‘We’ve been doing it your way long enough’: Syncretism as a critical process

Abstract

This article takes a new look at issues of marginalization and equity in literacy practice by focusing on the concept of syncretism and teachers’ creation of opportunities for young children to draw on knowledge from multiple worlds as, together, they construct new texts, contexts and practices. Recognizing that the strengths and needs of too many students from minoritized communities are not being met, this piece draws attention to the importance of teachers’ appreciation of syncretism as a powerful learning process for challenging discriminatory and exclusionary practices. Drawing on theories of syncretism, and critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, the authors introduce critical syncretism as a process in which teachers and children privilege traditions and practices typically marginalized in schools for the purpose of supporting achievement and broadening worldviews. The article provides examples from two primary-grade classrooms illustrating ways that the teachers made specific moves to change classroom power structures. Whereas White, middle-class, Standard English ways of knowing had been privileged by the school district’s choice of instructional materials and recommendations for teaching practice, the teachers’ new practices opened up possibilities for syncretism by embracing knowledge, languages, traditions and practices from students’ homes, communities and African heritage, as well as from school.

Keywords

African American childhood cultures home and school pedagogies classroom practice home–school practices critical literacy events cultural diversity culturally responsive pedagogy early childhood literacy sociocultural literacies

We can no longer teach just according to the ways of the White, middle class. If you are going to reach every student in your classroom, you have to broaden your comfort zone and learn about the lives and communities of your students firsthand. We’ve been doing it your way long enough.

These words were spoken by Carmen (a co-author of this article) during a presentation at the 2010 conference of the National Council of Teachers of English. As an African American teacher deeply concerned about the need to create opportunities for success, not only for her African American second graders but for students of colour in classrooms across the USA, she spoke of the urgency felt by many in the field of literacy education who recognize that narrow views of curriculum and teaching practices, largely derived from White, middle-class, English-only perspectives, have been normalized for too long and that this narrow vision continues to deny educational opportunities to many students of colour, students who speak languages other than English, and those from low-income communities (Delpit, 2012; Kincheloe, 2008). Carmen’s words also argue that, by helping teachers recognize the discriminatory and exclusionary nature of many existing practices and by building teachers’ ability to co-construct culturally relevant curricula, achievement might be raised in ways that challenge existing inequities (Edwards et al., 2010; Gay, 2010; Nieto, 2009).

The authors of this article – two classroom teachers (Carmen and Janice) and two university educators (Dinah and Susi) – take a new look at these issues by making explicit connections between the concept of syncretism and the tenets of critical pedagogy and culturally relevant practice to identify what we believe has been inherent in the definition of syncretism all along – attention to power structures that silence some ways of learning and teaching while privileging others. We discuss the interwoven nature of these bodies of thought by introducing the concept of critical syncretism, a creative reinvention of cultural practices, drawing from diverse sources, that aims to transform existing, unequal power relations. We focus in particular on the syncretic processes which Carmen and Janice use to create curriculum and teaching practices that nurture achievement by privileging the language and literacy resources in their African American students’ lives and heritage.

Our work is inspired by decades of research in the homes and communities of under-represented and minoritized¹ groups where young children and their siblings, peers, parents, grandparents and community members use their knowledge and experience, jointly and syncretically, to create new contexts and strategies for teaching and learning (Gregory et al., 2004; Long and Volk, 2009). Findings from study after study illuminate the learning potential of these syncretic engagements as they occur outside the institutions and communities of White, middle-class, English-speaking cultural groups. The same studies also demonstrate how schools systematically ignore and devalue the very resources that make those engagements powerful sites for learning and teaching, resources such as languages, interactional styles, funds of knowledge, and the teaching/learning practices used by children, their families, peers and community members (Delpit, 2006; González et al., 2005; McCarty, 2002; Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines, 1988; Valdés, 1996).

Ignoring the resources of cultural and linguistic groups that have been positioned outside a narrowly defined norm privileges students who fall within that norm, particularly when classrooms, curricula and teaching strategies are designed to complement dominant cultural knowledge and practices. As a result, many children from minoritized communities have little agency in the classroom, the richness of their contributions to classroom interactions cannot be fully appreciated and utilized, and inequitable educational experiences are perpetuated. In contrast, when teachers work from a critical perspective they are better able to identify the power structures that underlie the institutions of schooling and begin to recognize that important resources are missing from curricula and teaching practices. Teaching from a foundation set in critical pedagogy, teachers are better able to appreciate the importance of creating contexts where by syncretic practices are enriched because students are encouraged to draw on the language and literacy resources in their homes and communities.

