Language and Literacy for a New Mainstream

Ollie

Ollie was raised in a monolingual Caucasian English-speaking family in Toledo, California. He had relatives on the East Coast and in Canada as well as in California. Ollie’s brother was a student at a state university about two hours away. Before Ollie’s brother left for college, the males in the family, as well as male friends of Ollie’s brother, often gathered to watch professional wrestling matches on television. In fact, Ollie was still watching wrestling and discussing it with his brother in real time during their weekly telephone calls, as he noted in an interview: “When we usually watched wrestling on weekly shows, we’d speak to each other while we were watching it.” Outside of school, Ollie’s time was also spent mostly around other males, with football practices and games during the school year and work as a camp counselor during the summer. Mrs. Godkin, Ollie’s mother, was a fifth-grade teacher in the same school district, and according to Ollie, she had always been very involved in his schooling and school-related projects. He resisted her help at times, though, especially in preparing presentations, explaining,

I remember all through elementary school and middle school, she always helped me with, I always do well, but she’s always helped me, with presentations and you get frustrated because she’s like no, you gotta do it this way, blah blah blah blah.

His frustration with her was mingled with admiration, however, as he added, “She’s so good at it, it’s ridiculous. She’s not afraid. I admire that.”

In spite of his mother’s involvement, Ollie struggled with academic reading and had been placed in a remedial reading class in the ninth grade. In describing his early high school English instruction, Ollie explained,

Like you know how you take the test at the beginning of the year tells you what reading level you’re at? My class wasn’t considered grade level so we did a whole a lot of reading and trying to comprehend, so by the end of the year when we took the test at the end, we were all past high school.

Despite struggles with reading, Ollie’s grades were good, averaging Bs in most of his classes, including English. Of the 10 focal students in the study, his class rank was the highest, at 85 out of 227 (compared to Belinda’s 125 and Leesa’s 179). Still, Ollie avoided reading and found tricks to meet academic requirements without doing the requisite reading. The strategies that Ollie used in place of required reading became apparent over the course of his Senior Exhibition project.

Belinda

Having emigrated as a small child from Mexico with her mother to Toledo, California, Belinda had attended Toledo schools in English-only classrooms her entire life. She lived with her mother and younger sister, settling near other bilingual relatives in Toledo. Belinda could not recall seeing her mother read or write in English or Spanish, and she reported that her own experience with reading and writing had been almost exclusively in English, since the daycare and school-based summer programs she attended were all English-only. Although she did not own books, Belinda said that she brought home storybooks in English from the after-school programs, especially liking the Sweet Valley High series. She wrote at home infrequently: She never kept a diary or wrote letters, but she drew occasional pictures for her mother that might have had a few words of affection. At the time of the study, Belinda’s mother did not speak English and relied on her daughters to interpret when English was required. Although she could not recall ever seeing her mother read or write in Spanish, Belinda learned Spanish literacy skills as a by-product of her Catholic catechism classes, which her mother insisted she take in Spanish.

In kindergarten, Belinda’s teacher referred her for nearly every type of special service: ESL classes, Chapter 1 (services for low-income students), and RSP (resource specialist program for students with learning disabilities). Although notes in her cumulative file say that she “didn’t qualify” for RSP, Belinda repeated kindergarten with ESL support and was designated as fluent English proficient by the end of the following year. From 1st grade forward, Belinda was in regular English-only mainstream classes, although her 8th-grade mathematics teacher noted in her cumulative file that she might need a “sheltered” mathematics class, with instruction designed for students who are not fully proficient in English. This notation indicates that even though Belinda had been in mainstream classes since kindergarten, her bilingualism was still noted at times as a source of academic struggles. While Belinda never remarked specifically on the relationship between her own language proficiency and school performance, she did comment on how bilingual education programs could “really hold you back” academically. She compared her sister’s experience in the district’s well-respected bilingual program to her own experience in English-only classrooms, attributing her sister’s greater struggles in English-only classrooms to her earlier bilingual instruction. Belinda’s 12th-grade English teacher, Mr. Quinn, identified her as a student needing a lot of help with writing but one who was persistent in seeking that help.

