Dialogic pedagogy for socially-just curriculum: Language lessons from locked-up and locked-out youth
By Tatiana Harrison, Sonoma County Alternative Education Program
tharrison@scoe.org
I am a teacher in the Sonoma County, California 'Alternative Education’ program. This program administers classrooms for 'locked up' students in the local facility for juveniles in detention or awaiting sentencing. This program also runs two classrooms for students who are 'locked out': that is, they are excluded from all other classroom settings.
Young people from marginalised social-structural positions are disproportionately represented in such classrooms around the world, and those where I teach are no different. In them, I have had the privilege to learn from primarily Latinx, Native American, and African-American youth from communities of struggle, who teach me about the highs and lows of their lived experience. Specifically, in our classroom settings, I learn much about the experiences, and associated knowledges and knowledge capacities – 'funds of knowledge' (FoK) – that marginalised young people inherit and develop in their community lifeworlds.
'FoK' means knowledge of meaningful use for survival and potential thriving (Hogg 2021; Moll, 2019). In marginalised community lifeworlds, FoK often involves knowledge built around difficult circumstances – what Zipin (2009) calls 'dark' FoK, and others (Neri, 2020) called 'difficult' FoK – that build around lived effects of power inequalities. As macro-structural issues across the wider social space, these inequalities permeate the micro-spaces of marginalised young people’s lifeworlds – for example, through policing. As well, they permeate systemic-institutional contexts that marginalised young people inhabit outside their lifeworlds, including mainstream schools.
My learning from young people about these lifeworld experiences, and the FoK that build around them, occurs through a pedagogy of dialogue that has evolved in my engagement with those students as a teacher who realises that, beyond knowledge instituted into ‘official’ curriculum, marginalised students can teach me more than I teach them. This has pushed me to think about the rich benefits of pedagogical dialogue in which teacher and students mutually learn-and-teach together. In practising this pedagogy, students have participatory voice and agency to express their knowledges; and teachers’ ears are open to hearing and learning.
To share my pedagogic insights about the benefits of, as well as barriers to, dialogic pedagogy as a practice of social-educational justice, I draw in this paper on dialogic data from a project in which I and three former locked up/locked out students with whom I worked – I’ll call them 'alumni' – engaged in and recorded dialogues. Here is a brief summary of our different positionalities.
Avionn
Three years learning in locked-up and locked-out classrooms
African-American
Malachi
Two years learning in locked-up classrooms
African-American
Karla
Four years learning in locked-out classrooms
Mexican-American
Ms. T (myself)
15 years teaching in locked-in and locked-out classrooms
White/Peruvian-American
For our project, we met (in person and on Zoom) for four hours each week for about five months. Dialogues resulted in 30 hours of transcriptions. We chose portions from the transcriptions for key themes, some of which appear in this paper. Our analyses and selected excerpts were edited into a co-authored article for an international academic journal (Harrison, Ledezma, Morgan & Morgan, 2024).
In this article for ReConnectEd, I draw on dialogic data from the article we co-authored (See Harrison T et al. 2024). The next three sections each centre on a rich data 'snippet,’ involving linguistic funds of knowledge from the students’ lifeworlds, around which I build analytic discussion; and I note that our dialogues included much analysis of what we talked about, by the alumni students as much as me (See Harrison T 2023).
Wrong About Our Own Language
In this first snippet, Karla is telling us her story about a White Spanish teacher’s insistence on ‘proper’ Spanish, and the effects this had on Karla and other Mexican-American Spanish-speaking school students in the class.
Karla: She marked down our papers for using our Mexican Spanish to answer the questions.
Malachi: What do you mean?
Karla: Well - there was this one time she had asked the class how you say “pool” in Spanish. She called on me and I said “alberca.”
Malachi: That’s how you say pool?
