Julia Carboni

EDUC 517

Classroom Discourse & Interaction

12/11/2016

Connecting Multicultural Identities to Notions of Success: Creating a Student-Centered

Curriculum in a High-Stakes Testing Classroom

While I was leading a college admissions panel at Moder Patshalas SAT Program this

year, a young Bangladeshi-American girl asked me a question: How much do you think race

matters in a college application? At first, I felt this question should have a simple answer,

namely that colleges and universities across the country value diversity and desire a student body

which represents students from highly varying backgrounds. However, as I began to answer, I

thought about the nature of the question and the large-scale context in which it was situated. Our

class had just completed a discussion of the implications of the most recent election, and in this

space the issues of immigration, citizenship, and deportation had been brought up by concerned

students. Unfortunately, occasions to discuss student concerns of this nature are typically few

and far between in high-stakes testing environments such as my own class, due to the emphasis

placed on preparing students for the test. Furthermore, the SATs and other high-stakes

standardized tests traditionally assume that the student populations they assess are relatively

homogenous, sharing common knowledge about topics ranging from Western history and politics

to advanced math topics. I argue that many of these assumptions reflect mainstream schooling

practices in the U.S which emphasize knowledge privileging White American culture in the

classroom. Often, this testing-shaped curriculum serves to limit voices of diverse students,

viewing all other forms of knowledge as illegitimate in classroom spaces.

 Although the SAT was most likely developed to provide an unbiased assessment of

college readiness, many exercises within the test assume an uncanny knowledge of the American

political system, and heavily favor White American cultural norms. However, test preparation

materials generally neglect to address this imbalance, and even posit: Prior topic-specific

knowledge is never tested, insisting that all students need to score well is good reading skills

and the material provided by the test (College Board 2016). Teachers of SAT preparation

programs therefore spend most of their time teaching to the test, creating a rigid test-centered

curriculum.

Some argue that students should review test materials without deviation to best prepare

them for the academic literacies they are likely to encounter in college and optimize their

chances for success. I argue, however, that by placing SAT scores as a gatekeeping mechanism to

the abstract notion of success, we are positioning our multicultural students, especially those

with less experience with these types of literacies, as unsuccessful or lacking knowledge. This

social distancing may serve to further isolate these students from mainstream classroom

practices, and by extension from pursuing a post-secondary education. My question then

becomes, how do you create spaces for students voice to hold value in a high-stakes testing

classroom? And, how do you connect their multicultural identities to notions of success, when

essayist literacies are heavily favored in the admissions process, and intelligence is measured in

arbitrary ways? In this paper, I analyze two separate speech events to discuss how multicultural

student knowledge can be either incorporated or silenced in a testing-focused curriculum.

Poole defines essayist literacies as the type of written language often associated with

school literacy and characterized by an impersonal, decontextualized presentation of factual

information (2008: 378). A common assumption underlying these literacies posits that
additional context does not need to be provided for readers to comprehend the text, but rather can

be decoded or read between the lines(Trimbur 1990, as cited in Poole 2008). This definition

of literacy overlaps with Streets (1984) concept of autonomous literacy, which privileges one

social formation (e.g., various forms of religion, schooling or the state) as if it were natural,

universal, or at the least, the end point of a normal developmental progression (as cited in Gee

2015: 39). Such positions limit the view of literacy as socially constructed and situated in

different contexts, and fail to acknowledge the privileged viewpoints which essayist literacies

promulgate. However, essayist and autonomous views of literacy dominate most U.S.

classrooms, and thus impose these viewpoints on increasingly diverse student populations.

According to Scollon & Scollon (1981), autonomous views of literacy may lead to an

effacement of individual and idiosyncratic identity, as essayist literacies do not allow for diverse

interpretations of the values they transmit (as cited in Gee 2015: 51). This is especially true in

classrooms like my own, where a member of the majority culture transmits privileged forms of

decontextualized literacy to members of minoritized cultures. For a more complex understanding

of how this type of literacy functions in high-stakes testing classrooms, I turn to a speech event

from my own classroom.

Discourse Analysis

The first speech event I analyze for this paper illuminates a highly decontextualized form

of literacy used to prepare for the SAT reading test. In this excerpt, I lead the class in a teacher-

centered discussion of a multiple-choice question corresponding to a political reading passage.