Leesa

Leesa’s language and literacy experiences were influenced by several unique factors related to family, immigration, and schooling. The daughter of rural Mexican parents, Leesa’s upbringing was transnational and bilingual. She was born in a small rural town in Mexico not far from a tourist area. Although her father was illiterate, her mother could read in Spanish. As a small child, Leesa was mostly in a Spanish-only environment. When Leesa was 4, her mother remarried an English-speaking American who understood some Spanish but encouraged English in the home. Although they were undocumented, Leesa’s stepfather moved the family to Texas, where he was ultimately incarcerated. Literacy activities in the home involved letters to and from her stepfather and her mother’s Spanish Reader’s Digest and Watchtower magazines. During her 4 years in Texas, Leesa attended a bilingual school and was awarded prizes for her English reading abilities. At age 8, Leesa returned to Mexico with her mother, with schooling in Spanish and classes in English as a foreign language. At 14, Leesa moved with her mother and a second English-speaking stepfather to Toledo, where she enrolled as a newcomer immigrant student at Cerro Vista High School. Leesa’s mother insisted on concealing their former undocumented status; therefore, school personnel were unaware of Leesa’s former bilingual schooling in Texas. Leesa described her stepfather as “this really Republican” who rarely shared her liberal political views. However, she admired his verbal skills, wishing she “could just have half of his persuasion.”

Leesa was the first student referred to me by the teacher, and the only student specifically nominated for inclusion by the principal. The Cerro Vista faculty believed that Leesa was a newcomer to the United States when she began high school. As such, Leesa’s arrival and rapid transition into mainstream classes was seen as remarkable. Leesa’s questionnaire and interview data corroborated the school’s assumptions that she spent her childhood and early adolescence in Mexico, arriving in Toledo at the beginning of ninth grade. Although the school initially enrolled Leesa in English language development classes, she enrolled in mainstream classes by the second semester of ninth grade. She was perceived as a quick learner, and she mastered a high degree of English proficiency far more quickly than most newcomer immigrant students from Mexico. From the school’s perspective, Leesa was a case of an “exceptional” English learner. No one voiced concerns about Leesa’s skills, performance, or potential since she outperformed all other newcomer students at the school. According to Leesa, “ESL kids . . . have their own little world. The way the school is set up doesn’t get them into CP [college prep] classes. They’re in their own little box.” She also noted the remedial classes that many were enrolled in, in spite of their previous mastery of the same content and skills, albeit in a different language.

Language socialization data

Although the field-based data collection efforts focused on capturing the experience of focal students as they engaged in their Senior Exhibition projects, many questionnaire and interview questions were designed to elicit information about the young people’s home language socialization and prior school-based socialization into academic language. This was essential to understand students’ prior language and literacy skills and dispositions that were interacting with school-based notions of language and literacy throughout the project. Questions in the initial student questionnaires, for example, asked students to contribute information about the types and “tracks” of classes in which they had participated in the past. Bilingual students were also asked to select which language they primarily spoke with a variety of family and nonfamily members. All students were asked to answer questions about the ease with which they engaged in different types of language activities in English and, if applicable, Spanish. While questionnaire data provided an overview of students’ schooling and language use, interview questions and informal interactions with students elicited rich data concerning their use of language inside and outside of school historically and at the time of the study. Some interview questions were directly focused on eliciting such information, for example, “When do you talk to your family about your Senior Exhibition? What kinds of things do you talk about?” and “What special talents, abilities, or interests do you have outside of school? How do they relate in any way to this project?” Follow-up questions focused more deeply on language socialization issues. For instance, Belinda said that she was not planning to invite her mother to her presentation because her mother would not understand anything. This prompted questions about how her mother gets the information she needs, who in the family has interpreted for her, and how these experiences have affected Belinda.

Analyses

Analyses were informed by qualitative approaches in sociolinguistics, drawing from methods in ethnography of communication (Duff, 2002), discourse analysis (Gee, 1999), and rhetorical analysis (Hatch, 1992) within case studies exploring the multiple literacies of each focal student (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Initial analyses of the data began through a recursive process during the data collection period, with ongoing review of the data throughout the study so that incipient patterns could be explored by refining future interview questions and reshaping next steps in data collection. Final data analyses were conducted the summer and fall after students graduated; the students and the teacher were available to answer brief clarification follow-up questions when necessary during that period. Ultimately, data analyses involved open, axial, and selective coding (Strauss, 1987) of transcripts, field notes, and student texts. In the tradition of Dyson and Genishi (2005), sociolinguistic concepts were used to guide the analysis of how the learning and performance of language and literacy practices were “socially organized and enacted” (p. 110). In this way, language data were analyzed not only for content but also for linguistic features such as lexicon and syntax and sociolinguistic constructs such as literacy events, participation structures, communicative acts, and functions (Dyson & Genishi, 2005, p. 87). In order to confirm or contradict patterns that emerged in preliminary analyses of data from initial interviews, field notes, and students’ written texts, I conducted “member checking” (Creswell, 2006) by embedding questions in the final interviews to elicit students’ perspectives on these patterns. Many of these questions also evolved from changes that I noted as I analyzed each draft of the essay for changes in content, organization, development of argument, and language use (syntax, lexicon) and tried to trace the origins of these changes to influences from the teacher’s feedback, other print resources (the handbook, friends’ papers), and human resources (mentor, friends, siblings, parents, other teachers).