Karla: That’s how we grew up saying it. She told me “No, that’s wrong. Se dice piscina” (Translation: ‘It is said – pinscina). The whole class is Mexican. She could’ve said, “That’s your Mexican Spanish. This is Spaniard Spanish.” She’s like, “No, you’re wrong.” Most of our parents only speak Spanish and here came Ms. Whyte [pseudonym] telling us that we’re wrong about our own language.
Malachi: Wowww.
Ms. T.: What do you think the effect of your teacher doing that was?
Karla: We dreaded going to her classroom. I remember my other teacher threatened us with not taking us to Spanish and we were all okay with it so it wasn’t much of a threat.
Ms. T.: So the theory in education is that Karla’s ability to learn in that classroom was literally diminished. If you feel invalidated by your teacher, you can’t learn as well. But the social justice issue is: you don’t feel as comfortable and happy and confident.
In this snippet we hear about Karla’s memory of the teacher, Ms. Whyte, treating a linguistic knowledge usage – a fund of knowledge: a cultural asset in Karla’s and other Mexican-American students’ community lifeworlds – as a deficit, not useful for learning. This classroom instituted systemically narrow language curriculum. The teacher negated, rather than engaged, students’ FoK, which Karla experienced as alienating (“we dreaded going to her classroom”). It is important for teachers to understand that language usage in young people’s family/community lifeworlds is deeply cultured into their identities: what Esteban-Guitart and Moll (2014) call ‘Funds of Identity.’ Such alienation can induce pain and aggravation among marginalised young people when their ways of speaking and knowing get treated in schools as 'behavior problems' which, in turn, get policed in disciplinary ways that can funnel students from school into locked-up and locked-out settings: what gets called ‘the school-to-prison pipeline’ (Mallet, 2014).
As I summed up at end of the above dialogue, a narrow curriculum and its pedagogic delivery, instituted into mainstream classrooms, works to reproduce rather than redress social-educational injustice. It is such unjust curricular functioning that is both addressed and redressed by the dialogic pedagogy I have learned to practise in engaging with students in locked-up and locked-out settings. And it is this pedagogy that the three alumni and I illustratively practised in generating the data used for our academic paper.
Let’s now consider the hard-earned potential benefits of dialogic pedagogy that features co-participatory voice and agency in which students and teacher teach-and-learn together.
Someone to Call
The next excerpt is a snippet from a broader dialogue the four of us had about language in relation to the power that policing exerts upon marginalised young people and their communities.
Ms. T.: So some kids live in a place where there’s no one to call because they don’t feel like the police can help them?
Malachi: You say pəlˈiːs (puh-leece)? Personally, I grew up like saying, oh that’s the pˈo͡ʊ- lˈiːs (poh-leece)- the pˈo͡ʊ-lˈiːs is coming - oh no! (He laughs.) But it’s not that there’s no one to call. Like, where regular people will call 911, other people call their friends, their cousins, their gang, they aunties and uncles. There is someone to call, it’s just that person doesn’t have a badge.
Ms. T.: Does it matter for the language teacher to understand the distinction between the pˈo͡ʊliːs and the pəlˈiːs?
Malachi: I think teachers should understand. I’m talking about teachers that are actually trying to understand for a beneficial reason. I think they should understand what is going on in the classroom. Teachers that are looking to report things to the pˈo͡ʊliːs, they can mind their business, but if they want to understand, then fasho, I think it’d be very beneficial.
In this bit of dialogue, I gained from Malachi’s storying of his lived experience, along within his analytical capacities to draw ethical principles from them. This excerpt demonstrates how I learned to consider and make use of three generally important points for curricular/pedagogic practice.
Point 1: Older and younger people in marginalised lifeworlds respond to the structural power dynamics they cannot entirely avoid in their micro-worlds by developing rich resources ('funds'). Youth (and adults) turn to these funds as an alternative to mainstream-institutional systems, such as police forces, which marginalise them.
