African-Centered Pedagogy: Developing Schools of Achievement for African American Children

CHAPTER EIGHT. DISCOURSE PRACTICES IN A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVEMENT

CHAPTER EIGHT DISCOURSE PRACTICES IN A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVEMENT Humans are both blessed and cursed by their dialogic nature—their tendency to encompass a number of views in virtual simultaneity and tension, regardless of their logical compatibility. —Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds This chapter describes the social and intellectual practices that are important for successful work with African American children. As I discussed in the last chapter, classroom discourse has become an increasingly important area of research in education, and has produced useful insights as to how discourse processes mediate social, intellectual, and cultural practices of a classroom as a community of learners. In this chapter I detail aspects of discourse practices that teachers need to acquire in order to construct learning communities that meet the needs and scaffold the development of African American children. I explain the relationship between discourse practices of the teacher and the social organization, pedagogical decision-making, and cultural context created in the classroom. I also further develop this notion of practices as the basis for organizing cultures of learning—and for revising instructional practices, pedagogical decision making, and classroom interactional routines in ways that promote understanding among African American students. Finally, I further develop the notion of building a symbolic culture—the context in which young people are continuously improvising (Holland et al., 1998)—or negotiating what I have been calling a situated identity. In this chapter, we look specifically of African American students’ identity as it is situated in literacy learning , social studies and mathematics. To develop a rich context for teaching, an analysis of the discourse processes in the discipline communities, of mathematics, history, and language arts, is needed. By “discipline communities” I am referring not just to subjects in school, but also to enclaves of people in those disciplines such as “scientists doing science,” “historians doing history” and so on. Later, in chapter 10, I will use, as an example, my own classroom to illustrate the oral and written discourse practices that help define discipline communities. The following discussion examines the relationship between the discourse routines of an academic discipline (i.e., American History) and the learning experiences of African American elementary and middle school learners. In this explanation I draw again on the research traditions I discussed earlier—situated cognition, situated learning theory, and the sociocultural perspective. According to these perspectives, what counts as disciplinary knowledge of a particular community of practice (for example, your class “doing history as historians”) is a product of two knowledge sources. One of these is the corpus of knowledge in the discipline, and the other consists of learners’ constructed understandings and enacted practices of the disciplinary knowledge. In other words, knowledge consists of content such as the laws of thermodynamics and the causes of the Civil War, as well as learners’ understanding and use of this content knowledge. Thus, in any classroom, the total package of knowledge must be understood as partly “constructed” and partly “received.” The part that is constructed occurs as individuals interpret the content, and build an understanding based upon their experience and prior knowledge. These are the learner practices of meaning-making and inquiry in my theory. According to my theory, learners do construct more than knowledge and their understanding of the content—they also construct themselves as users of that knowledge. That is to say, learning is a process of identity management as a learner participates in a setting. Humans naturally appropriate the discourse practices (i.e., the language and forms of talk) of the group as they participate in the group —like your class as a community of learners—who then affiliate over time and build common knowledge together. The “received” part of the knowledge package is what teachers call “the material.” This is the content specified by curriculum guides, frameworks, and content standards. Of course, not just any “American history knowledge ” or “English knowledge” will do and there is a limit to the “legitimate scientific knowledge” that the community can construct, given that they are, after all, not “real” scientists, historians, or professional writers. But the point here is that learners’ acquisition of both received and constructed knowledge is a social process shaped by the discourse and practices of the community in which that learning takes place. The activity and the relationships among their peers also mediate access to, and development of, these knowledges. 126 AFRICAN-CENTERED PEDAGOGY CULTURE...