory action research (YPAR)].

Findings

Three major themes emerged from the data that demonstrate how instructors and students collectively engaged in a third space through the YPAR project. These themes include developing an ethic of care with students and among instructors, cultivating an atmosphere of social justice awareness and the contrast of the classroom space with the wider-Hillside Vocational High School environment.

Originality/value

The study engages the use of YPAR within a high school class that became a unique space for students to learn and develop. The ELA class did not just reflect adding the first space and second space together or merging the two. Instead, it seemed to demonstrate the creation of a new type of space or the development of a third space. In this space, students could bring and bridge their out-of-school and in-school experiences to develop new knowledge and ways of seeing the world.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 May 2020

Lauren Leigh Kelly

This study aims to refocus the field of Hip Hop based education on youth identities and epistemologies rather than on the tangible artifacts of Hip Hop culture. It argues that…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to refocus the field of Hip Hop based education on youth identities and epistemologies rather than on the tangible artifacts of Hip Hop culture. It argues that centering classroom pedagogy and curriculum on youth self-actualization best supports the critical literacy development of students grappling with social and structural inequities within an ever-evolving youth and media culture.

Design/methodology/approach

Building upon previous literature on critical literacy, Hip Hop pedagogy and adolescent identity formation, this paper shares data from a semester-long teacher–researcher case study of a high school Hip Hop literature and culture class to explore how young people develop critical literacies and self-actualizing practices through a critical study of youth culture.

Findings

For youth engaged in Hip Hop culture, co-constructing spaces to discuss their consumption of popular media and culture in class allows them to openly grapple with questions of identity, provide support for each other in dealing with these questions and reflect more critically upon their self-constructed, performed and perceived identities.

Originality/value

This form of English education challenges traditional notions of teaching and learning as it positions students as co-creators of curriculum and as part of the curriculum itself. Building on research that frames Hip Hop pedagogy as a culturally relevant tool for engaging urban youth, this paper argues that educators should approach critical Hip Hop literacy development as a means by which young people across diverse educational and social backgrounds come to know themselves and others as part of the process of self-actualization and critical resistance.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 May 2020

Nicole Mirra and Debate Liberation League

This paper aims to analyze how a group of middle-school debaters integrated their identities and epistemologies into the traditional literacy practice of debate to advocate for…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to analyze how a group of middle-school debaters integrated their identities and epistemologies into the traditional literacy practice of debate to advocate for more expansive and inclusive forms of academic and civic discussion. The adult and youth co-researchers of the Debate Liberation League (DLL) detail their creation of a critical debate praxis through the use of spoken word and translanguaging and illustrate how they sought to redesign a foundational activity of English Language Arts on their own terms.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing upon critical race and borderlands theories, the authors use critical ethnographic and participatory action research methods to explore how the DLL deconstructed the boundaries of what counts as public dialogue and offered an alternative model of what intergenerational and multi-voiced democratic discourse could look like in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms and beyond.

Findings

The findings demonstrate how DLL students broke down normative binaries of affirmative/negative and objective/subjective in their debate performances and introduced testimonios as evidence for civic claims to make space for their voices and reimagine deliberation.

Originality/value

This study foregrounds dialogic data generation through a collaborative, intergenerational research approach. It highlights the constructed nature of literacy “rules,” demonstrates youth expertise in reimagining ELA, and offers a pathway toward a more compassionate public sphere.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 22 November 2023

Emery Petchauer, Tia Harvey and Rolando Ybarra

This paper aims to explore sonic play in close proximity to a music, literacy and songwriting for social change community-based initiative. The authors leverage ideas about time…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to explore sonic play in close proximity to a music, literacy and songwriting for social change community-based initiative. The authors leverage ideas about time, space and narrative under the concept of sonic flux to understand youth’s sonic and aural play on digital beatmaking technologies. In doing so, the authors break from a fixation on the written and spoken word and address sound, aurality and Blacktronika creative technologies that are often present but muted in literacies and songwriting scholarship.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors’ team consisted of three community-based teaching artists who situated this inquiry around their own practice with youth. The authors conducted this inquiry through a qualitative, participatory and community-engaged research approach. As such, the authors codeveloped and carried out research questions and sense-making protocols that balance the power of interpretation and epistemologies among us.

Findings

The findings address how the joy, laughter and play of one young musician, Malik, moved across different conceptions of time while learning to make beats in proximity to peers writing lyrics for songs. Specifically, the authors unpack how Malik’s play with mobile sound-making technologies moved across linear and nonlinear time that characterize sonic space and sound art, not music and lyric writing. In doing so, the loops and durations of his sonic play were sometimes unbound by narrative structures that often code literacy and songwriting initiatives.

Originality/value

The authors’ inquiry speaks into literacy and songwriting initiatives that privilege spoken, written and performed word over sound. The authors ask what kind of participating structures, collaborations, ontologies and youth epistemologies open up if we think of youth in these spaces not only as performers but as programmers tinkering with time in the machine. In addition, the authors ask what literacy and songwriting spaces might look like when the duration, loops and drones of sonic space and not music are the structuring codes over narratives and linearity.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 22 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 18 October 2018

Theresa Ann McGinnis

In September 2014, 1,200 unaccompanied immigrant youth, from a region of Central America known for high rates of violence and homicide, enrolled in a suburban school district of…

Abstract

Purpose

In September 2014, 1,200 unaccompanied immigrant youth, from a region of Central America known for high rates of violence and homicide, enrolled in a suburban school district of New York State. This paper aims to highlight the stories of the newly arrived Central American high school youth, as told through Bilingual (Spanish/English) digital testimonios completed in the English Language Arts classroom. The author examines how the telling of their stories of surviving migration offers a way for the youth to respond to political and emotional struggles. The author also explores how the youth become active participants in the telling of political narratives/testimonios.

