Extraordinary Pedagogies for Working Within School Settings Serving Nondominant Students

Extraordinary Pedagogies

Extraordinary pedagogies are not about “best practices” or what might be the most effective method for teaching to the students’ learning needs. In this volume, extraordinary pedagogies encompass larger sociocultural issues, bringing attention to how poverty, race, social class, and language interact with local practices in teaching and learning, and in the everyday lives of families, educators, children, and youth. Extraordinary pedagogies examine alternative ways of engaging families and communities; they encourage teachers to become aware of themselves as practitioners and human beings who are mediated by their own sociocultural experiences; they expand understandings of narrative inquiry and arts-based learning for posing questions and agency in learning; they draw on the abilities and practices that children and youth of color bring to school; and they point to practices for future generations of children and youth for whom ordinary teaching and learning practices have neither sufficed nor helped in countering the widespread inequities in schooling.

Extraordinary pedagogies begin with the proposition that schools and educators must learn and do more than the ordinary. A prominent theme emerging from these chapters is that teachers and teacher educators must take greater responsibility for understanding the historical, societal complexities that come into play each and every school day. In this volume, the core of all of the extraordinary pedagogies presented seeks to humanize educational practices through the examination of issues of racism, classism, agency, sexism, poverty, community, and language. Finally, this volume provides a vast review of pedagogical practices and frameworks for addressing the needs of diverse children and youth in school.

Overview of the Volume

The 10 chapters in this volume speak to the extraordinary pedagogies teachers and educators have found to be noteworthy for working with nondominant students. Whereas many of the authors in the volume review quantitative studies that show significant impact on students’ engagement and achievement, others look to qualitative studies as evidence for pedagogies that make a difference in the lives and schooling of nondominant children and youth.

The volume begins with a thorough examination of poverty and schooling. In the United States of America, more than 15 million children live in poverty, and nearly all of these children attend public schools throughout their childhood. Milner offers an extensive review of how poverty has been conceptualized—not an easy task—and using a critical race theory lens, argues that educators who take responsibility for the elimination of inequity in schools—from school funding and resources (libraries, committed teachers, classroom materials, well-kept buildings) to hiring practices—and who continue to learn about culturally relevant pedagogy can go a long way in reducing the impact that poverty has on schooling.

The next chapter by Howard turns attention to Black male youth, perhaps the most academically and socially marginalized group in U.S. schools and universities. Howard acknowledges early in his chapter that Black male identity is complex and diverse, but throughout the literature he reviewed, Black males are unabashedly essentialized as being “at risk” and largely “uneducable.” Owing to this deficit portrayal, Howard argues for a multipronged paradigm shift in how Black male youth are viewed and understood in teacher education and local classrooms alike, a shift that includes an array of counternarratives and counterpractices, starting with dispelling myths about Black males and stereotypes about Black males, and ranging from addressing microtransgressions to rethinking content curriculum to make it culturally relevant.

Many readers are likely familiar with the Funds of Knowledge framework developed in the early 1990s; however, little is known about the discourse(s) of Funds of Knowledge concerning the power and agency of teachers and students embedded within and/or emerging from the enactment of Funds of Knowledge. In this chapter, Rodríguez argues that Funds of Knowledge pedagogies need to be clarified and extended by theoretical dialogue with other “anti-cultural-deficit” frameworks, lest they become another way of teaching poor Latino/a children in ways that pay little more than superficial attention to the cultural wealth that children and youth bring to school. Rodríguez presents a strong case, based on her review, for the Community Cultural Wealth framework rooted in Critical Race Theory and Chicana/o Studies as a site of power and agency for teachers and students who wish to address the power imbalances that can result when teachers and students are not involved in the co-construction of knowledge that emerges from using students’ Funds of Knowledge.

A recurring theme throughout this volume is that extraordinary pedagogies for working within school settings that serve nondominant students must be humanizing, that is, they must pay attention to communities, families, and youth served by school. In her chapter, Salazar lays out foundational principles and practices for humanizing pedagogy. Drawing on Freire’s work, among others, Salazar shows how humanizing pedagogy respects and draws from students’ histories, realities, and perspectives not only to validate students’ interests and experiences but also to develop critical consciousness in teachers and students alike toward issues of power, privilege, and social injustice in school and society.

