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Using SFL genre pedagogy, one teacher centers the brilliance of multilingual student writers and resists the constraints of accountability frameworks in a grade 2 classroom.
On a February afternoon, Kayla gathers her second graders on the class carpet and displays images of a phonograph, a conventional record player, and a DJ turntable. Students talk excitedly as they guess what each image represents. After Kayla shares that she listened to music on a record player as a little girl, she points to the phonograph and explains to the class,
This is an early record player. . . . We wouldn't have this technology if it weren't for [the phonograph]. . . . Yesterday [we] talked about how someone makes something, and then somebody takes that idea and they build on it, and they make something else from it. You can make inventions from other inventions. . . . Over time people improved on [the phonograph and] made it better. And today we have turntables, where DJs can spin music and scratch on them. And make beats from them! This was the beginning of that idea.
In this lesson, Kayla is building student background knowledge for the written report they will be crafting during a literacy unit on inventions. This vignette also metaphorically illustrates a key element we witnessed in Kayla's teaching philosophy: that literacy instruction should build on the long traditions of excellence and creative innovation developed by students and communities of color that are often ignored in schools. Remixing, as Kayla invokes in this vignette, is a core tenet of technological invention. Creative remixing is also foundational to composition and should be at the heart of antiracist genre pedagogy that aims for social change (Accurso & Mizell, 2020). By opening this essay with a metaphor about remixing, we start from the premise that pedagogical designs must "cultivat[e] the genius that already lies within students" (Muhammad, 2020, p. 13), including the multilingual languaging and culturally specific rhetorical strategies that enrich-but are often silenced within-literacy classrooms.
Kayla fought to design a child-centered learning environment that holistically addressed the literacy and language development of Black and Brown students despite the opposing pressures she faced to narrow the curriculum within her highly surveilled classroom. The process of designing...