Although I initially conceptualized the project as a “writing study,” the analytic process revealed patterns far broader in scope, requiring more attention to the social aspects of literacy and more layers of analysis than originally intended. According to Strauss (1987),

Often in contemporary qualitative research the emphasis on interactions (and on immediately contextual aspects in relation to interactions) is so strong that it overwhelms or prevents attention to the larger structural conditions. . . . Minimizing or leaving out structural conditions, whether more immediately contextual or “further away” . . . short-circuits the explanation. Doing the reverse, overemphasizing structural conditions, does not do justice to the rich interactional data that put life and a sense of immediacy . . . into the analysis. (p. 78)

Initial patterns in the data called attention to this dilemma and made me recognize two needs in terms of analyzing data with attention to depth and breadth of the young people’s experiences and literacy practices. First, I needed to use patterns noted in the initial analyses to reduce the number of participants whose data would be analyzed in depth for full case studies. Next, I would need a framework that could capture texts, interactions, and contexts in ways that highlighted the language experiences of the young people involved in the study.

Based on trends and patterns from the initial analyses, I selected a subset of students for deeper analyses based on the depth and breadth of data from each case, their representativeness and uniqueness of experience, and their availability for follow-up consultations through the analysis stage. Of this subset, three are presented here to illustrate three distinct cases of academic language and literacy in the New Mainstream. As a bilingual Latina student, Belinda was considered to be typical of many Generation 1.5 (Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999) students—children who grew up in homes where another language was spoken but who were schooled almost exclusively in the United States. As such, her case illustrates how former English learner status affected learning opportunities and framing of her educational successes and struggles, by the school and by Belinda herself. Leesa, on the other hand, was considered by school personnel to be atypical in a number of striking ways. Leesa defied categories, and a number of factors allowed this to facilitate her access to important opportunities for learning and development. Leesa’s case reveals the potential for learning and growth that is available to young people when traditional categories and dichotomies no longer constrain their opportunities or conceal their strengths and skills. Ollie was nominated for participation in the study because, according to the teacher, he was a strong student with some fairly typical challenges with regard to academic literacy. While his case might initially appear to represent one “typical” White native-English-speaking student’s experience of academic language and literacy, it ultimately exposes the ways in which traditional categories also limit our understanding of these students’ learning, skills, and needs. These three cases, then, offer evidence to argue that traditional categories and dichotomies do not serve any students in New Mainstream classrooms but instead constrain teachers’ and researchers’ understanding of their performance and limit the students’ opportunities for growth and learning.

Ollie’s Senior Exhibition

The teacher thought Ollie’s Senior Exhibition topic was one of the most creative, “The Relationship Between Professional Wrestling and Classic Myth.” Actually, Ollie had combined a personal interest with a friend’s Senior Exhibition topic to arrive at his topic choice:

Well, I like professional wrestling. And since my brother is two years ahead of me . . . so I knew that they are gonna—he found out they are going to have a Senior Exhibition. So I figured when I become a senior I am going to have it so, for five years I have been thinking about how I can connect it to professional wrestling. And then last year a friend of mine did his on the graphic novel, The Watchman, and how it relates to classic myth, so I just took his idea into the professional wrestling and just started it.

By incorporating professional wrestling into his Senior Exhibition topic, Ollie was able to discuss the project with his older brother regularly. In their phone calls, Ollie explained,

Then he will ask me a question I’ll refer to a match that happened a week before and I’ll explain how it related to one of my things. Like, I wouldn’t tell him specific ones that I used on my paper, because some of them are from like 1980 matches or whatever, but I’ll talk to him about uh, we get in like a two-hour conversation about a match that’s happening now and how it relates to a certain myth.

Since his brother had experience with professional wrestling and with the academic demands and expectations of the Senior Exhibition, this provided Ollie with ongoing informal support to make connections and develop ideas.

The academic literacies that Ollie used to complete his Senior Exhibition successfully all demonstrated creative ways to meet the teacher’s standards without engaging in deep academic reading. Although Ollie’s lack of reading for the project may have stemmed from disinterest or his own admitted laziness, the fact that he had been enrolled in a remedial reading class, together with comments in his interviews, suggests that reading might still have been a source of struggle for Ollie. For example, Ollie told me that for his project he read “nothing complicated. I’m not into reading as much as people that I know and it was fairly simple reading.” When I asked him how he met the assignment’s requirement of including a book as a source, he told me he had a “book of Greek myth. It has myths in it, but it’s a children’s book. It’s a simplified book, which is good for me.” First, he found print texts that were nonstandard sources readily accessible. He noted, for example, that “I really didn’t do any book readings. I haven’t done any actually for my report—mostly the Internet.” The children’s book on Greek myth was actually from his mother’s fifth-grade classroom, but this would not be obvious to his teacher, who saw only the title in Ollie’s list of references. For other sources on mythology, Ollie relied on two sources. The “Internet” sources that he referenced above were not actually the result of his own Internet searches. Instead, he pulled Internet quotations from his friend’s Watchmen paper, citing the URL as his friend did so that it appeared he had done the Internet research. Other quotations, from Joseph Campbell’s books, actually came from the teacher, either from handouts distributed in class or from helpful hints that the teacher supplied to Ollie during writing conferences. Ollie was skilled at eliciting from the teacher exactly what the teacher would require in a successful paper. For example, when the teacher wanted more direct quotations from Campbell’s books instead of Internet sources, Ollie explained evasively,

