Abstract
Historically, US schools have failed multicultural and multilingual children of colour and marginalized expansive conceptualizations of home and community literacy practices. Given the importance of fully inclusive education, this article seeks to understand the ways in which young multilingual and multicultural children take up issues of educational success and inclusion through translinguistic oral narratives. Through the analysis of a representative narrative authored by an Afro-Latino boy within the context of an afterschool programme, I introduce the notion of children as syncretic natives, intentionally and skilfully navigating within and across normative binaries set up by teachers who often occupy the role of syncretic immigrants. Because of a lack of support through professional development, teacher education and/or the ideologies promoted in school systems, many teachers tend to stick to a menu of known pedagogical practices and tools, taking on the role of syncretic immigrants as they implement and enforce normative binaries as opposite and exclusionary educational practices. As syncretic natives, children tend to engage in the creation of new practices, which move beyond traditional normative binaries. Findings indicate incoherencies in the construction of normative educational binaries and what counts as educational success. Implications point to the need for teachers to learn how to disrupt and move beyond normative binaries in order to see the brilliant syncretic practices of young children from multicultural and multilingual backgrounds, thus fashioning more fully inclusive curricula and teaching with the acknowledgement and recognition that children are syncretic natives who bring knowledge and expertise that can greatly enrich classroom opportunities for them to learn and grow.
Keywords
Introduction
As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached in New York City (NYC), television programmes repeatedly showed scenes of the aeroplanes hitting the twin towers, the towers burning and then collapsing, and the rubble forming a thick cloud in the air as some individuals jumped out of windows and others ran for their lives. Subway adverts abounded, advertising free services for those whose health had been affected by the 9/11 events. As the 9/11 memorial was inaugurated, family members were interviewed, many times crying as they recounted the loss of loved ones. There was little chance that any child attending public schools and/or regularly riding public transportation in NYC would be oblivious to 9/11 events.
In schools throughout NYC, officially and unofficially, young children engaged in activities that recalled the event. Primary-grade children read books and talked about what happened on 9/11, even though they were not born at the time. Their experiences were thus initially detached from the fear and pain felt by so many of their family and community members. Within and across schools, 9/11 was a common topic.
In one Manhattan public school, second graders recognized the twin towers in picture book illustrations and pinpointed their current absence in the city’s landscape as they read books exploring NYC and its five boroughs (part of the official curriculum). While recognizing the complexity of bringing events such as this to the forefront of the curriculum, one dual-language second-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school asked her students to interview a family member who had been in NYC on 9/11. Children were at first confused as they had been socialized into the fiction/non-fiction binary often present in the primary grades English/Language Arts curriculum. If there were so many so-called ‘true’ accounts of 9/11, including those portrayed in books and articles they had read, why would they ask family members for others? One student reported that his teacher told him that everyone experienced 9/11 differently and that all who experienced 9/11 were experts. This second grader, Tomás (pseudonym), said family members know about 9/11 ‘quizas hasta más que los que escribieron los libros porque no todos ellos estaban aquí en Nueva York’. 1
Recognizing the children’s interest in the 9/11 events and seeking to build on their interest in responsive and authentic ways, the second-grade teacher decided to bring a variety of texts to the classroom (e.g. adverts, newspaper and magazine articles, photos, children’s books). Seeking to offer perspectives of those who had lost loved ones on this tragic day, she read aloud The Day the Towers Fell (Santora, 2011), a book written by a NYC teacher and mother of a firefighter whose life had been claimed in one of the twin towers. After reading the book, the teacher invited students to scrutinise whose perspectives had not yet been considered.
After students acknowledged that many people who were not even there, or did not know anyone who was there, were affected by the 9/11 events, the teacher moved from dialogue to action (Souto-Manning, 2010) by citing conversations they had had with family and community members. She invited students to brainstorm possible questions they would like to ask family members about how they experienced 9/11. Because students in the classroom spoke English and Spanish, they wrote their interview questions in both languages – and family members could choose in which language they would respond.
This second-grade teacher blurred the official and unofficial curricula, bringing together official and personal accounts of 9/11 as valid and complementary. Beyond hybridizing 2 the curriculum, she validated Spanish and English as equally worthy languages and utilized family voices as resources in the creation of a new curriculum. In this sense, she created opportunities for syncretic literacy practices in her classroom.
The study reported in this article draws on the narrative of one child from the classroom described above within the context of an afterschool programme. This narrative is representative of a larger dataset. The larger study sought to understand the nature of student talk across languages and cultures and its potential for disrupting normative binaries established in schools. Through my analysis of student talk surrounding parent interviews and class discussions of 9/11, I introduce the notion of children as syncretic natives, intentionally and skillfully navigating within and across normative binaries set up by teachers who are syncretic immigrants creating new unconventional practices, yet expecting conventional responses and results.
