Developing an educational practice from a sociocultural perspective on literacy: Self-study of a hearing teacher of Icelandic in deaf education

Abstract

In this article I describe a three year long self-study in which I explored my educational practices as a hearing teacher of Icelandic in deaf education. The purpose of this study was to harness a sociocultural perspective on literacy in order to draw on students’ linguistic and cultural resources in practice. The aim of the study was to highlight incidents within the classroom to explore in what ways circumstances and educational practices either provided students with, or hindered, opportunities to draw on their linguistic and cultural resources in their learning. The theoretical foundation of this study was a sociocultural perspective on literacy and deaf education, more specifically the notion of big D-Discourses and multimodality.

The data collected were participant observation, a research journal, half-open interviews with parents and students, and students’ assignments. Analyzing the data, I utilized the concepts of literacy events and literacy practices (Barton & Hamilton, 2000) identifying significant literacy events in order to explore and work with underlying literacy practices. Through the analytical process I identified three themes: events characterized by tension or resistance, events characterized by amazement or confusion, events characterized by students’ active participation.

The findings of the study illustrate that in order to draw on students’ linguistic and cultural resources during instructional time it is important for the teacher to recognize and work with conflicting ideas about reading and writing within the school, develop and sustain a learning community within the classroom which welcomes students’ different resources and to recognize students’ agency within the learning process. The findings of this study further demonstrate the importance of writing in deaf students’ learning of the written form of Icelandic.

I entered this self-study with the intention of basing my literacy instruction on deaf students’ literacy practices. I brought to the task the NLS perspective for looking at and grappling with the reality of the classroom. This self-study reveals that the greatest challenge in developing educational practices informed by sociocultural theories of literacy was scrutinizing the educational Discourses I enacted (Gee, 2005, 2008) as a way to make a space for alternative literacy practices and experiences to emerge within the classroom. By carefully documenting and analyzing the first-hand experiences within the classroom, I came to recognize how my educational practices were mediated through an institutional Discourse that reflected the very notion of literacy that I wanted to avoid replicating, one that reinforced educational practices that marginalized students’ literacy practices within the classroom. Consequently, if I wanted to avoid emphasizing literacy as the acquisition of a predetermined skill and instead enable students to negotiate their identities as readers and writers by drawing on their resources, I needed to do more than modify my ideas about literacy and literacy education. I also needed to examine how the Big-D Discourses shaping the educational setting foster or hinder students’ ability to draw upon their literacy practices. To explore how I drew upon students’ literacy practices through my teaching, it was necessary to develop, negotiate, and sustain a learning community that would preserve students’ agency in developing their identities as readers and writers. As instruction became more meaningful, I began to notice how students’ learning of written Icelandic was not limited to the linguistic mode or to being able to translate Icelandic Sign Language into written Icelandic. Rather, students’ increased sense of agency within the learning process enabled them to draw on multiple modes of meaning-making in their search for written signifiers that could convey the meaning they wanted to express in writing, as in the examples of Melkorka’s composition process. In this way the fundamental writing task that individual students confronted changed from “How do I say what I mean?” to “What can represent what I mean and how can I use the resources available to find a written signifier that will capture that meaning?” The latter question shifts the focus to writing as a mediated activity occurring within a sociocultural context. This shift draws attention to the vital role writing can play in providing deaf students with greater opportunities for accessing written Icelandic. When the students were able to communicate their intended meaning through multiple material and representational resources, the written signifiers that emerged were already imbued with their meaning. The implication of this self-study research is that instead of pressing words on students and forcing them to use words in hearing ways, the literacy instruction of children who are deaf needs to engage with students’ ways of being and acting in the world and to provide them with opportunities to immerse themselves in the written language through the resources already available to them. In this way, we can enable students to build a bridge from their resources to the written language, thereby facilitating their understanding of these same written signifiers when they encounter them while reading.