Transformative Pedagogies: The Design of "Discourses" and Discourse Practices in Educational Programs that WorkSarah Michaels, The Jacob Hiatt Centre for Urban Education, Clark University. AbstractThis paper looks in broad strokes at a set of innovative educational programs: Fostering a Community of Learners, the Number Worlds Project, and Puente, all of which were specifically designed to support both access and high levels of academic achievment for under-represented students (at elementary, middle school, and junior college levels). The programs are discussed in light of the pedagogical practices called for in a "Pedagogy for Multiliteracies": situated practice; overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice, asking whether a set of principles can be drawn from these locally divergent success stories. The paper then characterizes, in more depth, the discourse practices in one particular program -- The Investigators Club -- which was designed as an after-school research site to instantiate and better theorize the principles behind a pedagogy for multiliteracies. Here, we can look at the actual discourse practices and ways that talk in different activities facilitate the acquisition of an identity (as a thinker) and the acquisition of particular academic tools and concepts. Taken together, the paper addresses the complexity of transformative learning environments as "forms of life" or as "Discourses" (with a capital-D) as well as the moment-to-moment discourse practices that animate teachers and learners in a coherent community of practice. |
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