While syncretic immigrant teachers bring together home and school practices, many still see these realms as separate. They tend to have had few professional opportunities to gain appreciation of the syncretic practices that syncretic native children have intentionally created and perfected through their actions and interactions. Thus, here I offer a new conceptualization of the roles of teachers and students within the notion of syncretism, using student narratives to explore the complexities and intricacies of the concepts of syncretic natives and syncretic immigrants.
A theoretically informed literature review: On syncretic literacy practices
In 2004, Gregory and colleagues (2004: 1) edited a volume that served as a starting point to what they titled ‘Syncretic Literacy Studies’ in the field of early childhood education. In it, studies explored the power of family contexts (e.g. Volk, 2004), the possibilities afforded when friends are teachers (e.g. Long, 2004), and the learning that goes on in community settings (e.g. Romero, 2004). Defying deficit-ridden normative paradigms, Gregory and colleagues (2004) wanted to account for the experiences of young children from diverse backgrounds. While they recognized that paradigms do not change easily, they underscored the need for a paradigm that argues for the value of home, community and peer literacy practices. They pinpointed the invisibility of multicultural and multilingual children’s syncretic literacy practices in the early childhood literature. Their ‘starting point was the conviction that the teaching and learning skills of young children living between and within different linguistic and cultural settings had largely been omitted from the Early Years/Early Childhood educational context’ (Gregory et al., 2004: 2).
Drawing on concepts of heteroglossia and hybridization (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984), Duranti and Ochs (1997: 172) defined syncretic literacy as how ‘an intermingling or merging of culturally diverse traditions informs and organizes literacy activities’. This article builds on this definition of syncretic literacy while also forefronting the work of Bakhtin (1981: 293) on how multiple voices, languages and perspectives co-exist within the same utterance because: There are no “neutral” words and forms – words and forms that can belong to “no one;” language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents … [L]anguage is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world … As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing
I recognize that the ‘word in language is half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin, 1981:293) – which often means bringing together diverse and at times seemingly opposite practices, perspectives and interpretations in novel and brilliant ways that deepen our understanding. As such, I employ syncretic literacies as a framework for analysing how multilingual and multicultural second graders in a public elementary school in NYC utilized diverse cultural knowledge, practices and frameworks as they engaged in literacy activities and made sense of their worlds. Combining traditional codes, they engaged in what Bakhtin (1981: 358) called hybridization, ‘a mixture of two [or more] social languages within the limits of a single utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses separated from one another by … social differentiation or by some other factor’. This hybridization was an element leading to students’ syncretic construction of new practices, which, true to the basic tenets of syncretism, they did in intentional and creative ways. However, this study goes beyond seeking to understand how children picked and chose the ways in which they navigated within and across normative binaries, initially engaging in what I call a remix of languages and literacy practices, to look at children’s intentional creation of unique translinguistic and transcultural practices – a result of syncretic acts betwixt and between spaces.
I pay close attention to the premise that syncretism may include (m)any culturally and linguistically ‘diverse values, beliefs, emotions, practices, identities, institutions, tools, and other material resources into the organization of literacy activities. The main idea … is the belief that, when different cultural systems meet, one rarely simply replaces the other’ (Duranti and Ochs, 1997: 173) – there is the creation of a new one. So, instead of focusing on a code- or text-centred notion of syncretism, I seek to gain further insights regarding: The merging of different activities, acts within the same activity, and tools that originated in and are indexically related to different cultural traditions [including] … (a) the need to use tools that originally were not specifically designed for literacy activities, (b) the need to connect different cultural traditions, and expectations, and (c) the ability to coordinate among competing simultaneous activities. (Duranti and Ochs, 1997: 173)
Reframing literacy practices
Home, community and peer literacy practices have deep and lasting influences on learning, so we must consider the ‘complexity… of how literacy practice in the homes and communities of learners appears to influence the effectiveness of early literacy learning in school’ (Purcell-Gates, 2007: 211). Children’s home literacies ‘can significantly contribute to the developing picture of complex and synergistic relationships among home literacy practice and linguistic capital within contexts of power, language, hegemony, and textual resources’ (Purcell-Gates, 2007: 212).
Moving beyond traditional definitions of home literacy, Gregory et al. (2004) employed syncretism to offer an expansive conceptualization of home, community and peer literacies. In such an inclusive perspective of literacies, they highlighted that: (1) young children’s language and literacy development is not linear or predetermined; (2) children are members of diverse groups and learn how to function within them; (3) young children live in simultaneous worlds, so when they experience different linguistic and cultural practices at home, they do not stay in separate worlds and code-switch, but instead they develop a new practice syncretically; and (4) young children who participate in several linguistic and cultural systems learn to carry out multiple identities, embodying and performing many context-specific roles, thereby developing deeper metacognitive strategies. This is the conceptualization of literacy employed in this study. From this perspective, I see literacy development as syncretically sociocultural. In other words, children draw on resources/knowledge across social and cultural contexts of homes, communities and schools to create new opportunities and practices for learning languages and literacies.