The excerpt begins with a typical essayist literacy event, in which read-aloud turns are used as

text displays (see Poole 2008):

Let's go over the material then? So without looking at the back

1 Julia (4:23) (.) u:m
2 let's go over the question. In lines 49 to 54 (.) what is the most
 likely
reason Jordan draws a distinction between two types of parties?
3 Can I
4 have a volunteer to read (.) u:h lines 49 to 54 please?
5 ((Sayda raises hand))
6 Julia: Go ahead.
((reading)) U::h (.) prosecutions of impeachments will seldom
7 Sayda: fail to agitate the
passions of the whole community (.) said Hamilton, in the
8 federalist
papers number 65 (.) we divide into parties (.) more or less
9 friendly (.) or
1 Inim-inimical to the accused. I do not mean (.) political parties
0 in that
1
1 sense.
1
2 Julia: Perfect. Ok.

In the passage above, we see a text display embedded within a larger Initiation-Response-

Evaluation (IRE) turn-taking sequence (Mehan 1985; Rymes 2015), in which I ask the student to

read aloud and subsequently evaluate their display of the text. According to Poole, these types of

text displays serve to make the text more central to interaction than the reader, making the

student a kind of speaker or animator for the author (2008: 387). This interaction can be

illustrated using Goffmans production format (1981, as cited in Rymes 2015) in the table below:

Utterance Animator Author Principle/Belief

Initiation: Can I have a Julia Julia Julia/ Text should be
volunteer to read (.) u:h lines displayed.
49 to 54 please?

Response: prosecutions of Sayda Hamilton, Jordan SAT Test Excerpt/This

impeachments will seldom (speechmaker) excerpt is relevant to the
fail corresponding question.

Evaluation: Perfect. Julia Julia Educational Expectations/

Text should be read in a
certain way.

This turn-taking pattern shows how the interpretation of the text is already being constrained

from the start, posed as a known-answer question rather than being open to students unique
interpretations. This is largely due to the multiple-choice nature of the question being posed, as is

illustrated in the following sequence:

1 Perfect. Ok. So. With that being said, what is the most likely
2 Julia: reason
1 Jordan draws a distinction between two types of parties? What
3 did you
1
4 guys come up with answers? What did you guys say?
1
5 ((students murmuring in background))
1
6 Sayda: Uh
1
7 Julia Go ahead.
1
8 Sayda: We were confused with A and D
1
9 Julia: A and D?
2
0 Sayda: So I think we decided to go with A
2
1 Julia: A?
2
2 Sayda: Mhm
2 To counter the suggestion that impeachment is or should be
3 Julia: about
2 partisan politics. (2.0) that's correct. Ok. How many people said
4 A?
2
5 Raise your hands. A. Ok.

The discussion here is limited by the multiple-choice nature of the known-answer question in

lines 12-14. Rather than giving students the agency to interpret the text based on their own

knowledge, the corresponding questions suggest that there is only one correct way to analyze the

text, which is defined within the text itself. This format exhibits key characteristics of

autonomous literacies, which posit that the correct interpretation of a text comes from the

perspective of an authoritative or privileged institution (Gee 2015: 30). This notion of literacy is

not only problematic in limiting students responses, but also in making assumptions about what

constitutes common knowledge and what can be omitted from a text. For example, after
further probing students about their understanding of the passage, I discovered that they were

unfamiliar with key terms and concepts used throughout the reading:

7 It's like the reason that people try to impeach a president, right?
2 Julia: So
7 someone is impeached because of partisan politics. What does
3 that
7
4 mean? (6.0) Anybody? What does partisan mean? (1.0) it's a
7
5 political word. Right have you guys heard it before?
7
6 Sayda: No.
7 No? Partisan? Ok. Umm: when you hear partisan (.) what does it
7 Julia: sound
7
8 like?
7
9 Karim: Separated?

From the example above, it appears that students do not understand the political context of the

word partisan, even though this word is essential to understanding the posed question.

Additionally, students resisted demonstrating their knowledge on the U.S. political system,

giving one to two-word responses only when I directly elicited them.

Obama is the president right? Do we know what political party

98 Julia: he's
99 affiliated with?
10
0 Student: Democrat?
10 Democrat. Right? Ok. So (.) U::m Obama is a democrat, but
1 Julia: Congress (.)
10
2 is everyone in Congress a democrat?
10
3 Student: No.
10
4 Julia: No? There also republicans there too right? And right now (.)
10 ((slowly)) Republicans have control (2.0) of the house. Is
5 everybody: is
10
6 everybody familiar with the Congress setup?
10
7 Saiem: House of rep?
10 Julia: Huh?
 8
10
9 Saiem: House of rep?
11
0 Julia: Yeah. house of repub- u:h representatives right. So. Is everybody
11 familiar with that? Like the congress setup (.) house of (.)
1 representatives
11 and senate. No? Ok. So u:m (.) essentially (.) congress has two
2 parts.

