Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom: Engaging Mexican-Origin Students 9781788927642

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Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

BILINGUAL EDUCATION & BILINGUALISM Series Editors: Nancy H. Hornberger (University of Pennsylvania, USA) and Wayne E. Wright (Purdue University, USA) Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is an international, multidisciplinary series publishing research on the philosophy, politics, policy, provision and practice of language planning, Indigenous and minority language education, multilingualism, multiculturalism,  biliteracy, bilingualism and bilingual education. The series aims to mirror current debates and discussions. New proposals for single-authored, multiple-authored, or edited books in the series are warmly welcomed, in any of the following categories or others authors may propose: overview or introductory texts; course readers or general reference texts; focus books on particular multilingual education program types; school-based case studies; national case studies; collected cases with a clear programmatic or conceptual theme; and professional education manuals. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

BILINGUAL EDUCATION & BILINGUALISM: 121

Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom Engaging Mexican-Origin Students

Kimberly Adilia Helmer

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/HELMER7635 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Helmer, Kimberly Adilia - author. Title: Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom : Engaging Mexican-Origin Students/Kimberly Adilia Helmer. Description: Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 2020. | Series: Bilingual Education & Bilingualism: 121 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book examines the first year of a charter high school and presents a case-study of compulsory Spanish heritage language instruction with both a dominant and non-dominant Spanish teacher. The study also follows the same students to their humanities-English class, bringing into focus what works and what does not with this group of learners”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019043254 (print) | LCCN 2019043255 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788927628 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788927635 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788927642 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788927659 (epub) | ISBN 9781788927666 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—Education (Secondary)—United States. | Heritage language speakers—Education (Secondary) | Spanish language—Study and teaching (Secondary) Classification: LCC LC2683.4 .H45 2020 (print) | LCC LC2683.4 (ebook) | DDC 371.829/68073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043254 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043255

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-763-5 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-762-8 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​multi​lingu​almat​ters Blog: www.c​hanne​lview​publi​catio​ns.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m Copyright © 2020 Kimberly Adilia Helmer. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by NBN.

For my mother, Marta, the inspiration behind this book, my father, Jim, who instilled in me the love of lifelong learning, and my friends at Downtown High School, Rachel, Jason and Susan, without whom this project would not have been possible.

Contents

Acknowledgements ix 1 Beginnings and Endings Camping with Downtown High Charter School and Research Project Beginnings

1 1 13

2 From Cecilia Paulson to Downtown High School, Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks 17 The Emergence of Research Questions 20 Doing Research at DHS: Research Design and Methodology 26 Theoretical Frameworks 27 The Ethnographic Context and Practicalities 32 Participants 33 Data Collection 37 Conclusion 40 3 Hablais Como Pachucos 42 Bigotry and the Borderlands 46 Resistance through Non-participation: Some Theoretical Explanations 49 Non-participation in a Spanish Class for Heritage Learners: The Ethnographic Context 53 Classrooms and Lessons 54 Discussion 64 Reflections of a Participant-Observer 69 4 It’s Not Real: It’s Just Spanish Class A New Teacher is Found: Semester II Spanish Heritage Language Learner Characteristics Classroom Lessons, Data Analysis and Discussion: Performance Strike! (Again)! The Year Winds Down: Yearbooks and Safe Houses Reflections of a Participant-Observer vii

73 74 79 90 107 112

viii Contents

5 The Tao of Teaching 115 Part 1: Semester 1, from Spanish to Humanities, the Ethnographic Context 117 Part 2: Semester 2 Winds Down, FICTIONMANIA 134 Discussion 154 Reflections of a Participant-Observer 157 6 Place and Project-based Spanish Heritage Language Teaching and Learning Spanish Instruction: Ethnographic Views Pedagogical Suggestions: Student Views Imagination, Experience, Awareness and Acquisition: Frameworks for a Pueblo-based Pedagogy Projects and Themes for Critical “Pueblo-based” Spanish HL Instruction Final Thoughts: Caring Rigor and Imagination 7 Then and Now Final Visits Findings Synthesis: Identity, Ideology and Imagination Institutional Factors Contributing to Resistance and Engagement Closing Remarks

159 160 170 174 185 194 198 198 210 213 223

Appendices 225 Appendix A: Transcription Conventions 225 Appendix B: Principal’s Letter to Participants’ Parents 226 Appendix C: Student Interview Questions 227 References 230 Index 245

Acknowledgements

The founding teachers of Downtown High School – Susan, Jason and Rachel – made this ethnographic study of a high school possible by making Downtown High a reality. What an ethnographer most wants are access and honesty. I thank the three principle classroom teachers and their students who allowed me open access to their classrooms for over a year. I hope this book accurately and honestly documents both their successes and their failures in the first year of a new, charter high school. My experience doing ethnographic research at Downtown High School helped me to understand the complexities surrounding minority student education, specifically, Spanish heritage language issues. Because I am a Spanish heritage language learner myself, my research time at Downtown High helped me to understand myself better as it taught me to better appreciate my Nicaraguan heritage. My mother was born in Nicaragua and spent her first 11 years there. The transition for her – from Spanish language/culture to English/US culture – was difficult, but she did it, very successfully. Marta became a United States Citizen, but without ever losing her Nicaraguan identity. I thank Mama, Marta Adilia Helmer, for everything she has done for me. She has helped me selflessly all of my life. My father, Dr James John Helmer, teaches me every day to love learning for learning’s sake and to love human life for its own sake. My Papa is a perfect example of a professional who loves both scholarship and humanity. Papa taught both me and my brother the importance of doing smart work in the theoretical world and good and practical work in the material world. I thank my brother, Jimmy, for learning to learn with me: Jim Junior is a good doctor and teacher in the world and I respect him for that. To McKenzie who has come to almost every presentation I have made as well as every award ceremony I have been part of. He has supported me in my career, most of all, by being there. Although he does not consider himself a critical pedagogue, he is a righteous good teacher and amazing writer. I have learned a lot from him. ix

x Acknowledgements

Writing is not easy for me: I need support and I got it from my writing group: Drs Nolvia Cortéz, Beth Specker, Jill McCracken, Erica Reynolds and Leigh Jones. They suggested relevant literature, asked the right q ­ uestions and pushed me to be explicit in my writing and clear in the organization of my material. I appreciate their friendship and support. These smart women made writing fun for me and made me a more functional and intellectual academic. I also thank Guadalupe Valdés who first inspired me with her ethnography, Con Respeto. So under the influence, I unconsciously named this book after another of her books without realizing it until after I sent the manuscript off to the publisher. During the editing process of “my” Learning and Not Learning, Guadalupe Valdés provided invaluable feedback, and I thank her for that. Finally, as this is a book about teaching, I thank my teachers, Mrs.  Indranee Wijesekera, Drs. Mary Wildner-Bassett, Susan Philips, Perry Gilmore, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Leo van Lier and Lynn ­Goldstein. These educators have carved paths in the academic and intellectual world. That sounds a bit cliché, but there it is – these scholars have been the role models for my generation of scholars, ethnographers, intellectuals and writers. Not only have they been role models for dedicated teaching and exemplary scholarship, but they have also made the world a smarter and better place.

1 Beginnings and Endings

Camping with Downtown High

Midway up the steep climb, Adi, Ethan and I1 realize we don’t have enough water to safely continue on our hike. Typical of late spring in the Sonoran Desert, the temperature steadily climbs into the 90s. Jason, prepared with his CamelBak, pours water into our plastic bottles so we can climb on. Earlier, the rest of the hikers, two teachers, Rachel and Cameron, and four Downtown High School (DHS) students, Emma, Evan, Scott Thomas and Emily, had decided to head back to our campsite, preferring the shady pines. DHS, a new charter school, opened its doors in 2004 with 85 students, coming from 45 different middle schools within the city’s Unified School District (USD), representing every zip code of the desert city. The founding teachers, Jason, Rachel and Susan, had previously been teaching at a high-performing public high school located in the city’s foothills. They formed the charter because they believed that students needed more school options, especially small-sized schools, which the large districtrun high school could not provide. The founders chose the pedagogical framework of place-based learning (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008), where learning links to local communities, geographies and histories, to guide curriculum and projects. Jason, one of DHS’s founding teachers, along with the two other founders, Susan and Rachel, had been coming to the Chiricahua Mountains for years. When teachers and students planned the first DHS camping trip, the Chiricahua National Monument seemed the logical choice for both its majesty and familiarity. The monument’s many striated and sharp peaks loomed like a massive La Sagrada Família, Antoni Guadí’s gothic basilica. Susan, Rachel and Jason had decided to form their own charter high school some four years earlier, and I had the good fortune to document their first three years as a school through ethnographic research, though the focus of this book is its first year. Methodologically, ethnographers immerse themselves in a local context to gain both an emic, an insider’s 1

2  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

perspective, cultivating a degree of empathy or intersubjectivity (Schutz, 1970), and an etic, an outsider social-scientific perspective, of a people’s “way of being” (Goodenough, 1970; Harris, 1980; Pike, 1967). This emic–etic perspective is accomplished through participant observation. Participant observation entails observing events and social practices with as much detachment as can be mustered, while on other occasions, actively participating as one of the group (see Eckert, 2000; Fetterman, 1989; Hymes, 1974; King, 2001; Kulick, 1998; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Moerman, 1988; Philips, 1993; Rampton et al., 2002; Saville-Troike, 1989). Through this practice, the participant-observer uses their insider’s perspective to understand (to the extent possible) views held by community members, while at the same time, maintaining an outsider’s perspective to understand events and social practices with more critical and analytic distance. The ethnographer’s challenge is to balance intimacy with enough social distance that the “taken for granted” (Garfinkel, 1984) does not completely recede and become inconsequential and unnoted. In critical research, routinely questioning the taken for granted interrogates assumptions and practices that, if left unchecked, continue to bolster and reinforce ideologies that disenfranchise or maintain inequalities (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1997; Pennycook, 2001). In short, my process as a researcher was a phenomenological enterprise (Schutz, 1970): an enterprise concerned with how individuals, including myself, make sense of the world through interaction, intersubjectivity and categorization of past experience. Chapter 2 provides further theoretical and methodological discussion. My choice to be more “observer” or more “participant” at any given moment was mainly dictated by the needs of the school. For example, if a chaperone was needed to accompany a small group of students while they interviewed a local business owner, I was more of a participant, accompanying the students as a watchful adult. On other occasions, as a participant, I would act more like a high school student and grab a smoothie with a couple of kids instead of doing our work, or have a side conversation when we should have been listening to the teacher or principal. Once, Principal Susan reprimanded me during a whole-school meeting for such a conversation, which made me both embarrassed and happy to be so immersed and accepted by students. I rarely instigated offtask behavior, but I never discouraged it either. I tried to make it clear to everyone that I was not a teacher at the school, and thus not responsible for discipline, but of course issues of personal safety were paramount. I wanted students to be able to trust me, but at the same time, I also made sure that teachers could entrust me with their students. As an observer, I would lurk in the background, quickly writing all I could survey in my small black notebooks. Once I had become a fixture in the school and participants trusted me, I videotaped classroom

Beginnings and Endings  3

interaction and school events so I could later transcribe conversation, gesture and spatial relationships more accurately. In addition to participant observation, I conducted individual and focus group interviews with students, staff and teachers. Interviews were later transcribed and analyzed. I also attempted to connect local practices to larger societal issues, ideologies and histories in order to bridge what occurred at the micro or local level to the macro or societal level and vice versa. Again, Chapter 2 provides more detail. Doing participant-observation research in schools can (for some) catapult the researcher back to a time of adolescent insecurity and self-doubt (Eckert, 1989). Indeed, magnifying my feelings of anxiety, at the start of the school year, I noted that some students avoided me because it would not be cool to be too chummy with someone resembling a teacher. I felt like a ghost during those first months. Although I had been out of high school for over 20 years, being back in that context brought back teenage insecurities and desires to fit in and be liked. Intellectually, I knew that I didn’t have to be “best friends” with these 14 and 15-year-olds to be able to do my research, but I also knew that they would need to accept me to some degree if my research was to be successful. I needed to have their trust in order for them to be candid with me about their learning experiences. Making camp

At the time of our hike, the school’s first year was almost over and the heat of the city was starting to aggravate. The beginnings of a large endeavor, such as opening a school, are exhaustive and exhausting. This quick trip out of town was going to recharge our batteries. My job of documenting, analyzing and writing about the new charter was relatively simple in comparison to starting a new school. However, deciding on my study’s focus challenged me as so many questions and issues could be further explored in a study of this kind (e.g., service-learning efficacy, the construction of teenage sexual orientation, teen use of social media and factors that contribute to gang membership). Despite myriad possibilities, I chose to focus on factors contributing to Mexican-origin student engagement in and resistance to learning in two contexts: Spanish for heritage learners and humanities. Examining engagement and resistance among Latina/o students is a vital area of research as Latina/os are one of the largest growing populations in the United States while simultaneously dropping out of high school at the highest rate. As a researcher, teacher, and teacher educator, I wanted to understand how the educational system could better serve these students. Latina/o youth have diverse and complex linguistic and cultural backgrounds and identities. Their linguistic, social and cultural capital are resources from which school curriculum can be developed and expanded.

4  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

Unfortunately, these resources are too often viewed as roadblocks to be overcome as evidenced by English-only curricular mandates in states such as California, Arizona and Massachusetts (Stritikus, 2006). As the Latina/o demographic continues to expand, educational research and innovation seeking to resolve achievement gaps must take center stage. For me, this overnight camping trip was a chance to get to know a few DHS folk better outside of the school day. As we hiked, I learned that Jason had worked for a software company in Singapore and had also taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan. On the hike, I got a chance to spend more time with DHS students Adi and Ethan, students who were not focal participants in my study. Adi, a non-Latino freshman, had been homeschooled his entire life; this past year had been his first in any public or private school. In fact, a small handful of students had marked this year as their first in a formal educational setting. They impressed me: bright, confident and independent. Ethan, a tall, lanky freshman of Pascua Yaqui Indian heritage, was a thoughtful, quiet youth. Cameron, DHS’s art teacher who was also on this camping trip, once commented, “Ethan is who we made this school for.” What she meant by this was that a student like Ethan, shy and not as academically prepared as he should have been, could benefit immensely from a small-school atmosphere because of the personal and specialized attention provided to students. Ethan had learned about the school as he walked passed it one afternoon before it had officially opened. A year before the school launched, the storefront that would soon become its urban campus was occupied by Susan, the school’s principal, who had taken a year’s leave of absence from her high school teaching position to work full-time toward DHS’s opening in the fall. I learned that Ethan commuted a total of four hours by bus each day from the Pascua Yaqui nation to get to school. His family life had been troubled and DHS seemed a refuge. I got this impression from many of the students who lingered at school for hours after final classes had ended. In fact, this is what triggered this impromptu camping trip. As we sit in our folding lawn chairs outside our tents, Emma, a DHS student explains: “We were sitting around in March. And it was Scott Thomas, Evan, me, Emily, Adi, Ethan, other people, but they didn’t come,” she laughs. “But that’s when we decided, when Rachel said, ‘Jason, how about a camping trip?’ And that’s when everyone was like, ‘Yeah, camping trip! Camping trip!’ So that’s when we decided.” “First it was a joke,” Scott Thomas says. “Yeah, it was a joke,” Emma continues. “And then they were serious, and then the kids were like ‘Yeah, camping trip!’ That’s,” she laughs, “how it happened.” Rachel, the students’ humanities teacher, and one of the school administrators and founders, could see the possible and make it happen. Soon she, Jason and the students decided that they would be the trailblazers of

Beginnings and Endings  5

what would be future, larger-scale, overnight school trips. Luckily, they invited me to come along, but with one stipulation: “No field notes.” I could videotape, but we were just going to relax. This was not going to be a working vacation, though the teachers were still on duty. On this trip, I could see that Ethan and Jason were bonding – wherever Jason was, there was Ethan. Ethan’s attachment to Jason made me acutely aware of the importance of male role models for students, especially for those who do not have fathers in their lives. As Adi, Ethan, Jason and I approach a shaded grove of pines at the hike’s peak, we decide to rest. I discover that this is Ethan’s first time to hike or camp. While doing my research with DHS students, this was not the first time that I caught myself realizing how I have taken for granted my privileged upbringing. Earlier that morning, we loaded a rented van and Rachel’s truck with our gear. The amount of supplies that we were taking on our short trip impressed me. Pushing aside Rachel’s featherbed used to line her onewoman tent, we filled her truck and then the rented van with our tents, sleeping bags, a barbeque, large bottles of water, a massive cooler packed with ground beef, hamburger buns, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, cold cuts, wheat bread, a couple of dozen eggs, berries, pancake mix, ground coffee, a French press, real cream and, of course, marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers. I chuckled at the abundance of food. Rachel explained, “If you are going to car camp you might as well go all out.” To me, the wealth of supplies tangibly represented the teachers’ excitement and exuberance surrounding the school’s first overnight excursion. After hours on the road, Rachel’s gray truck led the way down a gravelly road to our campsite, covering my little white car in dust. Our three vehicles arrived at Jason, Rachel and Susan’s regular camping spot. The three teachers had often vacationed together, not only on overnight camping trips in the mountains, but weeks in Europe. At camp, we unloaded and staked our tents surrounded by large pine trees growing from black soil every few feet. A small clearing near the edge of our camp looked well charred from past campfires. A slow stream sparkled below. The boys whiz a football around camp, and Jason gathers us around a small open space to review the camp rules. I videotaped and later transcribed this stretch of conversation – like the other dialogues found in this chapter, but without its analysis. However, is course analysis occurs in later chapters, with its specific methodology described in Chapter 2. We sit in a circle and Jason begins, “One, don’t hassle each other, don’t give one another a hard time, respect each other, that just goes without saying.” I believe that these rules are mainly aimed at Evan who had been in and out of trouble all year. Jason reminds us that this trip is “to get away from things.” Ethan looks around the circle, “We all thank you, Jason. And Rachel. And Cameron. And Kim.” Ethan pauses,

6  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

“And, the students.” At that, everyone laughs. Quickly following Ethan’s words, Jason and Rachel remind everyone not to complain. Emma, wearing a floppy floral hat and Jackie-O glasses commands sergeant-style, “This is Downtown High School’s first camping trip so you better enjoy it!” We laugh again. “There is just one more very important rule,” Jason pauses, “don’t kill anything. A fly is okay, something biting your leg, take action, but nothing else.” Jason was nervous that butterflies and innocent wildlife would become targets, but it never happened. Next, Rachel asks who wants to be on cleaning and cooking detail. The 10 of us quickly divide into cookers and cleaners. Rachel adds, “And everyone is on the wood collecting crew.” Emma ends the meeting suggesting that everyone must have their own peeing area, which Emily seconds. At that suggestion, Jason joins the group with a substantial shovel, “This is the bathroom if you have to go.” “Are you serious?” Emily asks. “Don’t go on the shovel, okay?” Adi jokes. Jason continues, “Dig a hole for number two, you don’t have to for number one.” Ethan quips, “Jason, can you demonstrate?” “No, you can make it up as you go along.” Scott Thomas shakes his head “no.” He seems very wary of this whole process. This was his first camping trip too. Rachel jokes that we should burn our toilet paper in the holes we dig – little bonfires – and quickly adds, “Don’t be bringing your toilet paper back to camp!” Everyone laughs. The casual banter between teachers and students illustrates a more personal and intimate relationship that I hadn’t seen to this degree prior to the trip. If this type of relaxed relationship is desired in a learning environment, “off hours” excursions of this nature contribute to individuals being able to express themselves more freely. By the end of the weekend, I felt I had seen everyone as “whole people” and not just in their roles as teachers and students. For teachers, the advantage of knowing students more three-dimensionally allows them to create a more intrinsically rewarding curriculum that builds off of learner interests, thus motivating more thoughtful and thorough work (Schiller, 2007). By knowing students more fully, teachers can better understand the daily challenges students might face, such as long commutes, parental troubles, personal trials and poor living conditions that impinge upon learning and completing assignments. Students also learn to appreciate teachers as people with lives outside of school, thus humanizing them and fostering greater student–teacher empathy. The students on this trip weren’t necessarily best friends, the best students nor the best behaved, but they all felt comfortable enough with one another to hang out for a weekend (not to mention hang out with their teachers, and their teachers wanting to hang out with them). The same could be said about most of the students at DHS: One could have selected any group of first-year students for this trip and a similar relaxed

Beginnings and Endings  7

camaraderie would have been observed. By the end of the school year, students had become like a family, though it wasn’t always the case. In the first days of the newly opened school, students sorted themselves according to perceived ethnic identities, musical tastes, intellectual interests or any other semiotic combination. In the first weeks and months, students balked at working in cooperative learning groups with people they considered to be “different” from themselves. Eventually, the students who were more reluctant to interact with perceived “others” left the newly formed school. Rachel explained that many of these students left to attend another charter school set up for students to work individually at their own pace where they filled out worksheets and took computer-assisted tests that would ultimately grant them a high school diploma. With the reluctant students absent, a less combative and friendlier learning environment emerged. During passing periods, students would stream out of class and begin their ritual group hugging. One couple, of same or different sex, would hug and then another would join, and another and another, until a small knot of arms and torsos formed. When it was time for the next core class to begin, it was a challenge for teachers to get the students to separate. By the end of the school year, in interviews, students referred to themselves as a family with no clear hierarchy based on popularity. What contributed to this familial ethos? Students themselves said it was due to the school’s small size. Additionally, several students helped shape the student body ethos of caring acceptance and affectionate stances that “infected” the campus. This may contradict the statement that there was no hierarchy based upon popularity, but these kids didn’t necessarily fit the stereotypical “popular” mold. Thus, contrary to what students claimed, there was a hierarchy at the school, but it was based on friendliness, tolerance and being outside the norm, not on the usual criteria of attractiveness and athleticism. Teachers and staff also played a part in shaping a caring culture. Teachers were young, creative and energetic, to such a degree that one student in an interview described teachers as “kinda like kids themselves,” which contributed to the students’ perception that school was safe and accepting. Indeed, the faculty pages in the DHS yearbook outshone the students in their posing and humor. The students’ four-year advisory class, similar to a homeroom that provided academic advising, also helped to positively shape the environment. In advisory, students and their teacher would remain a cohort for the duration of high school with the advisory teacher acting as a student advocate. When advisory met before lunch, students and their advisory teacher often had potlucks in the neighboring park or go to La Plaza, the nearby open-air food and commercial space, to eat together. To a

8  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

certain degree, students were “forced” to spend time with people with whom they wouldn’t necessarily choose to associate. Such informal and supervised groupings of students created safe spaces for students to interact and get to know one another, both by engineering comradeship and creating natural spaces for relationships to emerge through close contact and interaction. When I first contacted the school and the board approved my research study, Jason handed me Ted Sizer’s (1985) trilogy based on the fictional teacher “Horace,” who shows how small schools benefit teachers and students. Jason explained, “If you want to understand our motivation for opening Downtown High, read these.” Indeed, after forming a charter, the teachers joined Sizer’s national school reform network, the Coalition of Essential Schools, founded in 1984. The coalition’s mission is to “create and sustain equitable, intellectually vibrant, and personalized schools and to make such schools the norm of American public education” (Coalition of Essential Schools, 2018). Through this relationship with the Coalition of Essential Schools, a more established California-based charter school mentored and assessed DHS. These small-school partnerships create support networks crucial for any newly formed entity. DHS also used the coalition’s Habits of Heart and Mind and the Ten Common Principles to guide and shape the school’s pedagogy. The Habits of Heart and Mind (see Groff, 1995; Meier, 1996) is a set of practices and evaluative criteria embedded in course projects to encourage lifelong learning. They include: Action (what can I do to make things better?); Inquiry (what do I want to know?); Reflection (what can I learn about myself?); Expression (how can I share what I think and feel?); Evidence (how do I know what I know?); and Perspective (whose viewpoint should I consider?). The Habits of Heart and Mind guide teachers in the design of course curriculum, using concepts that teachers share throughout the entire school curriculum, which also inform grading rubrics. Thus, the Habits of Heart and Mind provide a shared vocabulary for teachers, students and parents to use when discussing student work and progress at semester-end conferences.2 The Ten Common Principles also shape learning and can be summarized as follows: teaching and learning should be personalized, inclusive, focused, authentic, democratic and performance based, set within a school context that values “unanxious expectation,” trust and decency; decency defined as fairness, generosity and tolerance (Coalition of Essential Schools, 2018). These guiding principles and habits are succinctly summarized on DHS’s website and promotional materials: “Downtown High School is… small enough so that everyone is known well; organized around democratic principles; challenging and engaging for all students; a place where learning is connected to real-world issues in the community.” In

Beginnings and Endings  9

addition, Susan, the school principal, explained that DHS’s curriculum strives to prepare students not only in the “three Rs,” traditionally known as “reading, writing and arithmetic,” but also in “rigor, relationships and relevance,” skills and characteristics, which are emphasized in high school reform movements across the country. This updated three Rs course through DHS’s place-based curriculum with increased strength as each year passes. This book, however, focuses on the school’s first year in which its identity was still forming (not that identity is ever fixed). The school was sailing new waters that were choppy and unpredictable, but sometimes smooth. The voyage metaphor entails that launching a new school is a discovery of the unknown with risks and rewards. Back on the trail

On our way down the mountain, much of our conversation returns to how we are going to eat the apple pie that waits for us at camp. Although it is scorching, Jason and I muse that a slice would taste good with a cup of coffee. Before arriving at the Chiricahuas, Jason insisted that we stop at a small rustic mercantile to buy what Jason claimed to be one of the best apple pies found anywhere, weighing in at about five pounds and standing a foot high from its center. As Jason, Ethan, Adi and I get closer to camp, we see Emily, Emma and Rachel, the humanities teacher, and Cameron, the art teacher, reading paperbacks in the shade. Jason makes straight for the pie, gingerly removing it from its box. He carefully sinks the heavy knife into its depths, slicing a piece for each of us. As if a dinner bell sounds, Scott, Thomas and Evan line up for their share. Jason’s right. Both tart and sweet, with a light and flaky crust, the pie is one of the best I have ever tasted. As we sit as a group, savoring the last bites of our pie. Adi, Emily and Emma discuss what the school mascot should be, as one had yet to be selected. “How about the ‘Downtown High Gila Monsters’?” Emma asks. Adi counters with “Pikachus,” a Pokémon® character. Rachel practically leaps from her seat, “the Pigeons!”. “Yeah, the Pigeons!” Emma agrees. “Then we’re like flying pests,” Adi says. Rachel insists, “They’re cool, they’re city birds!”. “Flying rats,” Scott Thomas adds under his breath. “Downtown High Pigeons,” Rachel says with finality, as if the decision has just been made. Jason doesn’t share her enthusiasm. Emma strikes a bargain, “The Downtown High School Squirrels,” a city animal, but cute. Rachel laughs, “You should have seen us when we were figuring out the name of the school. I almost walked out crying and walked home from Mount Lone Pine.” “Why?” Emma prompts. The kids look at Rachel, intrigued by her revelation. The students listen with great interest as Jason and Rachel remember the school naming process.

