Negotiating Displacement Spaces: Exploring Teachers' Stories About Learning and Diversity

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to explore the learning of six in‐service U.S. teachers who engaged in a cross‐cultural learning experience during the summer of 2001. The teachers were enrolled in a graduate seminar conducted in English and entitled “Literacy Across Languages and Cultures.” Cindy (the first author of this manuscript) was the course instructor. The primary emphasis of the course was exploring current conceptions of quality literacy instruction for children from diverse backgrounds in mainstream U. S. classrooms. One credit of the three‐credit course was conducted on WebCT in the United States. Two credits of the course were conducted at the Universidid Nacional in Heredia, Costa Rica. The teachers who were enrolled in the course lived with Costa Rican families for the month that they were studying in Costa Rica. In this investigation we sought to explore what we learned about literacy instruction for students from diverse backgrounds from course readings, one another, and a cross‐cultural experience in Costa Rica. Our experiences positioned us to reexamine our own cultural frames of reference and our thinking about instructing children in our classrooms whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds are different from ours.