Examining syncretic literacy practices offers a broader interpretation of what constitutes literacy and includes what peers, families and multiple communities of practice contribute to children’s cultural and linguistic worlds. This view opens doors to learning about and coming to genuinely value what each child already knows instead of conceptualizing certain children in terms of deficits, as if needing to be fixed. Multiple studies – across time and space – have offered insights into the many ways in which children are already skilled and intentional (cf. Genishi and Goodwin, 2008; Gregory et al., 2004). This study seeks to add to this existing body of literature by investigating the processes whereby a multicultural and multilingual child makes sense of literacies syncretically within the context of a US public elementary school, thus offering implications for fashioning more fully inclusive curricula and teaching through the acknowledgement and recognition that children are syncretic natives. It does so from a re-mediation theoretical framework.
Building a syncretic theoretical framework
The work in this study suggests a conceptualization of syncretic natives and immigrants in a move towards challenging normative binaries. It is grounded in a theoretical frame that centres on the notion of syncretism, which helps us understand children’s expertise in creating new practices through their multilingual/multicultural interactions with each other and with adults. Thus, the theoretical framework employed here is also syncretic – supported and enriched by re-mediation and sociocultural-historical theories.
Re-mediation
As I consider the nature of syncretism in children’s learning, I find the concept of re-mediation to be a particularly helpful component of the theoretical framework that underlies my work. The basic rule of re-mediation (as opposed to remediation framing children in terms of deficits) involves an expansive and additive approach to differences and diversities focusing on the sociocultural-historical influences on, and the context of, students’ learning. In contrast to the traditional ‘remedial’ approaches, re-mediation involves a stronger notion of learning and disrupts the dogma of pathology linked to deficit practices of intervention and re-mediation. Instead of emphasizing so-called ‘basic skills’, framed as problems of the individual, re-mediation involves a reorganization of curriculum and teaching. According to Gutiérrez and colleagues (2009), re-mediation remains a central strategy in addressing the academic needs of students who differ from the dominant norm (read White, middle class, mainstream American English monolingual). To build on the strengths of each student, we must move towards re-mediation.
Sociocultural-historical perspectives on languages and literacies
Hand in hand with the notion of re-mediation and fundamental to my understanding of syncretism, is: … a sociocultural-historical perspective [which] requires [an] examination of the cultural nature of everyday life. This includes studying people’s use and transformation of cultural tools and technologies and their involvement in cultural traditions in the structures and instructions of family … and community practices. (Rogoff, 2003: 10)
Sociocultural approaches to learning have provided new ways of expanding students’ learning and literacy repertoires (Gutiérrez et al., 2009).
Key to the use of sociocultural-historical theory in my work is recognition of the sociocultural nature of language structured by an alignment of speaker-hearer conventions and conceptions of a social activity or event (Ochs, 1986). Language has an important role as children acquire knowledge of how to act and communicate within and across activities and events. After all, language does not simply serve as a response to an activity or event – it is the actual social activity/event (Hymes, 1974). Within and across codes, sociocultural information is encoded in the organization of how people talk (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986).
From this basis, I frame syncretic language and literacy practices socioculturally by embracing the premise that language and literacy development are interdependent and develop as children engage in interactions with more skilled partners in various communities of practice. I believe that paying close attention to how multicultural and multilingual children make sense of their interactions within and across communities of practice through the analysis of their narratives can provide insightful information regarding the successful teaching of diverse children. Through the lens of re-mediation anchored in a sociocultural-historical perspective, I have constructed a syncretic theoretical framework and seek to illuminate the expertise and learning of second-grade multilingual and multicultural students of colour and how their syncretic literacies offer insights for re-mediating learning futures and creating new teaching practices.
Data collection and analysis
Given the importance of fully inclusive education, especially in light of the historical failure of multicultural and multilingual children of colour in US schools (Goodwin et al., 2008) and the marginalization of expansive conceptualizations of home and community literacy practices, this article addresses the following question: What counts as successful educational practices? Seeking to address the above question in depth, the study pursues the following sub-questions: (1) In what ways does a young, multilingual and multicultural student of colour take up issues of educational success and inclusion through an oral narrative?; (2) What insights does this student’s narrative offer regarding normative binaries in the educational practices he experiences?; (3) How does this student perceive normative discourses indexing 3 academic in/competence?