This does not mean, however, that we advocate embracing home and community resources without paying attention to the development of students’ proficiency with languages and literacies of power. Research in the area of culturally relevant and critical pedagogies insists that an important component of effective teaching is helping students succeed within existing power structures while working to alter an unjust status quo (Freire, 1970; Gay, 2010). At the same time, we do not propose that teachers embrace home and community knowledge simply as a pathway to conventional literacies, it is also a way to enrich classroom practice by broadening definitions of the norm. Thus, we believe that teachers’ understanding of the syncretic process has the potential to benefit students from traditionally marginalized communities, while broadening the world views of students from dominant culture groups who are often schooled to believe that their ways are more effective, important and legitimate than others.

Making the implicit explicit: The critical nature of syncretism

Before sharing classroom practices, it is important to establish precisely what we mean by syncretism, critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy, as they come together to support our definition of critical syncretism. To do so, we begin by drawing on the words of a Dominican American writer, Julia Alvarez (1998), to help us describe the characteristics of the syncretic process. Alvarez (1998:173), in reference to her identity as both Dominican and American, writes:

I’m mapping a country that’s not on the map, and that’s why I’m trying to put it down on paper. It’s a world formed of contradictions, clashes, cominglings – the gringa and the Dominican, and it is precisely that tension and richness that interests me … A duality that I hope in the writing transcends itself and becomes a new consciousness, a new place on the map, a synthesizing way of looking at the world.

This ‘mapping a new place’ metaphor helps us explain the syncretic process as one in which human beings work together, drawing on multiple resources to co-construct and reinvent practices. These constructions are inherently complex and embody the contradictions and potential for learning by emphasizing the cultural richness of home and community practices typically characterized as deficient.

Alvarez describes her identity as complex and dynamic (Johnson, 2005). In much the same way, Grobman (2007:35) characterizes multicultural texts as ‘always changing, and always influenced by various overlapping and even conflicting tropes, modes, discourses, genres, forms, voices, languages, styles’. We think of syncretic practices in the same way, as ‘multi-sided, continually emergent and nourished by resources drawn from varied contexts, with an emphasis on the creative and transformative process not a final product’ (Volk, 2013).

We understand this process to be different from the concept of hybridity, which is sometimes used synonymously with syncretism (Dyson, 1999, 2001; Gutiérrez et al., 1999). We see syncretism as emphasizing the transformative, inventive practices of participants with a focus on processes that emphasize the intentionality and expertise of children and adults as they bring multiple bodies of knowledge together through creative acts of the mind. In contrast, studies of hybridity put greater emphasis on the product, or on the new forms that are created. What is more, some studies of hybridity may fail to pay attention to issues of power that we see as endemic to the concept of syncretism.

Critiques of the concept of syncretism: Hegemonizing, essentializing, romanticizing

The notion of replacing multiple identities with a synthesized one – as in the melting pot metaphor – has been criticized for its potential to reinforce the dominant culture, thus ‘reproducing the hegemony of the colonizing language or form’ (Grobman, 2007:32). Critics also advise scholars to guard against interpretations of syncretism that essentialize cultures according to ‘discrete, static, and stereotypical characteristics’ (Volk, 2013). Still others argue that, as teachers come to value a syncretism of cultural practices as an important part of the teaching/learning process, there may be a tendency to romanticize. While romanticizing often means failing to see the negative, difficult or contradictory sides of syncretic interactions, it can also mean a failure to take into account the complexities of the syncretic process.

