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Participatory action research in heritage language education: A colloquium experience
Oral Presentation[SYMP86] Fostering participatory action research methods in applied linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 09:30:00 UTC
Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodologies aim to integrate stakeholders into the research agenda and distribute power with the end goal of creating social change and building sustainable programs within underrepresented communities (Rodriguez & Brown, 2009). Scholars within ethnic studies (e.g., Johnston & Marwood, 2017), sociology (e.g., Peltier, 2018; Zuber-Skerritt, 2018), education (e.g., Forbes & Colella, 2019; O'Neill, 2018), and Indigenous studies (e.g., Junker, 2018; Peltier, 2018) highlight the value of effective collaboration between researchers and stakeholders and, in particular, the implications of PAR for social development (e.g., Anyon et al., 2018; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017). Still, the field of heritage language education (HLE), and applied linguistics more generally, has largely failed to implement this research design. Within HLE, little research is guided by the heritage speaker community itself, and few studies explore the experiences of heritage language (HL) educators who also identify as members of a heritage speaker community (e.g., Cho, 2014). Work produced in HLE is almost exclusively influenced and guided by non-heritage speaker individuals, leaving HLE activities filtered through out-group scholars. Traditionally, this has resulted in teaching approaches and language programs that are often lacking in relevance and sometimes detrimental to heritage speaker communities.
The current project acts as a model for PAR methods in language research and fosters the development of sustainable resources for linguistically diverse language teacher and student populations. In this presentation, we will outline the events of a three-day online colloquium centered around HLE topics, in order to investigate current issues in HLE from an in-group perspective. Participants were 47 current and pre-service K-16 heritage language educators from 15 heritage language backgrounds. Specifically, the research questions we explore are: 1) How can an in-group HLE colloquium generate knowledge and understanding of HLE strengths and challenges?, and 2) How might an in-group HLE colloquium act to promote meaningful discussion and sustainable support networks for heritage speaker educators and scholars?
Centrally, this PAR project aimed at developing tools, resources, and support for current and pre-service heritage educators. Colloquium events included three heritage educator-led workshops, three information sessions, and four panel discussions for heritage speakers who currently teach or are in a teacher training program to teach their HL, as well as opportunities to network with and mentor other in-group educators. Central challenges in HLE highlighted through colloquium events include a lack of 1) professional development in the area of HL pedagogy, 2) access to minority language resources and materials, 3) a strong support network of HL instructors, and 4) in-group representation in the field. Together, study methods support greater accessibility to language teacher training for HL speakers, as well as better representation in the field, through collaborations that were developed, led, and sustained by HL communities. We conclude with efforts to maintain sustainable connections and collaborations with colloquium stakeholders, initiatives and methods for enacting post-colloquium changes by and for minoritized language educators, and suggestions for future PAR work within HLE.
Presenters Meagan Driver Assistant Professor, Michigan State University
The Community-Engaged, Anti-Racist Education Inquiry Community
Oral Presentation[SYMP86] Fostering participatory action research methods in applied linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 09:30:00 UTC
At a public, land grant University in the northeast in the United States, we are revising our language teacher education curriculum to align with Community-Engaged, Anti-Racist (CEAR) Pedagogy. In this presentation, we share the CEAR principles and practices guiding our framework, our process as we planned and piloted the curriculum, and the participatory action research project that grew from and along these efforts. Specifically, we will focus on our CEAR Inquiry Community and the ways teacher education faculty, public school educators, and community-based organization leaders planned, introduced, and collaborated on brainstorming inquiry questions, designing the study, creating interview protocols, collecting data, and analyzing and disseminating findings. We share how we are working to create a horizontal, collaborative inquiry space and the challenges and rewards of conducting inquiry in this new space.
At a public, land grant university in the United States, we are revising our language teacher education curriculum to align with Community-Engaged, Anti-Racist (CEAR) Pedagogy. Our framework is guided by scholarship by España and Herrera (2020), Muhammad (2020), and Garcia, Johnson and Seltzer (2017), among others. We share our CEAR principles and practices, our curriculum planning and piloting process, and the participatory action research project that grew from and with these efforts. We focus on our CEAR Inquiry Community and how faculty, public school educators, and community-based organization leaders planned, introduced, and collaborated on brainstorming inquiry questions, designing the study, creating interview protocols, collecting data, analyzing, and disseminating findings. We share how we are working to create a horizontal, collaborative inquiry space (Paris and Winn, 2018) and the challenges and rewards of conducting inquiry in this space.