The chapter by Baquedano-López, Alexander, and Hernández presents a critical review of parental engagement. The review points to new efforts by teacher educators and teachers to rethink parental engagement by examining the roles of race, class, and immigration in how schools ordinarily conceptualize parents and families of children of color. The authors present a decolonial approach to parental engagement as a way to challenge current thinking about modernity and development and the “crisis of education” at the heart of deficit-based parental involvement models. This decolonial approach calls into question the practices that perpetuate the exclusion of family and community knowledge in the promotion of local and home culture in school activities and parental engagement practices.

Harper reviews the literature on Black students in predominately White institutions of higher education to examine peer pedagogical practices Black students use productively to manage the racist environments they are sure to encounter during their time on campus. Drawing on both historical and current research on this topic, Harper shifts attention to peer pedagogy, specifically how Black peers, along with other minoritized students, teach one another about how to address racism on campus and seek out faculty mentors who help them navigate the racial climates of university settings. This chapter points to new areas of research for gaining insights into how Black students successfully navigate to and through colleges and universities despite the persistence of racist practices and deficit thinking levied toward Black and other minoritized students.

Narrative inquiry is about “thinking narratively” to shape an assortment of stories in which teachers, children, and members of the community tell about what matters most in the classrooms, schools, and universities. Huber, Caine, Huber, and Steeves make a strong case for narrative inquiry as a counternarrative to the prescriptive, transmission-oriented brand of schooling, which seeks to silence the narratives of school, students, and families. Through an extensive review of the literature on narrative inquiry, these authors tell us about the power of personal and community narratives for the development of counternarratives to reclaim the local spaces in which narrators live and experience life in schools. They found that transforming schools from ordinary, therefore, requires at least telling a different story based on the narratives and stories of teachers, students, and members of the community who envision a more socially just place called school.

The chapter by Chappell and Cahnmann-Taylor showcases arts-based scholarship and pedagogy that strives to humanize education by engaging in sustained, local, and critical practices in school and communities. The literature they review supports the inclusion of the arts in and out of schools to expand critical awareness of an increasingly diverse world; to challenge stereotypes, misconceptions, and ignorance; and to promote collaboration among teachers, students, and members of the communities served in schools. They argue forcefully that school, community, and public arts-based activities are a valuable way for disrupting the deficit scripts and for promoting more socially aware and socially just citizens.

Palmer and Martínez discuss teacher agency and the preparation of teachers of emergent bilingual students, especially of Latino/a students, the nation’s largest bilingual population. In their review of the literature, Palmer and Martínez acknowledge that although much of what goes on in schools is geared to high-stakes standardized assessment preparation, they find evidence for many potential spaces to promote bilingualism and language development. Their review found that entering these spaces requires a fundamental rethinking of traditional notions of what bilingualism means in communities and schools, of how language positioning works, and of what it means to invest in language practices. Finally, the literature review led them to conclude that teachers and teacher educators need to think beyond language to examine the broader questions of race, poverty, and class to make truly transformative changes in how language-as-a-local-practice happens in schools.

In the final chapter, Bunch reviews the literature on the practices that “mainstream” teachers and teacher educators have been taught to use with English learners and then presents a strong argument for the development of pedagogical language knowledge that all teachers need to have and be able to use to engage and support English learners. Bunch reviews an assortment of new approaches to understanding language as a social practice, that build teachers’ understandings of language as action, doing and using language in academic contexts for interacting, interpreting, and showing understanding within the content areas.

Overall, the narrative these chapters suggest is that extraordinary pedagogies are not only possible but also necessary to interrupt and challenge the current educational establishment that has attempted to refocus attention on learning outcomes, without taking into accounts the larger issues of race, class, poverty, and language. In this volume, our goal has been to provide readers with an array of efforts that open up possibilities for transforming schooling to make schooling experiences better for all children, regardless of their ethnic, class, and language backgrounds. Doing so, we argue, requires extraordinary pedagogies.