10  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

The importance of a name3

Rachel sits back on a propped pillow outside her tent; Brent stands to her left with Ethan between them, sitting on an ice chest. The rest of us form a circle under the shading pines curious to hear Downtown High insider history. “What were some of the other school names?” Jason asks. Speaking in unison each say, “[City name deleted] Essential School” and “[City name deleted] Community School.” “[City name deleted] Essential School sounded like a vitamin protein drink,” Rachel says. “There was Sonoran High School, Southwest High School, La Frontera, Presidio,” Jason says. “We kept voting and voting. We were way up into late at night,” Rachel says. “A lot of the names that we liked were already taken,” Jason said. “I like squirrels,” Emma chimes in. The two explain that they wanted to use the street name of the school, but they nixed that idea because they didn’t own the school building and therefore could potentially relocate, making the name obsolete. Rachel explains that at times the discussions got heated. Adi looks at Rachel, concerned. “I like Downtown High,” Emma says. Ethan drops a tossed water bottle, which he picks up and gives to Jason. “I do, too,” Rachel says. “It’s perfect,” Emma says with finality: perfect because “downtown” embodies the school’s pedagogical framework of placebased learning where students regularly engaged in community-driven projects in the city’s center. At camp, we didn’t realize how fitting it was to be discussing place and place names in Apache territory. According to Jesuit Juan Nentvig, writing from northwest Mexico between 1750 and 1767, he reported that Chiricahua is an Ópata4 word meaning wild turkey: The fowl had roamed the mountainous region until the 1900s and was an important source of nutrition (nps.gov). Place names in this context – the Chiricahua Mountains and Downtown High – held concrete connections to place, describing physical and metaphysical aspects of the terrain in relation to community. The importance of place

In his book, Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache,5 anthropologist Keith Basso (1996) documents the importance of place names to the Western Apache living in the community of Cibecue on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation located in Arizona’s White Mountains. Elders would invoke place names like Whiteness Spreads Out Descending To Water, Trail Extends Into A Grove Of Sticklike Trees or Widows Pause For Breath as a means of (re)teaching cultural values to listeners who had trespassed them or as a means of “talking around” an individual’s misdeeds without directly condemning. Apache associated these places and their names with an event (fictional or

Beginnings and Endings  11

otherwise) that had occurred there – usually someone acting foolish and getting bested by a wiser other. The stories would be told again to individuals whose present-day actions mirrored the “fool” in the story. The listener, familiar with the tale invoked by its place name would, more likely than not, understand the personal significance of the story, and every time they passed that place or heard its name, would be reminded of its lesson and their imprudence. Through stories connected to place, elders passed along community values. Elder Benson Lewis explains: I think of that mountain called Tséé Ligai Dah Sidilé (White Rocks Lie Above In A Compact Cluster) as if it were my maternal grandmother. I recall stories of how it once was at that mountain. The stories told to me were like arrows. Elsewhere, hearing that mountain’s name, I see it. Its name is like a picture. Stories go to work on you like arrows. Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself. (Benson Lewis, age 64, 1979 – Basso, 1996: 38)

Thus, physical geography embodies wisdom, as Basso’s title describes, tying everyday practices to lived places. The land holds stories that guide and instruct: the physical place reminds people of cultural mores and expected conduct. The stories, and their associated place names, make one a better person. This perceptual understanding of place, and the power a place name evokes, does not limit itself to the Apache; it also occurs with the Navajo. Basso (1996: 45), quoting linguist and anthropologist Harry Hoijer, writes: “Even the most minute occurrences are described by Navajos in close conjunction with their physical settings, suggesting that unless narrated events are spatially anchored their significance is somehow reduced and cannot be properly assessed.” Place, and by extension place name, serves to make the abstract concrete. Place functions as physical repositories of life lessons that index cultural values to be remembered. Places, areas marked by rocks, rivers and trees, were for the most part fixed, unless changed by some kind of natural phenomenon, thereby ensuring the longevity of important stories crucial for maintaining a community’s cultural legacy. As stories were not written, “reading” geography was a form of literacy and record-keeping. Place-based learning

Although dominant, Anglo culture is not tied to physical place names as profoundly, we see by the foregoing student–teacher conversation that names do hold significance. Names invoke cultural constructs perhaps in the same way as metaphors entail cultural meaning (see Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Quinn, 1991). The school’s name, Downtown High, not only evokes its urban location, but also suggests that the city will be its

12  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

campus and object of study. “Downtown” also suggests a certain hipster vibe or artistic-outsider leaning, which the school certainly had by year end. Once, when I explained to a friend where I was researching, she said, “Every time I walk by Downtown High, it feels like I’m on the set of Fame.” Like the fictionalized New York High School of Performing Arts,6 many students wore post-punk-like attire, had individualized hairstyles and abundant theatrical energy. In place-based learning (Gruenewald, 2003a; Lewicki, 2000; Long et al., 2003; Loveland, 2003), the school curriculum draws upon the town/ city/region’s history, geography, ecology, politics, economics, arts and languages. Learning takes place not only on school grounds, but also in neighborhoods, local museums, businesses, gardens, libraries, theaters, state and national parks, utility plants, universities and so forth. Placebased learning affords students concrete, tangible, relational and relevant manifestations of course content. Like the stories of the White Mountain Apache, knowledge or wisdom is no longer abstract. Teaching and experience become anchored in place, becoming more comprehensible and alive. Place embodies learning so when it is indexed or encountered that knowledge is remembered. Because of its multimodal, experiential orientation, place-based learning can effectively reach students with learning styles and aptitudes less compatible with traditional, logocentric pedagogy. Place-based pedagogy also aspires to connect learning to students’ varying communities. Proponents of place-based learning suggest that learning more about one’s own communities leads to greater understanding of identity. Keith Basso (1996: 34) explains: “Knowledge of place is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s own community, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person.” Place-based learning makes lessons more personal through the exploration of students’ own places, affording students the opportunity to gain greater self-knowledge. Unfortunately, too often there exists a disconnect between a student’s physical and mental habitats and habitus and what is taught as important in school (Bourdieu, 1974 [1967]; Moll, 1992). This discrepancy is what critical place-based pedagogy seeks to eliminate (Gruenewald, 2003a). The insertion of “critical” to place-based pedagogy stresses the importance for learners to gain greater conscientização or conscientization (or consciousness raising) (Freire, 1970), regarding their own communities, thus motivating a greater sense of ecological, economic, political and, I will include, linguistic stewardship and activism. According to Gruenewald (2003a: 3): “Place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit. Critical pedagogies are needed to challenge the assumptions, practices, and outcomes

Beginnings and Endings  13

taken for granted in dominant culture and in conventional education.” The injection of the “critical” creates a space for teachers and learners to examine social inequalities and environmental politics, and gives them a means to explore alternatives. The marriage of place-based learning to critical pedagogy also helps critical pedagogy to be less abstract and utopian, assuaging two common critiques of critical approaches (Ellsworth, 1992; Gur-Ze’ev, 1998). DHS’s science class, like the humanities class, consistently drew upon place-based pedagogy to organize academic units. For example, students studied water in desert biospheres, a relevant topic as the region continues to experience annual drops in precipitation. Indeed, at the time of the study, Arizona’s US Senator John McCain (2004) considered water to be the state’s most pressing political, economic and ecological issue. Complementing the study of aquifers and the water cycle, I accompanied students for a full week in the field learning the mechanics of water processing and distribution through a program run by the city’s water utility. We loaded up in vans and visited the city’s water processing plants, connecting book learning to the real world. Although individual teachers and the school as a whole engaged in many off-campus experiences, DHS’s “City Works Program”7 most tangibly connected learning to community. In City Works classes, students and teachers partnered with local organizations and institutions to collaborate in community-based projects for an academic year. For example, DHS and the university’s science center created a traveling science exhibit where high school students taught elementary school students about everyday science. DHS and the historic Fox Theater collaborated in the theater’s “memory project” documenting patrons experiences with the theater in its heyday of the 1930s and 1940s. City Works classes met twice a week: once for a regular 50-minute class period, and once for a three-hour block every Wednesday afternoon. In the first year of the school’s operation, students arrived on campus at 11am on Wednesdays, attended an all-school meeting, ate lunch and then proceeded to their City Works classes. The three-hour block allowed teachers and students to go off-site for extended periods without interfering with other classes. Charter School and Research Project Beginnings

Taking a break from analyzing interview data for another research project, I walk to the “Fourth Avenue Winter Street Fair.” Strolling crowds of every stripe fill the downtown street – former Dead Heads dressed in tie-dyed garments, bikers in leather chaps, middle-aged couples dressed in jeans, teens with spiked clothing and hair and young families with strollers and children in hand. Despite the diversity of the crowd, all seem to be enjoying the winter sun, fiddlers, jugglers and the many food

14  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

and craft booths. Through the wind chime cutlery, hand-crafted soaps and rainbow-glazed mugs, I spot a white wooden booth with the poster “Place-Based Learning” stretched across its side. As a proponent of experiential and service-learning for years, I have a sense of what place-based learning is, but I need to see for myself what this school is all about. Rachel and I begin a lively conversation about the soon-to-open charter high school, located just blocks away in the heart of downtown. We have an immediate connection, and after talking for about 20 minutes, I ask if it would be possible for me to do research in the new school that upcoming fall. Rachel thinks it would be a great idea to have an outside eye documenting their first year, but explains that she would have to run the idea by Jason and Susan and their board of directors. I am excited by the prospect of observing and participating in a pedagogy that holds so much promise for making learning more tangible and relevant. I leave Rachel, impressed by the idea of a group of teachers who saw the possibility of providing students with a different type of educational experience who then turned their theoretical dreams into a practical reality. Their road to becoming a charter began by Jason, Susan and Rachel forming the [Name of city deleted] Small School Project (XSSP), a notfor-profit organization whose mission promotes “professional development and community dialogue that foster smaller and more equitable learning communities for all students.”8 The not-for-profit organization then applied to the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools for a charter application for DHS, which was subsequently approved in March 2003. The formation of charter schools has been steadily increasing throughout the nation, with the states of California and Arizona taking the lead. At the time of the study, there were 2300 charter schools in the United States, and of these schools, 502 (20%) were in Arizona and 58 (12%) of those in Arizona were within the [city’s name removed] USD’s geographic boundaries. Nationally, at the time of the study, approximately 565,000 students were in charter schools with 81,612 students (14%) residing in the state of Arizona ([City name removed] Charter school study, 2005). Between 2003 and 2005, 5200 students had left the city’s USD in order to attend charter schools, reducing district school funding by 27 million dollars ([City name removed] Charter school study, 2005). The XUSD study found that the primary reason parents sent their child to a charter school was their perception that public schools could not meet a particular child’s needs, ranging from learning disabilities to giftedness, while their other children, without special needs, remained in the XUSD system. The XUSD study indicated that unless district-led public schools address the needs gap, alternative learning environments, such as charter schools, would step in to provide more personalized and

Beginnings and Endings  15

relevant educational experiences. In Chapter 7, I provide additional charter school literature and updated statistics. ~~~ With Downtown High’s emphasis on place-based learning, the school camping trip was exactly what Rachel, Jason and Susan had in mind when they imagined opening their own charter high school back in 2001: Teachers creating educational environments that introduced students to experiences that were meaningful, personal, cooperative and sometimes uncomfortable. In addition, by having a school that was both small and autonomous, they had the freedom to act on serendipitous ideas, such as the camping trip, with absolutely no school-district red tape. Such a trip would have been out of the question at the large public high school where they had been teaching. After learning about the forming school, I, too, believed that DHS’s three guiding pedagogical and evaluative frameworks of Place-Based Learning, Habits of Heart and Mind and 10 Common Principles would be a solid foundation for any new school that had the autonomy to design curricula, assessments and institutional ethos. I therefore embarked on a study to see how the school enacted these educational ideals experienced by teachers and students. Chapter breakdown

In the following chapters, I describe what I observed and recorded in DHS’s diverse classrooms, but data primarily come from a Spanish class for heritage language learners (SHLLs) and the same students’ humanities class. Field notes and interview and classroom discourse analysis (interactional sociolinguistics) tell the story behind the successes and struggles in these classroom contexts. In Chapter 2, I describe the study’s methodological and theoretical frameworks in more detail. Chapter 3 focuses on the first-semester Spanish class for SHLLs taught by Beth. The chapter primarily focuses on an incident when the teacher (innocently) referred to students’ slang coming from “Pachuco-talk,” which students took as an insult. Chapter 4 centers on the second-semester SHLLs class, this time taught by Alberto. The chapter examines the causes for student (and teacher) “performance strikes” (Shor, 1992) – the refusal to do expected work – and provides an example of a squandered learning opportunity. Chapter 5 samples activities in the humanities class taught by Rachel over an academic year, which engaged the same Mexicanorigin students. Through discourse analysis, I also discuss academic identity formation. Chapter 6 takes lessons learned from the humanities class and suggests a pueblo-based pedagogy for heritage language (HL)

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classes and offers additional insights through discourse analysis (i.e., interactional sociolinguistics) of why students resisted formal Spanish language instruction. Chapter 7 summarizes the study’s findings; suggests how institutional factors contributed to resistant and engaged learning; and reviews relevant charter school literature. Notes (1) Names of participants are pseudonyms. Because “place” figures strongly in the school’s philosophy, some place names have not been changed, but I do change place or street names that would identify the city where the school is located. (2) Advisory teacher, parent(s)/guardian(s), student and another individual of the student’s choosing attend conferences. For example, students can invite a relative, a classmate, another teacher at the school, the school secretary or a researcher. This format highlights the importance of community in one’s learning. (3) I understand the irony here. I’m describing how the school founders came upon their name when I am not using the school’s actual name. However, the name I chose conceptually fits with the spirit of the actual school name, though they may have discarded it the night they came upon their actual name. (4) Ópata is an Uto-Aztecan language of northern Mexico once spoken in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Mexican officials report the language to be extinct though some civil groups, as recent as the 1990s, have reported there to be as many (or as few) as 146 speakers (see http:​//www​.ethn​ologu​e.com​/14/s​how_l​angua​ge.as​p?cod​e=OPT​). (5) Although Basso’s ethnography may be critiqued as a nostalgic, prosaic view of the Cibecue Apache, I find his and the Apache elders’ discussion concerning place to be particularly apt for highlighting the significance place held for DHS pedagogy. (6) When I lived in New York, I often walked by The High School of Performing Arts and amused myself, thinking that Downtown High seemed more “Fame-like” than the actual school from which the film and TV series was based. (7) As an observer of Downtown High School over the years, I would characterize its City Works classes as its signature program, though it is no longer part of the curriculum as founders wanted all classes to be “city works” classes. (8) I have omitted the school’s website references in order to preserve anonymity.

2 From Cecilia Paulson1 to Downtown High School, Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks

After three years of preparation, the opening of Downtown High School (DHS) would not happen as planned. Jason was still working with contractors and construction workers to try to open the school’s doors on Thursday, September 2, 2004. Electrical wiring was still in progress and many of the interior walls and glass had yet to be installed – fortunately, the first two days of school would take place at the local botanical gardens and Museum of Modern Art, and Monday, Labor Day, would be a holiday – buying them a few more days. Nonetheless, on Tuesday, despite the extra days, the school’s building renovation was still incomplete. In the 1950s, the street where the new school would open was known as “Fashionable P. Street.” Cecilia Paulson’s eponymous clothing boutique, where the new school would be housed, welcomed the likes of Lady Astor, Debbie Reynolds and Liz Taylor, and was singularly responsible for the street’s allure; there was no store like it in Arizona. However, in the early 1980s, Paulson had to close her downtown store due to the popularity of the El Dor Mall, the previous site of the luxurious El Dorado Hotel. Now, even the mall, with its boarded-up interiors, fades as a commercial hub, boosted only by its surrounding box stores and cineplex. As the fate of these landmarks shows, the passing of time radically shifts our sense of place. With the city’s revitalization of its downtown, Cecilia Paulson’s former fashion emporium would soon be filled with teenagers with their own fashion styles and their young and eager teachers. The building would also house Raíces,2 a not-for-profit after-school writing program employing and training youth journalists. A major task in the renovation, carried out in stages to accommodate the growing student body – a new grade added each year – was to bring light into its second floor. The 17

18  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

second-floor façade was opened and fitted with large windows overlooking the street. Builders installed expansive skylights over the main staircase and an innovative system of industrial-strength, opaque, corrugated plastic walls running the length of the windowless classrooms to bring in light, mirroring the tin roofs and fences of the city’s architectural vernacular. Other classroom walls and doors still needed to be fitted with clear glass. However, as the school year progressed, these glass walls were slowly covered with student artwork and posters, functioning to display student work while minimizing hallway distractions. The four second-floor classrooms sat two-to-a-side and emptied into a wide hallway and open staircase. The floors were lined with blue lowpile carpet and polished concrete. The second floor’s west corner housed several white desktop Apple computers for students to use during lunch and breaks; in year two, this space would also become a classroom. For classroom use, teachers shared two rolling carts filled with white Apple iBooks with wireless internet connection. These classes included four core classes: math, humanities, science and Spanish; and class electives that required writing: yearbook, photojournalism and creative writing. Other electives included yoga, fitness, karate, cycling, drama, guitar and glassblowing. Downstairs, two glass swinging doors opened from the sidewalk into DHS’s and Raíces’ administrative areas. The after-school writing program occupied a large space to the north of the second-floor classrooms that would later become DHS classrooms in year two as the notfor-profit moved to another renovated space within the large building. Principal Susan’s “office” consisted of a large wooden desk that faced the west wall of the open-air administrative space. Rachel and Jason, the other two school founders who acted as teacher-administrators, faced one another against a blue northern partition, wooden desks touching. Linda, the school secretary, sat at an L-shaped desk, forming a southern partition, enclosing the founders’ desks. Behind Rachel and Jason was a small meeting cubicle, a round wooden table filling the space. Later, this cubicle was dubbed the “hard-talk room,” as this is where disciplinary discussions were held with teachers, students and parents. Beyond the conference cubicle, to the rear of the building, was the open office area of Raíces. Descending the central staircase, one could see (and often hear) everything happening below. This configuration of administrative space and desks iconically represented the transparent, interpersonal and professional relationships among staff and students. Although Susan, Jason and Rachel were very close friends – often traveling, camping and socializing together – Jason and Rachel had a particularly close bond, as the proximity of their desks suggested. For Susan, just as everyone could see into her work area, she reciprocally was able to monitor everyone else. Susan had an uncanny ability and intuitive sense to know what was happening in the school and

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  19

the lives of students, as if she were everywhere at once. As the year progressed, school secretary Linda’s position as a buffer, literally and figuratively, emerged. She forged close, nurturing and protective relationships with students – who often referred to her as the school nurse – a name elevating her status while conveying the ethos of healing and compassion. The informality of the workspace also reflected the first-name-only naming practices between administrators, teachers, staff and students, linguistically signaling a less traditional and formal school. Tuesday comes: Hotel High

As construction at the Paulson building was still underway, DHS desperately needed a temporary place to begin the fall semester. After negotiating several possible locations, the founding teachers selected a hotel, walking distance from the school site. Its proximity to the school under renovation and the hotel’s conference rooms made it a logical choice. The rear of the hotel opened onto a large, tree-lined courtyard, lawn and gazebo; its perimeter included coffee vendors, a hot dog stand, take-out sushi, Mexican food, a sandwich shop, a gym and other small businesses. Each establishment stood in brightly painted primary colors, a nod to the demolished 19th-century adobe structures once occupying this area. During the city’s warm months, the courtyard served as an outdoor theater featuring classic films and free popcorn each Thursday evening. This courtyard or “La Plaza” came to be a favorite place for teachers to bring students for lunch throughout the school year as their storefront location offered very little open, outdoor spaces. On Tuesday, the first day of “on campus” school, the hotel lobby filled as parents dropped off their kids at the hotel’s carport and students on foot, bicycle and skateboard rolled in. A stately grand piano sat in the middle of the lobby, along with overstuffed gold lamé couches and chairs, crystal chandeliers and valets in burgundy fitted jackets. The 85 students, in their tight and baggy jeans, sagging backpacks, long, short, spiked, colorful hair and baseball caps, looked like the result of a huge hotel reservation mishap. Not the usual crowd one expected to see at a hotel catering to professional conference attendees. Yet, that’s exactly how the hotel prepared for these students and their teachers. Their temporary classrooms, The Ocotillo Room, The Saguaro Room, The Cottonwood, were filled with long tables covered with white tablecloths, padded seats and many pitchers of iced water and thick wine glasses. Small flip chart easels and overhead projectors stood in for whiteboards. Teachers told students to congregate in The Palo Verde Room, a large second-floor conference hall, where students would be given hotel maps and their class schedules. Students laughed and smiled, chatted loudly and stroked furniture, clearly excited to be having school in a hotel, surrounded by relative luxury not associated with public school.

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The Emergence of Research Questions

Uncertain of my exact research questions, I decided to use the first weeks at the hotel as an exploratory period in order to get to know students, teachers and the curriculum better – hopeful that an interesting issue would emerge. That “issue” soon became apparent. During DHS’s first week, I observed the “Advanced Spanish” class, advanced because students already had some degree of Spanish–English bilingualism due to their ethnic heritage and familiar exposure to the Spanish language: a typical heritage language learner’s (HLL) profile. Because of students’ linguistic and ethnic identities, it became clear to their teacher, Beth, that it would be a Spanish class for HLLs. The class wasn’t initially labeled as such, but the students’ language proficiency warranted a heritage approach for language instruction. Although no monolithic approach to heritage language (HL) instruction exists, classes should be designed with learner characteristics in mind. Generally speaking, HLLs are closely tied to the target language and/or culture. Linguistically, it is typical for HLLs to have a larger discrepancy between speaking–listening skills and reading–writing skills, with ­reading–writing skills less developed as their formal educations have been in English unless they have attended bilingual or dual-language immersion schools. Because HLLs often come to school with more developed speaking and listening skills, due to authentic language use and exposure, classes often emphasize reading and writing skills with the overall aim to build and strengthen students’ academic proficiencies in all skill areas. I provide further explanation of HLL characteristics in Chapter 4 (see also Beaudrie et al., 2016). Through HL academic proficiency building, it is argued that this work can positively transfer to other academic areas in the societal language (e.g., English in the United States) through additional instruction, strategy building and practice. This is particularly valuable for students who may be struggling academically, while also providing space to honor home culture and language, which can also positively affect academic performance (Carreira, 2007; Ladson-Billings, 2009). Honoring home culture and language resonates with culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) that mandates academic rigor that connects course content to the students’ home cultures (Helmer, 2010, 2014). HL scholars also suggest that HL courses include instruction in sociopragmatic norms, register and sociolinguistic awareness (Martínez, 2006), including teacher education courses for language teachers (Bustamante & Novella, 2019; Leeman & Serafini, 2016). Sociolinguistic approaches teach how language is contextually bound and socially constructed, used differently depending on local and world geographies and further differentiated by social, economic, gender, identity and other individual factors that further permutate based on context. It is important for HLLs to understand how language works in order to mitigate against feelings of shame if a learner or their family speak a “non-standard” or

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  21

stigmatized variety of the HL. Also, as HLLs learn the HL in more informal conversational settings, they need to understand and learn how to vary their language style based on broader rhetorical situations. Related, students may harbor linguistic insecurity or linguistic shyness due to their incomplete acquisition of the HL (Krashen, 1998), worsened by teasing or judging by HL community or family members. Thus, HL pedagogy should include conscious “safe space” construction where students feel comfortable to take linguistic risks without fear of ridicule. Other scholars teaching Spanish as an HL also advocate for critical approaches that include service-learning projects where students strive for change in their home communities while understanding the workings of power that course through all societal and marginal languages. Critical HL service-learning integrates students into regional and local discourse communities while providing students with needed and wanted “reallife, hands-on experiences… as a part of their coming-to-consciousness regarding the social processes that affect Spanish speakers in the United States” (Leeman et al., 2011a: 2). These experiences also cultivate student linguistic expertise and agency as authentic interaction provides students with structured opportunities “to integrate their existing and new knowledges within community activism” (Leeman et al., 2011b: 485). As the foregoing description suggests, HLL is complicated. HL classes are fraught with complexities – ethnic, political, pedagogical, social, psychological and linguistic. And it is this complexity that is often not described in the extant literature on HLL, a literature that tends to focus on the heterogeneity of students’ language proficiency to the exclusion of their other and perhaps more important differences that include academic preparedness, economic and social class, personal style and myriad other differences in interests, motivation, abilities and challenges that influence learning. One means of understanding the complexities surrounding teaching HLLs is to ethnographically study student resistance to and engagement with learning materials and pedagogies. In the current study, I ethnographically investigate these issues in the school’s Spanish class for HLLs where all 16 students were of Mexican origin.3 Some were born in Mexico, others had one or both parents who were born in Mexico and others had one or both parent who identified as Latina/o/Mexican, but were born in the United States. I provide more participant and class details in the following chapters. Although the class was eventually given the “heritage” moniker, I don’t believe it was fully apparent to administrators and some teachers4 how distinct the needs of these students were. To be fair to the Spanish teachers and administrators, this was a group of learners with whom the founding teachers and other teaching staff had had very little experience. I, on the other hand, had never taught Spanish as an HL, but my Spanish language profile was very similar to that of several of the students – good listening comprehension, conversational speaking, basic reading, but weak writing. One main

22  Learning and Not Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

difference between the students and I, however, is I am of Nicaraguan heritage, not Mexican. Researcher positionality

In doing critical research, it is important, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989), writing in the field of critical hermeneutics, for the researcher to understand their social frame of reference as it influences research questions and interpretation. Although I am Latina, and relate to students as a fellow HLL, it is important to note that I am not Chicana/ Méxicana, I am outside of the “Mexican experience(s)”; thus, I cannot completely identify with the participants in my study. As an outsider, I have not fully experienced the community, solidarity or history shared between many Mexican-Americans, nor have I experienced bigotry aimed at Mexican-Americans directly. I believe I have been spared the psychological trauma of internalized bigotry. Because of the small number of Nicaraguan émigrés, most Americans have no opinion concerning “Nicaraguans” (not counting the Reagan era’s Contras and Sandinistas and the recent strife brought about by current Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, re-elected in 2007). Americans residing in the western United States, on the other hand, have plenty to say about “Mexicans.” This relative anonymity protected me growing up. Although I heard plenty of bigoted remarks pointed at MexicanAmericans, and although these stung indirectly, it still wasn’t my specific ethnic group under attack; my ethnic group was not named. When queried where I “was from,” which happened quite often as a youngster, I would confusedly reply “America,” and later when I understood that my olive skin, dark hair and eyes prompted this question, I would explain that my mother came from Nicaragua. Nicaragua was so far off the radar I might as well have said, “Timbuktu.” Contributing to my ambiguous ethnic identity is the fact that Nicaraguans are a very small demographic group in the United States with few marked enclaves. There was never a community network (in my region) with which to identify.5 Without knowledge of an actual community, I was not even able to imagine a Nicaraguan community.6 Anderson (1991) defines imagined community as a mental image of one’s affinity with a community or nation, imagined as it is impossible to know each member of such a large group of people. Thus, without an actual or imagined ethnic community, I could never categorize myself as Nicaraguan-American. My only extended contact with Nicaraguans had been with my mother who was born in Managua, my aunt, my mother’s and my own cousins, my grandparents and great aunts and uncles. Like so many Americans, I am a child of a family who immigrated to the United States; an extended family who had to learn English and who had to start over. It was only as an adult that I came to appreciate my

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  23

family’s sacrifice and the linguistic hurdles they had to overcome. This realization contributed to my adult need to connect with my ethnic and linguistic heritage, thus my gravitation to doing research in a Spanish class peopled with HLLs. I was further attracted to this particular context because I continue to be a learner of my HL, and I looked forward to spending time in a classroom where I would be exposed to formal language instruction. As an adult, I deeply regretted that I had not pursued formal Spanish study. Upon reflection, I have come to believe that it was the underlying bigotry toward Mexicans I had experienced growing up in Southern California that had caused me to devalue the language associated with this maligned people and therefore disinclined me to study the language as an academic subject. I therefore attended the Spanish class as a researcher and a learner. Given my history, I take the field of HLL personally and seriously. I believe that programs for HLLs should be de rigueur in K-12 contexts and universities where the student body is ethnically diverse. Because I feel that my own linguistic potential was not developed, my patience thins when I see similar things happen to others, and it is possible that this impatience seeps through my descriptive accounts of the Spanish class attended by HLLs at DHS; therefore, readers must consider and weigh this possibility as they sift through my presentation of data and findings. Hotel High: Week 2, Spanish is a waste of time

One morning at the hotel, I had been observing two boys7 playing in the hotel’s gravel garden under the staircase, ducking and laughing under plastic palms instead of being in class, when I entered the “Advanced” Spanish class already in session. On the room’s propped up whiteboard, Beth had listed a column of verb conjugations. The students seated at tables began to complain. “I could be taking a more advanced math class,” Gabi said. Their teacher Beth responded, “There aren’t any other math classes, it will get better.” I went over to Isabel who looked at me and said, “I already know this. This is stupid.” I nodded, but I wanted to be supportive of Beth. I suggested to Isabel that they needed to study Spanish just like they study English in their humanities class. She responded, “but we don’t conjugate verbs in there.” Sensing the students’ restlessness, Beth asked me to take a group of students outside to the plaza to supervise individual reading. Once in the courtyard, all hell broke loose. Scott, Isabel, Zac and Gabi complained incessantly. Gabi, the most academically focused of the group, repeated, “I could be taking a more advanced math class instead of this. This class is a total waste of time.” Her brother Zac agreed. Again, I suggested that this class was just like their humanities class, but

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in Spanish. “You need to learn to read and write in Spanish at higher levels just like you do in English. You speak, read, and write better in English than Spanish, but you’re not saying that English is a waste of time,” I said. This explanation would never make sense to any of them. But I had to admit that those verb conjugations didn’t make much sense either. I felt bad for Beth who admitted that she wasn’t prepared to teach HLLs. She said that it was mainly because she wasn’t a native speaker of Spanish and had had no formal training to work with HLLs. To her credit, however, she consulted with the university’s HL experts for advice on conducting her class. Despite her efforts, it seemed like the students weren’t giving her a chance, perhaps sensing her insecurity. I didn’t understand why the students wouldn’t want to be fully literate in their heritage tongue – a language that for some was their first. Although their reaction disturbed and puzzled me (but resembled my own ambivalence as a youth), I was excited and relieved to have found the focus of my study. Essentially, I wanted to get to the bottom of the students’ resistance to broadening their Spanish registers. After spending some time at the new school, the following questions surfaced: Why didn’t the students see any benefit to becoming balanced bilinguals? Was it just the way the class was being taught? Did it matter who was teaching them? Did it matter that the teacher’s first language (L1) was English? Were they demonstrating a form of internalized linguicism/racism in which they felt English was a superior language? Were they just weak and unmotivated students? In order to answer several of these questions, I became a participant-observer in the students’ Spanish and humanities classes, which they also took together (at least for the first semester), selected a different student each day to accompany for their full day of classes, took photographs, videoed classroom lessons and conducted interviews with students and teachers. Through complicated life events, the Spanish teachers changed in the second semester, from a non-L1 Spanish teacher to an L1 Spanish teacher, whose class I will describe in Chapter 4. This change in Spanish teachers also offered insights regarding differences between L1 and nonL1 language teachers. Next, I list these initial questions more formally, but broadly posed: (1) How do Mexican-origin students respond to Spanish (heritage) language instruction (using the school’s place-based pedagogy, Habits of Heart and Mind and 10 Common Principles)? (2) How do Mexican-origin students respond to Spanish (heritage) language instruction taught by second language (L2)8 and L1 users?9 (3) How do the same students respond to humanities (i.e., social studies/ English) instruction (using the school’s place-based pedagogy, Habits of Heart and Mind and 10 Common Principles)?