Design/methodology/approach

Part of a larger ethnographic case study, the author adopts the ethnographic approaches of the new literacy studies. Testimonios as a research epistemology privilege the youth’s narratives as sources of knowledge, and allow the youth to reclaim their authority in telling their own stories.

Findings

The integration of critical digital texts into the English Language Arts classroom created a participatory classroom culture where the Central American youth’s digital testimonios can be seen as a shared history of struggles that make visible the physical toil of their journeys, the truth of their border crossings and their enactments of political identities. As a collective, the youth’s stories become part of national and global political dialogues.

Originality/value

At a time when immigrant youth struggle for rights, to further their education and to negotiate the daily experiences of living in a new country, this research offers a unique perspective on the politics of inclusion and exclusion for unaccompanied youth.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 17 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 24 June 2020

Tiffany DeJaynes, Tabatha Cortes and Israt Hoque

This paper aims to examine a school-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project on educational inequity and high stakes testing.

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine a school-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project on educational inequity and high stakes testing.

Design/methodology/approach

A former high school teacher (currently a university professor) and two former students (currently research assistants and university students) take up a youth studies framework to collaboratively resee multimodal artifacts from a tenth-grade course in qualitative research.

Findings

Findings illustrate the power of finding allies in peers and educators; the transformative power of deep participation; and the longitudinal nature of social change and action. Thus, this research demonstrates that when students are positioned as researchers, experts and knowledge producers, they can collaborate with one another, teachers and administrators to confront social inequities within their schools and beyond.

Originality/value

This study has value for applying critical, youth-centered pedagogies in secondary English language arts classrooms and schools.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 May 2020

Jason J. Griffith and Jocelyn Amevuvor

This paper aims to argue for the curricular inclusion of youth-generated young adult literature (YAL) alongside canonical literature and adult-generated YAL. The authors support…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to argue for the curricular inclusion of youth-generated young adult literature (YAL) alongside canonical literature and adult-generated YAL. The authors support this argument with the results of a qualitative analysis of youth memoir published in The Best Teen Writing. They strive to inform the debate between educators who value memoir as part of the secondary curriculum and critics who question the ability of youth to write purposeful, meaningful narrative. Additionally, the authors also present memoir as a unique genre for youth to document and process adolescence, and for youth to speak to issues which they deem important.

Design/methodology/approach

Informed theoretically by the Youth Lens, which considers how texts reinforce and/or disrupt various figurations of adolescence and youth, this study uses a multistage qualitative analysis of 83 youth memoir published in nine volumes of the Best Teen Writing from 2010 to 2018. First, the authors conducted a Labovian plot analysis to consider what themes and topics were present as well as what this sample could teach us about youth. Next, they analyzed the sample for genre hallmarks specific to creative nonfiction and memoir to consider the question of quality of youth memoir.

Findings

The findings suggest that there is no typical adolescence and that youth are balancing complex, intersectional identities, which they write about skillfully through memoir. These findings directly contrast with critics of youth memoir. Rather than clichéd, the memoirs the authors analyzed show youth as intercultural, capable of thoughtful reflection, capturing the transitory state of their youth (knowing they are not children anymore and lightly speculating about their future), skillfully integrating memoir genre hallmarks, and recording important events and perspectives with appeal to a broader readership. Furthermore, these findings position youth memoir as worthy of curricular inclusion alongside adult-generated YAL.

Originality/value

If the critics of youth memoir are the loudest voices, youth memoir will be, at best, relegated as examples for writers rather than seen as valid additions to curricular canon. This work gives due credit to the quality of published youth memoir to showcase their potential for curricular and canonical addition. This study builds on smaller-scale case studies and personal accounts to make an argument for curricular inclusion of youth voices and youth memoir in the secondary canon.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 19 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 20 July 2023

Lorena Gutiérrez

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of documentation on the educational experiences, college readiness and aspirations of undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of documentation on the educational experiences, college readiness and aspirations of undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

Design/methodology/approach

This ethnographic study was conducted in a High School Equivalency Program at a large university in the Midwest. Data was collected during two semesters across a three-year span. Participants included six Mexican migrant and seasonal farmworkers who were preparing to earn their General Educational Development (GED) diploma. Using the grounded theory, data was collected and analyzed simultaneously where initial and focused coding took place, followed by cross-case analysis.

Findings

Analysis of student interviews, participant observations and in-depth fieldnotes that include the K-12 educational experiences, experiences during and after the High School Equivalency Program reveal that undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers aspire to earn a GED diploma to access a better future inclusive of college. However, the legal liminality, the uncertainty and ambiguity of being undocumented, impacts their educational journey prior to, during and beyond the High School Equivalency Program. Furthermore, undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers are unable to change their material conditions with a GED because of their documentation status.

Originality/value

Although researchers have studied the education experiences of Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers, analysis and consideration of documentation status is missing. This study contributes much needed findings about the impact of documentation status on the educational experiences, college readiness, and aspirations of Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 22 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

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