Storytelling in Critical Literacy Pedagogy: Removing the Walls between Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Youth

Abstract

The central focus of this research has been to document immigrant and non-immigrant students' storytelling practices and cultural knowledge and identify how these might be adapted as "cultural data sets" for academic literary study in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, middle-grade classrooms. Such data sets, however, have limited use when students' voices are not sustained or heard by the students themselves or by adults. This article focuses, then, on reworking relations of power in classroom practices and across school spaces so that students' voices and purposes for telling stories are recognised within school settings. The three stories the author analyses were told within and, eventually, across two, different, sixth-grade language arts classroom spaces, located side by side, and separated by a concrete block wall. In this analysis, the author draws on Blommaert's (2005) sociolinguistic and ethnographic theories of voice and their relation to specific functions of power or the "orders of indexicality" that position meanings and forms of meaning-making as they "travel" from an originating place (for example, a child's life experience) to an institution such as school. The author argues that orders of indexicality in school and classroom practices, associated with presuppositions of immigrant and non-immigrant linguistic and cultural segregation, are prevalent in multiple aspects of classroom storytelling and critical literature study. (Contains 1 footnote.)