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  25

(4) How do Mexican-origin students identify ethnically and linguistically, and how does this identification manifest symbolically through dress, music, language choice and so forth? (5) How, if at all, does student identification factor in answering RQs 1–3? Through these questions, I explored what caused resistance to (heritage) language learning and, at the same time, I wanted to investigate the converse, what caused engagement in learning. I was fortunate to find myself in a research context where naturally occurring class schedules and events allowed me to observe student behavior under a variety of conditions, enabling me to make stronger correlations. From the start, student resistance was the engine that drove my investigation. Educational psychologist and philosopher, William James, cited in Packer and Goicoechea (2000), observes that resistant or “bad” behavior, from a pedagogical point of view, could be considered a better starting point than “good” behavior for understanding teaching and learning. Resistance, or “bad” behavior, indicates to the practitioner or researcher that there is something in the environment that students are reacting against. In the present study, student complaints, sullenness and disruptive behavior brought into relief pedagogical practices that some learners found disrespectful, unchallenging and “a waste of time.” By understanding (and asking students) what is not working in a classroom, teachers and researchers can forge more responsive and informed pedagogies. Similarly, much is learned about effective teaching by observing learners involved in activity that grabs and sustains their attention. Indeed, during the same period of resistance, I also observed these same students engaged in their humanities class work. In this learning environment, students respected their teacher, found their work relevant and had a good time doing it. Understanding the factors that contribute to Latina/o student resistance and engagement has never been more critical. Census data show that Latina/os have the highest high school dropout rate while simultaneously being one of the nation’s fastest-growing demographic groups (Fry, 2014). The pairing of large student enrollments and high dropout rates signals a looming educational and economic crisis that we must confront. By 2050, Latina/os will likely be the majority group in the United States. For a democracy to prosper, its people must be engaged, educated and valued. If graduation rates measure engagement with learning and institutional care for the individual, our schools are failing at this democracy project. It is important to understand the contributing factors that lead to either resistance or engagement. Although much has been written, researched and discussed in the field of HL instruction in its 30 plus years as a discipline, none, to my knowledge, empirically investigates the topic through ethnographic research in a charter high school that includes a cohort of learners compared across two classrooms. At DHS, unlike many other Spanish HL (SHL) studies,

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the classroom context is compulsory. It is not set on a college campus where students already have an elevated motivation to learn. Its high school context presents the challenges of what many language teachers can face, including resistant learners. By addressing this research gap, I hope to positively contribute to the field’s body of scholarship, especially in an era of increased Latin American immigration into the United States. In fact, many traditional secondary Spanish foreign language classes will become de facto HL classes based solely on student enrollment. The current study provides researchers, pre- and in-service teachers, principals and administrators with a data-driven study that illustrates heritage learner characteristics while showing how to work better with them. Because of demographic shifts, foreign language teachers need training in HL approaches so as to avoid some of the pitfalls the teachers in this study encountered. Witnessing resistance and engagement back-to-back helped me to imagine a pedagogical framework for HL instruction that honors students’ linguistic and cultural communities through place-based pedagogy for SHLLs. In the following chapters, I present what I observed and experienced, learned and came to imagine for SHL pedagogy or what I call a pueblobased pedagogy. Doing Research at DHS: Research Design and Methodology

My research focus established, I participated in and observed first and second periods, known as Core 1 (Spanish) and Core 2 (humanities). Because students remained a cohort, I was able to observe the same students in two different contexts that included a different physical space, a different time of day (albeit still morning), different teachers with different teaching styles, and different academic content. The student participants (whom I will describe in more detail in the following chapters) remained (relatively) constant. In the second semester, students continued to take Spanish together, but they no longer remained a cohort for humanities. I therefore attended humanities with different students each day. As there were only four sections of humanities, no matter which student I selected, there were students from the Spanish class for HLLs in attendance in any given class period. Throughout the day, I interacted with teachers and students between periods, during breaks, after school and sometimes during class. During the school day, I handwrote field notes, took photographs and, in the second semester, I videotaped classroom interaction. Toward the end of the school year, I conducted and videotaped individual and focus group interviews with students and teachers. Although my focus was how students learned in these two contexts, I spent a considerable amount of time in the Health City Works class, Rachel’s advisory class, science, photojournalism and yoga, and attended

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  27

most whole-school meetings and participated in all school field trips. I chose the foregoing classes as several student participants took those classes or, in the case of science, it provided a good model of place-based pedagogy. I chose Rachel’s advisory class as she was a focal teacher participant and a founding DHS teacher. As a founding teacher, I wanted to see an advisory course as it was intended to be taught. My field trip role was as an extra adult-on-hand. In the following section, I explain my research process in greater detail, beginning by laying out the theoretical frameworks undergirding data collection and analysis. Because of the intricacies surrounding the formation of a new school and its study, I chose a multifaceted, integrated theoretical and methodological framework to inform data collection, analysis and theory construction. Theoretical Frameworks Study roots: Ethnographic approaches

The current research, in some ways, harkens back to the early days of the ethnography of communication where classroom communicative practices were compared and studied (see Cazden et  al., 1972). Such studies looked at how “different languages or language varieties [were] ratified by use in the schools, or not, and what the consequences of such uses [were] for the speakers of the languages, for their learning and educational opportunities, and for the future of the languages themselves” (Hornberger, 2003: 252). In the same vein, the present study explores the ideologies surrounding the place of Spanish in the DHS curriculum and the beliefs surrounding Spanish use by Mexican-origin adolescents, their teachers, peers and administrators in a multicultural, urban charter school. Similarly looking back, the current research borrows from microethnography, a subfield of ethnography, with intellectual roots in context analysis, the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, Goffman’s work on social interaction, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and continental discourse analysis (Erickson, cited in Hornberger, 2003). Erickson explains that microethnography differs from traditional ethnography in terms of focus: General ethnography documents a whole way of life, while microethnographic approaches investigate one aspect of this life with a focus on the process of interaction. For example, the participant-observer engaged in microethnography closely monitors and analyzes a single event, or series of same events, such as classroom lessons (see Philips, 1993) or interviews (see Erickson & Schultz, 1982). The interaction within these events is often audio or videotaped, as the addition of visuals adds an important semiotic and multimodal dimension to the analysis of interaction, language use and semiosis (Carspecken, 1996; Norris, 2004; van Lier, 2004). Hornberger (2003) explains that in

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many microethnographic studies set in educational contexts, researchers provide a detailed analysis of non-linguistic and linguistic behavior, which sheds light on the situated nature of interaction and identity. In addition to videotaped classroom interaction, interviews are also audio and videotaped to aid the analysis of non-linguistic symbolic exchange. Interviews and classroom interaction are transcribed and analyzed, utilizing the framework of interactional sociolinguistics described further in section titled “Interactional Sociolinguistics and Symbolic Interactionism.” Perhaps most relevant for my work is microethnography’s comparative method when studying interaction. By contrasting observations in Spanish and humanities, it afforded me to make more robust analytic assertions. As my findings show, interaction, identity claims and behavior altered depending on course content, language, location, task and teacher, highlighting “being” fluidity. Although microethnography is useful for understanding institutional cultures and their language practices, combining the study of micro and macro events can provide powerful explanatory insights concerning interaction in the micro setting (Heath, 1983; Jaffe, 2003; Philips, 1993). In fact, in the introduction to her ethnography investigating Warm Springs Indian communication, Philips (1993: xv) notes that “traditional ethnography and microethnography are commonly carried out together” and, microethnography is “also characteristic of almost all of the language socialization research growing out of the ethnography of communication in communicative competence.” That said, I now turn to critical ethnography as it examines and includes the workings of power in larger social contexts that impact institutional discourses. Critical ethnography

Those of us who work or teach in institutional settings know that larger political, social and economic contexts shape educational environments, suggesting the appropriateness of applying critical theories to educational anthropology (Mills, 1997; Norton & Toohey, 2004; Pennycook, 2001; Zou & Trueba, 2002). Both inside and outside of these political, social and economic contexts, individuals with agendas and ideologies govern these environments, whose agendas can be inferred through examining decisions made and courses of action taken. In research investigating non-societal language use, state politics governing school language policy, border politics and race relations need to be considered and weighed. In order to include an explanation of the workings of power in the analysis of discourses, ideology and action, the application of a critical lens is essential. Phil Carspecken (2002) credits the emergence of critical ethnography with the work of Paul Willis (1977) who documented how British working-class “lads” get working-class jobs. Carspecken (2002: 60) explains:

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  29

“Willis provided a nonreified way to think about social structure, preserving an emphasis on human agency and the cultural conditions within which agency always takes place.” Willis’s ethnographic work, and his reworking of praxis theory (i.e., a will to knowledge and a will to power or self-production) helped deconstruct the structure versus agency debate occurring at the time. Methodologically, Foley (2002) explains that most critical ethnographers, like traditional ethnographers, involve themselves in systematic participant observation fieldwork for at least one to two years, utilize key informants and conduct in-depth interviews that are later transcribed. What distinguishes critical ethnographers is “they are less interested in producing holistic, universalizing portraits of whole cultures,” and instead focus on “well-theorized ethnographies of societal institutions or subgroups” (Foley, 2002: 140). Another important distinction is for findings to demonstrate how “cultural formations both challenge and play into systems of unequal social relations and how research may contribute to [understanding] the challenges” (Carspecken, 2002: 62). In other words, critical ethnographers have to produce knowledge that has “catalytic validity” (Lather, 1991, 1993; Pennycook, 2001; van Lier, 2004), that is, knowledge culled from the research that has the power to stimulate change in the status quo where inequalities have remained unproblematized. Foley (2002: 140) succinctly summarizes: “critical ethnography is a well-theorized empirical study with a serious political intent to change people’s consciousness, if not their daily lives.” Foley (2002: 140) suggests that this is ideally accomplished when ethnographers openly collaborate “with the oppressed” to achieve their conceptualization of social justice. Kincheloe and McLaren (2002) add that critical ethnographers adopt a questioning reflexivity of their own taken-for-granted assumptions, which unchecked, can produce a false consciousness in which hegemonic practices and ideologies are taken as “natural.” This reflexivity is rooted in the Frankfurt School’s critique of positivism, questioning “scientific” claims to objectivity and “truth” (Giroux, 1997). Related to reflexivity is the importance for researchers to reveal their positionalities, as their social frames of reference are influential in shaping thought and analysis (Gadamer, 1989). For other researchers, stakeholders or participants, and other audience members, this self-conscious transparency works to reveal (to the extent possible) inherent biases and predispositions. Kincheloe and McLaren (2002), discussing Antonio Gramsci, explain that Gramsci held the view that a critical philosophy should be viewed as a form of self-criticism, that is, the ability to critically examine the ideological frames one uses for making sense of the world. This point is crucial as “claims to truth are always discursively situated and implicated in relations of power” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2002: 118). Thus, the workings of power are examined at all levels of the critical project.

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Critical ethnography goes beyond a description of culture found in many “traditional” ethnographies; it advocates action for change by challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions exposed through research conducted through a critical approach. As I also examine and discuss language pedagogy in this work, I include a critical applied linguistics (CALx) framework. CALx scrutinizes both foreign and L2 pedagogy, and in this case, HL teaching, with an eye toward the role of power inequalities or unchecked assumptions; this scrutiny in turn informs praxis and promotes reflective teaching. Pennycook (2001: 10) explains that CALx is more than a simple addition of the “critical” to applied linguistics: “It involves a constant skepticism, a constant questioning of the normative assumptions of applied linguistics… and presents a way of doing applied linguistics that seeks to connect it to questions of gender, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture, identity, politics, ideology, and discourse.” Like other critical approaches, CALx concerns itself with the ways in which inequity, discrimination, resistance and subjectivity are constituted linguistically with the purpose of acting toward the possibility of a more just and equitable society. This call for action is deeply rooted in the Frankfurt School’s working of critical theory “to strive for a better society and world” (Giroux, 1997: 64). In formulating CALx, Pennycook (2001) suggests that it adopt a problematizing stance that turns a critical eye on itself to safeguard itself from replacing one regime of truth (Foucault, 1983) with another, extending the feminist critique of critical theory (see Ellsworth, 1992; Gore, 1992). For example, CALx projects include, but are not limited to, the questioning of English-only pedagogies and the hegemony of “Standard” English versus World Englishes and projects that encourage teaching-preserving non-prestige languages that include target language community members in curriculum design and teaching (see Norton & Toohey, 2004). Because of the lofty aims of critical research, I cautiously venture into these critical waters. Critical workers have been criticized for their utopian views on how the world should be – democratic, equitable, selfrealized – and criticized for how they frame themselves as catalysts in aiding this idealistic transformation (Ellsworth, 1992; Gore, 1992, 1993, 1998; Gur-Ze’ev, 1998; Orner, 1992). Despite these well-taken critiques, I aspire to some form of these ends – not as researcher-teacher-“Savior” – but as an individual who enters a research context with the intention of working toward social justice; someone who provokes a conversation concerning assumptions that may have been taken for granted and thus warrant critical examination and action by researcher and stakeholders. It is my intention that this published work serve as a platform to work more credibly and effectively with secondary SHL educators in local and larger communities in order to bring awareness to HLL needs

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  31

and promote the idea that HL classrooms and pedagogies be consciously framed as additional contexts and avenues for Latina/o students to develop linguistically, intellectually, socially and personally. Interactional sociolinguistics and symbolic interactionism

In order to closely study actual language use, I examine spoken discourse through the process of analyzing transcribed interviews and naturally occurring interaction, using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics – the study of interaction between self, other and context (Schiffrin, 1994). Interactional sociolinguistics has its roots in linguistics, anthropology and sociology – thus its interest in language, culture and society. Interactional sociolinguistics is linked with Erving Goffman and John Gumperz, a close associate of Dell Hymes. Goffman contributes “a description of how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life, and how it reflects, and adds, meaning and structure in those circumstances” (Schiffrin, 1994: 97). Gumperz, drawing heavily on ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1984), characterizes conversation as joint action, in which symbols both verbal and non-verbal are exchanged through interaction in order to create meaning or perceived reality (Jaworski & Coupland, 2001), a concept consistent with symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1932, 1934) and phenomenology (Schutz, 1970). At the macro level, Gumperz views language as socially and culturally constructed, reflecting societal meanings such as group identity and status differences (Schiffrin, 1994). Despite societal influences, there also exists a freedom at the micro level (bound by context) to renegotiate and reposition self within a range of personal possibilities. González (2001) uses the physics metaphor of centripetal and centrifugal force – forces pulling to and from the center – to describe language socialization, which may be useful here to illustrate the dynamic interplay between micro and macro social forces. Rooted in symbolic interactionism (and phenomenology) and sharing commonalities with the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics asserts that “the meaning, structure, and use of language are socially and culturally situated and relative” (Hornberger, 2003: 253). The approaches differ, however, in that interactional sociolinguistics focuses more on the actual communicative process, often between interlocutors of different ethnic backgrounds, instead of focusing on the larger communicative event and its meaning for participants. Hornberger (2003) explains that methodologically, interactional sociolinguistics differs from the ethnography of communication in that it analyzes audiorecorded talk to a much greater extent. It often includes participants to review taped talk in order to form joint interpretations of the data. Finally, and perhaps most important for this study, interactional sociolinguistics upholds the situated and shifting nature of social roles and

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identity (Goffman, 1959), positing that the self is a social or interactional construction (Mead, 1934), which complementarily aligns with the other frameworks that I use. Although the preceding methods describe how data are captured and analyzed, these methods also constitute deeper theoretical frameworks for understanding larger processes of social and individual development. Helping to explain these phenomena, coming from early work in sociology, namely symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934; Morris, 1934), which conceptualizes interaction as fundamental for identity construction to emerge. Symbolic interactionism posits that individual subjectivity and meaning is achieved through face-to-face interaction: It is through social interaction that the mind emerges and knowledge constructs (Mead, 1934; Morris, 1934). Along with knowledge, accordingly, the individual is also socially constructed through the dynamic process of taking the attitude and opinion of the other in order to communicate. Through the process of interaction, and agreed upon meaning, society forms. This implies not a static conceptualization of society or individual, but a dynamic one, a concept that also resonates with phenomenology/ ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1984; Schutz, 1970) and points toward a poststructuralist, postmodernist understanding of the world. Symbolic interactionism and constructivism assume that identity and interaction are situated contextually, constructed locally, yet are influenced by larger sociohistorical metapragmatic models of identity (see Wortham, 2006). In sum, the current study roots itself in documented, experiential reality constituted in interaction that links to personal and broader institutional and social processes. The study acknowledges that identity and its performance shift according to context. Simply put, we act differently based on context and purpose. We act differently based on how we want to be perceived or how we perceive others to perceive us. Thus, doing ethnography presents a methodology, due to its intensive time with participants in varying contexts that allows researchers to understand individuals in various institutional settings, observing how they use and choose language to construct identities. This is particularly salient for studying the language practices of HLLs as HL use performs identity to varying degrees. The Ethnographic Context and Practicalities Research context and setting

DHS, located in the city’s historic center, served 85 students in its first year of operation, representing every zip code of the large southwestern city. At this time, the student body was roughly composed of 6% Black students, 5% Native American, 4% Asian, 40% Latina/o and 45% White. Nearly half of DHS’s students were eligible for free- or reducedprice lunch.

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Field experiences were a key component of the school’s curriculum, so in addition to conducting research on the campus of DHS, I accompanied teachers and students on all major field trips as an adult chaperone. Excursions included trips to the city’s botanical gardens, the Museum of Modern Art, the city’s “Jewelry, Crystal and Rock Trade Show,” the city’s water municipalities, the city’s university, Roosevelt Park, the city’s convention center, Head Start, The Historic Mansion, Barrio del Sol (a sustainable housing development), etc. The majority of classroom observations took place in the Spanish class for heritage learners (SHL) and the same students’ humanities class (n = 16). In the second-semester SHL class, 12 students (n = 12) were enrolled. In Chapters 3 and 4, the chapters concerning the first- and second-semester SHL class, I explain why students switched in and out of the SHL class and which students left and joined the school mid-year. In the second semester, however, the participating students no longer remained a cohort for humanities as students were reshuffled to strategically ameliorate discipline problems. As there were only four periods of humanities, with one of these periods coinciding with the SHL class, several of the SHL learners remained classmates in the remaining three classes. I rotated throughout these three humanities classes as systematically as possible in order to observe SHL learners in those classes. As previously noted, I also regularly attended Rachel’s advisory class, science, the Health City Works class, photojournalism and yoga to get a sense of the overall DHS experience. I sporadically attended math and other City Works classes as time allowed. My preference to attend science over math was primarily due to the science class’s emphasis on place-based learning. To the extent that the context allowed, I followed an even distribution of focal participants to these other classes. However, as the school was small, in whatever class I chose to observe, several focal participants were in attendance. All field notes were taken in these contexts and formal interviews were conducted on campus. A more detailed description of classrooms will be presented in Chapters 3–5. Participants Focal participants, the teachers: Beth, Alberto and Rachel

Beth, a young woman in her late twenties, early thirties, was a dominant English speaker, born and raised in the Midwest though a proficient Spanish user. She earned a master’s degree in Latin American studies, had taught both high school and university-level Spanish and had lived approximately two years in South America. She was politically active in the community, volunteering for an organization that advocated for migrant worker rights as Mexican border crossers had been dying in large numbers in the Sonoran Desert in their search for work in the north.

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The increased security at the border has forced Latin Americans in search of work in the United States to take more remote and dangerous routes. Beth was a conscientious teacher, strict and concerned with the growing discipline issues that were arising in the first weeks of the school. In teacher meetings she was often the one who raised questions concerning the lack of uniform discipline across classes and lack of strict enforcement of school rules that prohibited cell phones and portable music players in class. As this was a new school, discipline procedures were not firmly established, and teachers and Susan, the principal, were grappling with how best to create and enforce a discipline matrix. When Beth interacted with students, I could see her concern etched across her brow and hear the strained tone in her voice. In the second semester, as previously mentioned, the school schedule changed somewhat. Spanish class for heritage learners was now offered during Core 4, the last academic period before students took their art and fitness electives, and humanities no longer followed Spanish. With this change in schedule, students no longer remained a cohort for their Spanish and humanities classes – staying together only for Spanish. In addition, the Spanish class now had a different teacher. Because of a personal tragedy, Beth was forced to resign at the end of the first semester and returned to her home state. A second teacher was needed to fill her position in a hurry; a replacement was found through a network of substitute teachers that the school had used in the past. Alberto, the second-semester Spanish teacher, was a young Mexican man also in his late twenties or early thirties who had lived most of his life in Mexico, but was now living in the United States, married to a US citizen of Mexican heritage. A new teacher, Alberto had worked as a lawyer in Mexico and had worked his way through college as a fashion model for a large department store; he had no formal training as a teacher. Alberto was Spanish language dominant and an English language learner. As an English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) teacher for over 10 years, I would estimate that at the time of observation, Alberto was an advanced beginner – he could make himself understood, but his spoken discourse had many errors. Alberto was extremely affable. No matter the chaos surrounding him, he never lost his cool or smile. He was intelligent and whenever he spoke of his life as an attorney, there was no doubt where his passions lay; however, as with many professionals from other countries coming to the United States, a mastery of English and re-established professional credentials are needed before embarking on their prior careers. I was also a participant-observer in the humanities class. Rachel, the humanities teacher founded DHS with Susan and Jason. Rachel had previously taught at one of the city’s highest-performing high schools and she had also taught in her native New York City. She earned a master’s

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  35

degree in education and was a nationally certified public school teacher, an accreditation process she described as more rigorous than getting her master’s degree. Rachel was authoritative in the classroom with her subject matter knowledge and in creating a safe structured environment for learning to occur. She consistently enforced classroom policy, did not tolerate disrespectful behavior and never had to raise her voice to do so. Instead, she redirected negative student energy through her use of humor. When she had to give an ultimatum to a student, it was always carried through. This structured consistency helped learning happen. Rachel also acknowledged diverse learning styles in every course unit. Students created art and poetry, used oral and written skills, worked in collaborative learning groups and had choices in their learning. In my opinion, and the opinion of her students, Rachel was a master teacher. She creatively approached teaching, and perhaps more than any other teacher in the school, her teaching practice firmly grounded itself in the theoretical framework of place-based learning, a pedagogy that makes content relevant to the lives of students and the places they live and go to school. Focal and other students

Focal student participants in the study included 16 Mexican-origin freshmen and sophomores (nine female and seven male) enrolled in the Spanish heritage language (SHL) class first semester, and 12 (8 female and 4 male) in the second semester. Because I attended other classes (previously described), I enrolled 17 additional freshmen and sophomores (8 female and 9 male) of which 5 were of Mexican origin,10 but not in the SHL class. All students at the start of the study were between the ages of 14 and 16. In the following three chapters, I expand the descriptions of these students. Students were enrolled in the SHL class because they had some (to extensive) knowledge of Spanish due to family heritage, and in the case of five students (of which three eventually left the school), Spanish was their L1. Of these five, four were born in Mexico. The additional 17 students were selected for numerous reasons. One is that they were classmates of the 16/12 focal participants. Also, in order to help contextualize the focal participants’ experiences, I felt it was important to interview other students. Finally, I was also interested in interviewing the Mexican-origin students in this group to find out why they did not enroll in the SHL class and also learn about their Spanish language use, linguistic and ethnic identities, and their overall academic experiences. The information gleaned from these interviews helped me to understand the school context in greater breadth and depth, but the majority of findings center on the focal participants’ experience.

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In order to enroll students into the study, I first called focal participants’ parents to explain the nature of the study and answer any questions. I then explained that I would be handing their child the necessary paperwork to finalize their participation. For other student participants, when I attended DHS open houses, I approached parents and their children in order to discuss and explain the study to them. Without fail, students and parents signed the paperwork on the spot. I also waited outside the school before and after classes began to catch students and their parents as they were either dropped off or picked up, in order to discuss the study and get signatures. As a rule, parents and students were receptive to the study’s purposes, which I explained as examining the educational practices of the school and systematically studying what was and what was not working. The school’s principal also wrote a cover letter (in English and Spanish) expressing the school’s approval and support of my study (see Appendix B). Other teachers

Eight teachers (six female, three male) were enrolled in the study: five academic core teachers (i.e., one math, one science, two Spanish over the academic year and one humanities), one arts teacher who also worked with special education students and two electives teachers (yoga and photojournalism). All core teachers (minus the humanities teacher) plus the arts teacher also taught a City Works class. At the time of the study, teachers ranged in age between 25 and 45. All were Anglo except for the math teacher and second-semester Spanish teacher who were Latino. The focal teachers in the study came from the SHL class and the humanities class (n = 3) as explained earlier. Community partners

I also enrolled all six community partners who co-taught the City Works classes. They ranged in age between 25 and 50; all were female and Anglo except for one Latina. Administrators

The principal, a founder of DHS, is female, Anglo and between the age of 35 and 39. The principal also taught an advisory section. The academic coordinator, a school founder, is also the humanities teacher (see description of Rachel in the section titled “Focal participants, the teachers: Beth, Alberto and Rachel”); the facilities manager, a school founder, is male, Anglo and was also a City Works teacher.11 Staff

The City Works coordinator is a Latina between the age of 35 and 45; the school secretary/unofficial nurse is an Anglo female between the age of 45 and 50.

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  37

Board members

Board members ranged in age between 30 and 60, five are female12 and two are male. The ethnicities represented are one Chinese-American, one Latina and five Anglos. I enrolled all of these adult participants because I wanted as free a reign as possible in a variety of school contexts in order to capture and understand the complex undertaking of starting and sustaining a new school. The insights gleaned from interviews and observations with these individuals helped me to shape a deeper understanding and appreciation of the school and their work. Not all data collected from these individuals are directly represented in the current study, but I am deeply indebted for their time and willingness to share their thoughts and experiences with me. Data Collection Classroom observations, field notes, video, audiotape and other data collection

Participant observation was the primary form of data collection. Participant observation entails that researchers immerse themselves in the lives of the individuals being studied while maintaining enough distance to record information in a systematic, matter-of-fact manner (Fetterman, 1989). I took handwritten field notes in all core classes, during wholeschool meetings, Critical Friends Group13 (CFG) professional development meetings and field trips. I did not take field notes in the elective classes, because doing yoga and note-taking was not compatible and, in photojournalism, I essentially acted as an adult volunteer, escorting students outside to take photos. In all, I wrote a thousand pages of notes that I later coded. I expanded upon these notes as time allowed, transposing them into data files on my home computer. At times, I was at the school every day. When my own academic obligations and teaching intensified, I scaled back my time to about three times a week. I usually spent the entire day at the school, unless my time was demanded elsewhere. If I could not attend a full day, I would only attend the humanities and SHL classes. In classes, I often simply observed classroom activity and made notes, or acted as a chaperone if students worked off campus. In the SHL class, I often took the role of student, participating and asking questions in Spanish. If a teacher needed help, I willingly obliged. However, I made it clear that I would not take a disciplinary role with students. In fact, I actively discouraged students viewing me as an authority figure or teacher as I wanted the power relationships to be as even as possible. I also videotaped 12 classes in order to systematically analyze classroom discourse, interaction and other non-verbal cues. I used a handheld camera in order to have freedom of movement to capture events of

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interest. Filming took place only in the second semester of the study so that students and teachers would be more comfortable with my more invasive presence. Students who did not consent to participate in the study were not filmed and their input deleted from transcripts. Video logs

After filming classroom interaction, I viewed the tapes using the computer program iMovie. I roughly transcribed the footage into video logs, a table that included the following information: date, class name and period, classroom diagram, video time codes, classroom activity, topic and code (i.e., researcher notes and analytic coding). I used these rougher transcripts as a starting point to begin analysis and then when I had determined themes of interest, I transcribed specific segments of classroom interaction using the same conventions for transcribing interviews (see following section). The only difference is that I was able to include more non-verbal behavior, which is noted by double brackets [i.e., ((description))]. Interviews

I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews to determine the experiences and perceptions of participants (Patton, 1987). Interviews were video recorded and audio taped primarily as backups for one another and to capture non-verbal behavior to aid semiotic/multimodal analysis. Interviews were individual, paired and focus group. The majority of the interviews, however, took the form of focus group. The benefit of focus group interviews is that they synergistically help participants formulate views and provide a more relaxed and naturalistic interview environment (Marshall & Rossman, 1999). Interview groups did not exceed more than six people nor last longer than 90 minutes (see Seidman, 1998). The interview questions (see Appendix C) concerned past and current experiences in educational environments in which participants were encouraged to reflect on meaning and elaborate freely. Typed transcripts were made using the following conventions. Transcription conventions

Ochs (1979) writes that transcription is theory; Bucholtz (2000) describes it as political. These ideas suggest that a transcript’s form can iconically represent stance or ideology. I therefore chose to use transcription symbols that did not refer to written conventions, as I believe spoken discourse to be distinct. To represent this belief, I chose not to use commas, periods, question marks or capitalization as they are too closely aligned with written conventions. Instead, for example, I utilized other signs to mark pauses and rising/falling intonation [e.g., (.3), ↑, ↓].

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  39

The written discourse symbols that I preserve, for a lack of options, is the exclamation point, which I used to indicate an excited tone, quotation marks to indicate the speaker quoting another or around the word a speaker brackets with gestured scare quotes (quotation marks) and three periods to mark ellipsis. For all other conventions, I borrow from Gail Jefferson’s work pioneered in conversation analysis (see, e.g., Sacks et al., 1974) and other scholars writing in educational anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics. A convention key is provided in Appendix A. I also represent when students latch or interrupt (with the symbol =) or overlap, at the place in the stretch of talk that it occurs instead of returning to the beginning of that person’s turn. The transcript then resembles a musical score, which I believe to be an apt metaphor for discourse. For example, instead of (1)

Student A: let’s go to the= Student B: =no let’s stay here

I represent the talk as follows: (2)

Student A: let’s go to the= Student B: =no let’s stay here

Example 2’s spatiotemporal layout on the page more iconically represents the flow of talk, reflecting its choral nature when speakers overlap and latch. Photographs

I also photographed publicly displayed student work, publicly displayed information posted around the school (e.g., announcements and publicity posters) and a teacher’s bicycle (see Chapter 5). Photography quickly and efficiently records information that field notes cannot always capture. They serve as memory triggers of complex events when elaborate field notes are not possible. The school also enlisted me to take photographs at school events (e.g., school plays and field trips) to be used in monthly newsletters and school slideshows. Photographs were a way for me to immediately “give back” to the DHS community.14 Artifacts

Artifacts included teachers’ records/notes, instructional materials passed out to students such as assignments sheets, quizzes, readings, field guides, etc. I also collected the weekly news bulletin sent out to parents, the monthly school newsletter, newspaper articles written about DHS,

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published articles written by staff, television reportage of DHS, displayed student work (e.g., artwork, photographs, films and project displays) and the school yearbook. Member checks

I gave chapter drafts and/or transcripts to participants for them to check, amend or verify. As several participants had left the school, this proved a challenge. Working within these constraints, I was able to give drafts to two students and the three founding teachers. The students corroborated my findings and found certain aspects humorous. In fact, the students who read the drafts did not want to have their names changed to pseudonyms (though I did). Throughout the data collection process, I often discussed my thoughts with the founding teachers. In a sense, this was also a type of member check, as these discussions gave me additional perspectives. Applying a dialogic approach to data analysis (Frye, 1999) helped me get a more complex picture of what I had observed, experienced and interpreted. A more complex analysis of this type can also lead to contradictory analyses (though this was not the general trend in the current research). Data analysis

In the following chapters of data analysis and findings, I selected incidents that both jumped off the page and endured in my memory as significant events. I began the analytic process by carefully transcribing interviews and adding reflective footnotes linked to text. These comments were the beginnings of my initial coding of data. I used the information and themes that emerged from the transcripts, which primarily focused on resistance and engagement in learning, as a focused guide for reading my mass of field notes and video logs. Conclusion

The ethnographic study I conducted focused on the “triangle” of students, teachers and course content (Sizer, 1985) – in this case, the teachers and students participating in the humanities and Spanish class for heritage learners. Within this triangle, I examined language use, classroom interaction, place-based learning, HL instruction and student identity construction. Participation and institutional change are inextricably linked. By working with teachers and administrators who had a keen sense of what their needs were, the research became less about detached observation, and more of a reflexive mirror of school practices that I hope will lead to further discussion, problem-posing and reform where needed. Through a dialogic approach of data analysis and the sharing of findings, I hope students, teachers and administrators can continue to

Research Questions, Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks  41

work toward creating even more pedagogically effective environments for all students. And, for those working in different but similar contexts, my intention is that this research can also benefit. Notes (1) Pseudonym – all location names in this chapter are also pseudonyms. (2) Unfortunately, Raíces (a pseudonym) no longer exists in its original conception. Now, it is run through DHS as an after-school electives program without the paid journalism focus. (3) In the second semester, an Anglo student and a German exchange student were included because of their language aptitude. (4) How teachers worked with students in the Spanish class will be described in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. (5) I had visited Nicaragua at eight months so Nicaragua as an actual place was also outside my comprehension. (6) Chapter 6 further explores the role of firsthand knowledge and imagination within the context of academic identity formation. (7) Two of these students were later identified with special needs and given an appropriate individual education plan (IEP). (8) I use L2 for convenience. Of course, the language could be the users L3, L4, etc. (9) I use “user” instead of the commonly used “speaker” as speaker privileges spoken discourse, which confuses the project of heritage language competence that includes the academic skills of reading, writing and register awareness and use. (10) Other races/ethnicities were included among this 17, but a breakdown by race/ethnicity of these students goes beyond the scope of this current study. The focus of this study is Mexican-origin, heritage language learners. (11) Jason, the facilities manager, began the school year teaching two sections of humanities. He and Rachel, the other humanities teacher, were to co-teach a City Works class. This schedule soon became overwhelming and the two teachers regrouped. After a couple of weeks, all humanities classes switched to Rachel, and the City Works class switched to Jason so that he could devote more time to administration. (12) The two female board members, Anglo and Latina, resigned at the end of the first year because of the time demands involved with being on the board and working full-time. The Latina board member eventually became the Spanish teacher in year three of the school. (13) CFG is a group that I was a member of that included all core teachers at DHS, three individuals from the after-school non-profit youth group that shared the building space with DHS and a teacher from a state-wide teacher-education writing program in which the three founding teachers had worked and participated. The group met once or twice a month. All members were also enrolled in the study. (14) I also made a short film of the art class’s downtown art opening that I screened at a whole-school meeting. Again, this was my way of “giving back” during the research process.