Even though the SAT claims to assess students on their intelligence, and not necessarily

on prior knowledge, my students response to this question (or lack thereof) demonstrates their

unfamiliarity (or at least unwillingness to discuss) the U.S. political system. Many of the students

attending this class had only recently immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh, with

some arriving only one month prior to this excerpt. These students backgrounds directly contrast

with the idea that the SAT is somehow a test of common knowledge, and exposes its assumptions

of American cultural norms for test-takers.

However, not all students were silenced due to lack of knowledge in these areas. In fact,

many of my students had grown up in the United States as second-generation immigrants. Their

lack of participation may be due to the essayist nature of the text, which presupposes a correct

singular answer. This format, coupled with a teacher-centric participant structure effectively

limited student interaction.

However, not all interaction in the SAT class necessarily follows these structures. When a

more student-centered discussion format is used to give students space to express their own

political beliefs, they were able to display extensive knowledge of the political system through

examples of popular culture and their lives outside the classroom. The following excerpts are

taken from a discussion prompted by the election results, taking place on the Saturday following

the 2016 presidential election:

23 Sayda: Did you vote?

24 Julia: I did vote. (2.0) just not for Donald Trump.
25 ((students laughing))
So: (.) I was kind of mad (.) when (.) u:m (.) he won in
26 Julia: Pennsylvania (.) //[because I

27 Sayda: [yeah I know

28 Julia: was like no I voted!
29 ((students laughing))
30 ((Julia laughs))
it depends/ I guess like (.) the other states/ I-I mean Philadelphia
31 Sayda: voted for Hillary
32 Clinton, but I guess //[it was the other st-cities that surround here
33 Julia: [yeah.
yeah. Or like/ yeah (.) I think //[(.) this si:de of Pennsylvania: (.)
34 over here is really
35 Sadit: [()
36 Julia: different from //[this side of Pennsylvania?
37 Sayda: [ye:ah ((laughs))
Mahmudu It's //[like-It's like u:h Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and like one other
38 l: area
39 Israt: [there was the suburbs that ()
Mahmudu
40 l: //[and then everything else was Trump.

In the excerpt above, I open the floor for discussion by indexing a less teacher-like stance, using

humor and other youth-like repertoires to set the tone of the discussion. Students demonstrate

that they are aware of how partisanship divides geographic voting districts, even though they

were unwilling to display this knowledge in the previous interaction. Additionally, one student

supplements her interpretation of the different voting trends with a narrative of her own

experience outside the classroom:

5
2 Sayda: [I mean I had-I had like a debate tournament (.)
5 Mahmud
3 ul: [The west? Oh.
5 So then we had to go o:n this side of Pennsylvania right? And like/
4 Sayda: there was like
5
5 Trump Pence signs every//[where.]
Students also exhibited awareness of the ways that the election had been re-contextualized and

redistributed via pop culture:

6 Mahmud
6 ul: Did you know the Simpsons predicted ()?
6
7 Israt: Yeah!
6
8 Sayda: Yeah!
6
9 Israt: I saw that one.
7
0 Julia: What?
7 The Simpsons? I think like in 2000 they had an episode where
1 Sayda: Donald Trump's
7
2 president, and then like
7
3 Julia: ((laughing)) oh my god!
7
4 Sayda: It happened now ((teasingly))
7 ((laughte
5 r))
7
6 Israt: U:m they u:m said something else and that happened too.
7
7 Sadit: ()
7
8 Sayda: ((speaking Bangla))
7 Mahmud
9 ul: They predicted the map and everything.

