Negotiating between cultural spaces
These notes are part of a series for the book. This paper is about how children negotiate the cultural spaces between home and school (2 different cultural settings), especially focusing on a young male from a blue-collar family.
Outline
- Kindergarten apprenticeships
- Love and independence
- Embodied fictions versus school textualities
- Coming to know and be in 2 discourse communities
- Reading practices at home and school
- Reading and writing masculinities
- Toward hybrid discourses of instruction
Notes
The author studied 2 children, and focuses the paper on one of them — Jake.
In kindergarten, Jake likes to play with puzzles and manipulatives, but is not interested in any reading, writing, or math preparatory tasks. However, at home he likes listening to stories his grandmother reads to him. He also has his own carpentry workshop (his dad is a carpenter) and can “read” model cars and identify their drivers, etc. (his dad also collects model cars and is interested in racing). His mother and grandmother describe Jake and his likely future using terms that could also be applied to his father. Sustained tasks need to make sense to Jack as something that needs to be done.
In first grade, Jake got into video games and had 2 pretend dogs. In both cases, he was very physical when acting out the stories of playing with the dogs or being a character in the video games. He enacts fantasies of male power and control in his play.
At home, Jake was a good reader. He had a wide variety of reading interests, tied to family interests, stories, and discussions. At school, the worksheets and other reading-related assignments did not make sense to him — they seemed disconnected and pointless.
In second grade, Jake’s classes were workshops where you could choose your reading material and where you sit while reading, and there is also a writing workshop involving journaling. This allowed him more freedom to move between the cultural values of home and school.
For children who come from different backgrounds — ones with cultural values they cherish — the classroom must be set up to accept those values and cultural differences. When this happens, the children can then create hybrid discourses for their membership in multiple communities.
“Accountability” measures in public schools hinder what teachers can do when helping students create hybrid cultures.
See also
Wenger’s discussion about non-obvious boundaries within communities of practice: Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Ch. 4, Boundary’.
Wenger’s discussion about multimembership: Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Ch. 6, Identity in practice’.