Aligning Bookworms Middle School to Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogy: Creating a Gateway to the Third Space

Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Bookworms Middle School (BWMS) is an English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum that attempts to mitigate the gap between research about adolescent literacy and adolescent literacy instruction. The author team makes explicit commitments about adolescent literacy and equity. However, just as teachers are bound by their knowledge, authors of curricula are bound by what they know and who they are. This Education Leadership Portfolio (ELP) seeks to address the problem of how a module of BWMS can be aligned to culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy (CLSP) for the purposes of centering students’ assets and disrupting the perspectives and biases of a privileged and mostly majoritized author team and honoring their explicit commitment to equity. A variety of improvement strategies were used to understand the interactions between adolescent literacy instruction and CLSP, evaluate the alignment of a module to CLSP, invest the voices and perspectives of diverse readers, and revise the module. A subsequent evaluation of the alignment of the revised module to CLSP revealed meaningful improvement. A module-specific professional development was created to allow the orientations toward equity, diversity, and inclusion (DEI) that are necessary to operationalize CLSP and to center students’ assets to percolate in teachers’ minds. Last, an Innovation Configuration was revised to facilitate ongoing implementation of the module. The revision process established during this ELP may be applied to other modules of BWMS. This project was guided by a theory of change. That theory proposes that aligning a module of BWMS to CLSP allows teachers and students to develop new knowledge about text, people, and the world and dispositions toward DEI. Somewhat dishearteningly, this project resulted in unexpected learning about the extent to which historical power inequities become barriers to students’ literacy achievement. However, this ELP also revealed that curricula can become a vehicle for literacy and equity.
Description
Keywords
Citation