We begin describing the CEAR public school curriculum development project which prompted interest in launching an inquiry group. As we prepared to work on curricula, we engaged in powerful professional development which supported creating norms, beliefs, principles, and practices that guided our curriculum development efforts. As we entered the inquiry space, we considered adjusting these guiding frameworks and tools for conducting inquiry. We share these frameworks and tools.
As a group, we consider what inquiry questions should guide our investigation, and together we designed and reflected upon our interview protocols. We piloted our interviews, reflecting on the interview tool, the experience of interviewing, and of being interviewed. We specifically focused on how our process broke (or unintentionally perpetuated) "doing research" from a traditional framework, and we worked to consider how to align our practices and actions with our principles.
We report our findings of the diverse experiences shared by Inquiry Community members. Through a narrative inquiry approach (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), we analyze the ways our experiences and the stories we tell create counter narratives and offer new ways of engaging in the work of empowering teachers, K-12 students, community members, and faculty for anti-racist pedagogy and action. We found that our approach was sensitive to our teams' context and experiences: for example, all stages of motherhood, workloads, COVID contingencies, and ongoing racial violence. The stories shared moments of hope and ways to act gained from involvement in the project. We tell the story of how we attempted to change traditional research practices to enter uncharted spaces, share counter narratives, and collaboratively create an inquiry path as a community-engaged, anti-racist Inquiry Community.
References Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass.
España, C., & Herrera, L. Y. (2020). En comunidad: Lessons for centering the voices and experiences of bilingual Latinx students. Heinemann. García, O., Johnson, S. & Seltzer, K. (2017). The Translanguaging classroom. Leveraging student bilingualism for learning. Philadelphia: Caslon.
Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic Incorporated.
Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (2018). Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. SAGE Publications, Inc.
Presenters Christelle Palpacuer Lee Associate Professor, Rutgers The State University Of New Jersey
Disrupting Commodified Language in Tourism Economies: PAR and Social Justice in the Dominican Republic
Oral Presentation[SYMP86] Fostering participatory action research methods in applied linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 09:30:00 UTC
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is an epistemological stance, rather than specific method, which "deliberate[ly] inver[ts]… who frames and who is framed as the problem" (Fine, 2008, p. 2017). YPAR projects document and make visible how youth engage in language and literacy practices to address social justice issues while uplifting alternative language and literacy practices. As youth exert their power in the research process, they have increased control over what stories are told and how they want to tell them, disrupting dominant problematizations and defining their own visions for the future.
This presentation illuminates a YPAR approach to applied linguistics research in the Dominican Republic. Together, collaborative knowledge production and collective mobilization reframed dominant institutional discourses that problematize youth language and literacy practices in relation to employment opportunities. The YPAR project deconstructs language ideologies that position multilingualism as a straightforward path to economic development, illustrating (1) how the supposed benefits of multilingualism in tourist economies are differentially distributed and (2) how language learning and multilingual practices can be embedded in the ongoing construction of transnational solidarities and social justice rather than the extractive labor market.
Aligned with this symposium's goal to raise awareness, interest, and support for PAR methodologies in applied linguistics, I draw on two strands of literature from YPAR language and literacy activities: (1) participatory projects that study youth language and literacy practices deployed in a variety of settings and for different purposes (e.g., Lyiscott, 2020), and (2) participatory projects that engage youth in activities that develop multilingualism and multiliteracies for social critique and transformation (e.g., Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). I share the process of developing and implementing a YPAR project with Haitian and Dominican youth in a region marked by the imperial formations of tourism. Collaboratively-designed sessions-inspired by language and social justice frameworks (i.e., Baker-Bell, 2020; Martinez, 2017)-addressed topics such as Afrodescendancy, Racialization and Identity; Migration and Bilingualism in the U.S.; Dominican Spanish; Haitian Creole; and Social Justice, Activism, and Language. Youth-led final projects (addressing racism and discrimination, labor exploitation, food insecurity, and other topics) provide insight into how youth use languages and literacies as situated social practices to act within and transform their social worlds.
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge.
Duncan-Andrade, J. M., & Morrell, E. (2008). Youth participatory action research as critical pedagogy. Counterpoints, 285, 105-131.
Fine, M. (2008). An epilogue, of sorts. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 213-234). Routledge.
Lyiscott, J. (2020). The politics of ratchetness: Exploring race, literacies, and social justice with Black youth. In V. Kinloch, T. Burkhard, & C. Penn (Eds.), Race, justice, and activism in literacy instruction (pp. 131-146). Teachers College Press.
