The “New Mainstream” (2011) as conceived by UC Davis language and literacy scholar, Kerry Anne Enright, takes issue with the labels and categories that the traditional educational paradigm uses to identify and make judgments about student growth and progress. These assumptions might not be representative of all students, especially those who are traditionally out of the normed, mainstream of American schooling.
Enright posits that the categories and labels might even be contributing to the problem of the perceived “achievement gap” when students language and literacy practices express hybridity including identities they pick up outside of school, within their home cultures or expressed via a language other than English. Enright rightly questions whether schools are addressing these students’ individual needs in their zeal to standardize curriculum and remediation. In order to understand these labels and categories, Enright defines academic language and makes a case that individual students’ academic language might be more complex and nuanced, specifically for those students in linguistically diverse classrooms.
Enright establishes her theoretical framework in her multiple case study by drawing from multiple readings of Luke (2003; 2004; Albright & Luke, 2008) and Bourdieu (1989, 1991), who expanded on the socio-cultural focused, New Literacy Studies. These theories are grounded in “language, diversity, and equity” (p. 86). She cites Gee’s “shape-shifting portfolio people” who are “hybrid, transportable, and cosmopolitan in nature” (2004) to show how the concept of literate and literacies are changing. Luke’s (2003) portmanteau, “glocalized” to express the notion that students move between global and local literacy practices depending on where they are situated and in what context they are existing. Enright recounts language as both a “problem and a promise” (p. 87) by detailing how researchers and educators use language to talk “about” students, potentially reproducing inequities of power relations especially when making assumptions of the language used by the students when examined through “conventional dichotomous lenses that privilege a mythical ‘standard’ while neglecting the resources inherent to any child’s home language experience” (p. 87). She takes up these issues using the research question: How did young people of the New Mainstream use language and literacy throughout the planning, researching, drafting, and presenting of their year-long Senior Exhibition projects?
Enright provides thick description of the context of the setting of her multi-case study. She details how and why she chose the particular setting, how she narrowed down the participants and how the case was bounded by three specific students undertaking the same year-long research writing experience. She detailed her biases, explaining how the study was originally going to be a study on writing and why the study evolved into an examination of students’ literacy and language practices.
Detailed demographics were provided for the participants, the school, and the community, for the reader to understand where the cases were situated and to derive an understanding of who the participants are both in and out of school. An extensive, exhaustive, organized, and comprehensive member checked methodology ensured that the data culled from the experience would express an honest picture of the participants’ lived experiences. Enright made 68 visits to the school, made observation field notes, completed semi-structured interviews, conducted surveys, collected artifacts for document analysis, and used Yin’s Cross-case analysis to examine the trends in the data. Enright coded her data using open, axial and selected coding for emerging themes and patterns. For each situation, she kept in mind, “What is this a case of?” This question assisted her in interpreting the data within the lens of academic language and literacy as well as the concepts of the New Mainstream, a term that Enright, herself, coined. The data analysis recursively allowed the researcher to determine follow up questions and avenues of query. Enright also provided class rank, English grade, and project grade in chart form for all the featured students and identified those for this specific case study.
Enright found that had a typical researcher or teacher simply labeled and classified these three students in the multi-case study, he or she would have determined that two were successful in their language and literacy practices and one was in need of remediation. However, from the lens of the New Mainstream, the male participant, a Caucasian, understood what teachers wanted and acquiesced to do so even though he took shortcuts and took pains to “hide what he had not learned.” As the son of a teacher, he had been socialized to perform a certain way in the classroom. The first of the two EL students completed a successful paper but it was focused more on the structure and the process of the research instead of the content and the product. The student herself foregrounded some of these aspects as she selected an English teacher as a mentor instead of someone in the community and kept her questions to the structure of the paper, rather than taking on a more robust inquiry. She even chose a safe topic, one that she had seen demonstrated to her in a panel discussion the previous year. The final student had the least proficient level of traditional language and literacy but seemed to take up a transformative social justice project and reach the level of inquiry truly intended by the school and the teacher. Enright noticed that the teacher asked higher order thinking questions of this student. Other students noticed that this student was receiving accommodations due to her language skills, yet among the three, this student’s paper showed the most growth.
Enright defines “mainstream” to show how the typical “mainstream” student, the boy, was exhibiting non-mainstream literacy and language practices. One of the EL students was reflecting the stereotypical apprenticed BIC language and literacy practices, while the other exhibited CALP practices even though she was more of a newcomer to the US and made more convention errors within the text of her research report. When using the socio-cultural lens of diversity for analysis, one realizes that Academic English can be reflected in myriad ways. She uses this data to make her case for contemporary teachers to acknowledge the ‘talents, perspectives, and unique experiences that students with diverse backgrounds bring to classroom settings. She also advocated for flexible instructional practices with connections to students’ home language and literacy experiences. She cautioned that oversimplifying and focusing too much on standards at the expense of building relationships with students and addressing their hybrid literacies.
Enright makes a convincing argument by presenting a clear, comprehensive, and consistent narrative, extensive background grounded in rational and reasonable theory, and an exhaustive and detailed data collection and analysis. Milner’s article “Beyond a Test Score: Explaining Opportunity Gaps in Educational Practice” (2011) as well as the later chapters of Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education (2011), caution researchers and policymakers not to put so much credence in standardized tests. Enright’s study provides the detailed proof that all students literacy and language practices are more nuanced and might only reveal themselves in a longitudinal study that allows for students’ unique talents and experiences.
References
Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world and education: How America’s commitment to equity will determine our future. New York: Teachers College Press.
Enright, K. A. (2010). Language and Literacy for a New Mainstream. American Educational Research Journal, 48(1), 80-118. doi:10.3102/0002831210368989
Milner, I. H. (2012). Beyond a Test Score: Explaining Opportunity Gaps in Educational Practice. Journal of Black Studies, 43(6), 693-718. Retrieved June 20, 2015, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/23414665?ref=no-x-route:42a6ac727bc0fc1a4cb3c9544f1a4d5a