These speech events differ in several ways. The first event focused on a decontextualized

reading passage and a corresponding known-answer question, invoking a teacher-centered

participant structure. This structure values the knowledge of the teacher and the institution, rather

than incorporating all of the students perspectives. The second excerpt varies drastically from

this format, drawing on students lived experiences to elicit student responses, generating a very

student-centered discussion. The participant structures of these interactions can be graphed

accordingly:

Decontextualized speech event: T-T-T-T-S1-T-S1-S1-S1-S1-T-T-T-S1-T-S1-T

 Contextualized speech event: S1-T-T-S1-T-S1-S1-T-S2-T-S1-S3-S4-S3-S1-S3

As illustrated in the diagrams above, the decontextualized speech event centers around teacher

discourse, limiting student participation. Only one or two students in the first activity are actively

participating, albeit through procedural display (see Bloome, Puro & Theodorou 1989). In

contrast, the second interaction facilitates a student-centered group discussion, drawing on

multiple perspectives and only occasionally involving the teacher. This participation structure

allows for the co-construction of knowledge among students, valuing the diverse perspectives

they bring to the table. However, this participation structure does not necessarily guarantee the

inclusion of all students voices. Teachers should moderate these discussions to a certain extent

to ensure that students are not marginalized and that the class remains a safe space. For example,

Israt, although participating at first, is effectively silenced by one of her own classmates in the

following interaction:

10
2 Sayda: Who's not a citizen yet?
10
3 Israt: ((timidly)) Me.
10
4 Sayda: Ok. Bye. ((laughs))

Even though Sayda brings up a legitimate concern facing immigrant students (the risk of

deportation), her comments inadvertently distance Israt from the conversation. It is also

important to note that this conversation was mainly dominated by students who are less

marginalized by the U.S. political system. This is a challenge to overcome, since we as teachers

want to position all our students as powerful agents in the classroom. In this case, to avoid

silencing students experiences surrounding immigration, I offer the following consolation:

12 Yeah. So I can-I can say how I feel/ like I feel (1.0) kind of worried/
2 Julia: but I also know
12 that like (.) a:s (.) someone who: like (.) is friends with lots of (.)
3 people from all
12 over the world and (.) different races I can like (.) you know/ use my
4 voice to (.)
12 protect and try and like at least help in some ways? U:m so I'm
5 trying to move on a
12 little bit/ but I know for some people it's harder to move on because
6 it affects
12
7 them more directly.
12
8 ?: //[yeah]
12 [Like I know like (.) what he says is not gonna like (.) make me super
9 Julia: scared when I
13 go outside my house necessarily? But (.) I am worried for my friends
0 a little bit. But
13
1 I will be there. And if you guys have any //[issues]
13
2 ((whispering))
13
3 Julia: You can always let me know and I'll try to help.

Discussion

Based on the discourse analyses presented above, I propose incorporating student

knowledge in the classroom to increase participation and to make curriculum meaningful to their

lives. However, the method of doing so remains contested. According to Rymes deference-

denial model of mass media and schooling (2010), teachers can either appreciate students

outside knowledge for its intrinsic value, or they can view this knowledge as a means to develop

more academic proficiencies. I believe, however, that these viewpoints need not be mutually

exclusive, and that teachers can create spaces to legitimate student experiences in official

classroom discourse while also making connections to the course material. In this way, teachers

can position student knowledge as a resource both for learning test material as well as for

important identity work. By centering test preparation coursework on student aspirations and

notions of success, teachers can make the test more relevant.

 Thus, there needs to be a balance between privileged decontextualized literacies and

individual student needs. While teachers may continue to use traditional test preparation

materials, they should also offer opportunities for students to critically observe these materials

for what they are - culturally-situated, normative assessments. Students should recognize that

SAT tests focus on a very specific measure of privileged knowledge, and while their SAT scores

are important, they are not the only factor going into their college applications. Teachers must

provide spaces to explore students multicultural identities, either through the college essay or

extracurricular activities to contextualize and value students unique perspectives. After all,

teachers are not simply dispensaries of knowledge, but are ultimately responsible for helping

students grow and shaping their identities in a positive way.

References

Bloome, D., Puro, P., & Theodorou, E. (1989). Procedural display and classroom lessons.

Curriculum Inquiry 19(3): 265-291.

College Board (2016). Inside the Test: Reading Test. Retrieved from

https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/inside-the-test/reading

Gee, J.P. (2015). Literacy and Education. New York, NY: Routledge.

Mehan, H. (1985). The structure of classroom discourse. Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol.

3: Discourse and Dialogue.

Poole, D. (2008). The messiness of language socialization in reading groups: Participation in and

resistance to the values of essayist literacy. Linguistics and Education 19(1), 378-403.

Rymes, B. (2010). Deference, denial, and beyond: A repertoire approach to mass media and

schooling. 2011. Review of Research in Education 35(1): 208-238.

Rymes, B. (2015). Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Tool for Critical Reflection. New York, NY:

Routledge.