3 Hablais Como Pachucos

Although it is late September, it still feels like summer. Warm air and sunlight fill the cactus-lined courtyard outside the university bookstore. Female undergraduates pass by in short shorts and calf-high Ugg boots, tank tops tucked into sagging flannel pajama bottoms and terry cloth tube top dresses; male students sport baseball caps, board shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops. Bicycle riders carefully avoid walkers crowding the twolane bike path. I pace back and forth in front of the bookstore’s glass doors, anxious that the Downtown High School (DHS) Spanish class for heritage language learners (HLLs) might be late for the Norma Cantú prose reading. Cantú, a Mexican-American author, writes about her border experience growing up in Laredo, Texas, which students had been reading that week. Looking around, I find the group in the corridor outside the ­bookstore. “Hola, Beth,” I greet the Spanish teacher. I ask Juan, Zac, Olivia and Isabel if they had been there before. They all respond “yes.” Scott gives me a little “hello” – one of the few students who doesn’t treat me as invisible. Zac, dressed in a tie, long-sleeved shirt, dress slacks and shoes, complements his outfit with a tweed newspaper-boy cap. “It was like a Japanese anime but in real life,” I overhear Gabi, his sister, say to him. Beth leads us downstairs to the bottom floor of the university bookstore (she has done her homework, knowing the reading’s location). “Buenas tardes,” Beth greets one of her professors and explains in Spanish that she has brought her high school Spanish class. Norma Cantú stands with program organizers in front of past presenters’ books on display. Beth introduces herself and the students to the author. Cantú greets the students: “Buenas tardes” and several students, including Kate, respond in kind. Zac introduces himself formally and shakes her hand. Others in the group move on to examine items for sale near the bookshelves. “How rude,” Zac says pointing to the “shoppers,” and adds, “I won’t say it to their faces.” I joke that he had. “Not to their faces,” he corrects me. 42

Hablais Como Pachucos  43

Norma Cantú stands tall and thin with long black hair draping down her back. It is difficult to discern her age, perhaps she is in her early fifties. She wears black pants and a white western sleeveless blouse embroidered with flowers and rhinestones. A silky amber “reboso” hangs from her shoulder, resembling the hand-woven shawls crafted in the pueblo of Pátzquaro, Michoacán. As mentioned, students had read an excerpt from her book Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, reading it in Spanish. I move over to Kate and Paloma; they look at the display of pink stationary, appointment books and pads of paper that read, “Bad Girls.” “White girls probably buy this stuff,” Kate says disparagingly. She starts opening the packaging and although I always try to avoid any “disciplinary” language with the kids, I intervene, “You better not open that up or you’ll have to pay for it.” She stops. Spotting the refreshment table, students grab handfuls of large chocolate chip cookies and cups of cold red punch. With snacks and drinks, students seat themselves in the last rows of the reading – remaining there despite the invitation to move up closer. Stage right sits Juan, Allison, Paloma, and with a seat separating us, me. Stage left sits (closest to me) Manuela, Pablo, Kate, Nadia and Jorge. A few – Jude, Scott, Zac and Gabi with Isabel and Olivia behind them – sit closer. The students’ seating arrangement iconically represents my perception thus far of their academic engagement – the closer to the front of the room, the more engaged. Students also group themselves in these friendship clusters in class where there are no assigned seats. At the reading, about half of the seats were taken with Spanish, Latin American, Latina/o graduate students. Beth greets several of them – hipster types. Our attention moves to the border writer, Tom Miller, who introduces the Chicana postmodernist writer, scholar and folklorist. He explains that Norma Cantú was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, but grew up in the border town of Laredo, Texas – a town she writes about, which was also the topic of her doctoral dissertation. Later that night when I tell my partner, a Texan, about this, he says, “I know LaRayDoe, but not LaRRedo.” Norma Cantú begins by reading from Canícula, which she translates as “dog days of summer.” In Tex-Mex accented English, the author jokes that our desert town is in that perpetual state. I wonder: Does a more pronounced Mexican accent appear as she begins her performance? At a recent auditorium-filled university reading that I had attended, Michele Serros, the author of Chicana Falsa, read with a Chicana accent, codeswitching back to California-inflected English when she described her Oxnard upbringing and writing process. The topics from Cantú’s reading ranged from the 19th-century Mexican embroidered blouse, skirt and shawl associated with Catarina

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de San Juan or “China Poblana,” the death of her brother who died during the Tet Offensive, to the Chicana character in her novel in progress, Champú. The novel’s protagonist, a lesbian hairstylist, complains about her mother and her first male lover who left her “PG,” and explains how she got her first salon. Cantú commented on the difficulty of getting Spanish language books published. During the Champú reading, Cantú pauses: “I can tell that some of you don’t understand the Spanish so I will translate.” Zac looks to Gabi as if to say, “Who us?” As the writer reads a piece of dialogue that refers to a character wanting to know the familial relationship between two other characters, she pauses, turning to the audience: “You know, us Chicanas always want to be related.” This reminds me of Paloma’s comment that Ariana was her “sister.” The students for the most part listen as they rattle and chew on punch ice. I cringe at the amount of noise the ice hitting plastic makes. Kate, in particular, chews and shakes her cup most conspicuously, seemingly unconscious of the noise she makes. When Kate or the others rattle or whisper, Beth looks over, but only smiles – the quiet gesture signaling to students to quiet down. During the reading, a group of White male university students noisily exit the adjacent computer store, ignoring the in-progress public reading. “Shhhhhhhh,” I angrily hiss in their direction. Manuela snaps her head at me in surprise. To my right, Juan’s head nods down, his eyes closed, while Allison, looking straight ahead, listens. Taking her field book out, Paloma begins to write. I see the page turn and it is covered with the letters A through Z elaborately calligraphed. Across the aisle, Kate looks dreamily up the stairwell. Jorge, with his chair angled toward Nadia, gives quick glances to his friends. When the reading comes to an end, Cantú asks if there are any questions. “I’m here with my Spanish students, can you tell us about your experience taking Spanish in high school and how your experience in high school affected your voice?” Beth says. Cantú laughs, “Those are a lot of questions.” She explains that she learned from the 80-year-old Señorita González that there was a difference between the Spanish lexicon of the border and the Spanish in their textbooks: “She wanted us to know the differences.” By example, she explains the two ways to say “cheek”: “mejilla” in standard Spanish and “cachete,” a colloquial form; and, “sidewalk” translated into “banqueta” in Mexican Spanish and “acera” in Peninsular Spanish. Gabi raises her hand next: “What books did you read in high school?”; the question was in response to Cantú’s explanation that in order to find your voice, you have to read a lot to learn more about yourself. Cantú replies that she read, Raise Your Head Up High, Miss Brodie (which she mentioned in one of her chapters in Canícula that students

Hablais Como Pachucos  45

had read two days earlier). “I loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because it was about poor people like me and a book of prayers given to me by my great aunt,” she says. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve thought about those books.” The reading ends on that wistful remembrance. As Tom Miller thanks Cantú, the kids rise out of their seats ready to leave – not waiting the appropriate time for a final applause. Beth and the kids file upstairs. Olivia and Isabel linger over a book display on the first floor. I tell Beth that I want to buy Cantú’s book and that I would meet them in the food court located in the Student Union. Canícula in hand, I walk over to join the class. “Have you seen Olivia and Isabel?” Beth asks. “Yes,” I say, “but they left the bookstore before me.” Beth turns to find them. Within minutes, I spot the girls in line at Chick-fil-A (along with Juan and Allison). I run to find Beth to let her know. Kate, Pablo, Jorge, Nadia and Manuela grab food from McDonald’s and go outside to eat on the patio. I want to sit with them outside, but feel too much of an outsider, an “uncool” adult – so I don’t risk their rejection and stay inside. I figure they would rather eat alone. Zac and Gabi sit at one of the tall round tables flanked by Panda Express, Chick-fil-A and other national fast-food chains; no wonder the freshman 10 was now the freshman 15. I stop to ask the siblings what they thought of the reading. Both agree that Cantú was a good reader: “But I disagreed with her comparing the Texas-US border to the Berlin Wall,” Gabi says. Gabi continues to explain that her mom was from Laredo and that they had a lot family there, “They are pretty well known,” she says. Is that why Zac introduced himself by name? I ask, “Why didn’t you ask her about this?”. “I didn’t want to get everyone’s blood pressure up,” Gabi says. I told her that good writing provokes us to think critically and that it is okay to get people’s “blood pressure up.” Beth comes by our table: “We are heading back to school,” she says. “Why did you tell us first? That’s racist,” says Pablo, passing by our table. “That’s an interesting comment,” I say. I repeat what he said to Beth who had not heard it. She laughs and shakes her head. What was considered racist or not was a popular topic among students during the school’s first months. Because of its small size, students had no choice but to engage with student groups with whom they would not normally, and they complained about it. I say goodbye to the group as we near the glass doors that open onto the mall. Zac asks why I am not heading back with them. “I have a class at 4:00,” I say. “What are you taking?” Isabel asks. I am somewhat taken aback that someone other than my best friend Zac has asked me a question. “I’m teaching a class,” I say. “What is it?”. She seems impressed. “Bilingual and ESOL education,” I say. I don’t catch her reaction, and I repeat my goodbyes. – Field notes, university field trip 9/28/04

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Bigotry and the Borderlands

The university field trip juxtaposed sharply with the region’s historic stance toward Mexican immigrants and the education of their children where school districts banned and punished Spanish language use. In contrast, the university’s many programs and departments studied border politics and Spanish linguistics, taught Spanish as a heritage language (HL) and trained bilingual teachers; additionally, various literary centers and departments regularly invited Latina/o authors to read prose and poetry, filling large auditoriums. On stage, invited writers often codeswitched between English and Spanish both in their writing and speaking, a practice once corporally punished in the city’s schools, described further below. Today, K-12 physical violence has ended, but arguably, psychic violence persists as Spanish language use is still a contested language policy. In addition to repressive language policies, in 2010, Arizona banned Mexican-American studies from the K-12 curriculum, rationalizing that learning about one’s non-US or ancestral history, creates division. However, seven years later, an Arizona federal judge, A. Wallace Tashima, overturned the ban, ruling that it violated the constitutional rights of Mexican-American students, stating that officials were “motivated by racial animus” and “were pushing discriminatory ends in order to make political gains” (Strauss, 2017: par. 1). Despite, or because of discrimination, the city’s Mexican-origin community is large and vibrant. Latina/os are found in all professional, legislative and cultural contexts of the city, while the city has also become a mecca for Mexican performing arts. South of downtown sits the one square mile Spanish-speaking incorporated city of 5652 residents founded in part by de jure segregation.1 City incorporation “benefits” allowed for a different set of rules not permitted in the greater city limits. Benefits included greater issuances of liquor licenses and dog racing. Coinciding with these “benefits” came higher crime rates, gang violence and open drug activity. Drugs and violence were met with a rise in neighborhood activism and advanced police tactics to counteract crime. I lived in “Barrio Viejo,” a historic adobe-filled neighborhood, bordering the southern enclave. There, I saw gang violence making its way north: a neighbor’s nephew had been gunned down by a rival gang, his encomium spray-painted across the pink adobe walls of our neighborhood market, while another neighbor had a random bullet break windows of her house. Yet, despite this troubled and depressed community, the larger metropolis drew thousands to artistic events related to Mexican cultural identity. For over a quarter of a century, beginning in 1983, the largest gathering of “mariachi” musicians and “baile folklórico” dancers are drawn to the city for the annual International Mariachi Conference. The conference influences mariachi music and folkloric dance, not only in the

Hablais Como Pachucos  47

United States, but internationally. As a result of this interest in mariachi music and local Latino/a high school students’ protests to see their own culture included in the curriculum, mariachi music programs are now found in many public schools across the city, fostering cultural pride though arts education (Cecilia Mendoza, city principal, personal communication, June 3, 2017). It has been argued that the roots of this vibrant appreciation, study and practice of music and dance grew out of a type of expressive resistance to historical marginalization; that bigotry had been the compost for this artistic fecundity. In her ethnographic study contextualizing language socialization practices among Mexican-origin families, Norma González (2001) explains that the participants’ city’s flourishing arts scene rose from economic and ideological domination – a form of symbolic resistance through the development and valuing of music, art and theater that positively frame the cultural contributions of Mexican-origin people. Theatrical make-up and costumes, literally and figuratively, mask wounds and project a positive identity of Mexican pride that counterbalance prejudicial discourses and acts. Regardless of the proposed psychological origins of these expressive arts (or counter discourses), they have helped to forge positive “Mexican” ethnic identities for individuals and perhaps cynically, a more “palatable” Mexican identity for the dominant culture. English-only language policies

Historically in Arizona,2 Mexican and other linguistic minorities have suffered terrible educational and linguistic oppression. At the beginning of the 20th century, Arizona state law mandated that all schools must use English as the language of instruction (Sheridan, 1986). To comply, from 1919 to 1965, school districts with numerous Spanish-speaking students, including the study’s city, established a program called the 1C to integrate English language learners (ELLs) into the public school system. The program was part of a concerted “Americanization” effort to assimilate “foreign” students linguistically and culturally into the dominant culture despite the presence of Mexicans in the region for hundreds of years (Combs, 2006; de la Trinidad, 2000; Sheridan, 1986). This English-only program had to be completed before students could begin the first grade (i.e., 1C, 1B, first grade). According to Sheridan, 68% of the students in this pre-first-grade class were overage and were required to remain in the class until English mastery was achieved – a daunting task considering the courses had no consistent methodological framework for second language (L2) acquisition or clear language assessment instruments (de la Trinidad, 2000). Combs’ study found that students as old as 14 and 15 sat side-by-side with 5-year-old children. To add further injury, children and adolescents were corporally punished for speaking Spanish inside the classroom and

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on school grounds. The results of the 1C program were devastating, as de la Trinidad (2000: 6) explains: “Ultimately, the 1-C program resulted in psychological trauma and educational retardation for many, and contributed to high dropout rates among Mexican Americans,” an ongoing problem. Today, Mexican-Americans well into their sixties break down in tears when recounting their days in the 1C program (Combs, 2006). In November 2000, Arizona voters passed Proposition 203 mandating that all ELLs be placed in English-only classes – effectively eliminating bilingual education. However, if parents wish to continue to have their child in a bilingual program, the student must demonstrate English mastery through an English proficiency exam or parents can sign a waiver stating that their child’s mental health would be negatively impacted if placed in English-only classes (Goddard, 2003). The choices are hardly choices at all. The latter stigmatizes a child, framing the child as mentally unstable. The former both defeats the purpose of bilingual education (i.e., for students to learn English and Spanish, not to already have mastery of English) and unwittingly privileges non-Latina/o students or English-dominant students in what have become highly desirable and scarce bilingual programs as many middle-class parents understand the value of a bilingual education (Pomerantz, 2002; Valdés, 1997a). Although the effects of Proposition 203 are not as psychologically damaging as the 1C classes, the passage of Proposition 203 still sends a societal message of English language superiority and by extension, superiority of the dominant culture. González (2001) suggests that when social injustices are committed against minority groups, a collective affective memory of “minority status” is created that negatively impacts psyche and language use – and may have been a contributing factor in HL students’ negative attitude toward further Spanish acquisition in their Spanish class. The irony of such “Americanization” efforts is that minority group members may actually grow in solidarity and gather around actual and perceived injuries, thereby strengthening a separate cultural/ ethnic identity in direct opposition to the intended assimilation project (Halbwachs cited in De Cillia et al., 1999). Aparicio (2000) argues that the ideology surrounding English-only movements in schools comes from a belief that speaking a single common language will be a unifying force and create national solidarity. It is also believed that languages other than English spoken within US borders represent a fractured national identity, a cultural heterogeneity that is believed to be un-unifying. The concept that a person can have multiple cultural and linguistic identities seems to be a view not readily tolerated by school districts, politicians or voters. In this paradigm, language is privileged “as a mutually exclusive icon of nationhood” (Aparicio, 2000: 249) and implies that English language proficiency is the ticket to success, ignoring “the structural, socioeconomic, political, and racial factors that lead to social segregation and economic marginality.” The argument that

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language is the linchpin to social unification conveniently tables a serious national discussion of inequality based on race, ethnicity and economic class. Such an ideology also undermines educational efforts that strive to maintain HLs that should be viewed as national resources rather than as threats. As the 1C program demonstrates, as well as the implementation of Proposition 203, Latina/os of Mexican origin living in Arizona have had to endure serious educational abuse regarding the use of Spanish in educational contexts. Although purportedly well intentioned, programs like the 1C and English-only movements fail to understand the academic and social benefits of first language (L1) maintenance. Instead, such programs implicitly and explicitly teach children that their language, culture and communities are inferior to the dominant one – an ideology that undoubtedly contributes to the poor academic achievement of Latina/os. One measure used to combat L1 loss is the implementation of HL programs that aim for language maintenance and further HL acquisition. To be effective, HL programs must respect the language that students speak and not suggest a linguistic hierarchy that favors one variety of Spanish over another – which to some individuals may feel like metaphorical mouth washing just as the 1C students had to wash their mouths out with soap for speaking Spanish. Through this brief discussion of linguistic repression, one can see that being a heritage speaker and minority member is complex. On the one hand, strong and pervasive forces encourage the individual to forget the HL and replace it with a single societal language. On the other hand, for some, the endured suffering creates solidarity and the desire to remain a distinct and separate community. Because of this constructed binary, the heritage learner can feel pulled toward and against the HL and culture and helps to explain the ambivalence that the study’s Mexican-origin students exhibited in terms of their Spanish and English language use and study. They identified as “Mexican,” spoke Spanish, as determined by context, and understood the value of bilingualism, all while rejecting Spanish as an academic subject, at least in the way that it was taught. Resistance through Non-participation: Some Theoretical Explanations

Students learning second, foreign or heritage languages can resist instruction for a number of reasons. Often, this resistance or non-performance centers within contexts of asymmetrical power relationships, resulting in students perceiving or experiencing their languages, cultures or social identities disrespected, disregarded or misunderstood (see Canagarajah, 1999; Norton, 2001; Rampton, 1995; Salazar, 2010). The ensuing pedagogies that manifest from these power imbalanced teaching contexts can include irrelevant teaching materials and content that

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do not consider, acknowledge or include students’ linguistic, intellectual or cultural resources (Kohl, 1994b; Philips, 1993; Scherff & Spector, 2010). As a result, alienation ensues, contributing to resistant classroom cultures. Student disruptive behaviors, as the following studies illustrate, are symptomatic of teacher-imposed work that fails to recognize student interests, experiences or social identities. Educators, therefore, need to distinguish between students’ “failing” and conscious “not learning.” In the current study, SHLLs also resisted instruction. In this chapter, highlighting an incident that occurred in the first semester, students perceived their social identities disrespected, while in the second-semester class, taught by an L1 Spanish speaker, resistance centered on pedagogies failing to engage with students’ linguistic identities and abilities, discussed in Chapter 4. Although I write about a specific school and group of students, it is important to note that achievement gaps in the United States will not be understood until considerable attention is placed on understanding why many marginalized communities reject schooling. If this study resonates with others’ contexts, it is important for us to document and share our insights and experiences. Otherwise, it is up to individual teachers to critically engage with students on issues of oppression, both socially and at the school level, which though admirable, is insufficient for bringing about systemic change. Imagined communities

Bonny Norton’s (2001) reworking of Benedict Anderson’s (1991) concept of imagined communities is a useful framework for explaining non-participation in language classrooms where conflict arises between teacher and students where no authentic community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) has been established (i.e., new learners apprenticed by more seasoned others). Anderson defines nation as a political and corporal entity by which individual members “imagine” a set of shared attributes, imagined because of the physical impossibility of all citizens to ever meet or know one another. Kanno and Norton (2003: 241) explain that imagined communities “refer to groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination,” broadening the concept to include smaller communities within and beyond nations. In classrooms where students perceive few shared attributes with classmates or teacher and/or have limited access to target language communities, learners must then imagine their membership in communities that extend beyond the classroom and local contexts. Resistance or nonparticipation can arise when learners’ and teachers’ “imaginations” conflict. When a mismatch exists between how students envision their status in their imagined communities and how teachers perceive their location in a particular social nexus, the students’ sense of self is diminished or

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harmed, causing them to withdraw physically and psychically in order to preserve “the integrity of their imagined communities” (Norton, 2001: 173). As identity can be defined by both participation and non-participation in an activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991), students’ attempt to preserve self-identity can result in their decision to not participate in learning. Adults and children will manifest self-identity preservation differently. Typically, adults will not “act out” their frustration and resentment; instead they may simply withdraw from the learning environment with relative impunity. Children and adolescents, on the other hand, are legally bound to attend school; as captive members of a school or class, their non-participation may therefore take on a more anti-social cast. However, in extreme cases, like the adults previously described, students can physically withdraw from learning contexts, but the repercussions of dropping out of school can negatively alter life trajectories. Resistance from the margins: Strikes and self-sabotage

Herbert Kohl (1994a: 134) explains that adolescent resistance to schooling stems from a belief that taught material will challenge and “destroy” the learners’ “personal and family loyalties, integrity, and identity”; this resistance is compounded when students also experience perceived teacher disrespect (Salazar, 2010). Learning from individuals who invalidate one’s (imagined) identity can cause a major loss of self, with the only (perceived) alternative being “to not-learn and reject their world” (Kohl, 1994a: 134). This perceived invalidation and resulting resistance occur in contexts where incongruences exist between the students’ home language and culture and the sanctioned language(s) and ways of being prescribed by the school (Kohl, 1994b; McCarty, 2002; Philips, 1993). The preservation of personal integrity and the belief that one is being dismissed resonate with the description of teacher–student clashes of “imagined communities” described in Norton’s (2001) study. To protect cultural identity, students can engage in oppositional educational strategies (Ogbu, 2003) or self-defeating resistance (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) where students fail to pay attention, disrupt learning, flout teacher authority, resist school rules and practices or drop out. Ira Shor (1992: 20) calls this willful rejection of top-down culturally unresponsive schooling, performance strike, defined as the informal, “unorganized mass refusal to perform well,” while also highlighting student voice and power (Giroux, 1983). Often, a strike manifests itself through “low motivation, low test scores and achievement” and “discipline problems” (Shor, 1992: 21). Performance strikes emanate from student dissatisfaction with classroom tasks, which they find meaningless, impersonal, teacher imposed and disconnected from students’ “themes, languages, conditions, and diverse cultures” (Shor, 1992: 23). As long as

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students feel that they have no voice in their own education, active participatory learning will not occur. Specific to Mexican-origin student resistance, Salazar (2010) found similar strike-like behavior when ELL Mexican-origin high school students waged “huelgas” (strikes) in protest at dehumanizing and rigid English-only pedagogical stances, which students felt disregarded and threatened their ethnic and linguistic identities. Also in the ELL context, Valdés (2001) found that Mexican-origin, middle school student “ghettoization” and lack of cognitively engaging curricula contributed to learner disengagement and non-persistence. Related, Valenzuela’s (1999) ethnographic study of Houston, Texas, Latina/o high school students, found that students resisted test-driven curricula taught by “uncaring” teachers. Students defined uncaring as teachers being unresponsive to their interests, needs and cultural and linguistic knowledge. Paralleling the foregoing descriptions, individual resistance manifested itself through random acts of rebellion, posturing and mental and physical absenteeism. Specific to the Spanish HL context, Charla Lorenzen (2006) linked high school heritage learner resistance to classroom lessons that lacked real-world applications and did not tap students’ personal and professional interests to work with Spanish-speaking communities. Taught language variety can also signal a disconnect with lived experience and practical application; for example, (un)conscious valorization of Peninsular Spanish varieties over US-Latin American varieties reifies a linguistic hierarchy (Ducar, 2009) that could result in students adopting oppositional learning strategies or self-defeating resistance. The themes that emerge from the preceding studies show that students seek authenticity, relevance and respect in their school lives and, when not found, they resist in one form or another. To further complicate matters, student non-resistant cooperation can also cost. When students cooperate in disrespectful learning environments, they are subjugated to what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) terms symbolic violence, the performance of hegemonic power that is not physically overt, but mutually constructed as “normal.” Yet, students who try to sabotage this power relationship through non-participation can also find themselves subjected to symbolic violence as failing in school reasserts their subaltern position through the loss of the social and cultural capital that formal education provides. Despite these potential losses, Kohl’s (1994a: 135) San Antonio, Texas, research found that students acknowledged their social trade-off and “accepted the failing grades they produced in exchange for the passive defense of their personal and cultural integrity.” It is therefore important to stress that non-participation and its negative academic repercussions do not reflect an inability to learn, but can signify a willful rejection of teachers and curricula that students believe dismantle closely held beliefs about self and community; in short, academic failure can represent a passive defense against attacks on students’ personal and cultural integrity.

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Unfortunately, in these learning environments, student “voice” may only be heard through strategic disruption and manipulation of teachers. However, Ira Shor in dialogue with Paulo Freire reiterates that students are not passive victims of teacher authority, making the point that “[i]t is a kind of elitism to see students as weak, passive, or vulnerable… students are shrewd and feisty” (Shor & Freire, 1987: 176). That being the case, student resistance can provide insights into what specific educational trespasses contribute to learner non-performance, and through dialogue with students and teachers, together, they can seek remedies. As Freire astutely comments: “conflict is the midwife of consciousness” (Shor & Freire, 1987: 176); we can, therefore, see student resistance as an opportunity to change and better practice. Studying student resistance to learning foreign and second languages is an area of research that has great potential for informing not only foreign and second language teaching and learning, but also HL instruction. However, few studies specifically look at student resistance in the HL context; thus, its study warrants greater attention and action. The Spanish HL classroom involves topics and processes of language and social identity formation, coupled with academic literacy development for a historically marginalized student group who continues to be underserved academically. The present study seeks to contribute in understanding resistance and HL development while also understanding what contributes to student engagement with learning. Non-participation in a Spanish Class for Heritage Learners: The Ethnographic Context

The preceding theoretical explanations for student non-participation and resistance are productive frameworks for explaining the student disengagement and acting out that I observed over the course of two semesters3 in their Spanish class at DHS, located near the Mexican border. Data, for the following discussion, came from participant-observation, focus group interviews and videotaped classroom interactions. During the opening months of the school, I attended school daily, all day. Toward the end of the spring semester, I attended school three days a week on average, due to my own teaching and university obligations. Doing ethnography in a Spanish class for heritage language learners

In the first year of operation, as previously introduced, DHS had two Spanish language teachers: Beth and Alberto.4 After the first semester, Beth had to resign her position because of a family emergency. Alberto, a temporary and uncertified teacher, was hired to replace Beth with the option of applying as a permanent faculty member the following school year. Beth was an L1 English speaker and advanced speaker of Spanish.5 She had a master’s degree in Latin American Studies, had taught both high

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school and university-level Spanish and had lived for a few years in South America. She was strict and conscientious with a fairly serious teaching “ethos.” Alberto was an L1 Spanish speaker and beginning-intermediate speaker of English.6 He was originally from Mexico where he had been a lawyer by training. He had a pleasant, easy-going demeanor and seemed to enjoy himself in the classroom. Focal participants: Students

In the first semester of the new school, as previously described, 16 students7 were enrolled as a cohort in a humanities and Spanish for HLLs (SHLLs) classes. Placement in the heritage class was done through individual interviews with students, parents, Spanish teacher and principal. After just a couple of weeks, two of the students, a brother and sister from Mexico, left the school to move to Oregon with their uncle. After the winter break, five students out of this cohort dropped out of the school to attend others, one was expelled and two decided to join the non-heritage Spanish class.8 In the second semester, 15 students were initially enrolled: 5 were new to the school (3 of these 5 eventually left the school) and 4 were moved from the non-heritage foreign language class, leaving 12 students. I chose to focus on six regularly attending students (although all students in the class were participants in the study) who had been enrolled in the school from its start in order to get a more comprehensive and consistent overview of student experience. Of these six focal participants, all were of Mexican origin and identified as Mexican. Five were female and one was male. At the beginning of the school year, two were 14 years old, three were 15 and one was 16. All except one were born in the United States. Two of the six focal participants reported Spanish as their L1, both of whose mothers were born in Mexico. Other students in the class also had parents born in Mexico, but they were not part of the focal group. The students’ bilingual proficiencies ranged from highly fluent speakers to those who were more receptively bilingual. All, however, had a limited range of Spanish reading and writing skills, consistent with the typical HLL profile, though one had higher academic proficiency due to her prior schooling in a Spanish bilingual program and a year of school in Mexico. I provide further description in the following chapters. Classrooms and Lessons Semester I

As described in Chapter 2, students were not happy. After all, according to some, why should they study Spanish if they “already spoke Spanish.” Not only did they complain about the futility of conjugating verbs, animosity grew between students. Scott would chastise Kate with

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impunity for not understanding the teacher’s directions or class tasks, though outside of class his insults stopped. One morning while being dropped off at school, he expressed to his mother that Kate, the selfdescribed “mean girl,” would physically attack. His mom laughed it off and told him “no te preocupes,” don’t worry. Zac, too, would snicker at Kate, to the point that she threatened, “I’ll slap your face.” Between these threats and jeers, the rest of the class sat quiet and lethargic, slow to open textbooks, responding to Beth’s Spanish in English and parsimoniously answering questions. Beth expressed frustration to me after classes, but she understood her responsibility to teach. She took up a new game plan that included taking students to the city’s university, putting a face to the Canícula chapters they had read in class. She halted the verb drills, brought in crossword puzzles and inserted the political. Students read excerpts from Richard Rodríguez’s (1983) Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, the MexicanAmerican author (in)famously known for his opposition to affirmative action and bilingual education and from the Chicana feminist, activist, poet and writer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In class, Beth distributed Anzaldúa’s chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” written primarily in English with code-switched Spanish. The selected chapter tells the author’s childhood story of growing up on the Texas–Mexico border where she describes the prejudice or “linguistic terrorism” (Anzaldúa, 1987: 58) she encountered for not speaking “textbook” Spanish. As a defense, Anzaldúa (1987: 56, parenthetical note in the original) explains that she picked up “Pachuco” “(the language of the zoot suiters)… a language of rebellion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English” from her adolescent peers. Pachuco, a term describing the 1930s–1940s Mexican-American subculture, has been associated with Chicano youth gangs and conflicted identity – neither Mexican nor American (Anzaldúa, 1987; Barker, 1950; Paz, 1985b). Beth used Anzaldúa’s writing as an entry point for talking, in English, about language varieties and discrimination people could face if they did not speak the “standard.” Beth explained to the students that some of their slang, such as “simón,” meaning, “yes, I agree with you,” had roots in the Pachuco language variety. During a subsequent lesson, I sat next to Juan and Allison, the first “official” couple of the new school. At the beginning of class, Beth commented that she was learning slang from Juan, an indirect reference to the prior lesson on Pachuco slang and an attempt to show students that she valued them as linguistic resources. Beth asked Juan, “How do you say that, again?” referring to an earlier conversation. Juan responded softly, “ah, te, eme.” “What does that mean?” “Forget it,” Juan uttered under his breath. Curious about this expression, I asked Juan what it meant: “a toda madre,” he said. I laughed. I knew the expression “all fucked up,”9

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but not by its acronym ATM. I surmised the abbreviated form useful for text messaging or softening a curse around adults. I told Juan and Allison that Beth was just trying to connect with them, but they responded by shaking their heads “no.” Advocates of sociolinguistic or critical HL instruction (Leeman & Martínez, 2007; Leeman et  al., 2011b) would consider the “Pachuco lesson” awareness raising, especially in regions where language contact influences language varieties and where socially negotiated constructs have accorded hierarchical sociopolitical-linguistic statuses to these varieties (Correa, 2011; Leeman, 2005). However, despite its sound theoretical and pedagogical rationale, the lesson backfired. For individuals like Allison, an award-winning student and accomplished “mariachi” violinist, being associated with Pachucos indexed a gangster or “ghetto” identity that was not part of her imagined community of what it meant to be Mexican. Her resistance to this comparison can be explained by understanding the stigmatized linguistic and social identities surrounding “Pachuco.” Southwest anthropologist, George Carpenter Barker (1950) describes Pachucos as insecure and disaffected Mexican-origin youth who lack the means and subsequent ambition for social mobility, causing them to drop out of school and choose a party lifestyle. Positioned more menacingly, Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz (1985b: 16), after spending time in the United States, describes the Pachuco as “an impassive and sinister clown whose purpose is to cause terror instead of laughter… a mythological figure and therefore, in effect, a danger.” In addition to clown, Paz imputes the Pachuco “orphan” status who speaks a hybrid language, neither Spanish or English. More theoretically, ethnographer Laura Cummings (2009: 202) explains how dominant societal discourses have constructed Pachucos as “uniquely violent, or even vicious.” Thus contextualized, it is conceivable that students interpreted the Pachuco linguistic comparison as an accusation that their Spanish and by extension they and their families were substandard (Anzaldúa, 1987; González, 2001). For Allison, being associated with Pachucos felt like an indictment (by an out-group member) that persisted in her memory. Indeed, the following data show that the Pachuco index had great salience for students, especially for Allison who twice tells of the Spanish teacher’s Pachuco comparison. The first telling occurs during an endof-the-year focus group interview with four of the six focal participants where Allison overtly complains about the Pachuco characterization. The second telling takes place in Alberto’s videotaped second-semester Spanish class, where Allison comically frames the account. The following discourse analysis demonstrates that it is not only “what” individuals say, but also “how” they say it, illustrating how interlocutors construct and ratify meaning through the sequence and structure of talk and not simply through words alone. In the following four-participant focus