Critical pedagogy

Nieto (1999:104) describes critical pedagogy as, ‘not a standard set of practices, but rather a particular stance vis-à-vis knowledge, the process of learning and teaching, and the educational environment in which these take place’. Luke (2004:24) argues that, because of the importance of local contexts, it makes more sense to use the plural, ‘critical pedagogies’, suggesting that each instantiation of a critical pedagogical approach is unique, co-constructed by active participants and situated firmly in local events and knowledge, while sharing more general characteristics of critical pedagogy (Leistyna and Woodrum, 1996). The origins and evolution of critical pedagogy are drawn from the work of such scholars as W.E.B. Du Bois (1903), Paulo Freire (1970), Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren (1989) and bell hooks (1994). The belief shared by these educators is that education of any kind is inherently political and embedded within power structures that dictate privilege as well as bias and oppression. Thus, critical pedagogy is generally seen as grounded in visions of justice and equity and concerned with ‘transforming oppressive relations of power in a variety of domains’ (Kincheloe 2008:45), domains that include educational institutions.

Culturally responsive pedagogy

Culturally responsive pedagogy posits that the most effective learning occurs when it is grounded in children’s existing knowledge, experience, perspectives and ways of knowing. It requires teachers to use that knowledge to promote students’: (1) in-depth understandings about and appreciation for their cultural and linguistic heritage and history; (2) achievement according to conventional and unconventional assessment measures; and (3) ability to use knowledge to address systems of oppression and dis-privilege (Edwards et al., 2010; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2009). Culturally responsive teaching is not an add-on or merely about raising self-esteem but rather about teaching in ways that build on whom children are, what they know and the rich experiences they bring to school. Culturally responsive pedagogy is not just about high expectations but requires teachers’ belief that children can meet those expectations and teachers’ willingness and ability to take responsibility to make it happen. Considering pedagogy in this way, schools would no longer privilege students from backgrounds consistent with dominant cultural norms but would insist on practices that lead to real achievement for all students (Gay, 2010; Teel and Obidah, 2008).

Toward a definition of critical syncretism

When analysing teaching/learning encounters that occur within classrooms, it is important to understand these encounters not only as individual interactions but also as engagements within the contexts of the sociopolitical histories and contemporary realities of the students and their communities. Advocacy for critical syncretism would recognize these relevant power differentials and urge the construction of learning environments where previously silenced voices become prominent, legitimate and influential in the learning process (Nieto, 1999; Shor, 1992). Educational environments that embrace critical syncretism privilege resources that have been previously ignored or marginalized in schools; they encourage teachers to transform texts and contexts to support students in drawing on those resources (cultural and linguistic skills and practices) and interact with other students and their teachers in the interest of literacy learning.

Important in this dynamic is the understanding that participants are not merely constrained by social forces but can create agency to affect change (Lewis et al., 2007). This view draws from critical theorists who posit that change can only occur when action is taken by both oppressed and oppressor (Freire, 1970). With this in mind, we believe that the syncretic process includes the active engagement of participants in emancipatory actions (Du Bois, 1903).

The description and analysis of classroom work that follows is an effort to develop a concept of critical syncretism that involves the explicit identification of approaches that teachers can use to change normative practices while creating contexts for syncretic acts in classrooms. This work is part of a broader educational movement to challenge existing relationships of power in schools in order to generate more equitable practices for children from minoritized communities.

Critical syncretism in the classroom: Teaching and learning practices

Across the USA, measures of achievement demonstrate that students served least well in schools are Latino/a or African American, or from White rural and low-income communities. We argue, with others, that this is not the fault of students or families, but the responsibility of teachers and teacher educators, many of whom have had little opportunity to understand equity issues and learn how to address them (Ball and Tyson, 2011; Irvine, 2003). With a teaching population that is predominantly White and English-only and teacher education programmes that rarely address equity issues directly, we have much to learn from classrooms where ways of being in traditionally marginalized communities become an essential part of the norm.

In this section, we offer insights into the construction of contexts where critically syncretic practices can flourish by sharing work from two classrooms, first and second grades in a South Carolina elementary school where the student population is 99% African American. To understand the critical nature of these practices it is important to know that, prior to the implementation of the new practices, very few texts available for literacy instruction reflected children and families of colour, and none reflected the history, music, and traditions of the community in which the children lived. The teaching examples provided in the following pages are a few of many enacted by Carmen and Janice as part of a critically syncretic process, transforming practice by creating opportunities for students to draw on knowledge from home, community and heritage. We begin by describing Janice and Carmen’s work to help students make connections to African cultural heritage, elements glaringly absent from the established curriculum. We then move from the global to the local to share practices rooted in the children’s community worlds.