Point 2: Linguistic features of these responses to structural power in their lifeworlds, in this case 'poh-leece,' often develop into cultural funds for sustaining identity in relation to the normative power of dominant linguistic terms, in this case 'puh-leece.' The life-practised value of such alternative linguistic usages thus embeds far more deeply into the cultural identities of marginalised young people than the linguistic usages selectively privileged in mainstream schools as if 'normal' for all. It is then painful when ways of speaking that hold rich asset-value in their community cultures, are negated as 'deficits' for learning in classrooms.
Point 3: Teachers could benefit from (a) recognising the cultural asset-value of marginalised community language usage; and, in doing so, (b) putting those linguistic asset-funds beneficially into dialogic pedagogical practice that makes use of those funds, and at the same time contrasts it to, normative linguistic terms and how they function as power enforcers in mainstream systems.
The latter point is illustrated clearly in what Avionn says in the dialogic snippet featured in the next section.
The Language of Submission
The next dialogic snippet was part of broader conversation about biographic histories in which the alumni and their families experienced locked-up and locked-out settings.
Ms. T.: Avionn, is it ok for us to say that your experience with carcerality goes back to the beginning?
Avionn: Yes, because I was born in a prison. Then I myself was in the locked-up system from the ages of 15 to 18. But it wasn’t just the extreme shift to living locked up that I’ve had to adjust to. Growing up, there would be rapid change in my environment - going from living with my mom to living at my mom’s friend’s house, to a group home…. I actually have a memory about language from this time…We were living from pillow to post, meaning we didn’t have somewhere stable to lay our heads at night.
Malachi: Yupp.
Avionn: So we were walking down the street, and I was upset that she [Avionn’s mother] was making me move a big bag of clothes from one place to another. It was so heavy, and I was only about 12. The police were parked by the side of the street and they heard our disagreement and they heard my frustration in the tone of my voice. Then they wanted to join in my conversation. I felt as though they were jumping into a private family matter, so I told them “it’s none of yo business and you can mind your own.” My mom hit me on my head because of the tone I was using with the police, told me to shut up and show them some respect because they could shoot me in response to the frustration and anger that I was exhibiting. And it’s true, people take things I do when I’m being expressive, they take it a certain way. Basically, she was trying to tell me that the way I talk could save my life.
Ms. T.: Hmm. I feel like that’s a problem with [school-privileged] academic language. It kind of sounds like how you have to talk to the police.
Avionn: Yes, it’s definitely the language of submission.
The paper the four of us co-authored for an academic journal features “the language of submission” in its title. I am 'lead author' and yet, I did not coin the term: Avionn did, in the conversation this snippet of dialogue comes from! He created a term that academic scholars would find to have rich use to analyse the language of selective power in school systems, as well as richly explanatory use to understand the lifeworld situations of Avionn and his mother’s police encounter. The term “Language of submission” gets directly and astutely at how curriculum selectively privileges linguistic and other cultural features embodied among those from structurally privileged families and communities, to which marginalised young people are forced to submit. The fact that he is a young person from a structurally marginalised lifeworld serves to show that we are missing out by not having voices heard and put to learning use in classrooms and in teacher education.
Avionn’s coinage of this term led his brother, Malachi, to ask me: “I have a question for you, Ms. T. Do you think kids could benefit from speaking the language of submission? How do you feel teaching it?” In the thick of dialogue, I stumbled around this educationally challenging question, replying:
Ms. T.: It’s complicated. I do feel like learning the language of the powers-that-be can aid a long-term plan for marginalised groups to empower themselves. . . . But thinking that I’m “teaching the language of submission”—it’s tough when you put it like that. I’d have to feel like I was helping you with something you needed, not just submission.
But the question lingered in my mind. It hung on and haunted my thoughts about how to interact pedagogically with students in navigating the difficult and painful tension in which deep and powerful macro-structures of social inequality are embedded into, and mediated by, educational and other mainstream institutional systems. In their micro-lifeworld social spaces, marginalised young people are both infused and surrounded by such power structures. It is therefore important to craft strategic ways to learn the linguistic cultural codes of what Delpit (1988) calls ‘the language of power,’ while at the same time according what Zipin and Brennan (2021) call ‘ethical pride-of-place’ to students’ lifeworld funds of knowledge.