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group interview, we had been talking about how the students had experienced the Spanish class with two different teachers.10 In the transcripts where students use Spanish, the English translation lies directly below the utterance. Line 1 refers to Beth. Segment I: Language awareness gone wrong (focus group interview data)

(1) 1 Paloma: it was like she was kinda learning Spanish herself during at that time= 2 Allison:       =ye[ah 3 Scott:         [yeah 4 Allison: and Alberto you can sit down and have a conversation while Beth like “↑oh lo siento↑” ((spoken in high-pitched Angloaccented Spanish))     “↑oh I’m sorry↑” you know like [and= 5 Scott: [(…) In Example 1, Paloma echoes the stance that several students had taken regarding Beth’s Spanish language competence. From field notes, for example, one morning after Beth had given some instructions in Spanish at the start of class, Pedro told her, “My five-year old brother speaks better Spanish than you.” Often Kate, in a less mean-spirited way, would ask Beth to speak English because she could not understand her (anglicized) Spanish. During these exchanges, Beth kept her composure and told students that although she was not a native speaker, she could help them with their academic writing. Despite this appeal, students would not accept Beth as their Spanish teacher. Thus, in Line 1, Paloma constructs Beth as a Spanish language learner, thereby questioning her legitimate status as a Spanish teacher. Scott and Allison ratify this in Turns 2 and 3 through Allison’s latch (i.e., linked utterances without pause) and the pair’s overlapping “yeahs.” Allison builds upon Paloma’s statement with the conjuncting “and” as if Line 1 and Line 4 were the same utterance, co-constructing their opinion of the teacher. Allison continues this co-construction with dialogue animating the “voice” of Beth in Turn 4. Tannen (1989: 116) explains that the listener’s “construction of dialogue appropriate to someone else’s narrative demonstrates how thoroughly the listener appreciates the perspective of the speaker.” Through word choice, intonation, accent and so forth, constructed dialogue also demonstrates the impersonator’s evaluation of the ventriloquized other’s state of mind and their evaluation of the imitated individual as a person (Bakhtin, 1981). It is therefore inappropriate to call this “reported speech,” but rather it is constructed dialogue

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(Tannen, 1989) because it underscores that it is not an objective accounting of another’s talk, but a reformulation that shifts meaning and encodes stance (Bakhtin, 1981; De Fina, 2003). Allison signals the dialogue with the quotative “like.” The word “like” also semantically encodes “an approximation of,” and higher intonation paralinguistically signals a different voice. The hyperanglicized Spanish indicates Allison’s epistemic stance (i.e., the expression of affective attitude or certainty–uncertainty) toward her teacher’s authenticity and legitimacy as a Spanish language teacher, speaker and interlocutor. The constructed dialogue portrays a Spanish speaker who could not have an extended dialogue with another, in contrast to a conversation with an L1 Spanish speaker like Alberto. In Turn 4, Allison’s “Beth” begins with a discourse marker (DM) “oh,” code-switches to Spanish and apologizes: “oh lo siento.” DMs (e.g., oh, well, I mean and so, y’know) are defined as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (Schiffrin, 1987: 31). DMs often occur at turn initial, medial or final positions in a stretch of discourse, regulating discourse coherence. In this case, the turn-initial DM “oh” signals a change of orientation toward information or a change in the locally constructed state of knowledge and awareness (Heritage, 1984, cited in Schiffrin, 1987). Ventriloquized Beth’s “oh” signals a switch from English to Spanish, an English orientation to a Spanish one, and thus initiates her code-switch. “Oh” also suggests an exclamation of surprise as in the “receipt of unanticipated information” (Schiffrin, 1987: 89). Through this constructed dialogue of the teacher, “oh” suggests either surprise to be addressed in Spanish, a highly irregular occurrence, or it may also suggest a surprise orientation to be using a language that is not her own. As students construct Beth as a Spanish learner, this explanation is consistent with their perception of her Spanish language competence. Additionally, if Beth had been constructed as a Spanish speaker, her expression of surprise might likely be “ay,” the Spanish equivalent of “oh” (Montes, 1999). Thus, even the choice of DM ascribed to the teacher frames Beth as a Spanish language out-group member. However, this is not to say that native Spanish speakers who are Spanish–English bilinguals do not borrow English DMs when speaking Spanish. Torres (2002) explains that such borrowings are common in regions where there is language contact. After the turn-initial DM “oh,” the constructed teacher then codeswitches to Spanish, a discourse pattern I frequently heard from Beth. Spanish was almost always used to greet students and give instructions. However, when concepts were more complex or abstract, such as the discussion surrounding “Pachuco Spanish,” she spoke in English. This may be due to the comfort level of the teacher to use Spanish to discuss more complex or abstract issues or reflects her perception of the students’ Spanish language receptive competence. Students also preferred English in the first-semester class: when spoken to in Spanish, they would invariably respond in English. Ironically, I was never able to accurately surmise

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the students’ level of Spanish in that class. It was only after seeing them interact with one another in other contexts, with two visiting monolingual Spanish-speaking students, or with a parent, that I realized that many of the students were fluent speakers or had native-like comprehension of spoken Spanish. From a pragmatics perspective, “the study of speaker meaning as distinct from word or sentence meaning” (Yule, 1996: 133), using the form “lo siento” to apologize indexes a form of apology more associated with English-dominant foreign language learners as it is more of a direct translation of “I’m sorry.” Spanish L1 speakers, however, would more likely use the forms “perdón” or “disculpa,” which also mean “sorry” or “excuse me,” to indicate an apology. These forms of apology are more informal and are used with more frequency in quotidian use, while “lo siento” is reserved for more formal contexts. It is in this area of pragmatic competence that L1 and L2 speakers can be distinguished. Again, through the use of “lo siento,” Allison constructs the teacher as a linguistic outsider through negative identity practice (Bucholtz, 1999), defined as talk, in this case constructed dialogue, that marks the speaker to be a member of a different discourse community in relation to their interlocutors. Another way of looking at “lo siento” is Allison’s choice to frame the teacher as an apologizer, reflecting a vulnerable and subordinate position in relation to students. The students’ unwillingness to participate in class, including not speaking Spanish when instructed, sulking and overt complaining, coupled with some of the students’ greater Spanish language fluency, did rob the teacher of some of her authority. Thus, students can exercise power over teachers through acts of resistance. Issues of credible authority, legitimacy and authenticity are at work in Example 1 explaining student non-performance. Example 2 further illustrates this tableturning exercise of power through the mocking of the teacher’s Spanish accent and further construction of in-group–out-group identities: (2) 6 Allison: = [she like Beth like judged kids like= 7 Ariana:   [(… …) >no< 8 Scott:  =yeah= 9 Allison:   =like she told some of us that we talked like a bunch of pachucos like >pachuco talk< “simón güey”11        “yeah man” and everything she like kinda made fun of us she’s like “↑simón güey↑” ((high-pitched Anglo-accented Spanish)) “↑yeah man↑” 10 Paloma: ↑hehehe↑ ((high-pitched giggle)) In Line 6, Allison explains that Beth judged the “kids.” Ariana overlaps Allison in Line 7 and uses “no,” pronounced in a short burst to arrest the

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turn from Allison. “No” in this case does not function as a negation of a prior assertion, but instead it is a bid to contribute to Allison’s complaint akin to what Eckert (1993) calls “cooperative competition,” a term used to describe White teenage girl discourse, seen here to also operate among Latinas. Scott aligns himself with Allison and Ariana through his latched “yeah” in Line 8, taking a similar stance, constructing Beth as “judge.” In Line 9, Allison elaborates that the judgment referred to the students’ way of speaking Spanish “like a bunch of Pachucos.” She claims that Beth made fun of the students by mocking their slang. Again, Allison uses constructed dialogue “showing” the injury versus simply “telling” of it, thereby making the action more concrete and credible, involving the listeners as if we were actually witnessing the verbal exchange (De Fina, 2003; Goldberg, 1986; Labov, 1981; Tannen, 1989). In Turn 9, Allison uses Spanish pronunciation to first articulate “simón güey,” providing both an example of “Pachuco Spanish” as well as either performing herself or another student. It is followed by the general extender “and everything,” implying “more examples like that” without having to directly state them (Roth-Gordon, 2006). The second constructed “simón güey” is ventriloquized Beth mocking or making fun of students. Allison’s alternation between Spanish and hyperanglicized Spanish pronunciation demonstrates her linguistic control of two phonetic systems that exhibits her translanguaging competence, the ability to access multiple languages for communicative purposes (Canagarajah, 2011), which here performs a type of superior linguistic agency and defense against the teacher’s perceived attack. The constructed dialogue between teacher and student in Example 2 is not without irony: Allison does to Beth what she accuses Beth of doing to her and others – she makes fun of her anglicized Spanish through her “Valley-Girl-type” intonation (see Mason Carris, 2011). This mocking is ratified by Paloma’s shrieking laughter in Line 10. Mason Carris (2011: 146, italics in the original) calls this pejorative stylization of a White woman’s Spanish pronunciation la voz gringa (gringo voice) that indexes race-ethnicity, privilege, entitlement and gender, and “reclaims power through performance, and when performed by Latina/os, critically repositions nosotros (us Latina/os) vis-à-vis los otros (in this case, privileged whites).” Power is reclaimed when Latina/os voice la voz gringa to challenge White hegemony performed in White public spaces (Hill, 1998), spaces in which racial and ethnic minorities’ use of English is monitored for correctness while White speakers’ discourse that exhibits the same “disorder” remains unchallenged (Schwartz, 2008). Here students challenge the hegemonic practice by upending the linguistic tables. Students in Examples 1 and 2 construct Beth’s social identity as a linguistic outsider who lacks the authority to teach Spanish speakers Spanish. They explain how they felt “othered” by their teacher while at the same time they “other” her. Parody, ridicule or disparagement of one’s abilities are discursive strategies that negotiate self and other’s in- or

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out-group status (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004b; Jaworski & Coupland, 2005). Through the lens of social psychology, evaluating others negatively is a process of self-image maintenance and has been shown to occur when an individual’s self-image has been threatened (Fein & Spencer, 1997). As the students describe, the Pachuco comparison was interpreted as an insult. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987: 59) explains: “[I]f you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skins to linguistic identity—I am my language.” Thus framed, the students’ narrative and their observed resistance can be interpreted as both agentive and acts of psychic defense (Kohl, 1994a), acts not surprising when seen in the context of a region historically hostile to Mexicans (González, 2001; Sheridan, 1986). Next, in Alberto’s second-semester Spanish class, Allison tells the Pachuco story again, highlighting its saliency. From field notes: Semester II, May

Beth was not the only one who experienced resistance and nonparticipation; it just manifested differently in Alberto’s class. Instead of sulking and not speaking Spanish, most students did speak Spanish when spoken to, but they flagrantly disregarded Alberto’s authority, primarily due to his lack of teaching experience and his choice of learning materials. The form and cause of student non-participation that transpired in the second semester will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. I include the following example from Alberto’s second-semester Spanish class as it directly relates to the preceding analysis. In this class, students had just finished watching a segment of La Catrina, an episodic Spanish language learning video series created to accompany the second-year Spanish foreign language textbook Paso a Paso. While writing a series of names on the whiteboard, Alberto asked students: “¿Quién estaba en la fiesta?” (Who was at the party?). Allison responded, “una mujer (a woman), I don’t know. María, I’ll call her María.” Ariana laughed. The class continued like this with Alberto asking comprehension or display questions and Allison answering. In discussing the attributes of the eponymous “Catrina” in English, Allison compared the grand dame to Robin Hood: She broke the law in order to take from the rich to give to the poor. Alberto then asked Jorge, siting in the back of the class, if he agreed with Allison: Segment II: Sounding Pachuco, videotaped classroom data

(1) 1 Alberto:  no Jorge↑ ((smiling, he points his chin at and looks at Jorge)) (1.0) 2 Jorge: hu:h↑= 3 Allison: =say yes

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4 Jorge: yes ((leaning back in his chair against the wall, one arm crosses his chest, clasping his extended arm resting between his open legs)) 5 Alberto: dile simón (1.5) tell her yeah 6 Allison: hehehe simón güey ((Spanish phonology)) yeah man 7 Jorge: Simon↑ ((pronounced like the English name without Spanish phonology, he smiles broadly, and puts his hand behind head)) 8 Alberto: *Simon* ((pronounced like the name without Spanish phonology)) Jorge, a continuing student from the first semester, had sporadic attendance during the second semester, and when he did attend, he never opened his textbook or actively participated in lessons; he rarely did homework. His “huh?” in Line 2 indicates either legitimate inattention or playacting for a laugh. In either case, his response flouts teacher authority. Spanish was spoken in Jorge’s home; therefore, his behavior doesn’t stem from a lack of Spanish competence. At the time of the study, he was living with his aunt who had limited English language-speaking skills, which I had observed. In Turn 3, Allison tells Jorge to respond affirmatively, which he does in Turn 4. Alberto then asks him to do so in vernacular Spanish. Perhaps Alberto, like Beth, is trying to connect with the students through the use of slang. Instead of Jorge saying “simón,” Allison in Turn 6 repeats and embellishes it with “güey,” the laughter indicating that it is a joke. Through the anglicization of “simón” in Turn 7 (i.e., Simon), Jorge adds to the humorous key of the interaction, aligning himself with his classmates, while also complying with and resisting Alberto’s request by using a type of Mock Spanish – he says the word but without the Spanish inflection. Mock Spanish is a phenomenon described by Hill (1998) whereby White, L1 English speakers of Spanish anglicize Spanish pronunciation for derisive intent. Here, however, a Spanish-speaking youth uses a type of mock Spanish to indicate his knowledge of Spanish orthography while his conscious mispronunciation of “simón” resists the teacher’s command and simultaneously displays his translanguaging dexterity to wordplay. Alberto’s laughing repetition of Jorge’s “Simon” shows a cultural appreciation for this wordplay and aligns himself with students. Jorge, nonetheless, rejects the teacher’s use of insider slang, denying a more intimate footing between the teacher, the school and himself. In Example 2, Allison uses the introduction of “simón güey” to launch into her “Pachuco story”:

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(2) 9 Allison: hehehehehe like Beth’s simó:::n he[hehe ((hyperanglicized Spanish)) 10 Ariana: [hehehehe 11 Jorge:  [oh yeah ((looking at Allison, smiling with teeth showing, points at Allison, then rests arm on raised knee)) 12 Allison: me and Pedro we just look at her like “>noin Spanish we’re not learning anything (.3) I try paying attention in Spanish and I don’t feel like I’m learning anything< (.3) so (1.0) to that I mean↑ (.3) I might as well screw off you know it’s like I=it’s a waste of time it’s a waste of my time so I might as well have a good time

In essence, Olivia’s performance strike stems from a belief that there is nothing for her to learn in the Spanish class. In the interview, she continued to explain her disruptive behavior through a parody of one of La Catrina’s male characters. Using exaggerated facial features, increased volume and slow delivery rate, Olivia deeply enunciated: “” [Hi, how are you?]. Isabel, whose L1 was Spanish, nodded and laughed in agreement, adding: “>it is horrible actingI don’t know< (.3) because like you can read a book that you want to read instead of like (.3) you know “here’s a book you have to read it you know do a project” >I don’t know< 2 Kim: do you like that whole (1.5) taking the character’s persona=persona↑= 3 Isabel:  =yeah (.3) >yeah that was interesting especially if you like like the book and you have fun doing it but (.3) if you don’t like the book it’s pretty boring (.3) you know< (1.0)

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Isabel’s preference for the FICTIONMANIA assignment connects with her personal preference for thinking and reflecting, perhaps the essence of this assignment. The classroom discussions probed many deep, thoughtful issues that many adults wouldn’t think teenagers considered (e.g., honesty’s limits in relationships, national security versus individual freedom, the nature of creativity and the state’s role concerning people with mental illness). Echoing the other students’ values in Segment IV, she explains that she likes the assignment because “you can read a book that you want to read” (Turn 1). She counters this with a “constructed” teacher telling students what they “have to read” and do, similar to what Paloma states in Segment IV, Turn 9, and Ariana’s constructed teacher in Turn 10. In Turn 3, Isabel adds one caveat, however: If you select a text you don’t like, the whole process becomes boring. Students need to choose wisely. Both of these segments underscore the students’ preference for choice in their learning. Although Rachel set the parameters of the FICTIONMANIA assignment, students played a huge role in the process: They chose their own books (though Rachel suggested titles to some), selected the quote to illustrate, picked the characters to portray and designed their own probing or essential questions. The value of reading self-selected texts

In K-12 contexts, students who read authentic texts (i.e., not textbooks), such as the texts students read in their humanities class, perform better on comprehension tests than students who do skills-based drills to improve their reading ability (Coalition of Essential Schools, 2018; Krashen, 1993, 2004; Paulson, 2006). Krashen (1993, 2004), reviewing reading research investigating the correlation between reading and academic progress, concludes that extended reading, especially studentselected pleasure reading, is the only way to increase reading proficiency as compared to decontextualized reading exercises. Additionally, sustained pleasure reading develops good writers, spellers and expanded vocabulary users. It also promotes advanced grammatical competence. Paulson (2006: 53) explains that approaches that implement sustained silent reading “at the K-12 level show self-selected reading for enjoyment to be crucial to academic success.” Paulson adds that although reading promotes academic skills, it is important that reading programs instill that reading for the sake of reading is intrinsically rewarding (see also Marlow, 2002). Sullivan and Brown (2013) also found that longitudinal pleasure reading positively impacts cognition and was the strongest predictor of social mobility. Unfortunately, studies show that many learners across the nation (some national reports say as many as two thirds) read below grade level and read much less than previous generations (Rodríguez & Lira, 1998): a disturbing situation considering the positive correlation between

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sustained reading and academic achievement and retention and the reading demands of our information-based society. Fowles (cited in Rodríguez & Lira, 1998) reports a different a picture, however; he cites commerce data that indicate that book buying is nationally on the rise with the largest growing sector being young adult (YA) fiction. He suggests that students are willing to read if they are given the appropriate time and materials. The students’ behavior in the humanities class supports this claim. With these statistics as a backdrop, Rodríguez and Lira (1998) investigated how reading for pleasure could be cultivated. Reviewing the literature, they found that the following conditions contributed to sustained pleasure reading: reading enthusiast teachers who allocate adequate time for it; students who select and discuss their own books; and parents who are involved. Additional factors include teachers who create conducive reading environments and limit the amount of test preparation drills. Observations of the humanities class corroborate the foregoing conditions/recommendations. Although parents were not directly involved in the FICTIONMANIA project, their involvement in their children’s education was encouraged school-wide through biannual student–parent– teacher conferences, numerous family nights where students exhibited their work and their participation in field trips. The humanities data presented suggest that learner choice, that is, students selecting their own books, was crucial. In an ethnographic study of elementary school readers, Frank et al. (2001) found that when teachers gave students text choice, it helped them have real conversations about books. Rodríguez and Lira (1998) point out that text self-selection allows students to develop their interests in reading and discover the personal and pleasurable benefits of it. Students are not as amenable to reading and writing about literature that their teachers select to meet state standards. This point was also demonstrated in the same humanities class. When students read Carson McCullers (2000 [1940]), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a book they did not choose, but was recommended for high school readers, they did not exhibit the same enthusiasm and interest they did when they selected their own books of which many were of the same literary merit as McCullers.’ Students can learn to appreciate a wider range of literature by first selecting topics and genres that interest them. Once a reading habit forms, students may be more open to styles and genres that were not originally appealing. Choice also allows students to select texts that better match their reading comprehension levels – either high or low. This is particularly important within the context of differentiated instruction. Easy access to books is a key element in any program or class where students select their own texts (Krashen, 1995, 2004). Of course, this was not an issue for students at DHS. The largest public library was blocks

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from the school and was the location where most students selected their books. If students do not come from households that read for pleasure, they may not be in the habit of going to a library (or bookstore), so this assignment also taught library skills and the relative ease of library borrowing. Overall, a culture of reading germinated in the humanities class. Students experienced extended pleasure reading, talked about their books and discovered firsthand the ease and inexpensive way of accessing books through the public library. The following section presents classroom discourse data and discusses FICTIONMANIA presentations. FICTIONMANIA: Student presentations

As previously shown, the majority of interviewed students identified the presentation portion of FICTIONMANIA as meaningful. Each student presenter came to the front of the room, stated their book’s title and author, and provided some background information regarding setting and the character their would be portraying. The student, in character, then recounted a key event in their life. Following the account, the presenter posed a “probing” question inspired by the book’s key themes. The student then led a discussion surrounding the posed question. Rachel occasionally helped clarify a posed question or interjected her opinion, but overall, her back-row presence was minimal. Presentations lasted between five and seven minutes and consistently ended with enthusiastic applause. I could have selected any number of student presentations to illustrate the FICTIONMANIA project. However, I selected Jack’s because he was a reserved student (though not a HLL)14 and because his punk rock style with its history of anarchy and rebellion also figures into the analysis. His confident demeanor during his led discussion exposed a glimmer of his academic potential that otherwise may not have been revealed without such an assignment. The presentation showed, as did others, the intersection of curriculum with learner identity. For many students, the themes brought up in their books reflected their personal interests and concerns, and through their probing questions, revealed that students were grappling with what it means to be an adult in today’s society and how best to lead one’s life. At this time in the semester, students were between the ages of 15 and 17, a time in their lives when such questions were relevant. The following summary of Stanton Wortham’s ethnographic research in schools provides some insights regarding identification processes and learning. Through longitudinal classroom observations, Stanton Wortham (2006) explains that social identifications that are historically and locally constructed are resources from which academic learning draws and in turn shapes. Wortham found teachers (and students) using stereotypical

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social categories, such as “promising Black girl” and “lazy Black boy,” to illustrate curricular points. These indexical references, known as participant examples, link the students’ personal attributes to material being studied. Participant examples further entrench local models of social identification that include “girls are smart and promising while boys unintelligent and unpromising” (Wortham, 2006: 19). In this way, teachers and students used analogies from classroom life to explain societal issues discussed in their curriculum, which they in turn used to construct local identities of students. Wortham (2006: 14), citing Latour, points out that no knowledge is “pure”: “social identities, institutional arrangements and power relations” bound knowledge. Wortham explains that academic learning and social identification became interdependent, aided by the personalization of content through the use of students themselves as examples of curricular concepts. This dynamic is detrimental if stigmatized identities are forged through these processes. In Wortham’s study, certain students became identified as “outcast” and “beast.” Others, however, were constructed as “smart” and “promising.” Both identification types suggest that curricular topics also shape identity if tied to personal attributes. I found similar, but distinct dynamics at work, which are explored in the following presentation and analysis of classroom discourse. The main difference, however, lies in agency: Learners selected their own topics that engaged with value clarification, which I argue helped construct intellectual and personal identity. The following presentation took place in a humanities section early in the presentation cycle. Sixteen students were present, including Olivia, Allison, Daniel, Manuela and Leah from the Spanish HLL class. And, unlike their comportment in Spanish, they listened attentively. Students sat at their tables in two concentric semicircles facing the front chalkboard. A presenter’s stool stood in front of the board. Rachel remained at the back of the class, while I videotaped from a table against the back wall. In Segment VI, Jack presented the story of “Alex” from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Jack was dressed and groomed in his usual punk rock style, including a “Mohawk.” The sides of his head were closely shaved. A two-inch strip of longer hair stood on end and ran through the center of his scalp from his forehead to the nape of his neck. A tuft of hair fell to his nose reminiscent of a 1950s rock and roller. He wore an untucked light-yellow, cut-sleeved T-shirt with the punk band “Descendents” written across his chest in black. A stick figure of a baby “Milo,” the band’s “nerdy” front man, sits below the punk band’s name doing the splits, an image from their 1985 album’s cover, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up,” and become a destructive adult. With studded and plain black leather belts draped over slim pegged jeans, black high-top canvas sneakers, a black studded leather bracelet, a silver hooped nose

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ring and large metal rings inserted into gaping earlobes, Jack appeared to have dressed character-like, though coincidentally, this was also his usual style. Segment VI begins with Rachel thanking Mabel for her presentation, which students loudly applauded (Turn 1) and another congratulated, “Yay Mabel!” (Turn 2). Rachel (Turn 3) then announced: “Jack is up! Jack of A Clockwork Orange.” A student, too, encouraged him with, “Go Jack!” (Turn 4). Students rooting for one another in this way was fairly typical across all school contexts. Jack walked to the front of the room and announced his book as he sat down on the stool. He presented a plot synopsis, but veered from an important part of the assignment and did not tell the story from the main character Alex’s perspective. This may be because he was an early presenter and hadn’t seen many presentation examples, thus not fully grasping the assignment. Jack was smart, but not a stellar student. Jack explained that 15-year-old Alex had killed a woman and was sent to jail. In jail, he was given the option of undergoing a “technique” that made you “good” (Turn 5). Jack explained the procedure in which Alex went to a hospital where he was given injections while “they show him a bunch of films of like lots of violence and sex” (Turn 5). The injections caused “sickness whenever he sees violence or sex or anything that is weird” (Turn 5). Because of the successful treatment, Alex was released from jail. On the outside, his victims sought retaliation, his parents disowned him and he eventually attempted suicide. He was readmitted to the hospital where the treatment done in prison was reversed and in the end “he’s back to normal” (Turn 5). On this note, Jack posed his discussion question: “Is it better to be good than be free?” (Turn 5). The following transcript shows an utterance prior to the posed question and the discussion that ensues. Segment VI: To be “good” or “free”

(1) 5 Jack: … and so: they↓ they fixed him all up ((looks to his right, smiles)) ((looks down and up)) and my question was (4.0) ((tilts head and torso back, raises eyebrows quickly up, closes eyes, lifts bottom of mouth up frown-like, nods head once, opens eyes, smiles from left side of face)) Jack’s slow delivery accompanied by elaborate facial gestures and body language suggests the delivery of a weighty, complex question. Critical ethnographer Phil Carspecken (1996), suggests that critical ethnographers

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record body language with care as meaning does not solely reside in spoken discourse, but in action and bodily states. In Turn 5, a glimpse of Jack’s stance regarding his probing question is revealed. The question, as Jack posits, is a choice between being “good” and being “free.” In other words: Is it better to be a moralist or an existentialist? The query, whose meaning students negotiate in the following transcript, essentially asks if it is better to conform/law abide (be a “good citizen”) or be “free,” that is, true to yourself or nature. The first line of the turn, “they fixed him all up,” suggests that Alex’s revulsion to violence (i.e., what made him “good”) has been “fixed” (i.e., reversed). The choice of the word “fixed,” suggests that to be “good” (or no longer in control of one’s mind and actions) is akin to being broken. Jack’s smile indicates pleasure regarding the treatment’s reversal and states that Alex is then back to “normal,” his old self (i.e., free). It is normal (and thus right) for Alex to be himself, which also implies that committing acts of violence is normal. The converse is also true: not being one’s self is abnormal, undesirable and “unfreeing.” Jack sets up a construct that aligns freedom with the expression of the existential self. In Example 2, Sydney seeks a definition of “good”: (2) 6 Sydney: >what do you mean↑< (1.0) ((Jack looks at her at his left) like how do you define being good like↑ 7 Jack: well (.3) “good” ((raises both forearms to form scare quotes with fingers)) in like layman’s terms of being good in this book like ((looks down)) they want him to be just like (.3) like uh like (.3) 8 (….): >good citizen< Sydney, a highly inquisitive student (an inquisitiveness that she says got her into trouble with teachers at her past school), asks for clarification of Jack’s question (Turn 6). I am not going to refer to this negotiation of meaning in Turns 6 through 2015 as a “repair” sequence (Hatch, 1978), a process of making meaning clear. The metaphor of repair entails that an object or utterance is broken (which could be viewed as disparaging), and when fixed, the object or utterance is back to its original state (or worse off, rarely better). The concept of repair, at least in Segment VI, does not accurately capture the creative aspect that transpires when individuals seek clarification through engaged questioning. The original utterance and its embodied idea do not return to an original state, but instead, the ideas are expanded and extended. The process shows evolution of thought and understanding through interaction that the concept “repair” inadequately captures. A conversation between peers assumes that members of the discourse are on (more or less) equal footing – although the dynamics of power are inevitable. Nonetheless, there is not

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a superior member trying to fix or repair the inferior member’s “broken” monologue, but instead, the stretch of talk shows peers in dialogue trying to develop an idea collaboratively, that is, what I call collaborative invention, rather than repair or negotiated meaning. In Turn 7, Jack begins to clarify the meaning of good by first putting it in scare quotes and then elevating the status of the word and/or explanation by couching it in “layman’s terms.” Scare quotes are used in writing to convey that the “word” is not to be taken at face value, that there is some skepticism and/or irony surrounding its meaning in that particular context. Jack’s use of scare quotes suggests a more adult stance, that like an adult, mature thinker, he is able to see more nuance or irony in things. In this case, the word “good” in scare quotes conveys that the idea of good is relative and subjective, an idea that is further developed in the segment. Jack in this sense is opening up a communal, epistemological dialogue. The phrase “in layman’s terms” arises from the situation where a professional person substitutes a register-specific lexical item with a more pedestrian one. In Example 2, the word “good” is not professional jargon needing to be translated into quotidian English. However, its use by Jack frames him as an expert who will then explain to his “lay” audience its meaning. In sum, Turn 7 is an example of Jack practicing his emergent intellectual (or academic) identity. Jack is unable, however, to provide the lay terminology and one of his (unidentifiable) fellows ratifies his train of thought by providing, in Turn 8, “good citizen.” The facilitation in Turn 8 is spoken quickly, speedily giving the floor back to Jack. (3) 9 Jack: yeah [just like (3.0)= ((looks at Sydney)) 10 Sydney: [you mean like the average 11 Jack:  =like the typical good American= ((shifts gaze from Sydney and looks down to his right)) 12 Sydney: >mm hmm< 13 Jack:  =you know (.3) but in order to be free (2.0) ((looks at Sydney, nods head slightly to his left, and lifts left shoulder)) he’s got to be (2.0) good ((widens eyes, lifts both hands about two inches, palms up, shrugs his shoulders, tilts his head left, mouth lifts up and down shrug-like and looks down)) In Turns 9 through 12, Sydney and Jack continue to collaboratively invent and expand the concept of “good,” taking up the example of “citizen” offered in Turn 8. The students seem to be operating from their imagined community of what it means to be an American citizen, which entails that US citizens are upright and law abiding as opposed to Alex