Setting the context
The Teaching Immigrant Children project served immigrant children from first and second grades (ages six to eight) who primarily spoke languages other than mainstream American English. This after-school programme was designed to build on the strengths of immigrant children’s language, literacy and cultural experiences. The project took place at a public school in NYC. With an enrolment of approximately 750 students, the school’s demographics were as follows: 15% White, 25% African American, 55% Latino/a and 5% Asian. Its free/reduced lunch rate was 70%. According to adopted standardized tests, only half of the school’s students reached proficiency in reading and maths. Twenty per cent of the school’s students were identified as English language learners and 20% received special education services.
The after-school programme was grant-funded and incurred no cost to families of emergent multilingual students who were nominated by their teachers as needing additional help. Two female co-teachers worked with a group of 10 students three times per week (2:40 pm – 4:40 pm) over seven weeks. The co-teachers were pursuing graduate degrees in education at the time. Both were bilingual and had two or more years of experience as early childhood teachers. They planned weekly as they sought to conduct culturally relevant lessons. Their plans focused on cross-linguistic and transcultural aspects of learning, valuing children’s home and community language and literacy practices while facilitating their success in academic settings.
The goal of the project was to engage young immigrant children identified as coming from so-called disadvantaged backgrounds in language and literacy-rich activities that honoured their backgrounds and cultural legacies, not only bringing together their home practices and school expectations, but also creating new and hopeful language and literacy practices. Within this context, children learned by doing as teachers made purposeful connections within and across home and school communicative practices. The programme extended the school day for these children and sought to deepen their understanding of language and literacy – linking talking, reading and writing with their interests and experiences. The project sought to make education inclusive for children whose first language was different from the language over-privileged in schools – mainstream American English.
My role as a researcher was multi-pronged. I designed the after-school programme and secured funding for it. I hired the teacher-researchers and collaborated with school administrators to identify and invite students to participate. I co-designed the curriculum and met with the teachers regularly to debrief and plan responsively. While I did not attend every meeting, I was present (as a participant observer) the day the 9/11 narratives began.
Data collection and coding process
These narratives took place within the first three weeks of this generative interests-based after-school programme for emergent bilingual and multilingual, thus illustrating the ways in which these children – deemed to be ‘at risk’ – came to the after-school programme with sophisticated linguistic understanding and knowledgeable communicative practices. While not part of the official plan of the co-teachers or the after-school programme, these recorded 9/11 narratives became central to the ongoing programme. While the children had not been able to display themselves competently in their regular classroom settings in normative and linear ways due to their practices of orality and linguistic syncretism, they found the space to tell their stories in the after-school programme.
Data analysis
Procedurally, following each after-school session in which data were collected, I transcribed the interactions and added interpretive notes as I brought together field notes and transcripts. I created data packets for each participant in the after-school programme as well as thematic data packets (9/11 being one of them). Each data packet included observational and interpretive entries, field notes and supporting materials such as video recordings, transcripts and artefacts. These packets allowed me to separately analyse each child’s narrative through a critical sociocultural lens. I conducted preliminary retrospective analysis, reading and rereading the primary data and engaging in open coding (Miles and Huberman, 1994). I combined preliminary codes, focusing on those that were prevalent across 9/11 narratives. Finally, I looked at all narratives together, combining interpretations. Throughout the process, children were asked to engage in member checks in order to clarify and complete the analysis. At times, these member checks turned into mini-interviews, which added complexity to the stories told and helped me to gain a fuller understanding.
When analysed together, the narratives displayed four categories falling under the primary category of normative binaries. Within normative binaries, the four sub-categories were represented across narratives: (1) clandestine versus official readings; (2) oral versus written authoring practices; (3) collective versus individual learning processes; (4) fiction versus non-fiction/past versus present.
Selecting a representative narrative
This article focuses on the narrative that an Afro-Latino boy, Tomás, constructed in the Teaching Immigrant Children project. Tomás’s oral telling was selected as the focal narrative because his narrative represented (to varying degrees) all four coding sub-categories present within and across each of the 9/11 narratives of the children in the after-school programme. Interestingly, Tomás was reading at the lowest level out of those participating in the after-school programme according to the school’s assessments and was not deemed to be reading at grade level. Yet, as verified below, his oral narrative displays sophisticated syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge within and across mainstream American English, African American Language and Spanish. He skilfully employed three languages in concert, making intentional shifts that illustrated knowledge of syntax, semantics or pragmatics within and across languages, ultimately creating and competently engaging in a new and coherent syncretic communicative practice.