Links to literacy through heritage

During the summer of 2011, Carmen and Janice participated in a month-long professional development trip to Sierra Leone to learn more about important links between that area of West Africa and language, knowledge and cultural traditions in the USA. Recognizing that the majority of Africans who were enslaved and brought to the USA came through the port of Charleston, South Carolina and that the majority of them were from the West African coast where Sierra Leone is located (Littlefield, 1981; Pollitzer, 1999), the purpose of the trip was to gain knowledge to begin to fill gaps in school curricula about the history, language, economics, cultural tradition and geography of Sierra Leone and its impact on our lives in the USA today.

Commitment to providing counter-narratives

Carmen and Janice were dedicated to using the Sierra Leone experience to contradict negative and inaccurate stereotypes about Africa for their students and for them to build a sense of pride in their heritage. Recognizing this as a missing piece in her own educational life, Carmen explained that while she has a very strong sense of family and pride in being African American, her schooling did not provide her with a sense of her African heritage:

Had I known more about Africa than the negative views typically portrayed, I would have felt a sense of pride sooner about my heritage. Like others have a sense of pride about heritage like Irish American, we never had that. It’s almost like we went through a phase of Black pride but not African pride. I can appreciate, “Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud,” but where did that come from? All I knew in school was about slavery. I think knowing about the richness of my heritage would have made a difference in me.

Janice explained that going to Sierra Leone was important to her as a teacher and as an African American, but also, most importantly, as a member of an extended and supportive family:

I wasn’t going for myself. I was going for my family. They always wanted me to go and they sent me. And then I was able to show them all kinds of things. Everyone wanted a piece of Africa. It was deeper than a souvenir. Now, during Black History Month, they wear their real African attire. I can’t take that away from them. They sent their girl.

It was this feeling of connection with and pride in heritage that Janice and Carmen wanted to bring to their first and second graders, African American students who were regularly seen through a deficit lens by the community outside their own. As Carmen said:‘It will make a difference for my students and how they feel their significance in the world.’

Creating texts

Returning to the USA, Janice and Carmen developed a range of texts, including a series of books that helped students learn about the stories, songs, geography, language, homes, foods and cultural traditions of Sierra Leone as they influenced traditions of the Low Country of South Carolina as well as the students’ lives in the middle of the state. While they did not want to romanticize their view of West Africa, they also felt it important to redress the balance so long skewed towards all things negative and stereotypical. They worked to develop teaching materials that would send messages about broad differences within Sierra Leone and a view of Sierra Leone as but one of many countries on the continent of Africa.

Language was a particularly important aspect of these texts as the children learned about historical connections between the language of their West African ancestors and the language(s) used across the USA today. This made further syncretic moves possible as students drew from the resources of language heritage and history to expand the linguistic and meta-cognitive expertise required for success with conventional texts. For example, students explored the similarities and differences between the Krio language of Sierra Leone, Gullah of the low country of Georgia and South Carolina, and the English spoken in their own communities: ‘Wetin na yu nem?’ (Krio); ‘Wha una name?’ (Gullah); ‘What’s your name?’ (English). As they compared and contrasted the various translations of ‘What’s your name?’, the children used knowledge from multiple worlds to point out similarities, such as: ‘The word, “what” starts with a “w” in all three languages!’; ‘“Name” has the same beginning and ending sound in Krio, Gullah and English!’ This led to discussions not only of the phonetic similarities across languages but the historical impact of Krio on the languages spoken in the USA today.

Similarly, students were able to build on and then draw from knowledge about foods, such as the shrimp and rice dishes that are plentiful in Sierra Leone (also a staple in many parts of South Carolina), quilt and basket-weaving traditions, and the use of songs and stories/fables to begin to understand the significance of their ancestry in day-to-day life in the USA. Through teacher-made books that described these traditions while highlighting high-frequency words, word patterns and other skills required for success on traditional measures of achievement such as the district’s literacy assessments, students were able to take an active role and draw on knowledge of their histories as well as school knowledge and, with their teacher, create new contexts for learning the conventions of schooling.