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in A Clockwork Orange. Following the construct logic set up by Jack in the previous examples, this suggests that “typical” Americans are more law abiding (i.e., good) than free (i.e., being true to their nature), which relates to the nation’s puritanical roots. In an era of terrorist threats and the resulting enactment of the US Patriot Act, which some argue threatens (or has the potential to threaten) civil liberties, this dichotomy between law abiding and free is not far-fetched. To complicate matters, in Turn 13, Jack taps into another meaning of “free,” which is more in line with the plot of the book. In order for the novel’s Alex to be released from jail (i.e., be free), he has to be good (i.e., not his true violent self). Jack’s shrugging shoulders and upturned hands signal a type of resignation and surrender regarding Alex’s forced compromise. Jack’s comment no longer runs parallel to his original question that proposed a good–free binary; now one entails the other. Sydney, perhaps seeing the shift the question has taken in Turn 13, seeks clarification for the meaning of “free” in Turn 14 as follows: (4) 14 Sydney: like to earn=when you say free >what do you mean↑ (he has no choice in …)↑< ((Sydney’s head, looking forward, and torso rests on the desk)) 15 Jack: what↑ 16 Sydney: when you say free you mean he can do whatever he wants as opposed to (…) 17 Jack: yeah well (.3) like no doubt 18 Olivia: so (.3) if he kills someone↑ [he shouldn’t go to jail↑ 19 Jack:  [he had the choice (1.5) he had the choice to um to he could stay in jail and serve his sentence and crap and be bad full of violence and rage (.3) you know (.3) or he could >you know< he could be brainwashed (.3) and (2.0) 20 Sydney: be free 21 Jack: yeah be free (.3) but what’s the point of being free if you’re just going to live like like you’re (6.0) ((looks around the room, Logan raises a hand, Jack nominates him by pointing his book at him)) When Jack doesn’t hear Sydney’s muffled question, she switches from question to directly stating that she believes Jack’s conception of “free,” to mean that “[Alex] can do whatever he wants” (Turn 16). Sydney’s switch from question to assertion demonstrates that not all “questions” seek answers to unknowns, as she already had an answer in mind, but that questions also serve an elicitation strategy, not unlike what a teacher does. Asking a question can also function as setting up a slot for the asker

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to then answer the question without directly stating the opinion at the outset – an act of “knowledge display,” not genuine query (McKenzie, 2005). Jack then agrees with Sydney’s assessment (Turn 17). HLL, Olivia, interjects her opinion, again in a non-question-question form, challenging the notion of being able to do whatever one wants. Unlike the boys in this segment, the two girls more often employ question-asking instead of direct idea assertion. As Olivia’s comment really wasn’t a question, but an act of disagreement, Jack doesn’t answer it directly, but instead explains Alex’s choice: stay in jail and be full of rage (but remain mindfully free) or be brainwashed (i.e., mindfully changed and thus “good”). Sydney co-constructs the idea by completing Jack’s explanation with the words “be free” (Turn 20) implying an alignment with Jack. Now the question has essentially shifted from: Is it better to be good (law abiding) or free (one’s mindful true self)? to approximately: Is it worth it to be good (brainwashed, not one’s mindful true self, law abiding) and free (not in jail, locked up) OR imprisoned (not physically free) but one’s mindful self? This ontological question asks if Alex should be (re)defined by society’s norms and ethics or by his “true self.” Jack in a sense answers the question by stating the futility of being free physically (Turn 21) if one is brainwashed (Turn 19): physically free, but not mentally. After a long pause, Jack looks around the room for someone to respond. Logan raises his hand, and Jack nominates him by pointing his held book at him: (5) 22 Logan: well uh (.3) it might be like you know better to be it’s like better I think to be you know like a free person or whatever but in this case if being free means like just causing harm to other people (.3) violence and stuff than that’s (.3) basically >I mean< then you’re not really↑=you don’t really respect freedom cause you’re limiting their right ((Jack nods)) or ability to be free= 23 Jack:  =that’s what I was getting at hehe absolutely↓ Tristan ((Jack points to Tristan who raises his hand)) In Turn 22, Logan begins with a series of hedges to soften his comment that counters Jack’s prior claim that being brainwashed is not freedom; freedom is achieved when an individual is free in mind and acts accordingly. Logan complicates the notion of being free, returning the original question (or combining both ideas of “free”), by stating that “freedom” has its limits. He agrees that it is better to be a free person (both free in mind and body), but if that free person causes harm and impinges upon the rights or freedoms of others, “freedom” is not “respected.” His comment reflects the earlier remark that being “good” is akin to being a

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“good citizen.” The remark is also consistent with US constitutional values and US Supreme Court rulings that have also put limits on freedom. For example, the First Amendment, granting freedom of speech, does not permit all manner of speech: One cannot yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, blare announcements from a PA system in residential neighborhoods, air inappropriate media content when children are likely present or incite violence. These rulings limit freedoms if they infringe on others’ rights, safety, personal space and community ethical standards. Logan makes his point using the pronoun “you,” (e.g., “you don’t really respect freedom cause you’re limiting their right”) which most likely functions as the generic “one.” Jack, on the other hand, doesn’t argue with Logan, but instead confidently agrees with him, stating that this was his intention all along (Turn 23). From conversations with teachers, a few have commented that certain boys look up to one another or even try to seek approval of other boys whom they consider intelligent. Faculty and students alike regarded Logan to be one of the brightest students on campus. Jack may therefore be aligning himself with Logan because he respects his intellect and/or Logan’s argument has caused him to reconsider his position. As time hasn’t sufficiently passed for the kind of deliberation needed to change a course of thinking, it is more likely that the argument hasn’t won per se, but Logan’s ethos has won. Jack isn’t aligning himself with the argument, but with Logan. As Jack states “absolutely” in Turn 23, he confidently pulls himself up and points a finger at Tristan who has raised his hand. Jack’s selfassured manner of nominating students resembles a seasoned facilitator who regularly leads discussions. In Example 6, Tristan also uses the personal pronoun “you”: (6) 24 Tristan:  it is better for you or for Alex (.3) the actual person to  be  free↑ (1.0) but is it better for the people = 25 Logan: =yeah 26 Tristan:  =if you’re ((sweeps right arm from elbow to hand to the right like a windshield wiper, then makes scare quotes in the air with two fingers of each hand)) (1.0) >“good”< ((Emily looks at him with a slight smile, laughs, and imitates his scare quotes with her right hand)) (4.0) 27 Rachel: >hmm< (3.0) In Turn 24, Tristan conflates Jack and Alex. Jack didn’t role-play Alex, so the confusion doesn’t originate from playacting. Tristan may be drawing on Jack’s personal style that is Alex-like in its personalization, leather, rips and metal, but as far as I know, he has no reason to link

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Jack’s comportment to Alex. Jack is a sweet, polite kid. Some of the students with whom he associated had discipline issues at the school, but not Jack. Tristan may simply be using “you” in accordance with the assignment’s design to role-play and addresses Jack as Alex. Nonetheless, Tristan uses Jack-Alex as a participant example to illustrate why in certain cases personal freedoms should be limited. Tristan seems to be drawing from a societal construct of justice: The rights of others hold precedence over individuals whose freedoms cause harm. However, this premise continues to divide US citizens, particularly around the Second Amendment right to bear arms. For some, there should be no limits on this freedom even in light of epidemic public mass shootings. Logan latches to Tristan’s assertion (Turn 25) indicating the similarities between their two thoughts. Tristan also makes use of the gestured scare quotes around “good,” format tying Jack’s earlier “good” in Turn 7 (i.e., referring back to an earlier utterance or symbol production), thus connecting the two utterances’ propositions. Again, this gesture visually indicates a more mature and literate understanding regarding nuance, irony and subjectivityrelativity. The gesture similarly contributes to Tristan’s intellectual identity formation. Emily (from the camping trip in Chapter 1) shows amusement in the repeated gesture and imitates it, perhaps mocking its use. In Turn 27, Rachel comments for the first time, but it is merely a quick “hmm.” It is unclear if her interjection shows approval, disapproval or simply interest. She leaves the discussion moderation and development to the students, a fairly consistent pattern. By not entering into the dialogue, authority lies with the students and power is more evenly distributed among them, although some students’ opinions may wield more authority than others. It is nearly impossible to encounter any context where power is equally distributed. The teacher’s relative absence, however, takes a powerful discourse member out of the equation who has the authority to alter the psychological and physical setting, participant roles, ends, act sequence, key and norms of interaction (Hymes, 1974). Indeed, students govern this speech event with minimal overt teacher management. However, Rachel has created the space for student interaction, including her own marginal role. In Example 7, Sydney enters the conversation again, this time to comment on Alex’s psychological state: (7) 28 Sydney: I think that um (3.0) ((fingertips of both hands rest on her chin, her head is raised off of the desk)) it’s it feels better to be free↑ but in this case↑ >your main character’s name is Alex↑
free< he was free physically but I think that mentally he was ((both hands go to head)) trapped = 31 Jack:  =>yeah [yeah< 32 Sydney:         [in his mind so I think that he wasn’t free at all and so I think >it would be better to just be good because then< (.3) >it would be easier when he was free as opposed to having↑< (.3) >how long how long was it before he was (.3) out and kinda crazy< before he was fixed↑ 33 Jack: what’s that↑ 34 Sydney: how long how long was that period of time when you know when he was ((circles head with both hands)) having the dreams and he was brainwashed and stuff 35 Jack: >oh it was like a fortnight I guess ((brings left hand to his head)) that’s like fourteen days or something like thatthat I would do< to try to change the way I was >you know↑< but because it’s someone else trying something that they thought of and trying on me↓ and that would that just might mess me up completely= 42 Jack:  =yeah but he (you know) didn’t really know what what was going to happen to him because he didn’t know anything about this technique= 43 Mabel: exactly! 44 Jack:  =except that for that it would get him out of jail and that’s all he really cared about he didn’t really care about the consequences 45 Mabel: yeah (5.0) 46 Rachel: all right! thank you↓ good job! ((students clap loudly, Jack gets off of the stool and walks toward his table at the back of the room)) In Turn 41, Mabel begins by stating that she would undergo brainwashing with the important stipulation: It would have to be performed with her informed consent or desire to change. She explains that if she wanted to change, she would do it; but the fact that it would be others imposing their will on her would be even worse than the original ailment or behavior disorder. Mabel taps into the Western democratic construct that values self-improvement, self-determination and autonomy (Traube, 1989) where individuals can better themselves through behavior modification, medical treatments or motivated free will, but when others rob free will and one’s self-determination, it damages. In Turn 42, Jack begins with the negative collaborative expansion DM, “yeah but,” but his counterargument supports Mabel rather than counters her. He adds that Alex didn’t consider Mabel’s concern because he only cared about getting out of jail. Mabel’s “exactly!” again stresses her point that lack of consensual knowledge damages. Jack’s final point suggests that Alex’s desperation does not allow him the luxury to carefully weigh consequences to which Mabel also agrees (Turn 45), though his prior actions suggest that he never considers consequences. Although this is not elaborated upon, Jack’s comment illustrates that not all people have the privilege of choice.

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After waiting for additional students to comment, Rachel closes the discussion in Turn 46. She thanks Jack and once again, students applaud vigorously. Discussion

Segment VI, through Jack’s led discussion surrounding A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, students engage in an intellectual conversation that weighs autonomous free will against the rights of others. The question asks if it is better to infringe on another’s freedom of mind if it will ultimately benefit society. Through the discussion, students tap into a number of cultural constructs found in Western democracies, specifically the United States, such as self-determination, rights of others, autonomy, freedom of expression (albeit violent) and self-improvement. Students tempered these ideas, however, with a discussion concerning the conditions that would warrant the curtailment of these freedoms; curtailments that individuals, legislators, lobbyists, judges and jurors continuously negotiate and construct. As future adult members of a representative democracy, these issues are personally and socially relevant. Students are in the process of understanding who they are and where they fit on the individual–societal continuum. In addition, through this ontological discussion, the students’ own ontological selves construct. Students shape this construction not only by what they say, but also by how they say it. As the context of this discussion is in a classroom, through the vehicle of a formal, assessed presentation based on a literary novel, intellectual identity formation is salient. I argue that the most pronounced example of this lies with Jack. Jack’s body language, choice of words and moderation style illustrate a burgeoning self-confidence and intellectual identity. As time progressed “on stage,” Jack’s demeanor became more self-assured as he led the group and nominated speakers through serious talk and collaborative invention. I call this online, real-time process of collaborative invention an identity event, a speech event whereby stance and identity, through talk and gesture, germinate, perform and construct. Arguably, the vast majority of speech events could be considered identity events; I simply want to highlight the ontological aspects of speech events in the context of schooling. Packer and Goioechea (2000) explain that ontological learning occurs when individuals construct and transform themselves through the process of interaction, using various sign systems. Thus, any kind of learning, in this case academic learning, transforms the individual through changes in knowing: A change in knowing changes “being.” Learning entails an active social construction of knowledge that transforms. Cobb and Yackel (1996: 185) explain that “learning is a constructive process that occurs while participating in and contributing to the practices of the local community,” a process that actively cognizes individuals. Learning is therefore psychologically and socially reciprocal.

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Classroom turn economy

A noticeable aspect of the preceding classroom segment is that relatively few students – 6 out of 16 – actively participated. The lack of full classroom discursive participation was due in part to the authoritative turn economy present in the discussion; a turn economy found in bureaucratic settings such as classrooms and courtrooms. The turn economy comprises three strategies of interaction on the part of the setting’s leader: turn control, question control and control of ratification (Philips, 2006). In this case, however, the tables are somewhat turned as students manage turns, questions and ratifications under the guidance of their teacher. Although the teacher set up the assignment and structure of content delivery, it was up to the students to select their own texts, select presentation content, select probing questions and select student speakers. However, despite this democratizing aspect of the classroom, students proceeded to guide discussion, using the three strategies of interaction much like a teacher would. So, do these three strategies of interaction disenfranchise participants no matter who uses them, be it teacher or student? There is no question that if a teacher wants all students to actively participate in learning, the preceding turn economy is not the answer. However, as this authoritative discursive style was not the norm, the benefits of students being in charge outweigh its negative aspects. Each student would eventually become “the sage on the stage,” and even the weakest students would experience being the classroom authority, sending a powerful message that whatever they have to say and contribute is worthy of everyone’s attention. During these presentations, I witnessed profound discussions that arose out of student interests, inquiry and experience that could not have occurred under the leadership of a sole authoritative figure. The curriculum did not come out of the mind and experience of one teacher, but arose from 85 individuals who shared a common coming of age. That being said, I would not suggest that this turn economy be the norm, shifting the teacher’s talking head for a student’s, but done as a culminating experience or identity event, it has value. In this case, students literally took control of their learning. They explored ideas that in no way could have come out of single educator’s experience. Because respect had become part of the classroom culture, students took the assignment and each other seriously. By students being framed as the authority, even for this brief period, they experienced something few had ever experienced in the classroom up to this point. Too often, they had been receivers of knowledge and not crafters of it. Such events shape intellectual identity. In the classroom discourse presented, students explored issues that interested them as they entered a new phase in their lives, separating from parents-guardians while concurrently forging intellectual–academic identities. The curriculum, through self-selected books, afforded them

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this opportunity. Students sought texts that connected with their own concerns and found specific textual incidents that reified these interests. By selecting their own texts, they set the parameters for relevant themes, and as they read, they zeroed in on these themes and brought them to their peers for dialogic discovery or collaborative invention. Through this exercise, students learned that literature’s role provokes thought and discussion. In the case of Jack, a punk rocker, he arguably used the discussion to explore his identity and to what lengths he can take his own individuality, a (rebellious) individuality represented by his musical and personal style. In no other class had the learning been so personally meaningful. Implications for pre-service instructors: Teacher ethos and identity events

Like other professions, the excellent practitioner has a high level of skills, subject knowledge and a personal disposition suited for the job’s demands. All are necessary to do good work. Although the student interview data may suggest that ethos and front are primary, they also suggest that good teaching be linked with sound teaching practices, which Rachel also demonstrated. For example, these same students really liked Alberto, but that wasn’t enough to instill interest in the course content or keep behavior in check. Teaching is part art, part performance and part training scholarship. A teacher’s ethos that meshes with student values, needs and interests, integrated with theoretical knowledge and experience, student-respect and the desire and curiosity to continually improve, make up key ingredients for exceptional teaching. The data suggest that courses in teacher education merit greater discussion of teacher ethos and its significance – a discussion too often neglected (Freeman, 1989). Teacher ethos relates to what Donald Freeman (1989) calls attitude. Attitude is one’s stance toward self, activity and others and how these stances manifest in external behavior and performance. One’s attitude can be investigated through critical self-awareness, introspection, reflection, dialogue and action research. Through my experience at DHS, I have learned that teacher ethos, identity or attitude (however one wants to label it) is a critical factor for determining course success. Findings from the data show that students pay close attention to who teachers are and how teachers behave. Teachers need to treat students with dignity and respect, which in turn fosters personal and intellectual development. This entails discovering and building off of student strengths and intelligences, honoring their funds of knowledge and including them in decision-making. Teachers need not treat students as opponents, struggling for their attention and participation; when teachers include and respect students, students are more likely to buy into the learning process. When conflict does arise, teachers can deflect it through humor, frank talk or any number of ethos-based strategies that don’t

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resort to behaviors based on anger, frustration or fear. In this climate, respect develops between student and teacher, the foundation for learning to happen. Additionally, neither teacher nor student should shy away from sharing personal things about themselves. In this case, the teacher’s attributes of humor and knowing when to be “laid back,” and knowing when to be strict, served her well. If “humanizing” positive teacher attributes couple with work that students find meaningful, it makes it much more difficult for students to act out or to performance strike. Providing projects and identity events that allow students to be themselves while growing their intellectual identities through choice and personal expression, as in the FICTIONMANIA example, shows respect for the learner and fosters autonomy, creativity and discernment. These practices also “humanize” students so they are not misunderstood or treated uncaringly. As mentioned previously, Valenzuela’s (1999) ethnographic research found that it was a caring ethos that encouraged Latina/o students to stay in school. Discussions of teacher ethos and the development of student intellectual identity should weave throughout teacher education curricula. Reflections of a Participant-Observer

A careful reader of my work said I was “comparing apples to oranges” when I juxtaposed Rachel’s teaching with the Spanish teachers’ teaching. The critique suggests that it wasn’t fair to contrast a master teacher with a less experienced one and a novice. I agree. On the other hand, this wasn’t an experimental study where I set up the conditions: I observed what was there. But what I perceived to be “there” was filtered through my biases and the revisited data also passed through this sieve. My pedagogical predilections favor experiential learning. My own prior immersive language learning experiences and the still memorable field trips of my youth shape this bias. In my work as a curriculum developer and teacher of multilingual learners, I design curriculum that includes authentic materials and direct, authentic experience with the target language and its speakers. My students and I have experienced success working within this framework. When I first met Rachel at the Fourth Avenue Winter Street Fair, I felt I had met a pedagogical kindred spirit when she described the school’s place-based pedagogical framework. Thus, it may not be a fair classroom comparison because I went into the site predisposed to the pedagogies embodied in place-based learning. At the end of the day, however, students confirmed my observations. Every focal participant named humanities as their favorite class. Of the 17 other students I interviewed, all but 1 said the same. This one FL student stated Spanish with Beth had been her favorite class and she missed learning language with her. Teaching is a challenge. It is also a pleasure. Concerned educators constantly seek innovations to improve instruction. I decided on DHS as

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my research site for selfish reasons: I wanted to become a better teacher by immersing myself in a school founded on the benefits of experiential learning. I thought I would be doing a best practices study concerning language pedagogy. One thing is certain, however: I learned a lot. I learned what makes students resist and engage. I learned about placebased learning and the field of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) instruction and, as a result, I learned a lot about myself. In Chapter 6, I apply this knowledge to conceptualize a place-based approach to Spanish HL instruction. Notes (1) I understand the irony of referencing the Tao Te Ching and then describing the visit of the Dalai Lama. However, in the spirit of the Dalai Lama’s talk, it’s not ironic at all. (2) In interviews conducted with 15 other Downtown High School students, the response was similar. (3) Rachel had organized a whole-school field trip to see the 2004 vice presidential candidate at the city’s convention center, which was walking distance. Rachel was instrumental in organizing many of the major school field trips, including attending a large public presentation given by the Dalai Lama. (4) The brother and sister left DHS at the winter break because they did not find it challenging enough. They attended a private school for one year, and then Zac decided to attend his local public high school, and his older sister decided to attend the local community college, foregoing high school altogether. (5) Van Lier (2004) comments that Dewey, in the context of cognitive development, employed the scaffold metaphor early in his career, prior to its popular usage. (6) Thank you to Kofi Busia for the Sanskrit translation. (7) In subsequent years, electives expanded to include mural making, sculpture, filmmaking and orchestra. (8) Students in the class formed a cycling team in the city’s Tour de Southwest. (9) Many interviews were conducted during my time at the school, but are not included in this data set. For this book, I focus on the HLLs. (10) In a member-check with Rachel, she agreed with my interpretive analysis. (11) I put FICTIONMANIA in all caps as that is how Rachel presented it in all of her written materials to students. (12) A casual observer of the school yearbook might note that the teachers’ individual pages are more playful than those of the students. (13) At the time of data collection Rachel was 35. This is by no means old, but I just want to remind readers that Rachel is not in her twenties. For some youth, someone in their mid thirties may be perceived to be old. (14) This data source is a weakness in the overall coherence of the study. Although focal participants are audience members during the student presentation, none is the actual presenter. This is a flaw in my data collection. Unfortunately, I was unable to capture these students on videotape as their presentation times coincided with my own teaching responsibilities at the time of the study. However, because this assignment was the favorite one of the majority of focal participants (spanning the entire academic year), I felt it would be remiss of me not to include it in my ethnographic account. I therefore chose a presentation that included the most HLLs in attendance and includes one HLL in the post-presentation discussion. It must also be impressed upon the reader that the HLLs in attendance were focused on the presentation, and did not engage in side conversations or off-task behavior. This is in sharp contrast to the data presented in Chapter 4 and is illustrative of their engaged learning. (15) The ending of the negotiation is debatable.

6 Place and Projectbased Spanish Heritage Language Teaching and Learning “Two holes dug bi-nationally!” Mia laughs. Stuart, Downtown High School’s (DHS) science teacher adds, “¡Sin fronteras!”: “Without borders!”. Fourteen science-focused Audubon City Works students and a dozen Mexican high school students from Nogales, located in the state of Sonora, plant riparian vegetation along the West Branch of the Santa Cruz River. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are neighbors separated by an active border. On the Mexican side an enclave of deported Mexican migrants set up home so that their American children can visit more easily. Arizona residents also cross to the Mexican side to take advantage of affordable dental care and other lower-priced services. Although it is mid-October, the heat of summer continues. Halloween ushers in true fall. The city’s candle-lit “All Souls Procession” marks this turn of season where town folk parade down the city’s most vibrant avenue, stretching from the university to downtown, wearing handcrafted skull masks and other “Día de Muertos” (Day of the Dead) iconography. At the parade’s end, participants and parade-goers pool into the heart of the historic town center to enjoy live music, acrobats and flame throwers. At the Santa Cruz River, groves of mesquite, juniper, sycamore and cottonwoods provide shade in the far distance. Short wheat-colored grasses cover the sloping ground. In this desiccated landscape, groups of young people dressed in T-shirts and jeans shovel hard earth. On this first working day of native plant restoration, DHS City Works science students and Mexican ecology students keep mainly to themselves. The local Audubon Society, with minimal funding from its national organization, cooperate on many educational projects. The Audubon-led project includes its own full-time naturalist, graduate students from the Center for Applied Research in Anthropology (CARA), DHS City Works students and students from “Conalep en Nogales Ecología,” a Mexican state-funded technical school. During the academic year, the partners dig micro-basins to harvest rainwater and plant vegetation to enhance nesting bird density. To further recharge 159

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the aquifer, the city’s water utility has also purchased over 1700 acres of agricultural land to lay fallow. “I’m excited to meet the Mexican students,” Erin, a new DHS freshman, says. “I want to speak better Spanish so I can talk to my ‘nana’ (grandmother, colloquial).” Indeed, intergenerational communication is an important goal of heritage language (HL) maintenance and development. Sadly, in this second year of DHS, there is no HL program. Instead, several heritage language learners (HLLs) from DHS’s first year serve as foreign language (FL) teaching assistants (TAs) for the newly hired FL Spanish teacher. Although the analysis of this new HLL configuration goes beyond the scope of this book, I will say that it was not ideal for language learning. The TAs did not use their Spanish skills to help other students as intended nor did they have the opportunity to further develop their speaking, reading or writing proficiencies. Faculty had thought that this leadership opportunity would benefit HLLs and their peers as teaching others helps one master content and peer-to-peer learning has been shown to be effective. Unfortunately, the newly hired teacher did not have the capacity to manage assistants effectively. Because of this binational partnership, DHS students had been studying some relevant Spanish vocabulary: “rastrillo” (rake), “pala” (shovel), “sembrar” (to seed), “excavar” (to dig), “trinchera” (trench), “regar” (to water), “hormigas” (ants) and “abejas” (bees). Earlier that day, we had stood in a circle, introducing ourselves. “I am Mera,” says Mera. “I am Alex,” says Alex. Mia switches to Spanish, “Me llamo es (sic) Mia.” The students laugh. The next student follows her ungrammatical example. Though it is heartening that the students try to communicate in Spanish, I feel like I have to intercede or the DHS students will continue in this vein. I tell Ian, the next-up student, that he should say: “Me llamo Ian” (I call myself Ian, literally), which he repeats and the group gets back on track. It is ironic that it turned out to be the science City Works class and not the Spanish class that would eventually introduce DHS students to Spanish speakers and a real-world project. The Audubon City Works models what could be an ideal HL curriculum: one that is place-, content- and project-based that includes authentic interaction and real-world impact. – From field notes, 10/13/05 Spanish Instruction: Ethnographic Views

Before delving into the ethnographic data, I will contextualize how I explained “learning Spanish” to student participants during our focus group interviews: I equated the way they studied English in humanities (i.e., self-selected books, writing projects, guest speakers) as a way for them to understand what I meant by Spanish instruction and its value. However, students would have none of this analogy as they explain in

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the transcribed interviews. When pressed in interviews or casual conversation, students could not fully elaborate why they could not see English and Spanish instruction as similar constructs. In interviews, students used the words “proper Spanish” to describe language instruction for which they found little utility. Yet “proper Spanish” could have a variety of meanings. When students spoke of “proper Spanish,” I wasn’t always sure of their exact intent. “Proper Spanish” could refer to prescriptive grammar or Peninsular Spanish; “proper Spanish” could refer to formal registers used in professional academic writing and speaking contexts; it could refer to “standard” non-stigmatized forms; or it could simply refer to using correct syntax, verb tenses and gender agreement. Through casual conversations, I found that students did not have a deep awareness of language’s nuances bound by rhetorical situation (i.e., context, exigence, medium, audience, purpose, language user characteristics or communicative ability); register (i.e., formality or professionalspecific language); or form bound by other sociolinguistic factors (e.g., gender, age, socioeconomics, region and nation). We see this in Chapter 5 when students characterize their and Rachel’s English as “not proper.” There, I believe they meant that they spoke vernacular forms of English versus some imagined “Queen’s English.” I also saw a version of this misunderstanding when I taught at the City University of New York (CUNY) where Dominican and Puerto Rican students would call their Spanish “improper” based on varietal differences not represented in formal Spanish instruction. In Semester 2 Spanish, I observed this “proper Spanish” idea, surrounding the simple future tense. Spanish has two forms of the simple future: One, more used in peninsular Spanish (infinitive + inflection) (e.g., [yo] comeré [I will eat]) and the more common form found in Latin America (the conjugated verb “to go” + a + infinitive) (e.g., [yo] voy a comer [I am going to eat]).1 When Alberto, speaking English, taught the inflected form of the future, he offered no explanation of when, why or to whom one would use this form. Without this understanding, Scott and Olivia complained: “This is a waste of time,” “This is stupid,” “We don’t speak this way.” And, to make matters worse, Alberto’s erroneous choice of English words saying, “take off the ending of the infinitive” versus “add on to the ending,” compounded the confused resentment mounting in the room. To ameliorate this confusion, Alberto asked Scott to help his neighboring classmates. When I asked Scott about his knowledge of this other future tense form, he responded, “Yeah, I speak proper Spanish, too.” His response implied that the more common “conjugated ‘to go’ + a + infinitive” was somehow improper, which it is not. It is possible that the introduction of other grammatical forms not regularly used suggested to students that their more commonly used forms were somehow

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“improper” or inferior. As some US Latina/os get the message that their Spanish is “pocho” (literally discolored or short in length [regional]), a derogatory slang term aimed at Mexican-Americans, meaning uncultured, uneducated and overly influenced by English language/American culture contact (Wilson, 1946), getting this unintended message in Spanish class is unfortunate, but avoidable. This example illustrates the importance of teaching grammar consciously, contextually and communicatively coupled with pragmatic sociolinguistic explanations rooted in actual use. These language ideologies showed me that when teaching any language, the curriculum should include rhetoric and sociolinguistics so that students understand, develop and effectively use their myriad linguistic choices. But, as Chapter 3 data showed, this instruction or awareness raising needs to be done with care. That being said, when students use the words “proper Spanish” in the following, I use my contextual knowledge to try to understand students’ meanings and when I present pedagogical suggestions, language awareness remains central. Focus group interviews

The following interview transcripts illustrate the students’ beliefs that learning “proper” Spanish is a “waste of time,” providing further explanation for students’ strike-like behavior. After asking Allison why she doesn’t want to learn Spanish in the same way that she learns English in humanities, she offers the following explanation: Segment I: It’s not like I’m gonna go to Mexico to work

1 Allison: I don’t know because I mean because it’s not like I’m gonna go to Mexico to work and like write an ess=like an ­application and an essay (.3) explaining (.3) everything you know 2 Kim:

3 Allison: >I mean you’ll need it and everything but I mean you get paid more if you are bilingual< 4 Kim: uh huh 5 Allison: but to learn how to write it like pro:perly and everything (.3) it’s like (.3) why↑ I mean I’m not going to write a documentary in Spa:nish or (2.0) 6 Kim: but you don’t know (3.0) 7 Allison: [we:::l 8 Paloma: [I would like the sp[eaking 9 Allison: [yeah

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In Turn 1, Allison’s first reaction for not wanting to pursue formal written Spanish is that there is no need because she will not be working in Mexico and therefore will not need to know how to fill out an application, write an essay or write a script (Turn 5). The statement suggests that Allison believes that these more formal skills apply only in Spanishspeaking countries and not in the United States. When I ask if she believes that there is more need to know English over Spanish, she disagrees citing Spanish’s instrumental value. Thus, Turn 3 shows that Allison sees the economic value of being bilingual, but her comments suggest that she only needs an oral proficiency. For Allison, being bilingual means speaking the language. As the students have been primarily exposed to spoken forms of Spanish, this is a logical conclusion. They have not been in contexts where they have seen or had to produce formal written forms, other than Spanish class (primarily in the first semester). For them, Spanish is a spoken language. It is used between family, friends and in relevant commercial exchanges in Spanish-speaking businesses located in Spanish-speaking enclaves. Although oral language skills are essential and, perhaps more pressing in day-to-day life, there is a demand for individuals living in the United States with high levels of Spanish literacy who are more highly compensated than those with only verbal skills (Pomerantz, 2002; Valdés, 2003). Carreira (2003) makes the point that non-Latina/os see this opportunity and pursue language study for these professional and economic reasons. She argues that HLLs are better poised to acquire this level of Spanish as they have certain first language (L1) features and possess greater understanding of target language cultures. Returning to Turn 5, Allison explains that she doesn’t need to know “proper Spanish” because she won’t write “a documentary in Spanish.” The comment suggests that she has yet to see that increased linguistic skills could give her access to a greater range of personal and professional opportunities. I challenge her assumption in Turn 6. Her pause, tone and drawn out “well” indicates a hesitant, but nascent ratification of this proposition. The concept of “imagined communities” and “communities of practice,” as previously discussed, may help explain Allison’s more limited view of her linguistic potential. If she speaks Spanish primarily in familial contexts, the established habitus (Bourdieu, 1974 [1967], 1991) or habits of action and mind (Hanks, 2005) has not habituated her to imagine herself interacting with an imagined community in contexts that would require more elaborated Spanish forms. If teachers and students do not cultivate practices of the imagination – “a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves” (Wenger, 1998: 176) – students may not see the rewards that an investment in learning