Tomás’s narrative provides insights into the ways in which normative discourses sponsored by schools continue to fail children who constantly and syncretically negotiate within and across languages and cultures. While a situated representation of a pervasive phenomenon (Dyson and Genishi, 2005), his narrative sheds light on the ways in which schools devalue syncretic literacy practices displayed by multilingual and multicultural children, i.e. syncretic natives like Tomás, and (over)value normative ways of knowing displayed by teachers who are syncretic immigrants.
After selecting Tomás’s narrative and taking a closer look at it, I employed critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2013) as I sought to identify larger institutional discourses (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999) within each identified category. In doing so, I explored Tomás’s recycling of normative power discourses in his narrative. On a situated level, I examined how he portrayed himself in terms of agency. I took a critical look at language, paying attention to the relationship between the system (normative discourses) and the lifeworld (Tomás’s experiences) in the analysis of his narrative (Habermas, 1987).
Tomás’s narrative
On the day the topic of 9/11 was introduced in the after-school programme, Tomás arrived in a bad mood, verified by eye rolls and monosyllabic responses to questions. He orally expressed his frustration. Then, Tomás was invited to tell what he knew about 9/11. ‘I was there,’ he said, despite the fact that he had not yet been born at the time. He proceeded to tell the following narrative. Below, Tomás’s narrative is organized into stanzas as units of language, ‘clumps of tone units that deal with a unitary topic or perspective, or which appear (from various linguistic details) to have been planned together’ (Gee, 2005: 107): 1. I was at the table. 2. My food was there but I wasn’t eating. 3. I was reading my Pokémon. 4. When mi papi had got home from work. 5. You know, he work all night every night. 6. I was ‘posed to be eating breakfast. 7. Me dijo: ¿qué estás leyendo? 8. I jumped. 9. Papi asked: ¿Hiciste tu tarea? 10. Bueno … I looked down to the floor. 11. I don’t like no schoolbook. 12. I like Pokémon. 13. My friend like Pokémon. 14. Pokémon is fun, not reading homework. 15. All this was inside my head, you know. 16. I didn’t say nothin’. 17. No quería molestar mi papi. 18. Y no quería una paliza ni un castigo. 19. He always be sayin’ he work so hard. 20. So yo tenía que trabajar duro también en my tarea y en la escuela. 21. Pero, los libros de la escuela eran so boring y mis amigos like Pokémon. 22. Cuando yo leo los libros de la escuela estoy solo, you know? 23. Y nosotros jugamos Pokémon, jugamos juntos like everyday, you know? 24. And I take my Pokémon and read it every day. 25. I read it under my schoolbook my teacher give me. 26. Then, I was thinking all of this and I felt the floor moviendo violentamente. 27. I thought I will always do what mi papi want. Always. 28. Mi papi me dijo que no sabe lo que está pasando … y me abrazó. 29. I was so scared. 30. We went outside. 31. The building was falling, like collapsing. 32. Hundreds of feet tall. 33. Like falling, you know. 34. Someone say “the plane hit the building.” 35. Papi said “no creo.” 36. And people crying and screaming. 37. And people saying they be good from now on, you know. 38. Papi took me inside. 39. We turn the tele on. 40. It was happening. 41. All before I come to school. 42. And you know I didn’t have no time to write 43. All the words mi papi told me 44. He didn’t write no word down. He just told me. 45. Like I telling you.
4
Despite blurring past and present, Tomás intertextually syncretized his father’s experiences of 9/11 and his reflections on his own schooling experience in light of normative binaries. He incorporated the replies his father provided to his classroom interview, thus creating a text that was intergenerationally co-authored. At times, Tomás took on his father’s voice and experiences as if they were his own, fluidly shifting between personas, navigating across time, and remixing voices, perspectives and experiences in his narrative, all while competently navigating within and across the rules of Spanish, mainstream American English and African American Language – a novel and coherent linguistic practice, a syncretic act. Although Tomás did not complete the written portion of the interview project assigned by his second-grade teacher, arriving at the after-school programme that afternoon very frustrated by his indexed lack of competence and academic success (indicated by the appearance that he had not done his homework), he authored the sophisticated oral narrative above.
Through this oral text, Tomás had responded to literature and shown mastery of many of the listening and speaking Common Core State Standards 5 (2011) for second grade, third grade and beyond. Yet, he was constructed as being ‘below grade level’ due to the limited ways in which students were expected to express what they knew, in a unified rather than a universal design for learning in which competence was evaluated through standardized and normalized assessments.
