The (Im)possibilities of constructing multicultural language practices in research and pedagogy

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This paper examines the possibilities and challenges encountered in developing and researching more democratic language practices in a first/second grade classroom serving a heterogeneous community. Two university researchers and a school-based teacher researcher collaborated in developing strategies for family participation in language arts instruction and conducted ethnographic research on language practices during family visits in the classroom. Drawing on sociolinguistic, critical, and poststructural conceptualizations of language practices, the authors use the notion of hybridity to frame a way of understanding multicultural classroom language practices as creating spaces where new, hybrid practices may be constructed out of dialogue across different practices. Microanalyses based on Bloome and Egan-Robertson's (1993) approach to the social construction of intertextuality allow researchers to make visible the negotiation of multiple practices during classroom interaction. The authors draw on such microanalyses and consultation with cultural insiders to describe the broad patterns of interaction during family visits and to provide a close textual analysis of the visit of one Puerto Rican family. The discussion of this visit explores the negotiation of tensions involving the nature of the event, the social identities of participants, and differences in cultural ideologies. The analysis shows that both participants and researchers struggled to make sensible, respectful readings of each other but were sometimes drawing on contradictory discourses that led to incomprehensibility and misreadings. Although creating spaces for dialogue across difference entails moments of discomfort and vulnerability, the authors argue that examining and reflecting on these moments of incomprehensibilty opens up the potential for constructing a more democratic pedagogy.