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a fuller range of their HL could bring. At this point in the students’ adolescent development, they are still grasping that their identities can be myriad, flexible and situated. Perhaps this is because they are in the process of forming identities that are separate from their parents and discovering their own core values. However, this time of selfexploration may be the opportune time for adolescents to be exposed to possible life choices. In the case of HL classrooms, these choices entail a discussion concerning the linguistic strengths and cultural knowledge that students already possess and what additional acquisition could offer or enrich. By understanding a broader linguistic landscape (LL) in the United States and abroad, students can more fully practice their imaginations. Returning to Segment I, in Turn 8, Paloma overlaps Allison’s utterance and interjects that she would like to improve her spoken Spanish. Allison ratifies this desire through her overlapping “yeah” (Turn 9). As speaking Spanish is a more regular practice than writing for these girls, one can “notice the gap” (Schmidt & Frota, 1986) more readily between one’s spoken language and the target forms used by more proficient users. Noticing is conscious attention to the form of language produced; it is argued that noticing is a necessary process for second language acquisition (SLA) to occur (Schmidt, 1990). In terms of oral proficiency, through spoken interaction and noticing, one is made aware of the gaps in one’s communicative competence. This phenomenon is most likely behind the girls’ desire for “speaking” practice over a literacy focus as they more frequently notice speaking gaps. For a subset of HLLs there may be an incomplete acquisition of the HL, thus providing the motivation for seeking instruction (Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Valdés, 2005). In another interview with Isabel and Olivia, Isabel expresses a similar desire to improve her speaking skills after I ask her where she would place her Spanish proficiency on a scale between 1 and 100: Segment II: Spanish was my first language

(1) 1 Kim: where would you put your Spanish↓ (2.0) 2 Isabel: mm >I would put it just like a little bit below like (.5) English (.3) because it’s like (1.0) I don’t=cause like Spanish was my first language but like I came here and I like forgot like (.3) and I’m forgetting my Spanish now↑ like I still understand you know like (2.0) you know if I hear someone talking Spanish I understand it but like I really can’t speak it all that well↑= 3 Kim: mm hm

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4 Isabel:  =anymore↑ just because like I’m not used to talken it>you know because like everyone I know like speaks English so like I don’t have to=like>>you know what I’m sayenI mean I’ve never (.3) actually been in therapy< probably because my parents are therapists but ((group laughter)) it was almost like= 2 Jason: =yeah 3 Susan: I mean [I imagine that 4 Jason: [I haven’t been in therapy either but yeah 5 Susan: it was that sort of heaviness= 6 Jason: =like that yeah (.3) yeah 7 Susan: not really because of the = 8 Jason:  =cause you’re=it’s asking you to kinda (.3) dig (.3) pretty (.3) deep↓ 9 Susan: right (.3) >well andthis was the first year that I started asking people “what’s your job↑”…it feels like a dilemma sometimes to me that I continue to (.3) choose work that (2.0) I guess it got to a point this year where< the passion and the romance and the good good job kind of stuff didn’t outweigh the fact that I felt really beat at the end (.3) of each week and still worried about you know can I afford to do what I want to do in my life (.3) and be a teacher↑ (2.0) Rachel’s concerns are not hers alone. The combination of high expectations, low economic reward and the high emotional-intellectual demands placed upon teachers contribute to the high burn-out, dropout rate for new teachers: nearly half drop out of the profession within five years (Valtierra, 2014). Rachel’s contemplation of career change, due primarily to finances, despite how much she “loves being a teacher,” underscores this crisis in the teaching profession where gifted and effective teachers leave. Here, we see the roots of Rachel’s ultimate career change. However, in her new position, she can pass on the wealth of knowledge she has accrued at DHS and inspire “change.” Thus, she is not abandoning the profession but adding to its knowledge base and training educational leaders. After the prompt asked how she would resolve the preceding professional challenge, she says: Rachel: I had the best teaching year of my life by working as hard as I did this year so I don’t (2.0) know that I want to work less hard just so I can feel like “oh now I’m getting paid appropriately because (.3) I’m not working so hard” that’s not going to work for anyone so um (1.0) I’m definitely at a loss (.3) Rachel’s suggestion of just working “less hard” in order to match her compensation explains in part why some teachers may rely on canned materials that do little to inspire students, but require less teacher work. Rachel’s disquiet goes beyond the potential of charter school reform and lies in how societal culture and its political representatives value education. And, despite Rachel’s concerns, at the local level, there was no way to pay more. Jason explains later in the transcript how making payroll each month has been his concern and burden. When recently speaking with Rachel regarding the charter school debate, she offered a pragmatic solution, following models done in states like Colorado. In Colorado, for instance, charter schools do not lie outside of districts in which they funnel funds away. Instead, all public schools in a particular region are located within a single district where charters are partially autonomous (Colorado Department of Education, 2018). As monetary resources often lie at the heart of the charter school argument, this “all for one” district paradigm helps mitigate the budget battles.

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In districts not following this more equitable distribution of state funds, detractors argue that charters take resources away from neighborhood schools and continue to foster educational inequity and exacerbate stratification by race and ability (Zimmer et al., 2009). A US Department of Education (DOE) report (Bitterman et  al., 2013) surveying 85,530 traditional K-12 public schools, 4,480 public K-12 charter schools and 26,230 private K-12 schools found that the largest discrepancies in services related to income, special education and racial and ethnic diversity3 (e.g., students receiving individual education plans [IEPs], Title I services, race-ethnicity student make-up) were not between charters and traditional public schools, but between public and private schools, which is noteworthy, considering the much larger numbers of students who attend private schools compared to charters. Specifically, comparing public school type, charter school service statistics appear to be more favorable compared to traditional public schools, though the DOE report does not provide sufficient statistical data to calculate significance. Nonetheless, the statistical spread is more vast between public and private schools. For example, charter schools serve a higher percentage of lower-income students as indicated by student percentages receiving Title I services and free and reduced-price lunch: 48.8% of students in public charters receive Title I services compared to 36.9% in traditional public schools and 3.7% in private schools; 51.5% of students in public charter schools receive free or reduced-price lunch compared to 47.3% for traditional public schools and 8.2% for private schools. Regarding high school graduation rates and students entering fouryear colleges, charters graduate 91.3% of its seniors compared to 88.5% attending traditional high schools while private schools graduate 92.4%; for students attending 4-year colleges, charters send 37.2% of their students compared to 39.5% from traditional high schools while private schools send 64.3%. These performance percentages suggest that there exists some degree of parity between public schools, which may make educators and parents question the existence of charters if no measurable differences exist. In a RAND study (Zimmer et al., 2009), whose purpose was to investigate claims for and against charter schools, its authors systematically studied eight cities/states with high numbers of charter schools spread throughout the nation (i.e., Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, San Diego, Florida, Ohio, Texas). The study found that charter schools resembled nearby district schools in terms of racial and ethnic makeup. If educational performance is measured by standardized test scores, most charter school transfers do not perform any better once they move to charters, though the study does question the validity of these scores. Charter school transfers, on the whole, do not represent a cohort of higher-performing students, a concern of those who believe that charters take the cream of the crop.

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Regarding college enrollment and college graduation, the study found that students who began their charter attendance in middle school were more likely to graduate from high school by 7–15 percentage points as compared to their traditional public school peers; and those who began their charter school education in high school were 8–10 percentage points more likely to enroll in college. Interestingly, these higher statistics do not reflect what standardized test scores would have predicted and suggest that test scores alone should not measure a school’s performance. The RAND study’s sample shows greater percentage spreads between traditional and charter public schools than the DOE whole-nation survey. The RAND study does not provide sufficient information to offer any discrepancy insights. Additionally, the RAND study did not distinguish between charter school type, treating charters monolithically. As previously mentioned, not all charters share the same model. Arguably, the most controversial charter model is the for-profit educational organization or EMO. States like Arizona and California have the highest numbers of EMOs in the nation (Garcia et  al., 2009). In a three-year study comparing Grades 2–6 Arizona EMO-managed charters to other charters and traditional schools in the state, Garcia et  al. (2009) investigated student reading and math subtest scores. They found that EMO student scores outperformed others in skills-based areas taught through drilled practice and standardized curricula (e.g., vocabulary recognition) while non-EMO charter school students outperformed the other two school types in total mathematics. The findings suggest that EMOs’ skill-drill approach may be at the expense of higher order more complex thinking (e.g., reading comprehension). The foregoing study demonstrates that profit motive may not encourage the more difficult task of cultivating critical thinking, which requires costlier curriculum and professional development. Studying 49 school districts, the DOE found that districts can either see charters as threats or as catalysts for advancing reform and district change (Erikson et  al., 1999). Indeed, some school districts use charter school certification requirements to their advantage, establishing their own small district “lab schools” to test innovations or reform initiatives, circumventing district red tape (Manno et al., 2000). These tested innovations can then be scaled up and used district wide. However, Zimmer et al. (2009) found no increase in standardized test scores for students in traditional public schools with charter school neighbors. The preceding statistics, however, do not reveal on-the-ground experience. At the start of my study, I had been ambivalent regarding charter schools, understanding the various pros and cons. However, through my research I learned that charters vary – some can be highly innovative while others simply drill, teach virtually or are highly standardized and profit driven. I cringe when people lump all charters together. I became most convinced of alternative public school models when I heard my CFG colleague’s personal story of daily school beatings. When charters

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provide students with a safe haven, like DHS and its partnering middle school, it’s difficult to condemn their place in the educational landscape. This type of caring, coupled with innovative pedagogies, convince me that solving the antagonisms between traditional and charters schools need resolution. At the same time, I understand that not all charters serve equally. I stand by charters who provide students with safe, rich and personalized learning experiences that foster independent and critical thinking. The following encapsulation of findings summarizes how student investment in their Spanish and humanities class differed based on identity, ideology and practices of the imagination. I then explain how institutional factors, in particular DHS’s first-year start-up condition, contributed to observed student resistance – a resistance that the school has now overcome – and how its small-school environment fostered engagement. Findings Synthesis: Identity, Ideology and Imagination

Latina/os are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States, dropping from an annual 3% increase to 2%, but accounting for 51% of the United States’ overall population growth, the highest of all ethnic groups. After Whites, Latino/as account for the largest number of census recorded individuals: 58,603,060 compared to 197,959,872 or roughly 30% of the White population (Fry, 2014; Gramlich, 2017; Krogstad, 2017). These numbers, coupled with Latina/os high, but decreasing high school dropout rate, currently at 10%, dropping from 17% in 2012, but higher than African Americans (7%), Whites (5%) and Asians (3%) (Gramlich, 2017), still suggest a mandate for creating and providing culturally relevant pedagogy. Of these ethnic groups, Latina/os are also the least likely to obtain a four-year college degree (Gramlich, 2017). Census data indicate that Latina/os still enter the US K-12 educational system in ever increasing numbers, thus Spanish foreign language classes can become de facto heritage classes. For this reason, teachers and institutions need to understand the value of creating compelling and appropriate HL curricula informed by empirical research. Providing academically rich HL curricula leads to language maintenance and acquisition, leading to better integration (counterintuitively), harmony, increased self-identity and social peace, while promoting higher academic achievement that fosters self-esteem, self-efficacy and positive attitudes toward school (Baker & Prys Jones, 1998). As charter schools can work as innovative teaching sites, I was drawn to DHS to see how they would institute place-based Spanish language instruction, which seemed an innovative framework for project-based and communicative language teaching. Indeed, Wells et  al. (1999) urge researchers to explore the liberatory and emancipatory potential of

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charter school reform. Through participant-observation, I sought to investigate just this at a first-year start-up charter high school. Entering the study, my intention was to observe place-based learning in action, an approach to learning I believed to be cutting edge. I had hoped to capture a “best practices” vision of education. I decided to focus on Mexican-origin students enrolled in the new school in order to understand their educational experience in light of high Latina/o high school dropout rates. As I found the greatest educational contrast to occur in the Spanish class for heritage language learners (HLLs) and humanities, I focused my study in those classes, but continued to follow students throughout their day. In these two classroom contexts, students invested themselves in their learning quite distinctly. The study demonstrates that pedagogy informed these investments coupled with student–teacher imagined identities and the identities these same individuals imposed on others through imaginative practice. Darvin and Norton (2015: 37) characterize investment as the acquisition of symbolic and material resources to increase “the value of their cultural capital and social power.” This definition builds upon Norton’s (2013) description of identity that theorizes that language constructs our sense of self and mediates our relationship with the world across time and space, including how individuals understand future possibilities. Because of the students’ more limited experience with school and work due to their ages, coupled with the students’ unsatisfactory HL pedagogical experience, the fruits of this possible investment in Spanish language acquisition were not evident to them (i.e., “limits of the imagination”). Thus, as part of any curriculum, learning needs to be imbued with practices of the imagination that provide learners with tangible experiences that invite investment. In addition to language shaping identity, Packer and Goicoechea (2000) and Wortham (2006) propose that academic learning forms both personal and social transformation. This transformation is continuously negotiated through classroom interaction and curricular choices: Academic learning, then, shapes identity in a variety of socially constructed “realities.” In the Spanish and humanities contexts, students either resist this potential transformation or work through it. In the HL class, students resisted either a “proper” Spanish identity or one that mischaracterized how they viewed themselves (e.g., “Pachucos,” foreign language learners), while in humanities, students began to adopt an intellectual identity through actual experience and intellectual demonstration. In the case of the Spanish class, students could not “imagine” using “proper Spanish” in any domestic context, as it was not necessary. They generalized this experience to other contexts because they had never experienced actual opportunities to use a variety and range of discourses for authentic purposes that stretched beyond the familial and thus, had limited imaginations for its use. In their Spanish class, instead of providing authentic opportunities for broadened Spanish registers, artificial

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textbook drills provided stilted, over-simplified discourse, divorced from any purposeful use. In humanities, by contrast, students used more varied registers because context compelled their use. When meeting with professional adults or presenting their book projects formally, they had to adopt other “ways of being,” or imagined intellectual identities, that at the same time didn’t chip away at the professed self or threaten community. Learning in this way was not an intimidating or menacing abstraction. Instead, it was tangible, experiential and authentic. Over the course of the academic year, as exemplified by the Spanish HL and humanities classes, students saw more value in studying English and social studies (i.e., humanities) than they did in learning Spanish as an academic subject. They saw the content knowledge of humanities to be more applicable to more contexts and thus a better investment. I suggest the diminished perceived value of Spanish was in part because students could not imagine speaking or writing their HL beyond its current use, whereas they could with English. These stances could be characterized as ideologies. Pomerantz (2002) defines language ideology as constellations of people’s assumptions and expectations about language and language users. They differ from beliefs in that they are shared across individuals and implicated in power relations. Whereas beliefs are often characterized as existing within people’s heads, ideologies are seen as a social production, constructed within and through everyday linguistic practices. (Pomerantz, 2002: 280)

Darvin and Norton (2015) provide additional specificity regarding power and ideology, explaining that the workings of power embedded in ideology either invite, limit or prohibit participation in communicative events. Through the examination of student behavior and language use, an indication of the students’ language ideology regarding Spanish emerged. For students, Spanish was a language spoken between ingroup members for personal reasons. Interlocutors, therefore, were authentic members of Spanish language discourse communities who have Spanish as a first language (L1) or have L1-like ability. Spanish was mainly seen as a home language and it was not viewed as a professional or prestige language because of the compartmentalization common in language contact situations where societal–language hegemony exists (SilvaCorvalán, 1994). With this language ideology in mind, it is not difficult to see why the HL class was problematic for teachers and students. In order to teach Spanish as an academic subject, these barriers that hinder HL instruction and form part of a language ideology must be critically examined and tested through experience and frank, but carefully orchestrated sociolinguistic discussion and instruction grounded in real-world

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contexts. Because of ideological factors, teaching HLs can be a more complex endeavor than teaching foreign languages and therefore must be approached with greater sensitivity. Again, another reason why designated HL classes can best serve these students. Institutional Factors Contributing to Resistance and Engagement Growing pains

A lingering question not fully explored in the previous chapters, centers on the institutional factors that influenced student resistance and engagement. One obvious factor contributing to resistance was the school’s nascence. New schools suffer growing pains and some are even forced to close their doors due to staffing issues, dried-up funding or even corruption (see Rymes, 2001). In the case of DHS, although there had been three years of planning before opening its doors, not all contingencies had been anticipated. Probably the most striking was a lack of a fully conceived discipline matrix from the start of the semester that could be applied consistently by all faculty and staff. In the first weeks, months and even years, the question of how to discipline consistently and fairly had been an issue. Indeed, a lack of uniformity across classrooms contributed to chaotic learning environments of which students took full advantage, especially with novice teachers. This was definitely the case in the second-semester Spanish class. Although Principal Susan was aware of student–teacher conflicts and unruly lessons (not just in Spanish, but also in other core classes), she struggled with how best to mentor teachers and when to draw the line and “take people to task.” During the CFG protocol, introduced earlier, she continues to explain to Rachel and Jason how these conflicting impulses were her “major challenge” that created a “difficult situation”: Susan: ((inhales)) (.3) do I take people (1.0) to task↑ do I↑ (.3) >when do whenit was almost better at the Radisson but then we moved here and like these glass went in and like< I think it was (.3) really really (.3) ha:rd: like wanting (.3) to push (.3) (…) and Beth (.3) and Mark and thinking if I push they’re just gonna go:↑ (.3) and (.3) not wanting (.3) for that to happen um and then (2.0) the discipline not feeling like I was ever (1.0) in control or knew what to do and then it was the same like >at what

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time do you take people to task↑ at what point do we take kids to task parents to task teachers to task↑< ((inhale)) and feeling like I was too vulnerable the organization was too vulnerable so >I wasn’t in a position of power to take people to task because I was desperate to have those people here< (.3) *regardless* and so then I was in this disempowered sort of situation (.3) >“I have these expectations for you as a teacher I have these expectations for you as a student I have these expectations of you to get your kid here on timeif I took people to task< and they walked there was no school and so I di didn’t know (.3) what to do ((last clause spoken softly)) ((inhale)) with those things (3.0) This stretch of discourse qualitatively expresses why data show that students at charters perform better as the charter matures. For example, the discourse points to the fact that when enrollments became steady and the reputation of the school grew, the ability to “take people to task” was possible, which created structure and accountability. Indeed, in ­discussion with another educator who worked with students with ­discipline problems and who also had been a troubled teen, he explained that he as a youth and his students responded well to strict boundaries and structure, which the new school lacked. Nonetheless, at the time of the study, Susan felt powerless to assert her authority. She knew what was happening around her, but felt unable to intercede in the way that she had wanted, lest she jeopardize the delicate balance of the new school: She ventriloquized what she would have wanted to say, but couldn’t. I observed that it was difficult for novice or uncredentialled teachers to adapt their classes to this more hands-on, community-based approach. For the novice, it was much easier to follow textbook pages, but, unfortunately, that ease prompted student dislike and disengagement. Even when Principal Susan tried to help these teachers, they were not ready to hear or implement suggestions – it was too advanced or time-consuming. Thus, my critique of charters centers on their looser set of standards for teacher training or credentialing, which may contribute to poor classroom management or theory-less pedagogy. Years later, however, skilled and experienced teachers line up to teach at DHS. Presently at the school, a teacher had travelled across the country to be able to teach there. With a reputation created, the current principal, Jason, does not have to concern himself with unruly classrooms due to inexperienced teachers who are unable to craft place-based, project-based curricula nor feel powerless to intercede when needed. Jason’s comments, regarding school challenges that first year, also echoed Susan’s, but he emphasizes how “more focus” on classroom

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management and student accountability could help in their next year, not steering away from strict standards: Jason: I think um in terms of student behavior um (2.0) yeah I think having more focus on what’s going on in the classroom =I mean we’re going to see behavior (problems) drop off (1.0) but also “you have to keep every kid no matter what” we have a board (.3) cause that is going to be the piece that holds our culture back and that holds back (.3) what kids what other kids that do want to be here My field notes confirm Jason’s concerns. The field notes show that a whole class’s energy can turn on just one student, moving from managed to chaotic. Jason’s constructed dialogue gives him the permission to not “keep every kid no matter what.” Knowing Jason, a compassionate educator, I see the preceding stretch as a difficult realization: that is, for the health of the entire school, some students may have to be asked to leave. Through off-hour conversations, often around a fire pit at Susan’s home, Jason struggled with the same concerns that I had. It did seem that for the greater good of the organization that some students needed other learning environments as they were jeopardizing the learning of other students. But at the same time, no one wanted to give up on a student who may be acting out for explanatory reasons; a reason or cause with which the faculty was ill-equipped to help or change. Related to this concern was the fact that some students attend charter schools because they have had discipline problems and expulsions from other public schools. This was certainly the case with some participants in the current study. Indeed, as Rachel recalled, “those students got kicked out of every school.” More established charter schools, however, like private schools, maintain specified criteria for admission and retention, including stipulations regarding students who impinge upon the learning of others through inappropriate classroom conduct to which Jason alludes (see Lopez et  al., 1998). As previously mentioned, DHS’s mentoring charter school “coach” had once commented, “Downtown High School doesn’t have a discipline problem, it has an enrollment problem.” More established charter schools implement and enforce strict enrollment policies and standards for retention due to admission demands. DHS, on the other hand, operated below full enrollment.

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Dismissing disruptive students had economic consequences that DHS could not shoulder unless the dismissal was absolutely necessary. Some parents and students choose charter schools because of special needs such as learning disabilities or giftedness. When schools cannot meet these needs, discipline problems manifest from both groups. In the first year, the school was unable to hire a full-time special education teacher who could expertly modify the curriculum and run a designated classroom for students with learning challenges. Also, at the beginning of the year, student records had not followed students in a timely manner to alert the new school of students’ discipline histories or recommended learning accommodations. In addition, several of the students with discipline issues had yet to be tested to determine if they had learning disabilities that could help explain their disruptive classroom comportment.4 Therefore, students who clearly needed accommodations were initially enrolled with other students, which added to discipline problems that seeped into the overall culture of the school. I did see behavioral improvements with most of these students when they were able to work one-on-one with a special education teacher whom the school had hired in its second year. These factors, out of the control of the new school administration, added a chaotic feel to the school’s initial start-up. Contributing to this environment, new students who enrolled continuously throughout the year, created a feeling and fact of instability that placed burdens on teachers. Further, these new students had yet to be socialized into the school’s burgeoning collaborative and caring culture and thus, some individuals contributed to classroom disruptions. For new charter schools, with these discipline challenges as a backdrop, the current study suggests the importance of taking the time for prior-to-school-opening teacher training and continuous professional development around a school’s pedagogical cornerstones. This training should also include classroom management strategies, co-construction of uniform discipline structures and peer-to-peer mentoring. Indeed, as Jason reflected, “having more focus on what’s going on in the classroom” and being more “persistent with kids who are misbehaving on a regular basis” would positively contribute to diminishing discipline problems and would be his second-year focus. Under construction

Because of the extreme demands of opening a new school, from overseeing new construction to creating curriculum, teachers and administrators felt overextended and stressed. Student discipline problems only exacerbated these tensions. Jason, in very honest dialogue with Rachel and Susan, explains the stress he felt as “school-business manager” in year one:

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Jason: a nd then I think in general just feeling the weight of (.3) certain pressures whether it was (.3) you know the the building the electrical problem: the loa:n: (2.0) I mean it was just like ((air expelled)) (.3) it’s stress you had and so you just hadda (.3) to deal with it (.3) >you don’t want to tell an organization you know we might not be able to make the payroll on Saturday I mean we just (.3) there’s no reason for other people to know that< This stretch underscores the pressures of starting a new school: from dealing with finances to trying to maintain order when a school culture is still forming. Jason speaks slowly with numerous pauses. His measured and halting discourse iconically represents the overall content of the message, that is, his pacing parallels his reluctance to burden others with construction and financial start-up stresses. He also speeds his tempo when revealing potential payroll problems as if to quickly jettison the bad news. Starting a charter school is not unlike starting a new business, which suggests for teacher-run charters to retain board members with business and financial experience. Jason’s discourse stresses the sheer amount of work needed to start a school, adding to the explanations of why more able teachers and administrators were unable to provide sufficient guidance and mentoring to teachers in need, like Beth, Alberto and Mark, the math teacher. Jason continues to express how he felt “lost” to help with student behavior: Jason: so student behavior I just (.3) really felt (.3) Aside from high workload, another explanation for student resistance stems from the fact that the founding teachers had limited experience working with a more diverse student body. Prior to the founding of DHS, they had taught at a high-performing public high school located in the city’s affluent foothills where behavior problems were not pronounced. Their former school did not represent the city’s economic, ethnic and racial diversity, unlike DHS. As Rachel explained, the school’s first year had been the hardest of her career.

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Although there were institutional outlets for seeking pedagogical stewardship in CFG meetings, for reasons unknown, these teachers did not seek help through CFG protocols5; it was only the most skilled teachers who sought out CFG guidance. I surmise the novice teachers felt intimidated or embarrassed to share their challenges. Indeed, Rachel, during my recent CFG training, had expressed that some teachers in CFGs put their best foot forward instead of truly seeking help for legitimate challenges. Additionally, from observing teaching practice in non-Spanish classes and the Spanish class data I present, my impression was that several of these teachers had an incomplete understanding of the principles behind place-based pedagogy and its implementation. More formal training and discussion of place-based learning could have lessened the gap between observed practices and teaching ideals. Again, the demands of opening a new school circumvented more extensive on-site teacher education. Related to the pedagogical construct of the school, several of the study’s student participants had selected the school based on its experiential approach to learning. They therefore came to school with certain learning expectations. All interviewed students expressed disdain for textbook lessons, as it did not reflect the personalized pedagogy that place-based approaches offer. Indeed, textbook learning ran counter to what students thought they had signed-up. In the classes most plagued by discipline problems (i.e., the second-semester SHL class and math), they shared an overreliance on depersonalized textbook exercises. In contrast, the classes that had the least discipline problems (e.g., humanities, science, photography, art, drama) offered students a rich variety of authentic experiential projects in line with student expectations. Indeed, the first-semester art teacher had students present their artwork in a downtown gallery that included a public art opening.6 It must also be noted that these more successful teachers had greater teaching experience that enabled them to more readily craft personalized curriculum and provide effective classroom management. Full license

One of the institutional factors that contributed to engagement was the school’s autonomy to customize curriculum, restructure the school day and limit class size, especially when enrollment-financial goals had been achieved. This autonomy-power was a similar benefit expressed by other charter school founders (Wells et  al., 1999). Autonomy was particularly important in light of the school’s focus on place as it allowed teachers and administrators to quickly design field trips without red-tape hassle from a supervising school district. Rachel, along with the science teacher, Stuart, most fully took advantage of this autonomy to design place-based curricula and corresponding field trips.

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Rachel explains that what gave her the confidence to embark on her curriculum was the non-judging “support” she received from Susan and Jason. She explains, beginning with the idea of not being “taken to task,” a format tie from Susan’s earlier comment. Rachel presents the positive flipside to Susan’s stretch of talk regarding principal-teacher intervention; that is, Rachel explains the benefit of supported teacher-autonomy or what she describes as “full license” to teach as she saw fit, including the freedom to be “spontaneous”: Rachel: alright (.3) um (4.0) I guess I never really felt (.3) taken to task on anything that I was doing I felt like (.3) I felt really supported um the fact that you guys were both teaching homework tutorial and knew what was going on in humanities class at all times and helping the kids do their work but never asking me “why are you doing it this way” I mean (1.0) there was never any (2.0) judgment or (.3) wondering (.3) or questioning I felt fu:ll license from you guys to do things the way I: (.3) felt like I needed to do it um I never felt I felt like I could make spontaneous decisions I never really felt that I don’t know (.3) I never got a parent calling me saying “why are you doing this with my kid↑” so I felt support all around the weekly bulletins that highlighted the activities in the classrooms were (.3) exciting to me you know so it highlighted what I was doing but it also (2.0) you know kinda let me know that what I was doing was worthy of (1.0) >what it was< Not only does this stretch of talk describe the support that Rachel received, but it also points to how Jason and Susan worked with students who needed extra help. The weekly bulletins, written primarily by Susan,7 informed the DHS community of upcoming events, important dates, achievements and classroom news, which empowered Rachel. Rachel explains that she took advantage of administrative support and crafted an engaging curriculum that included outdoor activity to concretize lessons. Rachel’s multiple agentive “I’s + verb” linguistically construct her power position along with her lack of questioning naysayers, which she constructs. Indeed, students with teachers were able to learn off campus with ease. Rachel explains that her freedom to make spontaneous decisions contributed to her successful teaching that allowed her to teach in the moment and seize upon a line of inquiry that would most benefit learners. Perhaps this can be done in traditional schools, but the DHS ethos encourages innovative and hands-on approaches that may lead a teacher, for example, to spontaneously move learning to the library plaza for a writing exercise.

