Centering Diversity in English Curriculum: A Critical Race Curriculum Analysis.
April, 14 2023
2023 AERA Annual Conference, Chicago, IL
While the ostensible focus of the English curriculum has been generic reading, writing, and language (Applebee, 1974), the hidden curriculum (Anyon, 1980) in English education is an Anglicized and Whitewashed (Kirkland, 2010; Luke, 2004) narrative of literary history, despite a racially and linguistically diverse student population and long history of multilingual and multicultural literature published in the geographic space now occupied by the United States. The purpose of our inquiry is to examine how English curriculum exists today in a localized context to illustrate how, in spite of theoretical and literary advancement, there remains a core of naturalized whiteness within the curriculum in terms of course offerings, staffing, and the vision for English Studies. Attending to race, power, and representation in English curriculum is urgent given the current political moment where CRT and its adjacent theories that inform Ethnic Studies are being criticized and banned in education spaces across the country.
Disciplinary disconnects: Students’ and teachers’ understandings of the discipline of English Language Arts.
December, 2 2020
Annual conference of the Literacy Research Association (LRA), LRA 70th Annual Virtual Platform, LRA Room 22
Labeling Adolescents’ Multilingualism: A Synthesis of Terms in the Field
April, 16 2023
2023 Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL
This presentation shares preliminary results from a large-scale literature review about the scope and nature of research about multilingual adolescents’ literacy. For decades, education research has taken up deficit language to describe multilingual learners in terms of what they lack: English proficiency or a minimum score on a standardized test that more accurately measures reading comprehension than language ability (Brooks, 2019). More appreciative terms like emergent bilingual begin to reframe how schools and researchers define multilingualism. However unitary terms mask the diversity of ways people use language and interact with texts in multiple languages (Valdés, 2021). Recognizing and describing the symbolic power in labels is the first step to resisting and disrupting imposed frameworks. This critical content analysis draws on methods for qualitative research synthesis (Compton-Lilly et al, 2021) and critical discourse analysis. After a comprehensive EBSCO search using seven databases, we screened 621 abstracts for relevance, identifying k = 184 total studies, published between 1985 and 2021. Using mixed-methods approaches we analyzed the corpus to answer our research questions regarding how labels frame multilingual adolescents’ literacies.