I suggest that student-teacher dialogic pedagogy, as illustrated in this paper’s data snippets, offers substantive strategic potential to navigate that complex balance between what Colina Neri, Zipin, Rios-Aguilar and Huerta (2021) call “expedient justice” and “fair-world” justice. In their definitions, “expedient justice” refers to pragmatic learning of the cultural codes enforced by the narrow curriculum of submission in mainstream institutions. In contrast, “fair-world justice” means prioritising recognition and use of the asset-value of diverse cultural knowledges, as would happen in a world structured not for power inequality but for social justice.
Conclusion
In both locked-up/out and mainstream schools, education that aims to cultivate a culture of social justice should practise social-educational justice through design of curricular knowledge activities, and the teacher-student interactions – the pedagogies – that put curricular designs into active practice (which can re-create curriculum with further nuances and dimensions for social-educational justice).
I believe that, underlyingly, many staff in mainstream schools are motivated by 'fair world' care for a richer curriculum towards a better world. However, school teachers and leaders operate within the institutionalisation of 'official' curriculum, pedagogy and assessment that narrowly select for the 'cultural capital' of the structurally privileged few over the marginalised many who attend schools. Thus, the balance in which 'expedient justice' works towards 'fair-world justice', too often falls into a disequilibrium in which the connection between ‘expedient’ and 'justice' are weakened (see Zipin and Brennan articles in this ReConnectEd issue). The scale slides to the 'expedient' side which urges complicity with selective processes that further marginalise students such as Karla, Avionn and Malachi.
Yet, in the carceral education settings in which I engaged with students from the lifeworld positions of those alumni, a potential emerged for dialogic pedagogy that reverses the tide of complicity with curricula and pedagogies of submission. Together, the three alumni and I generated the data of this paper that illustrates those possibilities for teachers to engage marginalised young people’s Funds of Knowledge and Identity as assets not just for students’ learning but for teachers’ learning.
It may seem a poignant irony that locked-up/out education settings opened me to student-teacher invention of curricular and pedagogic possibilities for social-educational justice that appear more difficult to invent within the confines of non-carceral mainstream schools. I am therefore pleased to have been invited to share the dialogic pedagogical potentials of what Karla, Avionn, Malachi and I could illustrate with readers of ReConnectEd, as an e-magazine read by students and teachers who inhabit mainstream school settings. I hope the potentials we illustrate spur experimental possibilities in all settings.
References
Colina Neri R, Zipin L, Rios-Aguilar C, & Huerta A.H (2021) Surfacing deep challenges for social-educational justice: Putting funds, wealth, and capital frameworks into dialogue, Urban Education, 58(7): 1–27. DOI: 10.1177/00420859211016520.
Harrison T, Ledezma K, Morgan M, & Morgan A (2024) The language of submission: a fourway duoethnography exploring translanguaging pedagogy with carceral students’ Problems that matter and funds of identity, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, DOI: 10.1080/17501229.2024.2311840
Harrison T, Ledezma K, Morgan M, and Morgan J (2024) The Language of Submission: A Four-Way Duoethnography Exploring Translanguaging Pedagogy with Carceral Students’ Problems that matter and Funds of Identit, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 18(3): 237–52. DOI: 10.1080/17501229.2024.2311840.
Harrison T, Morgan M, Ledezma K, and Morgan J (2023) The Language of Submission Full Dialogues, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. DOI: 10.3886/E195728V1
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Zipin L & Brennan M (2021) Ethical vexations that haunt ‘knowledge questions’ for curriculum in Green B, Brennan M, & Roberts P, (eds.) Curriculum challenges and opportunities in a changing world, Curriculum Studies Worldwide. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-61667-0_11173-193
