As student populations in classrooms in the United States continue to diversify, the diversity of classroom teachers lags behind significantly. It has become increasingly important for programs preparing (mostly white, female) teachers to invest in instructional strategies that promote culturally-relevant educational practices. This includes introducing pre-service teachers to the various discourse communities and practices that k-12 students bring to the classroom. The instructional method presented in this chapter engages pre-service teachers in coursework that develops their own professional identities and promotes their understanding of educators' professional discourse. The project exposes pre-service candidates to their own discourse practices and hidden biases, while increasing their funds of knowledge in order to better value the discourse practices brought to the classroom by the K-12 children in their care.
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In her seminal work, Ways with Words, Heath (1983) introduced her audience to three very distinct discourse communities in the Carolina Piedmont through which she navigated for more than a decade. As glimpsed through her research, each of these communities, shared rich and relevant ways of speaking, communicating, and negotiating written texts that had direct bearing on the classroom experiences of the children involved. Some of the community traditions aligned perfectly with expectations in a typical American classroom, while others did not. The alignments and misalignments often, but not exclusively, fell along racial and socioeconomic lines favoring white, middle-class cultural norms. Although the publication is nearly forty years old, and the data collected at least thirteen years older than that, many of these differences between home literacies and school literacies are still active in American public schools today.
Communication, oral and written, is an integral part of education (Kwok, Vela, Rugh, Lincoln, Capararo, & Capararo, 2020; Lave & Wenger, 1991), and there is often an expectation that students come to school either ready to communicate in the ways expected, or that they should quickly learn to adapt (Heath, 1983). Consistent, decades-long data showing achievement (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Rojas, 2021) and opportunity (Lee, Keith, Bey, Wang, Yang, Li, & Ji, 2022) gaps between non-White students and their peers however, provide evidence that expectations for children to conform to typical classroom practices, including traditional forms of academic discourse and other types of classroom communication, can no longer be assumed to be effective (if they ever were). As Bakhtin (1986) noted while discussing speech genres, individuals speak in different forms without realizing it. The genres differ based on socio-cultural elements, position, status, and role. “Many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres.” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 80). The less students’ out-of-school discourse experiences match in-school practices, the more opportunities for lack of understanding, and therefore lack of engagement, belonging, and connection, arise without explicit interventions.
The purpose of this chapter is provide an example of an instructional unit in a Mid-Western, university-based teacher preparation program that is designed to help pre-service teachers unpack the language, expectations, and ways of being and knowing in familiar and unfamiliar discourse communities through guided discussions and analysis of exemplar discourse communities to which they belong. The essential goals of the instructional program are two-fold: first, to introduce the teacher candidates to the concept of discourse community (Gee, 1996), and second, to provide the candidates the opportunity and space to consider how their own expectations, preferences, assumptions and biases about communication and language may impact learning in their future classrooms (Engebretson, 2016; Garlen, Chang, Farley, & Sonu, 2021; Hafner & Ortiz, 2021; Kwok, Vela, Rugh, Lincoln, Capraro, & Capraro, 2020; Mark, Id-Deen, & Thomas, 2019). A tertiary, metacognitive, goal of the approach is to apprentice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) the pre-service teachers into the academic discourse (Duff, 2010) community of professional educators through reflective practice and discussion (for additional examples, see Mewald & Mürwald-Sheifinger, 2019; Modla & Wake, 2007; Pewewardy, 2005).