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Although not strictly an institutional factor, the school’s geographic location downtown close to public resources such as the main library, convention center and bus station greatly fostered off-campus experiential learning opportunities. Now, a trolley also runs between downtown and the city’s university, another important cultural destination with a renowned photography center, Native American museum and frequent public lectures and performances. Visits to the university can also demystify higher education for those who may find it intimidating. The small-school size also contributed to opening up the city for exploration. Its small size allowed for greater management of class and whole-school field trips (of which there were many) and facilitated the reorganization of the school day to accommodate a specific teacher’s field-trip plans (e.g., creating double periods or week-long excursions). Regarding restructuring the school day, the average day at DHS was actually longer than the school day at other public schools. This allowed students more time to engage in the City Works curriculum off-campus and participate in senior year internships. Control over the school day also allowed administrators to plan half days completely devoted to City Works. This freedom to structure the school schedule enhanced extended learning experiences that would be nearly impossible to accomplish at a larger public school. The founding teachers’ commitment to the small-school movement allowed for enhanced teacher–student and student–student interaction, which contributed to personal instruction, active learning and a closeknit community. These close-tied interactions contributed to the familial atmosphere established at the school and created safer spaces for students to take risks and present their work publicly. Safe learning spaces foster intellectual growth and creativity. An additional factor to which I have not paid justice was the role of humor in DHS’s success that served to redirect negative energy or function as a pressure-releasing valve for faculty and students. Humor was certainly present in Rachel’s classes and between faculty members when they met professionally and socially. For example, as I was packing up my recording equipment, the tape was still rolling and I captured this final stretch of talk in which Jason playfully pokes fun at us and our CFG work, using constructed talk: Jason: sometimes I think about what other people from other industry or other professions would think if they were like (.3) just stepped into a CFG meeting ((Cameron laughs)) especially from the one we just had *they would think like “what are you ↑” ((Cameron and Rachel laugh)) like hehe “it’s the work day” haha ((strong laughter from Cameron and Rachel)) it’s like “what are you doing↑* You are like totally wasting ” like “what is this↑ what are you talking about↑” you know but but ((the tape ends))

Then and Now  221

This friendly poking fun made researching at DHS a pleasure. In my recent fall visit to DHS, I participated in a professional development day in which faculty and staff participated in an afternoon of games and contests in order for the now larger organization, which includes DHS and its partnering middle school located at two sites, to get to know one another through elaborate handshakes, human knots and obstacle courses. And of course, laughter. Filling a research gap

A large segment of HL research takes place in university settings. The current study’s high school context provides HL teachers and researchers with a distinct perspective, as some of these students will not be attending university, which thus broadens the study of student experience. Unlike university students who have achieved academically, at least sufficiently to enter college, and have more likely self-selected HL instruction, the present study’s participants entered HL instruction distinct from university students. Indeed, these students did not have the same academic track records as university students (though some were certainly college bound) and because of their more limited work and educational experience and younger age, they may not fully realize the value of language maintenance and further HL acquisition as compared to those who pursue HL instruction at the university level. For me, this realization didn’t occur until my mid-thirties when I was pursuing work in higher education. I saw closed doors that would have been otherwise opened if I had acquired more formal Spanish registers. It could be argued then, that because of these differences between high school and university students, that I present “rawer” data that describes student experience in obligatory courses. Perhaps because of these differences and the participants’ adolescent life stage, student interactions with teachers were not couched with the deference one usually expects from university students. Conceivably in adolescence, teenagers express themselves more forthrightly. In the current study, several students acted out verbally and non-verbally in ways that conscientious or mature students would keep hidden. This outward display of resistance, not necessarily captured in a university setting, can be highly instructive in the search for more suitable and relevant approaches to HL instruction. Further, the study’s comparative approach showed how another subjects’ pedagogy can suggest a method for teaching HLLs that connects community to the target language; that is, place-based or pueblo-based HL instruction. Pueblo-based HL instruction also fills a need for pedagogical directions that cut across all HLs as this framework lends itself to most HLs – especially those with available target language communities. Essentially in this approach, teachers highlight the funds of knowledge students possess through their membership in the HL community, while also tapping genuine student inquiry grounded in project- and

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content-based instruction that connects community issues and geographies with students’ lives. As successfully shown in other DHS classes, HLLs could document family histories, research their neighborhoods, research border issues, produce culturally relevant artwork or media or report on community events. Students could also collaborate with Spanish-speaking professionals, forge community partnerships with groups serving Latina/o communities or be involved in service-learning projects with Mexican high school students across the US–Mexico border or other such projects. The inclusion of critical pedagogy into this framework not only places emphases on democratic learning, but also provides tools for critical investigation of power relationships that construct minority status and disenfranchisement, themes particularly relevant in an SHL class (Brito et al., 2004; Freire, 1970; Leeman et al., 2011b; Lynn, 2004; Nieto, 2002; Shor, 1992). From a linguistic perspective, a critical lens helps students and teachers to develop critical language awareness and understand the social processes involved in code choice and formation, especially in language contact contexts. As HLLs may speak stigmatized forms of Spanish, sociolinguistic discussions with students engaged in research regarding their own HL or community language practices are essential. Thus, a critical pueblo-based approach is particularly apt for students who come from marginalized societal positions and communities. Pueblo-based learning in its design honors and respects these other ways of knowing and distinct histories. A glimpse of this occurred in Beth’s class in the first semester. The lessons in which she was able to break down barriers occurred when discussing Latina/o civil rights movements and Latina/o World War II veterans, who students learned had received disproportionately more commendations and medals than any other ethnic or racial group. At this information, Isabel commented that she had learned about African American civil rights movements, but had never heard the discussion framed around Latina/os. As this demonstrates, raising cultural and historic awareness in the HL classroom serves an important function of filling historic gaps that instill pride, which mainstream curriculum ignores or glosses over. Study limitations

A major limitation in the current study centers on a lack of data surrounding the participating students’ own communities and life outside of school. Documenting multilingual practices outside the school context as well as investigating community factors that shape code choice would have provided further insights regarding resistance and engagement. The investigation of students’ communities could provide further insights into academic achievement or lack thereof as well as provide curricular ideas. Despite the value and my desire to understand student life outside of

Then and Now  223

school hours, the fact that DHS students came from every zip code in the city, made it too difficult for me, working alone, to capture the students’ varying community contexts. However, a study set in a school that draws from single or contiguous neighborhoods would be more conducive for the inclusion of these data. Another limitation was the restricted number of participant member checks I could conduct. This was due to the students’ tight schedules (though I did share my analyses with several) and to both Spanish teachers leaving the school. As explained earlier, the first-semester teacher had to resign her position for personal reasons and left the state. The second-semester teacher also did not return to the school in the second year, and I lost contact with him. However, it is my understanding that he is no longer teaching. Despite this shortcoming, however, in terms of all participating teachers, I did speak with them daily after observing their classes, so I don’t feel completely in the dark regarding my analyses. Nonetheless, final input from the two Spanish teachers would have been an asset. Research beyond the current study

Other related research could be the investigation of established and successful HL programs at the secondary level. Many studies investigate collegiate programs, thus more research is needed with high school students who may or may not attend college. College students represent a select group of students who have successfully navigated the K-12 system and who often self-select heritage instruction. Thus, investigating pre-collegiate programs can provide expanded descriptions of Latina/o student experience, strengths and their linguistic-affective needs. And, as the current study shows, high school students offer candid views of their experience that instruct greatly. Their classroom comportments provide direct evidence of how they experience instruction. These studies could include greater involvement of the students themselves, including interactive diaries, video journals and student-generated research questions. Closing Remarks

I am highly indebted to the teachers and students of DHS who allowed me such personal access to their hearts, minds and experiences. Through this research I have gained an invaluable education and insights regarding place-based learning, HL instruction, identity construction, charter school formation and on-site professional development. The founding teachers of DHS inspire me to this day. They teach us that educators have the power to create unique learning environments that can function outside and alongside other public school options. They had a vision, and they made it happen. I credit them for allowing an outsider to come into their school and document their first institutional steps.

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As each year passes, these steps become firmer, steadier and more solidly grounded. Their school stands not simply as a physical structure, but it includes dedicated staff and teachers, students and their families and guardians, community institutions and surrounding landscapes – in short, “un pueblo.” The first year’s students and faculty set the school’s foundation of care and inclusivity that has made DHS a learning refuge. And not surprisingly, DHS’s founding teachers, faculty and staff continue to grow professionally and extend that growth to like-minded educators across the state and country, establishing their campus as an innovation’s incubator. Notes (1) The “n” represents the students enrolled that semester with some student overlapping over the course of the academic year. I only had five focal participants because they attended DHS for the entire first school year. (2) The National School Reform Faculty has divided into two organizations that both offer the same professional learning community protocols. One is called Critical Friendship Group and the other is Critical Friends Group. I am now a certified coach under both organizations. At the time of the original study, the split had not yet occurred. The three founders are now members of Critical Friendships. (3) Support services, such as Title I, provide extra academic support, paraprofessionals and after-school and summer programs for schools in low-income residential areas and qualifying at-risk individual students. Free and reduced lunch is determined by federal poverty guidelines adjusted by state for qualifying students. (4) At the high school level, students are not tested for giftedness in the same manner or rate as they are in elementary school; thus, this discussion’s emphasis on learning disabilities, which are continually tested. (5) The first-semester Spanish teacher did seek advice regarding HL instruction from the city’s university. (6) I created a short film around this opening to show at a whole-school meeting as a thank-you gesture for allowing me such great access to their new school. I knew the students would love to see themselves on film. I also created a multimedia slide show in year two for the same reasons. (7) I had also written a short piece in the bulletin in the second year. It was another gesture of gratitude, thanking the school’s openness to me and my research.

Appendices

Appendix A: Transcription Conventions

>word or words< Rapid speech rate Slowed speech rate Very slowed speech rate = Latching (no discernable pause/breath between utterances) [word  Simultaneous speech (noted before speech of both participants (word) Uncertain transcription (…); (… ….) Inaudible utterance or word (.3); (2.0) Pause(s) in seconds *word, phrase* Laughing voice (speaking while laughing) hehehehe; hahahaha Indicates laughter (soft and loud) ↑ Rising intonation ↓ Falling intonation ↑words↑ Series of words spoken at a higher pitch ↓words↓ Series of words spoken at a lower pitch word Emphatic stress wo:rd: Colon indicates vowel or consonant elongation WORD Spoken at a louder amplitude “words” Indicates speaker’s use of reported speech or constructed dialogue °“word or words”°  Aspirated, higher pitched, and softly spoken reported speech or constructed dialogue ! Animated tone ((comment)) Transcriber’s note (includes background noise, gestures, etc.) … Ellipsis

225

226 Appendices

Appendix B: Principal’s Letter to Participants’ Parents

Dear Parents or Guardians, This year at Downtown High School, we have been working with Kim Helmer, a Ph.D. student from the University of Arizona. She is investigating how advanced Spanish is taught in order to help improve our program. As a part of the study, she would like to videotape some Spanish classes that your child is in, and conduct group interviews. Attached is a permission slip that you and your child must sign in order to participate in the filming and interviews. No disciplinary actions will be taken against any student for any reason. Kim Helmer is also interested in interviewing bilingual parents to learn about family language history, and learn about what languages are spoken in the home. All names will be changed to protect you and your child’s privacy. Participation in this study is strictly voluntary. Kim plans to call you and explain the study in more detail and answer any question you might have. We hope that this research will positively benefit Downtown High School. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at 623-5555 x555 or susan@cityhighschool. org, or Kim Helmer at 884.1336 or [email protected]. Thank you for your cooperation, Carrie Brennan, Principal Estimido Padres o Tutores, Este año en Downtown High School, hemos estado trabajando con Kim Helmer, una candidata a doctorado de la Universidad de Arizona. Ella está investigando como el Español esta ayudando aquí para majorar nuestro programa. A ella le gustaría grabar unas clases de Español en la cual su hijo/a está asistiendo, y hacer unas entrevistas. Anexo un permiso que Usted y su hijo/a tienen que firmar para participar en el grabación y entrevistas. No acción disciplinaria sucederá contra su hijo/a por ninguna razón. Por otra parte, Kim Helmer está tambien interesada en entrevistar a los padres bilingües, para investigar su historia lingüistica, y saber qué idiomas están hablando en su casa. Para proteger su privacidad y la privacidad de su hijo/a, todos los nombres serán cambiados. La participación en éste estudio es totalmente voluntaria. Kim le llamará por teléfono para explicarle el estudio con más detalle, y responder las preguntas que Usted tenga. Esperamos que ésta investigación nos benefice. Si Usted tiene preguntas, por favor no dude en llamarme a 623-5555 x555 o [email protected], o Kim Helmer a 884.1336 o [email protected]. Gracías por su ayuda, Carrie Brennan, Directora

Appendices 

227

Appendix C: Student Interview Questions Life history: All students (Ss)

( 1) What is your name? (2) How old are you? (3) What grade are you in? (4) Where have you lived? (5) Where do you live now? (6) Where have you gone to school? (7) How do your past schools compare to DHS? (8) Why did you decide to come to DHS? (9) What is your favorite class and why? (10) What is your least favorite class and why? (11) What about DHS do you like best/least? (12) What could be done to make the school better? City Works (CW) questions: Non-Mexican-origin Ss (ask later in interview for Mexican-origin Ss if time)

( 1) What is your ethnic background? (2) What were your first languages? (3) What City Works (CW) class are you in? (4) Describe your CW class to me. (5) How do you like your City Works class? (6) What has been the best thing you have done in your CW class? (7) What has been your least favorite thing? (8) Why is there a CW class? (9) What are some of the key things you have learned in your CW class? (10) What would you like to see in a future CW class? (11) Tell me about Spanish class—the differences between Beth and Alberto. How could Spanish class be improved? (12) Do you think Mexicans are respected in AZ? Why or why not? (13) How do you think Mexicans should be viewed? (Note: Move down to “free time” if interviewing non-Mexican-origin students) Language background

( 1) What is your ethnic background? (2) What were your first languages? (3) What languages did you hear growing up? (4) What languages are spoken in your home? (5) Who in your family speaks Spanish? (6) What languages do you understand? (7) What languages do you speak?

228 Appendices

( 8) When do you speak Spanish? (9) Who do you speak Spanish with? (10) How many brothers and sisters do you have? (11) Do they speak Spanish? (12) Who speaks the most Spanish in your family? (13) Do you ever speak Spanish with friends or neighbors? Educational experience/Spanish

(1) How would you describe your past Spanish classes? (2) How would you describe your past English (humanities) classes? (3) How was Spanish with Beth different from Spanish with Alberto? (4) Who do you prefer and why? (5) Why did you and your classmates not speak Spanish in Spanish class with Beth? (6) Why did people start speaking Spanish with Alberto? Details of experience

(1) Describe your experience in advanced Spanish: What activities did you like, dislike, what did you learn? (2) At the beginning of the school year, there was a lot of complaining about Spanish class – Do you remember that? What was the issue? Why did you or others not want to take Spanish? (3) In Spanish class, I have heard people talk about “talking White.” What does it mean to speak White? (4) What’s the best way to speak Spanish? (5) How do you know if someone is Mexican or Mexican origin? (6) Have you been to Mexico? (7) Do you have any relatives there? (8) Do you have to speak Spanish to be Mexican? (9) Do you speak Spanish there? (10) How do Mexicans treat you? (Remember what Selena’s dad said) (11) In the movie Selena the father talks about it being difficult being Mexican-American, that you have to be more American than American, more Mexican than Mexican-What do you think about that? Is that true for you? (12) How would you like Spanish to be taught? (13) What kind of activities would you prefer to do? If you were the teacher, what would you do? (14) Do you ever feel embarrassed to speak Spanish? When? Why? Why not? (15) Do you ever feel uncomfortable or embarrassed being spoken to in  Spanish in front of people who do not speak Spanish? Why or why not?

Appendices 

229

Reflection on meaning

(1) How do you see yourself using Spanish in the future? (2) Do you think Latino culture is respected at Downtown High School? In our city? In Arizona? In US culture? (3) Have you ever experienced bigotry or racism? (4) Do you think Mexicans are respected here? Why or why not? (5) How do you think Mexicans should be viewed? Free time

(1) What do you do in your free time? (Do you party at all?) (2) What are your five favorite music groups (genres)? (3) Do people group themselves according to musical taste? (4) Do you use myspace.com? What is that all about? Why do you like it? Tell me about it. (5) Who are your main friends? (Are they at DHS or from other schools?) (6) Are there groups here at DHS? Is there a popular crowd? (7) What are your main concerns as a teenager?

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Index

Bourdieu, P., 12, 66, 86–87, 163 Bucholtz, M., 38, 59, 83, 123, 125, 187

A Abuelito, 186-87 accent, 57, 74, 99, 103, 113 acquisition, incomplete, 21, 164, 166 activities, teacher scaffolded, 180 administrators, 19, 21, 26–27, 36, 40, 94, 119, 216–18, 220 affordances, 75, 77, 106, 110–12 after-school, 18, 181, 224 Anzaldúa, G., 55–56, 67 applied linguistics, 30, 84, 197 Arizona, 4 1C program, 49 bigotry, 176 charter schools, 14, 74, 209 language policy, 46, 66, 166 linguicism, 77 linguistic oppression, 47 project-based learning, 189 Arizona, John McCain, 13 Arizona, Mexican-American/ethnic studies, 46 artwork, 91, 125 data collection, 40 project-based learning, 170, 218 student views, 171 authority, 59–60, 68, 102, 122, 139, 150, 155, 214 autonomy, 15, 122, 153–54, 157, 175, 205–6, 218

C CALx, 30 Cameron, 1, 4–5, 9, 200, 204, 220 Canagarajah, A.S., 60, 109–10 Cantú, Norma, 42–43 care, 162, 194, 224 caring, 71, 102, 181, 210 Carreira, M., 20, 78–79, 81–83, 85, 92, 106, 163, 174, 183 Carspecken, P.F., 27–29, 104 CBDA (classroom-based dialect awareness), 169 CBI (content-based instruction), 173, 176–77, 179, 197, 222, 243 CBI, sustained, 177–79 CBI courses, 176–77 CBI teachers, 179 CDA (critical discourse analysis), 190 CFGs (Critical Friends Group), 13, 37, 41, 201, 205, 209, 218, 220 Characteristics of place-based learning, 175 charter school argument, 207 charter school composites, 205 charter school reform, 207, 211 charter schools, 74, 208, 210, 216 admission to, 215 district study, 14 entrepreneur-initiated, 205 establishing, 217 formation, 14 funding, 207 grassroots, 205

B Bakhtin, M., 57–58, 103, 133 Basso, 11 bilingual education, 48, 55, 166 body language, 106, 144 245

246 Index

new, 1, 216 number, 14 parent-led, 205 public K-12, 208 student performance, 206, 208 teacher-led, 205 types, 205 urban, 27 charter school study, 14 charter school type, 209 Cho, G., 77, 86, 173 choice, 122, 137, 140–41, 157, 196 choice of learning materials, 61, 107 city’s school district parent survey, 205 City Works (CW), 36, 41 eliminated, 175 local partners, 182 logistics, 220 projects, 186, 192–93, 199 City Works classes, 13, 16, 33, 111, 199–200 City Works Program, 13 City Works Showcase, 192, 200 CLA. See critical language awareness class, 227 classes, advisory, 7, 26–27, 33, 73 classroom activities, 38, 169 classroom-based dialect awareness (CBDA), 169 classroom discourse, 37, 95, 143, 155 classroom interaction, 28, 38, 40, 135, 211 videotaped, 26, 28, 53, 96 classroom lessons, 90, 134 classroom observations, 33, 37, 111 classroom tasks, 51, 102 classroom turn economy, 155 Coalition of Essential Schools, 8, 140 code-switches, 58, 67, 109 cognition, 140, 174, 178–79 collaborative expansion DM, turninitial, 63, 152 collaborative invention, 146, 154, 156 collaborative service-learning, 181 Combs, M.C., 47–48, 71 Common Principles, 8, 15, 24 communication, ethnography of, 27–28, 31 communities

imagined, 22, 50–51, 56, 64, 67, 102, 146, 163 limited-imagined, 68 community partners, 36, 198–99 community research, 175, 185, 188–89 compassion, 19, 116, 181, 187 comprehension, 95, 101, 176–77 constructed dialogue, 57–60, 63–64, 103, 133, 139, 215, 225 content-based instruction. See CBI content learning, 176, 178, 196 content-place-based projects, 185 corrective feedback, prolonged teachercentered, 187 courses, teacher education, 20, 197 critical approaches, 13, 21, 30 critical discourse analysis (CDA), 190 critical ethnographers, 29, 144 critical ethnography, 28–30 Critical Friends Group. See CFGs, 13 Critical HL service-learning, 21 critical language awareness (CLA), 69, 167, 169, 222 critical pedagogies, 12–13, 118, 175, 188, 222 critical theory, 30 critical thinking, 209–10 culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), 20, 174 culture dominant, 13, 47–48, 84 resistant classroom, 50, 110 CUNY (City University of New York), 124, 161, 189 curriculum place-based, 9 school’s, 33 backward-design, 179 CW. See City Works D DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), 201 Dalai Lama, 115–16, 118, 158 data analysis, 40, 71, 90 data collection, 37, 158, 169, 203 Department of Education (DOE), 78, 207–9 Dewey, John, 111, 121-22, 158, 180

Index 247

discipline problems, 51, 64, 90, 94, 113, 132, 202, 214–16, 218 discourse analysis, 15–16, 203 discourse marker. See DM disruptive students, 94, 117, 216 DM (discourse marker), 58, 126, 204, 239, 241, 243 documentaries, 162, 188–89 DOE. See Department of Education Downtown High, ix, 1, 10–12, 15–16 dual-language immersion schools, 20 Ducar, C., 52, 76, 81–82, 105 E EAP (English for Academic Purposes), 174, 191 Eckert, P., 2–3, 60, 128 education, place-conscious, 174–75 EL (expeditionary learning), 181 elementary school, 182, 224 ELLs (English language learners) 1C program, 47 Alberto, 34 Proposition 203, 48 resistance, 77 emic, 1–2 EMOs, 209 engagement, 3, 21, 25, 40, 102, 104, 171, 213, 218, 222 English for Academic Purposes (EAP), 174, 191 English language learners. See ELLs Essential Schools, 10 Coalition of, 8, 140 ethnic groups, 78, 81, 210 ethnic identities, 20, 35, 47–48, 61, 77, 85–86, 110, 137, 195 ethnic identity negation, 194–95 ethnicity, 30, 49, 71, 84, 88, 195 ethos, 19, 54, 123–24, 128, 156 teacher’s, 132, 156 events, speech, 150, 154 expansion, turn-initial collaborative, 63 expeditionary learning (EL), 181 F FAs (formative assessment), 173, 183–84 favorite class, 227 FICTIONMANIA, 134, 138

humanities, 117, 157 Spanish, 157 student behavior, 112 student views, 126–27, 131 FICTIONMANIA, 131, 134–35, 137, 142, 157–58 field trips, whole-school, 73, 158, 220 first-semester Spanish class, 15, 68 FL. See foreign language FL classes, 75, 91–93 FLLs (foreign language learners), 78–81, 88–90, 92 distinctions, 78, 87, 93 pragmatic competence, 59 focal participants, 33, 35–36, 54, 56, 70, 113, 134, 157–58 focus group, 38 foreigners, 104 foreign language (FL) de facto HL, 26 distinct from HL, 213 HL training, 26 pragmatics, 59 social mobility, 88 teaching assistants, 160 textbook, 61 foreign language learners. See FLLs formative assessment. See FAs founding teachers, 19, 21, 27, 40–41, 69, 74, 203, 205–6, 217, 220, 223 Frankfurt School, 29–30 front, 124, 156 G genres, 141, 173, 184, 189–91, 229 gesture, 3, 64, 116, 150, 154, 225 Giroux, H.A., 2, 29–30, 51 Goffman, E., 31–32, 123–24, 128 González, N., 31, 48, 56, 61, 77, 81, 195 grandfather, 186–87 gringa, voz, 60 Grose-Fifer, J., 189 Gruenewald, D.A., 12, 174–75 Gumperz, J., 31 H Habits of Heart and Mind, 8, 15, 24, 135 Helmer, K.A., 20, 77, 89, 171, 174

248 Index

heritage language (HL), project-based instruction, 195 heritage language acquisition, 84 heritage language development, 243 heritage language education, 238, 240 heritage language instruction, 72, 239 heritage language learners. See HLLs heritage language learners, 42, 49, 53 characteristics, 79 ethnography, 53 field trip, 41 resistance, 67, 74 the study, 211 typical, 20 heritage language teaching, 230, 232, 238 high schools, traditional, 208 HL classes classroom-based variety awareness, 187 complexity, 21 critical language awareness, 167, 190 identity, 85, 92 ideology, 212 resistance, 211 HL communities, 21, 86, 88–89, 221 HL instruction, 223 class, 87 communicative curriculum, 173 critical language awareness, 69 ethnography, 25 formative assessment, 183 formative instruction, 183 identity, 68, 86 language maintenance value, 221 mixed groups, 183 pedagogical framework, 26 place-based instruction, 26 resistance, 53, 221 resource, 86 HL learning, 84, 195 HLLs (heritage language learners), 20– 21, 23, 26, 78–85, 89, 93, 108–9, 112, 117, 158, 160, 164, 172 appropriate materials, 111 characteristics, 20–21 content-based instruction, 222 distinctions, 79, 93, 105, 163, 185 engagement, 148

field trip, 42 identity needs, 78, 85, 194 learning needs, 173 linguistic insecurity, 195 linguistic landscape projects, 193 participants, 21, 54, 117 perceived need, 78, 169 place-based learning, 174–76 project-based learning, 196 service learning, 172, 181 teacher training importance, 107 HL programs, 49, 88–90, 111, 160, 173, 195, 223 HL teachers, 69, 90, 187, 195, 221 HL teaching-learning, 181 home language, 51, 87, 212 Hornberger, N.H., 27, 31 houses, safe, 107, 109–10, 112 humanities class authentic texts, 140–42 favorite class, 112 findings, 210, 212 focal teacher participant, 36 ideology, 212 John Dewey, 122 participant observation, 33–34 participant-observer, 24, 33-34 participants, 36 positive relationships, 195 project-based learning, 193 proper English, 125 second semester, 117 student behavior, 104, 112, 117 student views, 126 study context, 15, 24, 33–34, 90, 100 teacher ethos, 124, 126 teacher views, 219 humor, 7, 35, 113, 118, 124, 129, 133, 156–57, 220 I identity bicultural, 84 language learner’s, 83 teacher’s, 123 identity construction, 32, 64, 84, 101, 223 identity crises, 84–86, 173 identity events, 154–57

Index 249

ideologies, 2–3, 27–30, 38, 48–49, 83, 166, 169, 181, 210, 212 imagination, 41, 50, 101, 163–64, 173– 74, 194, 196–97, 210–11 instruction, 223 content-based, 173, 176, 222 intellectual identities, 152, 154–55, 157, 196, 211 interactional sociolinguistics, 15–16, 27, 31, 39 K Kohl, H., 50–52, 61 Krashen, S., 21, 81, 84, 140–41, 173 L Labov, W., 60, 100, 132, 168 language standard, 82 technical, 186 language acquisition, 85, 166, 176, 178–79, 197 additional, 79, 166 language attrition, 166, 170 language awareness, 57, 106, 162 language choice, 169 language contact, 58, 85, 193 language forms, 84, 178, 194 language ideologies, 77, 88, 162, 212 language instruction, 20, 24, 78, 161, 185–86 explicit, 75, 177 resisted English, 77 language learners, 80, 113 foreign, 72, 78, 87, 172, 211 language learning, 107 affordances, 75 appropriate materials, 172 authentic texts and projects, 106 content-based instruction, 176 identity needs, 85 place-based learning, 174 second language, 113 study background, 25 language maintenance, 49, 88, 210, 221 language policies, 47, 89, 181 language practices, 28, 32, 66 language proficiency, 20–21, 89 language skills, 71, 167, 188

language socialization, 31, 83 language teachers, 20, 26, 197 language varieties, 27, 55–56, 106 learners, young, 182, 196 learning academic, 142–43, 154, 211 classroom, 173 conceptual, 178 democratic, 122–23, 222 experiential, 121, 157–58 peer-to-peer, 160, 178 prior, 176–77 project-based, 173, 179 textbook, 170, 174, 218 learning disabilities, 14, 72, 113, 216, 224 learning environments, 6, 14, 25, 51, 53, 122–23, 215 safe, 194–95 learning materials, 21, 61, 107, 111 designed language, 76 mass-produced language, 75 learning process, 122, 156 Leeman, J., 21, 56, 69, 181–82, 222 librarians, 182, 203 linguistic insecurity, 21, 80–82, 113, 183, 195 literature materials, 141 self-selected, 141 linguistic landscape work, 194 Lynch, A., 78–80, 90, 105, 172 M Mead, G.H., 31–32, 68 Mendoza-Denton, N., 2, 63, 83, 99, 152 Mexican-Americans, 22, 162 1C program, 48 perceptions of, 66, 76 segregation, 71 Mexican identities, 64, 93 Mexican masks, 64–65 Mexican nationals, 65–66, 87 microethnography, 27–28 Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), 188–89 MIIS (Middlebury Institute of International Studies), 188–89 mocking, 59–60, 150

250 Index

Moll, L.C., 12, 67 N national identity, 66, 101 newspapers materials, 106 project-based learning, 190 rhetorical situation, 191 non-participation, 49–53, 61, 67–68 Norton, B., 51, 83–84, 102, 173, 211–12 P Pachucos, 55–56, 59, 64–67, 95, 211 participant observation, 2–3, 37, 131 PBL (project-based learning), 173, 179–81, 183 pedagogies, place-based, 12–13, 24, 26–27, 173–74, 218 performance strikes, 15, 51, 90, 102–3, 157 personal front, 124–26 Peyton, J.K., 78, 86–87 phenomenology, 31–32 Philips, S.U., 2, 27–28, 50–51, 155 philosophy, school’s, 16, 182 photographs, 39 data collection, 24, 26, 39–40 giving back, 39 linguistic-landscape projects, 193–94 project-based learning, 121, 187, 190, 193 student work, 121 place-based learning, 12, 33, 35, 158, 173–76, 180–82, 188, 205, 211, 218, 238 critical pedagogy, 13 description, 1, 10–12 identity, 12 personal, 12 school’s framework, 15, 40, 111, 157 the study, 14 place names, 10–11, 16, 193 Plato, 118–21, 128 Pomerantz, A., 48, 68, 78–79, 87–88, 163, 212 project-based learning. See PBL proper Spanish, 161–63, 167–68, 211 public schools, 14, 19, 47, 71, 190, 202, 205, 207–9, 215, 220

traditional, 208–9 R resistance, 3, 24–25, 30, 49–51, 53, 56, 61, 66, 170, 210, 213 S scaffolds, 178–79, 191 Schiffrin, D., 31, 58 school, private, 208, 215 school curriculum, 3, 8, 12 school day, 26, 218, 220 school founders, 18, 36 school schedule, 34, 220 school yearbook, 40, 158 second language acquisition (SLA), 90, 164 interaction, 80, 178 noticing, 164 second language learners, 197 second language learning CBI, 197 definition, 113 second-semester Spanish class, 61, 79, 90, 96, 167, 170, 213 Selena, 76–78, 166–67, 228 self-observation, 135–36 service-learning, 14, 181 service-learning projects, 21, 183, 222 SHL class critical pedagogy, 222 registers, 101 second-semester, 33, 218 study context, 33, 35–37 Shor, I., 15, 51, 102–3, 175, 222 simón güey, 59–60, 62 SLA. See second language acquisition social identification, 142–43 social identities, 49–50, 56, 60, 68, 70, 83–84, 143 teacher-imposed, 68 societal language, 20, 80, 101, 107, 113, 169 Spanish language discourse communities, 68, 212 Spanish language learners, 57, 68, 181 Spanish language newspaper, rhetorical situation, 191 Spanish language use, 35, 46, 100

Index 251

Spanish teachers, 157 field trip, 42 legitimacy, 57, 71 member check, 223 non-Latina, 71 second semester, 24 student views, 170 student resistance, 25, 53, 69, 79, 111 symbolic interactionism, 28, 31–32 T Tannen, D., 57–58, 60, 103, 132–33, 152 target language culture, 74, 77, 84, 163, 195 TAs. See teaching assistants teacher ethos, 123–24, 126, 156, 197 explanation, 123 student views, 132 teacher education, 157 teacher ethos and identity events, 156 teacher identity, 123 teachers advisory, 7, 16 constructed, 58, 140 favorite, 112, 128, 133 humanities, 4, 9, 34, 36, 41, 116

teaching assistants (TAs), 72, 113, 160 teaching HLLs, 71, 197, 221 teaching language, 189 communicative, 178, 210 texts, 137, 140–41, 155–56, 193 theoretical frameworks, 15, 27, 32, 35 translanguaging, 109 Troyan, F.J., 176, 179, 181 turn economy, 155 turn-initial DM, 58 V Valdés, G., 48, 52, 78, 80, 86–87, 89, 163–64, 166 van Lier, L., x, 27, 29, 75–76, 106–7, 110–11, 158, 172, 188–89 vosotros, 76, 105 Vygotsky, L.S., 121, 178–79 W whole-school meetings, 2, 27, 37, 41, 201, 224 Willis, 29, 104 work, teacher-imposed, 50, 103 Wortham, 32, 68, 83, 101, 142–43, 211