Walls, Bridges, Borders, Papers: Civic Literacy in the Borderlands

Leah Durán University of Arizona ; Michelle Aguilera University of California, Santa Cruz

Abstract

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

Journal
Research in the Teaching of English
Published
2022-11-15
DOI
10.58680/rte202232153
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. Research in the Teaching of English
  2. Research in the Teaching of English

References (75) · 1 in this index

  1. American Civil Liberties Union
    ACLU factsheet on Customs and Border Protection’s 100-mile zone
  2. Borderlands—la frontera: The new mestiza
  3. Arizona’s English language arts standards: 3rd grade
  4. High-stakes testing and curricular control: A qualitative metasynthesis
    Educational Researcher  
  5. We were marching for our equal rights”: Political literacies in the early childhood classroom
    Found in translation: How language shapes our lives and transforms the world  
Show all 75 →
  1. For a better world: Reading and writing for social action
  2. Relating policy to research and practice: The Common Core Standards
    Language Arts
  3. Critical fictions of transnationalism in Latinx children’s literature
    Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature  
  4. Melania modeled in the US prior to getting work visa
    AP News
  5. Toward a pedagogy of border thinking: Building on Latin@ students’ subaltern knowledge
    The High School Journal  
  6. Let’s go there: Making a case for race, ethnicity, and a lived civics approach to civic education
  7. The Trump effect: The impact of the presidential campaign on our nation’s schools
  8. Black ants and Buddhists: Thinking critically and teaching differently in the primary grades
  9. Culture and power in the classroom: A critical foundation for bicultural education
  10. Practices and commitments of test-centric literacy instruction: Lessons from a testing tr…
    Reading Research Quarterly  
  11. Border literacies: A critical literacy framework from Nepantla
    The Handbook of Critical Literacies  
  12. Literacies of refuge: “Pidiendo Posada” as ritual of justice
    Journal of Literacy Research  
  13. Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education
  14. Note to educators: Hope required when growing roses in concrete
    Harvard Educational Review  
  15. Contesting cultural control: Youth culture and online petitioning
    Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth
  16. Writing ethnographic fieldnotes
  17. Multigenerational punishment: Shared experiences of undocumented immigration status withi…
    Journal of Marriage and Family  
  18. Activists and writers: Student expression in a social action literacy project
    Language Arts
  19. Diles la ver- dad”: Deportation policies, politicized funds of knowledge, and schooling i…
    Harvard Educational Review  
  20. Bordering work in contemporary political discourse: The case of the US/Mexico border wall…
    Discourse & Society  
  21. Electing to heal: Trauma, healing, and politics in classrooms
    English Education  
  22. Dear future president of the United States”: Analyzing youth civic writing within the 201…
    American Educational Research Journal  
  23. Signifying nothing”: Identifying conceptions of youth civic identity in the English langu…
    Berkeley Review of Education  
  24. GRETCHEN WHITMER, Nos. 18-1855/ 1871 (6th Cir. 2020)
  25. The laundromat as the transnational local: Young children’s literacies of interdependence
    Teachers College Record  
  26. Coloniality and education: Negotiating discourses of immigration in schools and communiti…
    Equity & Excellence in Education  
  27. Youth, social justice, and communities: Toward a theory of urban youth policy
    Social Justice
  28. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research
  29. Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms
  30. Cultures are more hybrid than identifications: A dialogue on borders from the Southern Cone
    Latino Studies  
  31. Developing a socio- critical literacy in the third space
    Reading Research Quarterly  
  32. Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice
    Educational Researcher  
  33. The freedom schools: Student activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement
  34. Schooling and the everyday ruptures transnational children encounter in the United States…
    Everyday ruptures: Children, youth, and migration in global perspective  
  35. Controversies about controversial issues in democratic education
    PS: Political Science & Politics
  36. As the test collapses in”: Teaching and learning amid high-stakes testing in two urban el…
    Urban Education
  37. Slate Magazine
    Read 5-year-old Sophie Cruz’s eloquent, emotional letter to Pope Francis
  38. Race-ing through the school day: African American educators’ experiences with race and ra…
    International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22  
  39. High quality civic education: What is it and who gets it?
    Social Education
  40. The Gloria Anzald ú a Reader
  41. Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy
    American Educational Research Journal  
  42. A culturally based cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching African American high school studen…
    Reading Research Quarterly  
  43. 10.4324/9781315692715
    Asset pedagogies in Latino youth identity and achievement: Nurturing confianza  
  44. Good kids, mad cities: Kendrick Lamar and finding inner resistance in response to FergusonUSA
    Cultural Studies → Critical Methodologies  
  45. Intersectionality and possibility in the lives of Latina/o/x children of immigrants: Imag…
    Occasional Paper Series, 2018
  46. Reading through linguistic borderlands: Latino students’ transactions with narrative texts
    Journal of Early Childhood Literacy  
  47. A field guide to Trump’s dangerous rhetoric
    The Conversation
  48. Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation
  49. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking
  50. A quality of imagination: Young people show us “what’s next” in ELA
    Voices from the Middle  
  51. A critical discourse analysis of Donald Trump’s language use in the US presidential campa…
    International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature  
  52. Reading for the enslaved, writing for the free: Reflections on liberty and literacy
    Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society
  53. A plea for identity and criticality: Reframing literacy learning standards through a four…
    Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy  
  54. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures
    Harvard Educational Review  
  55. A brief history of bilingual education in the United States
    Perspectives on Urban Education
  56. No room for silence: The impact of the 2016 presidential election on a second-grade dual-…
    Occasional Paper Series  
  57. La calle: Spatial conflicts and urban renewal in a Southwest city.
  58. Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice
    Educational Researcher  
  59. Learning to read and write genre-specific text: Roles of authentic experience and explici…
    Reading Research Quarterly  
  60. Structural vulnerability and health: Latino migrant laborers in the United States
    Medical Anthropology  
  61. Teaching and learning in the age of Trump: Increasing stress and hostility in America’s h…
  62. Cultural citizenship and democracy
    Cultural Anthropology  
  63. A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey …
    Review of Research in Education  
  64. Advancing border pedagogies: Understandings of citizenship through comparisons of home to…
    The High School Journal  
  65. Spectacular things happen along the way: Lessons from an urban classroom
  66. The Wall Street Journal
  67. The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice
  68. 10.4324/9781315848624
    Negotiating critical literacies with young children  
  69. Written Communication
  70. Politics and patriotism in education
    Phi Delta Kappan