Findings: Tomás – a syncretic native
According to Tomás’s narrative, traditional literacies (Dyson, 2002) were privileged in his school, even when caring and competent teachers were responsively drawing on the interests of the children they taught. Through the four binaries explained below, Tomás shows us that he is a syncretic native – meaning that it is through his ability to draw actively on varied resources across generations, languages and funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005) that he makes sense of the world. He does so intuitively. No one has directly instructed him to utilize multiple resources in this expert manner. Yet, as exemplified by the above narrative, Tomás syncretically drew on knowledge across contexts to ably challenge both normative ways of seeing the world as well as socioculturally constructed binaries. Syncretically he brought apparently opposite practices together in intentional and knowledgeable ways. Tomás’s intentionality was informed by his socialization in multiple cultural and linguistic contexts – navigating in, out, across and between multiple practices. He showed that syncretism is first nature for him as he created practices that make sense in the context of multiple spaces.
Findings point towards the need to recognize and challenge normative binaries that continue to disadvantage children whose literacy practices are syncretically negotiated day in and day out. In situated ways, Tomás’s narrative highlights some of the literacies that are privileged in school learning by syncretic immigrants and those that are invisiblized or dismissed, disadvantaging syncretic natives. Thus, syncretism provides a model for disrupting normative binaries. Below, I offer specific insights as I discuss four normative binaries that figured strongly in the children’s 9/11 oral narratives.
Normative binary 1: Clandestine versus official reading
The first normative binary I identified as I analysed the children’s narratives was that of official reading (what counted in school) and of clandestine reading (which served as a way for Tomás to engage in pleasure reading and facilitated play and friendships). Traditionally, official kinds of reading (often honouring traditional texts) are authorized and promoted as ‘appropriate’ in classrooms and schools ‘while others tend to be neglected or even intentionally excluded’ (Sterponi, 2007: 2). Thus, what counts as appropriate, conventional or official reading is culturally situated and frequently coherent with ethnocentric discourses. In schools and classrooms, power discourses overprivilege the normative official reading practices, which are often levelled and grade-level specific. In an agentive reaction to the official reading discourse, Tomás engaged in clandestine reading.
In the third stanza (lines 9–12), Tomás displayed the shame of not having done his homework. While he knew that doing his homework indexed him as a competent learner at school, he clearly articulated that he did not like schoolbooks. He liked Pokémon. He articulated his interests and official schoolbooks as being distinct. In lines 13–16, Tomás situated unofficial reading practices as affinity-related endeavours (Gee, 2003). He again reified his dislike for official reading tasks – books and homework. He aligned himself with his friend who also liked Pokémon. Then, in the sixth stanza (lines 21–25) we see how Tomás challenged this normative binary of official and clandestine reading events and materials even in the classroom. When he was reading (at least supposedly) the assigned book, he negotiated a space in-between, to read in a clandestine way by placing his book immediately under the official book and scanning the environment periodically so that he did not get caught. He navigated across texts and created connections, thus creating a new betwixt and between reading practice that was neither official nor clandestine, but richly syncretic.
For teachers who are syncretic immigrants, official and clandestine reading practices may appear to be opposite or even exclusionary. Yet, Tomás, a syncretic native, managed to engage in both kinds of reading simultaneously, creating a new practice that brought together un/official readings. Tomás illustrates how this syncretism was native and normative for him. As verified in Tomás’s narrative, he engaged in official and unofficial reading practices together, expanding the terrain of the normative reading canon, thus crafting a sophisticated syncretic practice.
Normative binary 2: Oral versus written authoring practices
Tomás clearly articulated how doing his homework and producing written evidence indexes students as academically successful, as good students. Thus, the discourse of competence in school was heavily tied to written authorial practices. Yet, Tomás was not easily colonized by this discourse. He challenged the normative binary of oral versus written authorial practices as he explained that indeed he did his homework (the interview regarding a family member’s 9/11 experiences). He interviewed his father, nevertheless his lack of written evidence did not halt or impede his authoring process. He positioned himself as unable to write due to time, which was further elucidated by his father’s nightly work schedule. Further, he highlighted how his father was able to tell of his experience even without having written it down (last stanza).
Tomás positioned himself as not having the time to write down his father’s responses to the interview questions instead of making the choice not to, creating a new syncretic practice that allowed him to engage in learning (carrying out the assigned task) without being bound by traditional literacy practices (i.e. writing). Morally, he framed himself as a good person. He positioned his oral word as worthy, challenging the over-privileging of the written word as creditable. His oral narrative was complex and sophisticated, being highly tellable (Ochs and Capps, 2001) and having a clear and organized structure. Tomás invited us to see how oral narratives may serve as adequate and worthy responses to written texts. Tomás positioned himself agentively, in a knowledgeable and capable way: ‘I telling you’ (subject + active verb + object).
Here, it is important to listen to what Tomás said, because by not opening up possibilities for such students to display the ways in which they syncretically make sense of their worlds and create new and purposeful practices, teachers as syncretic immigrants may be missing invaluable insights and excluding students from the learning process or at least contributing to their indexicality as incompetent and unsuccessful. If teachers really want to engage in inclusive teaching, they need to learn about the multiple and syncretic ways in which students represent their knowledge – in non-normative ways.