‘I Can Read Swag’

In addition to drawing on global and heritage connections, Janice and Carmen focused heavily on building practice from local knowledge. For example, at the beginning of one school year, Janice realized that her students (six-year-olds) knew and often sang a hip-hop song that was popular at that time, ‘Pretty Boy Swag’. Using that knowledge, Janice developed a strategy to support students in blending expertise and knowledge from home and community with the practices of schooling. She wrote new words to ‘Pretty Boy Swag’ and, in her classroom, it became ‘I Can Read Swag’. Because she was dedicated to knowing the children better in and out of school, including the music they listened to, Janice was able to create a context in which she and the students could syncretically draw from resources of the community and the resources of school to learn literacy conventions of schooling. To the rhythms of ‘I Can Read Swag’, the children sang:

This right here is my book.

Watch me read the pages, look.

Every – body pay attention.

This, right here is my –

I can read swag – read!

Get out the wayyyy, smart kids coming through.

I’m trying to find a book so that I can show you.

The lyrics to ‘I Can Read Swag’ were printed and bound as copies of individual books that the children and teachers used for small-group reading instruction and independent reading. They were used for word study and projected onto the interactive White board at the front of the classroom to become a shared reading text. High-frequency words required by the school district were highlighted in the text. Skills required by the school district’s pacing guide (requirements for the week-by-week introduction and teaching of specific skills) were easily taught as the children learned about letter–sound relationships, word patterns and consonant blends through lessons constructed using ‘I Can Read Swag’. The children were able to bring community knowledge to conventional literacy practices, such as shared reading, small-group guided reading and independent reading, as they read texts that were unconventional in school, but conventional in their lives. As a result, new learning/teaching contexts were created as the teacher and children syncretized conventional and unconventional literacies through the children’s interactions with each other and the texts.

In this and the other examples in this article, the teacher did the groundwork, but the children were the active constructors of knowledge as they drew on experiences from multiple worlds to build new knowledge. The process of blending and recreating home and school literacies to construct new texts was syncretic. The syncretic practices continued as the children used learning from ‘I Can Read Swag’ to transact successfully with conventional texts. For instance, in one of many examples observed throughout the school day, Latrise, walking down the hall, turned to Damion and pointed to the word ‘bag’ posted on the wall: ‘That’s like Swag! Swag – bag!’ Syncretically, she drew from the language of her community, language that she had been encouraged to use in the classroom, to help her read conventional print.

‘You will love knowing Ms.Baines’

Just as with ‘I Can Read Swag’, Janice created a book to introduce herself (Ms Baines) to the class at the beginning of the year using rhythms she knew to exist in her students’ lives. Observing some of her girls stepping (percussive dancing using complex rhythms and sounds) in their neighbourhood, she paid close attention to the ways in which they used language and rhythm and then created a book, Meet Ms. Baines, as a context for students to draw on home knowledge and blend it with school knowledge. In this way, cultural repertoires of the classroom were expanded while students built expertise in conventional literacies. Reading the book in the rhythms of the stepping chant, the students learned conventional skills:

Ms. Baines is my name.

Teaching is my game.

I have books on my mind

All the time.

I have a big fami-ly.

They make me happy.

Pink is my color.

Community interviews

In both Carmen and Janice’s classrooms, students drew on knowledge and practices in home communities by interviewing elders in the historic African American community in which they lived. The teachers first engaged students in discussions about the gentrification of their neighbourhoods, talking about what happens when housing is levelled to make room for more modern structures. As a result, they learned about the importance of preserving the stories of their community. They continued their preservation project by interviewing members of the community, including a school board member, a local attorney, one of the school’s custodians, one of the first African American nurses in the city and a local barber. Each interviewee told them about their life experiences, helping the students construct a history of the community. Students and teachers used those stories to create books through richly syncretic practices:(1) Janice’s students viewed video tapes of the interviews and then worked in pairs to use interview data to write about each interviewee, developing books about each community member; (2) once the books were developed, the students had further opportunities to play an active role in their learning as they shared the books with older students and read and talked about conventional texts, such as trade books, classroom charts and other textual sources of literacy; and (3) Carmen used language from these and other class-made books to introduce testing practices that the students would encounter, such as sentence dictation in the formal testing required by the school and school district. In the process, the children appropriated skills, vocabulary and reading strategies learned through the preservation project and put them to use when reading a variety of conventional texts.

