INTEGRADO ULN 2803

“LIFT EV’RY VOICE AND SING”: THE FINDINGS FROM AN

ETHNOGRAPHIC MULTIPLE CASE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTS OF

EXCELLENCE IN A LOW-INCOME COMMUNITY

Introduction

This chapter presents the findings regarding the ways that two extraordinary African American mothers used a range of sophisticated strategies to facilitate their children’s participation in language and literacy communities. It also presents the

findings regarding how teachers perceived students and the ways that teacher perceptions and parental pedagogies examined together can transform classroom practice. These core questions were examined:

1. In a low-income community, how do parents of two families establish and maintain environments of excellence, or environments where the

characteristics, conditions, dispositions and practices in home and community settings support student academic success?

2. What is the perceived identity that teachers have of students who live in this low-income community who benefit from an environment of excellence in their homes?

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3. What can be learned from the beliefs and practices of the two participating families and the teachers about transforming classroom practices to reflect an alignment of home and school practices in support of marginalized children? I utilized the performance ethnography format (Marshall & Rossman, 2011), which portrays and illuminates the “staged re-enactment of ethnographically derived notes” (Alexander, 2005, p.411). This type of representation allowed me to characterize culture in performed, embodied ways rather than merely the traditional textual ones. McCall (2000) argues that the notion of performance is derived from the idea that ethnographic data and cultural understandings can be presented as drama with scripts, props, and costumes. In this tradition, representation of lived experiences is not only a text, but a living, breathing depiction of cultural knowledge (Conrad, 2008) ranging from a staged production to dance or storytelling.

The type of performance ethnography in which I engaged is known as Reader’s Theater (Coger, 1982), consisting of dialogues and monologues. The particular variation of Reader’s Theater that I have created for this chapter also included ethnopoetics (Hymes, 2004), a movement shaped by the work of researcher Dennis Tedlock and poet Jerome Rothenberg in the 1960s. Ethnopoetics is defined as a method of recording texts that uses poetic lines instead of prose passages, an approach which emphasizes the strong poetic tendencies of various cultures. All of the ethnopoetics in this chapter consists exclusively of words spoken by participants during interviews. No words were added or deleted except when indicated in the text. The primary source of data is the words of the participants. Through this format I show how each Act in the play addresses each of the research questions guiding this study, as well as the theory that supports each finding.

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The script is presented in past tense, as I am retelling the participants’ stories as they were told to me. The Reader’s Theater was constructed through data from interviews with the participants as well as my field notes and analytic memos, which include my

reflections on the interviews and observations I conducted.

There are three Acts in this play/chapter, and each Act explores a different research question. Act I and Act II are represented through Reader’s Theater. Act I addresses and explores research question number one, and Act II addresses and explores the second research question. Act III, which is in ethnopoetic format, addresses the third research question. Supporting data from documents are interspersed throughout the chapter where appropriate. Finally, analysis of the data is integrated throughout the dialogue presented and at the end of each Act. In the unpacking I will draw on the larger data as well as data included in the Reader’s Theater script. This approach is appropriate for this dissertation because my core area of inquiry is environments of excellence in low- income communities, which I found to be lively and dynamic spaces. These spaces included a diverse range of cultural perspectives, beliefs, and communicative styles. This rich diversity of thought is reflected through the use of the multiple genres of

representation contained within these pages.

Findings

The key findings of this study are:

(1) In environments of excellence, parents incorporate the tenets of culturally responsive pedagogy.

(2) The race, experience and habitus of teachers influence the ways in which they sort students into categories, and

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(3) While there were both divergences and convergences between parents’ practices and teachers’ perceptions, within the convergences there were sites of possibilities for critical conversations.

In presenting these findings, I allowed the women who participated in the study to speak for themselves as much as possible. Making room for the participants to tell their own stories in their own words and question issues of equity in their children’s education is appropriate for this study, and is in the traditions of sociocultural and critical

sociocultural theory, two of the theoretical underpinnings of this study.

According to Marshall and Rossman (2011) one of the main purposes of

ethnographic case studies, an area from which this study borrows elements, is to take the reader into the setting “with a vividness and detail not typically present in more analytical reporting formats” (p. 267). The use of Reader’s Theater allowed me to breathe life into the data, offering to the reader an experience of environments of excellence, rather than merely an intellectual encounter with data. The Reader’s Theater approach is also consistent with sociocultural theory because this theory takes into account aspects of the participants’ lived experience. I allowed the mothers and teachers in the study to speak because they were the experts on their experience.

Critical theorists question issues of power and privilege which are addressed in this report, and they also integrate experiential knowledge in an effort to unmask and expose racism in its various forms (Ladson-Billings, 1999). Adopting those critical beliefs, when participants spoke using Black English Vernacular, I reported those voices exactly as I heard them in order to honor Shameka and Chaquita’s life stories as much as

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possible. This choice allowed me to maintain the integrity of the report and sustain my commitment to authentic inquiry and high ethical standards.

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Table 4.1 Playbill for “Lift Ev’ry Voice: A Play in Three Acts”