Martinez, D. C. (2017). Imagining a language of solidarity for Black and Latinx youth in English Language Arts classrooms. English Education, 49(2), 179-196.
Enabling tribal agency and voices: Creating bilingual books for marginalized communities through collaborative methodologies
Oral Presentation[SYMP86] Fostering participatory action research methods in applied linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 09:30:00 UTC
Tribal or Adivasi communities represent the "weakest among the weak" sectors of society in India (Sivanand, 2001), marked by economic and socio-political vulnerability (Mishra & Joshi, 2015). The Government has responded through the provision of free formal schooling for tribal children. However, under a neoliberal framework of development (Misra & Mishra, 2018), formal education has become a tool of acculturation and mainstreaming, and the identity, culture, and languages of first-generation school-going tribal children are disregarded and left out from curriculum, materials, and classrooms. In this presentation, I report on a collaboration between tribal communities in central India, an Indian NGO with deep ties with these communities, and myself, a female Indian researcher with previous prolonged engagement in central India's tribal schools now doing a Ph.D. in the USA. The goal was to support mother-tongue multilingual education via the creation of a repository of multilingual books in Tribal languages and Hindi for use in schools. The NGO worked with tribal community members, tribal school teachers, and Tribal-Hindi language experts and created multilingual books in two endangered oral Tribal languages: Sehariya and Kol. Upon the NGO's invitation, I became a supporting researcher on the project. The data comprise my participant observations, audio and video recordings of work sessions, conversational interviews, photoelicitations, and researcher fieldnotes, all collected during one summer of fieldwork. I document how different key actors in the project contributed our different onto-epistemologies, privileges, vulnerabilities, and expertise. I map how the NGO yielded control and supported extensive and strategic involvement of the tribal communities. This alternative collaborative methodology enabled Tribal agency and Tribal voices, thus leading to efficacious redistribution of power. The study has important implications for researchers interested in developing successful community-led research collaborations that foster appropriate representation and co-creation of knowledge in high-vulnerability contexts. Bibliography Mishra, R. C., & Joshi, S. (2015, January). Acculturation and Children's Education in a Rural Adivasi Community. Indian Educational Review, 53(1), 7-24. Misra, G., & Mishra, R. K. (2018). Ethnopsychological Perspectives on Education for Adivasi Children in India. Indian Educational Review, 53-71. Sivanand, M. (2001). The good doctors of Sittilingi. Reader's Digest, 159, 110-17.
A Participatory Approach to Language Research in Minority Languages: Perspectives from Northeast India
Oral Presentation[SYMP86] Fostering participatory action research methods in applied linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 09:30:00 UTC
The last 100 years have witnessed a lot of changes in the realm of linguistic research into various aspects of languages. (Higgins, 2009) (Leonard & Haynes, 2010) (Rice, Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork: An overview, 2006). One of the prominent changes among these is the change of roles and responsibilities of the researchers and the researched in terms of design and implementation of research endeavours, participation in research activities and ownership of the research outcome achieved through collaborative mode (Nath, 2013). Particularly in the field of language documentation and revitalization, the active participation of the community members has added new vigor to such efforts. This presentation revolves around the issue of active participation of the community members in community-based language research (Higgins, 2009) in the light of the author's experience in the field of endangered language documentation and mother tongue literacy development programs for some of the indigenous minority language communities in Northeast India. In this context this presentation will focus, in particular, on documentation and development of the Singpho and Tai Khamyang languages spoken in Northeast India. The presentation will take the audience through various stages of both the research endeavours and will highlight the use of participatory methods in achieving the goals in both the contexts. It will also focus on the challenges both on the part of the linguist and the language communities working in collaborative and participatory mode.
BibliographyHiggins, E. C. (2009). Research Models, Community Engagement, and Linguistic Fieldwork: Reflections on Working within Canadian Indigenous Communities. Language Documentation & Conservation, 3(1), 15-50. Retrieved from http://handle.net/10125/4423 Leonard, W. Y., & Haynes, E. (2010). Making "collaboration" collaborative An examination of perspectives that frame linguisitc field research. Language Documentation & Conservation, 4, 268-293. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4482 Nath, P. K. (2013). Collaborative Approach towards Language Preservation and Revitalization-Perspectives from North east India. In M. J. Norris (Ed.), Endangered Languages Beyond Boundaries (pp. 47-52). Foundation for Endangered Languages. Rice, K. (2006). Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork: An overview. Journal of Academic Ethics, 4, 123-155.
Meagan Driver
Christelle Palpacuer Lee