What happened? Critical syncretism, impact and challenges

The teaching and learning examples in this article illustrate syncretism in several ways:(1) classroom practices and materials were developed through the syncretic process of the teachers’ engagement and interaction with students, their families and community members, and their interactions with members of heritage communities in Sierra Leone, resulting in the creation of new texts and practices to support student learning; (2) the process of syncretizing texts from the community and community heritage with conventional texts of schools created and nourished new opportunities for student learning; and (3) the development of new texts and practices enriched the learning contexts in which students’ abilities to draw on home and community resources were highly valued, creating potential for students’ syncretic interactions with each other, their teachers and the texts.

These classroom illustrations are critical in nature, because they provide examples of ways that teachers might alter what counts as privileged knowledge and practice. Carmen and Janice moved from the use of texts and practices created for and about dominant culture groups to creating texts and experiences for and about their students’ worlds, thus privileging new literacies in the classroom. As Carmen expressed it in the opening quote, these new practices reached beyond the sole use of languages, literacies and interactional styles of middle-class, White, English-speaking communities and made stories, music, history and language of the children’s local communities just as foundational to classroom practice. In doing so, possibilities were generated for and with students to draw syncretically on what they knew through the creation of new learning that simultaneously challenged the status quo.

Positive impact

Students and teachers renewed their excitement for teaching and learning

An important outcome of the work described in this article was the renewed enthusiasm for teaching and learning felt by both teachers and students. The children were more engaged and the teachers were more excited about the work that they were doing than they had been in the past. The differences in terms of attitudes towards teaching and learning were remarkable. As Carmen said: ‘I’m more excited about coming to school every day. I am more connected to what the children are doing and what they need to learn.’

Pride in heritage was reinforced

The students’ African American neighbourhood of low-income housing projects was typically defined by the wider community in terms of poverty, gang presence and drug use, rather than by its history as a community of influential artisans, politicians, activists and professionals. Creating contexts in which community knowledge – from the local community to West African heritage – were valued as essential rather than incidental to curricular design led to and reinforced students’ pride in self, family and heritage. As Janice said:

We want them to have self esteem so high. [Through this work] we let them know that they can be anything. We say to them, “You have to let people know how smart you and your people are and where you came from.”

Opportunities to syncretize helped children connect ‘their stream to the mainstream’

Creating opportunities for children to draw on knowledge of home, community and heritage, as they syncretized that knowledge with the conventions of schooling, crossed important borders, as previously silenced texts and teaching strategies were privileged in these classrooms. Janice describes this as ‘teaching from [the children’s] stream to the mainstream’. For example, her students used the text of ‘I Can Read Swag’(their stream) to help them build expertise with conventional reading skills (the mainstream). Children also used ‘I Can Read Swag’ as a spelling resource. Often, when struggling with the spelling of a word needed in their own written texts, children would open the book and sing or recite their way through the familiar text, turning the pages and pointing to the words until they found the necessary one. They then appropriated the word from ‘their stream’ for use in writing conventional texts (the mainstream).

A similar process occurred as Janice helped the children make connections between their community interview books and trade books (conventional texts of schooling). For instance, a child might read a phrase from one of the books they had created and Janice would say: ‘Oh my goodness who else writes like this?’ The children would then draw comparisons between their books and trade books or traditional instructional texts, thus creating further syncretic practices by taking knowledge learned through culturally relevant texts and using that knowledge to support the development of proficiency in conventional texts.

Teacher–student relationships were strengthened

Work of this kind also means that relationships are strengthened between teachers and students because teachers are required to know and value students in ways that they may not have considered before. Janice and Carmen certainly found this to be true. Deficit views of students and families are more likely to be abandoned when teachers learn enough about children’s worlds in order to create opportunities for them to draw on those worlds to learn in classrooms. This creates whole new and important connections with children and their families and impacts teachers’ abilities to see children for their strengths.

Students affirmed and learned structures from multiple worlds

Earlier in this article, we used the words of Julia Alvarez (1998:173) to describe syncretism as a context through which human beings move in and out of the worlds that define their lives as they develop ‘a new consciousness, a new place on the map, a synthesizing way of looking at the world’. The students in Janice and Carmen’s classrooms did just that. They engaged with the language and knowledge of their worlds, but they also learned the structures, vocabulary, skills and strategies of the dominant culture, thereby creating a new place on the map that honoured the resources of multiple contexts.