Normative binary 3: Collective versus individual learning processes
Tomás’s narrative forefronted the social nature of learning as integral to the syncretic process. Tomás stated that when he read schoolbooks, he felt alone. Thus official reading practices and materials in Tomás’s narrative (as well as in the narratives of others in the after-school programme) were correlated with individual learning processes. Individual learning processes are associated with the discourse of power, which is represented in multiple levels in schools and classrooms, and very prominently in the culture of standardized testing, competition and ranking. Tomás positioned himself individually when talking about ‘los libros de la escuela’. Yet, when referring to Pokémon, he took on a collective agentive stance, indexing his identity as part of an affinity group (Gee, 2003), of Pokémon experts. Thus, this social aspect motivated Tomás to take his Pokémon book and read it every day, as indicated by his narrative.
Yet, it is important to understand that Tomás did not engage in one practice to the detriment of the other – he brought individual and collective reading opportunities together, creating a new and intentionally syncretic practice. His Pokémon books were authentic and represented his interests and peer group; his schoolbook allowed him to do well in school. As he stated that his father ‘always be sayin’ he work so hard,’ he explained that he too had to work hard – on his homework and at school. According to Tomás, the schoolbooks would allow him to do well in his future life, thus orienting to his family’s moral compass. The Pokémon books would allow him to be able to play with his friends and have fun in the moment.
The implications of this specific normative binary point towards the need to (re)conceptualize teaching and learning in more inclusive and relevant ways – recognizing and building upon both individual and collective learning processes syncretically, thereby fostering more inclusively and universally designed educational practices and settings.
Normative binary 4: Fiction versus non-fiction/present versus past
9/11/2001 was the first day of school in NYC that year. According to Santora (2011: 30), many people ‘were bringing their children to school’ when the towers collapsed. This detail was intertextually employed by Tomás in his narrative, even though he had not yet been born. Present and past were inter-textually brought together as Tomás fluidly narrated his schooling experiences together with his father’s responses to the homework interview. Tomás brought together non-fiction and fiction, crossing time and space boundaries and syncretically creating a compelling narrative (e.g. lines 30–41, stanzas 8–10).
In the eighth stanza, Tomás employed the verb ‘collapse’, which came from the book his teacher had read, The Day the Towers Fell. He displayed knowledge about the height of the twin towers – ‘hundreds of feet tall’. In the ninth stanza, he brought knowledge from television footage when he narrated that ‘Someone say “the plane hit the building.”’ Then, his father’s voice (responding to one of the interview questions) was intertextually woven in as he expanded on his father’s learned lesson to ‘be good from now on’. Temporally, Tomás’s own timeline was blurred with the real timeline of 9/11 and all of the narrated events happening before he went to school (here we would have to surmise the general ‘I’ as with any child who goes to school, cf. line 41). Here again, he appropriated the discourse and storyline presented in Santora (2011) and a variety of other texts to craft his own narrative.
Tomás brought together his own experiences, syncretically creating a timeless and creative mashup of genres that initially seem opposite: his father’s answers to the interview questions (even if they were not written down), terms and facts from television, the Internet and Santora’s (2011) story. Additionally, he knowledgeably navigated within and across mainstream American English, Spanish and African American Language as he employed a translinguistic approach to remixing languages in a sophisticated and agentive way. This is the result of a syncretic act, the action of a syncretic native.
Insights from findings
Tomás showed us that he is a syncretic native. Syncretism is a ‘zone of comfortable competence’ to Tomás, as it comprises a ‘tidy familiarity with routines and roles not as communicative competence, but comfortable competence … within this zone, expectations are predictable and unproblematic’ (Rymes, 2004: 327). Hence, while powerful, such syncretic practices may disadvantage him academically if adults in schools who may be syncretic immigrants (having long accepted the false normative binaries stressed above, and perhaps many others) do not come to appreciate and create contexts that capitalize on the power of syncretic practices such as his. Challenging normative binaries, however, may make teachers uncomfortable – perhaps because syncretic literacies can displace a teacher from a position of expertise regarding institutionally sanctioned, ‘textually tidy’ (Dyson, 2003: 5) and tested skills and practices. In terms of syncretic literacies, often (monolingual) teachers and (multilingual) students inhabit seemingly ‘contrasting zones of comfortable competence’ (Rymes, 2004: 321). This occurs when teachers do not recognize the impact of new practices generated through the interactions of multilingual students across cultural, social and generational contexts. Tomás’s narrative repeatedly points towards the importance of challenging colonizing educational practices that continue to enforce normative ways of being and false binaries in ways that ignore the richness of practices of young multilingual and multicultural children.
