Teach the kids to code switch... which is a very easy thing to say: Heterosystemic pedagogies for racial justice within a field of (im)possibilities

Abstract

This study employs ethnographic field methods to investigate the ways Eric, a ninth-grade English language arts teacher committed to racial justice, enacted literacy education in his classroom. With a background in critical literacy, I entered the field with preconceived notions of what a justice-oriented classroom would look like. So, I was surprised to observe a teacher-centric, basic-skills-focused classroom that offered few opportunities for student voice. By observing staff development and committee meetings, learning that Eric’s school, Wayside Junior High, also expressed commitments to racial justice, but engaged in behavior management practices (PBIS) that are generally understood be in tension with racial justice. The purpose of this study is to better understand how Eric and the Staff at Wayside came to take up these apparently contradictory practices. To achieve this purpose, I developed a Foucauldian interpretation of Activity Systems Analysis (FASA), which combines elements of Engestrom’s Activity Systems Analysis (objects, rules, tools, subjectivities, and contradictions/tensions), with several Foucauldian concepts (problematization, freedom, and the field of possibilities). The resulting analytical framework can be expressed in the question: How do subjects construct and enact agency within the field of possibilities produced by the problems, rules, tools, and subjectivities in their environment? An analysis of the data had several implications. Justice-oriented teacher educators 1) must engage with the real and practical problem of organizing a group of individuals for a collective learning activity, what many call “behavior management” and 2) must avoid conveying an ethic of moral purity, and instead encourage teachers to cultivate practices of hybridity—to inventory the multiplicity of problems, objects, rules, and tools in their environment and creatively assemble new justice-oriented learning activities that we, as researchers and teacher educators, could not have imagined. Furthermore, justice-oriented teacher educators in the field of literacy and English language arts 1) must devote more resources and more credit hours to preparing educators to teach the craft of writing, and 2) must identify, teach, and conduct research on strategies for teaching so called “basic skills” through a critical and justice-oriented lens in order to provide minoritized students with codes of power (Delpit, 1988).