Challenges and contradictions

Essentializing

In conference presentations, when other teachers watch video clips of Janice’s students singing ‘I Can Read Swag’, they often ask for CD copies to use with their own students. This helps us explain the trap of essentializing that is easy to fall into: generalizing about cultural, racial, linguistic or socio-economic groups based on stereotypes or partial knowledge. ‘I Can Read Swag’ works as a context for rich syncretism because Janice knows her particular group of students and their communities at particular moments. However, success with other groups of children can only be approached through teachers’ willingness to get to know the home and community contexts of their own students, which also means avoiding essentializing whole classes of students by getting to know each child and his or her family and community.

Similarly, the possibility of essentializing heritage and local community literacies such as the Sierra Leone–South Carolina connections or the appropriation of hip-hop was important to recognize and resist. The very purpose of the work with regard to Sierra Leone was to help students move beyond the typical essentializing of Africa. The teachers began by charting and discussing with students their assumptions about Africa in general, recognizing that, at age six or seven, the children were already generalizing and stereotyping. Through the books they created with and for the students, Janice and Carmen worked to represent an array of economic conditions, educational variations, dress, homes, song, dance and so on. One of their goals was to provide counter-narratives that would begin to communicate the many faces, practices and traditions of Sierra Leone to the students.

Serving only the dominant culture

It can also be easy to fall into the trap of using community knowledge solely as a pathway to students' proficiency in dominant culture practices. Janice and Carmen are firm, however, in their commitment to embracing the resources of children’s communities as a way to create contexts for teaching conventional skills more effectively while broadening definitions of what counts as the norm. Thus, creating books about West African heritage, community elders or hip-hop is not just for the purpose of teaching high-frequency words and word patterns, but also to change the status of knowledge to privilege previously marginalized home and community resources and the contributions of students’ communities to the broader knowledge base.

This raises an important contradiction: developing syncretic texts to challenge normative practices while using the same practices to support students’ achievement on the standardized test imposed by the dominant culture. This is an example of contradictions inherent in syncretic processes (Volk, 2013). We see this as a necessary contradiction: while working to challenge and change unjust assessment practices, teachers have the responsibility to support students’ success within existing norms (Long, 2011).

Romanticizing practice

Some critiques of syncretism also point towards a tendency to romanticize the power of the syncretic act as a panacea for all problems related to learning and teaching, particularly with populations of children who have not previously been well served in schools. Janice and Carmen found that it is important to be constantly on guard against such assumptions. While these practices are indeed powerful and have had significant impact, the teachers are not without challenges in their efforts to reach out to every child and they also recognize that many children face challenges of their own.

What teachers need to know: Creating contexts where rich syncretism can occur

As a result of their experiences, Janice and Carmen provide advice below for teachers seeking to develop contexts where linguistically and culturally rich syncretic acts can occur and be utilized in the interest of children’s learning.

Janice

Get to know the worlds of your students

How do I know about the rhythms, chants, songs in children’s worlds? I listen. I pay attention. I spend time as a participant in their worlds. I listen to the children in school and on the playground. I listen to older children in school because my younger students learn from their music and traditions all the time. I learn at the laundromat, in stores, in homes, in students’ communities. I go where they go. If I know they are going to have a celebration, I’m often invited and I go. I visit the day care centres of their brothers and sisters. I ask the children about events in their lives. For example, every Wednesday I ask about their church experience on Tuesday night. Soon they are saying: ‘Ms Baines, I want you to go too.’ Then I think about how I can use what I learn so my students can draw on that knowledge in the classroom.

Think about cultural relevance as learning

Some folks might look at the books we make, the hip-hop songs we sing and the stories we tell as cute manifestations of the curriculum. But while the children are indeed cute as they sing and read and connect, it is not the cute that helps them learn and grow, it is what is behind the cute. So, I use rap but I am strategic and intentional, always thinking about how I can create opportunities whereby the children’s syncretic moves can also lead them to success in traditional forms of assessment or to proficient reading of ever more sophisticated trade books.