In looking closely at Tomás’s narrative, it is clear that normative definitions of what counts as educational success informed by syncretic immigrants abound. Given the raced, classed, cultured and linguicized ways in which such norms have been established (Goodwin et al., 2008), normative definitions of educational success are likely to exclude children as syncretic natives (who navigate within and across normative binaries such as the ones pinpointed above) from the most supportive opportunities for learning. Tomás’s narrative invites us to rethink rigid notions of inclusion and exclusion and to consider such texts within the contexts in which they are located. He complicated simple notions of inclusion and exclusion as he positioned academic and social realms linked to official and clandestine reading practices in novel and intentional ways. His narrative invites us to challenge the universality of the normative binaries of schooling, (re)positioning them as tools for colonization that contribute to the failing of multilingual and multicultural students. Such normative boundaries provide limited opportunities for students like Tomás to demonstrate their expertise in navigating within and across language and literacy practices on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis. Tomás further invites us to recognize how power discourses normalize what indexes academic in/competence, challenging us to think of the mis/alignment of language and literacy practices as ethnocentrically indexing in/competence.
Tomás and other children in the after-school programme, all diverse multilingual children of colour, repeatedly positioned such normative binaries in syncretically native ways. They navigated within and across official and unofficial school practices, simultaneously becoming members of different literate communities. Yet, because their syncretic practices were not recognized as valid and perhaps not understood by syncretic immigrant teachers, their sophisticated language and literacy practices went unnoticed – or at the very best did not align with the expected language and literacy practices that currently dominate school discourses in the US. In Tomás’s narrative, syncretism comes to life as the creation of new cultural systems, as supported and/or interrupted by the roles of syncretic natives and syncretic immigrants.
Implications and conclusion
Tomás’s narrative reveals a need to create contexts in which students can negotiate multiple and changing communicative competencies, literacies and texts (including curricula and materials as well as social/interactional contexts) in today’s schools if we are to honour the expertise of children who syncretically make meaning of/in their worlds. Insights from findings point towards the need to pay close attention to the ways in which multicultural and multilingual children navigate educational experiences because such experiences tend to be ethnocentrically rated against White, middle-class and monolingual ways of being. By listening to Tomás, we are invited to recognize and challenge such normative binaries.
This commitment to include fully multilingual and multicultural learners in schooling requires a more nuanced understanding of the communicative practices they continually negotiate. To come to this nuanced understanding, teachers need to recognize the ways in which they may be syncretic immigrants and how the children they teach are syncretic natives, thus coming to position themselves as learners and creating authentic spaces for their students to be positioned as the experts they are. This repositioning, this blurring of teacher and student roles, can lead education in more equitable, meaningful and sensible directions. Teacher-students and student-teachers will then learn from each other about the diversity of practices that take place in the world, and about learning and meaning-making. After all, ‘the socialization of a humane world depends on a continual human willingness to assume the status of novice’ (Ochs, 1996: 432).
Tomás’s second-grade teacher – an excellent and caring educator – involved her students by inviting them to design an activity based on their interest in 9/11. While her intent was to bring together community resources and position families as experts, it may have been helpful to frame such activity in a more open-ended and universally designed way, so that students would have been able to engage in learning and become empowered to express their learning in a variety of ways. After all, not honouring syncretic literacies equates to a colonizing stance that continues to disadvantage multilingual and multicultural students who continuously bring together seemingly opposite practices in unique, intentional and powerful ways.
My analysis of data in this study affirms work that sees children as experts in their own learning and multilingual multicultural contexts, which are rich in teaching and learning potential. This leads me to propose that, as a field, we need to conceptualize literacy in more syncretic, diverse, divergent and expansive ways. We can genuinely start to do so by seeking to understand the language and literacy practices of children, syncretic natives, who constantly navigate within and across languages and cultures, going beyond hybridity and crafting new and intentional syncretic practices. At the same time, we educators must acknowledge our zones of comfortable competence and recognize that we are culturally located, and thus tend to be ethnocentric. Recognizing those zones while naming and problematizing normative binaries can be productive for the teaching and learning of all students, resulting in more inclusive pedagogies.
To accomplish this, I suggest that we start by challenging static and normative notions of bilingualism and/or code-switching, which presume a syncretic immigrant perspective. We can do this by turning from conceptualizing linguistic systems as self-contained to understanding and appreciating children as translingual and transliterate beings. This offers direct implications for teaching, moving beyond a culturally responsive stance and employing conflict and divergence at the center of multicultural teaching and learning.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article benefited from the support of the Zankel Urban Fellows Fund, the vision of the Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project (TCICP) directed by Celia Oyler and Britt Hamre, and the insights of the guest editors, Susi Long, Dinah Volk and Eve Gregory.