Consider this work foundational, not an add-on or frill

An essential element in thinking about creating classrooms where rich syncretism can take place is seeing this kind of work as foundational to everything else. Embracing children’s home and community knowledge is not an add-on or an extra or the fun thing we do on Fridays. It is the foundation to all of the work we do, it brings everything else together.

Carmen

Texts must reflect children’s lives

In almost every reading programme, the suggested instructional texts reflect worlds other than those of our students. They typically depict White characters engaged in activities that are not familiar to my students' lives. The alternative to books about White people seems to be books about cute little animals produced in an attempt to move away from White dominance. It does not work, those texts make it almost impossible for our students to engage in powerfully syncretic interactions. They need familiarity to be able to tap into their knowledge. If the books are all lily-white or about cartoon-styled animals, my students are put at a disadvantage because their culture is not accessible to them in school. If we want to create spaces for syncretic acts to flourish as richly as possible, it is essential that books and materials in classrooms are created or purchased to reflect children’s worlds.

Show sincere caring

An essential part of creating classrooms where children feel comfortable drawing on home and community knowledge is to let them know that you care about them and their cultures, languages, traditions and heritage. Getting to know their worlds is a first step in the direction of sincere caring. I conduct home visits, not to spy on or evaluate families but to get to know children, families and their interests – where they come from, what they are doing. For example, Jerome is one rough cat as a first grader, but because I asked him about his momma and daddy and got to know his family outside of school, now when he rolls his eyes at everyone else, he speaks to me and tells me about his dad who is in jail. He can tell that I care about him, not just his education, but about what is going on in his life. If we do not show them that we care, if they do not feel that we like them, they are not going to feel comfortable enough to draw on their lives as we live and learn together.

Look beyond yourself to help students value their communities and heritage

You have to look at your student population. I am African American and, although I teach in a school that is predominantly Black, that does not mean that I know their worlds. Because of different life experiences, they may be accustomed to different genres of music, so I have to find out about that. The children at my school relate to rap, they have that background knowledge, so I sometimes use it as a foundation for learning. It not only gets their attention but provides opportunities for them to see that you value what they know, that there is value in what they know. Then you and the children can use that knowledge to build new knowledge.

Confront your own biases

Teaching in this way is all about teacher attitude. You sometimes have to recognize that you may have biases that prevent you from recognizing the knowledge, beauty of language and importance of cultural traditions other than your own. Get over it. While you do not want to close your eyes to students’ realities that may be difficult, you must figure out what you can value in whom they are. If you do not, you hamper not only the students’ opportunities to draw on home knowledge and use it to learn in schools, but you hamper your learning and growth as a human being in the world.

Do not let pacing guides paralyse you

Pacing guides and standards are sometimes interpreted in ways that paralyse whole schools and school districts and definitely teachers in classrooms. Do not allow that to happen. Our district has very rigid pacing guides and standards, but there is not one practice or text I have used, drawing on students’ home and community lives, that I cannot tweak to address any guide or standard that comes my way.

Conclusion

As we consider critically syncretic practices in Janice and Carmen’s classrooms, we ask: what are the characteristics and commitments in Janice and Carmen’s teaching that allow them to create such contexts? We find that they are dedicated to:

Transforming practice by privileging traditionally minoritized voices, texts, knowledge and practices.

Valuing the expertise and brilliance of not only the students’ local community but also of their heritage communities, in this case, aspects of the larger African diaspora.

Getting to know families and students well, intentionally moving away from deficit views of families and communities.

Getting comfortable with the multi-faceted and continually emerging nature of syncretic teaching and learning by paying close attention to children’s creative and transformative processes, in addition to final products/end results.

Recognizing that some of the most powerful learning occurs when children have opportunities to interact purposefully, drawing on what they know and continuing to create contexts where those syncretic transactions can flourish.

With such convictions, these teachers are able to move many steps closer to addressing educational inequities. They create contexts that value and nourish the expertise and intentionality that children bring to the classroom. Recognizing the learning potential of syncretism as students draw from resources across cultural and linguistic communities, Janice and Carmen intentionally design classrooms and curricula where deeper learning can take place, which also reorders hierarchies of power and privilege. In the process, classrooms become important contexts for legitimizing learners and learning in the service of developing and sustaining more equitable educational environments for all children. As Carmen said: ‘We’ve been doing it your way long enough.’

Footnotes

Note

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