But, oh no, but uh, I type the website in and it does the e-mail, the URL thing and it’s all messed up. I got this from a friend of mine who, uh, found that. I’ve been trying to find like, ya know like type in like hero’s journey and I can’t find? quotes or anything? that would be like . . .

The teacher responded by saying,

My guess is it’s from the Hero’s Journey, his book the Hero’s Journey. And my guess is that it’s gonna be in the first chapter of the Hero’s Journey, just from what it’s saying [reads aloud again] . . . or maybe in the introduction.

He then pulled a copy of the Hero’s Journey from his bookshelf, found an equivalent quotation in the introduction, and told Ollie where to include it in his paper. Rather than include the exact quotation in his paper, however, Ollie chose to paraphrase and cite a different Campbell source.

Ollie’s first Campbell citation appears in paragraph 8 of his 24-paragraph (16-page) essay. According to the handbook, which adapted this heuristic from the school’s AVID program, students were to apply different sorts of typeface to sentences that served different functions in a paragraph in order to make sure that the paragraph was complete: boldface for topic sentences; underlining for evidence and analysis; italics for sentences that tie back to the thesis statement. Although Ollie reassigned the text conventions in his paragraph below, he adhered to the purpose of the heuristic. The full paragraph illustrates how Ollie cited Power of Myth where the teacher called for a primary source citation in his previous draft, discussed during their writing conference.

When a story is passed from one generation to another, the costumes or images change along with the details, but the original message of the story is always the same. Joseph Campbell, an expert in mythology, believed that all stories’ myths represent all of our lives. He says that myths are the basic outline of the life of every person living today or in the past, and each time the myths/stories are changed, so is the life surrounding the generation that tells the story. (Campbell, Power of Myth) The setting fits the theme. Mr. Donald Jacobson, English teacher at Cerro Vista High School, agrees with Mr. Campbell. Mr. Jacobson believes, an example of his generation’s stories and myth revolve around the movie “Star Wars,” and have changed in our generation to “Harry Potter” books and movies (Jackson, personal interview). Even though these stories may be completely different, in style and costume, they both contain the same message . . . good will prevail. The battle between Luke and Darth Vader is a perfect example of the battle of good vs. evil. . . . Professional wrestling does this in the same way. the hero comes out every show and protects the company from falling into the hands of the villain. . . . Wrestling is continuing the tradition of the hero cycle by using them in their weekly shows and monthly Pay Per Views.

In his list of works cited, Ollie listed “Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, New York; Doubleday 1988: PBS television series.” In our interview, he said that the only book he read for the project was the D’Aulaire children’s book (published in 1962); therefore, this Campbell citation may have been intentionally ambiguous to conceal the fact that his source was a video. On the other hand, he may have copied the citation and paraphrase from his friend’s paper, which was also the source of the other Internet Campbell references in his paper—the references that his teacher was urging Ollie to replace with primary sources.

Ollie, a case of . . .

Ollie is an interesting case that could be understood from a number of perspectives. In some ways, he appears to be a classic case of a mainstream student “doing school” with strategies noted by Pope (2001) and others, facilitated by linguistic and interactional norms and skills that he acquired at home as the son of a teacher. In other ways, he presents the case of the “remedial” student working very diligently at school to show what he knows and hide what he has not learned (Varenne & McDermott, 1999). Social reproduction theorists would also view Ollie as a case of mainstream White middle-class male entitlement, shepherded through the system toward good grades in spite of evidence that his conventional academic skills were no greater than those of his Latina classmates. The behaviors he engaged in throughout the Senior Exhibition process could be seen as deceptive or creative, lazy or strategic, depending on the lens of the observer or evaluator. In fact, different “official” lenses evaluated Ollie’s Senior Exhibition quite differently. In order to make the workload of 12th-grade English language arts teachers more manageable in light of the extra Senior Exhibition demands, the final essays were distributed to teachers across content areas schoolwide for grading with the standardized rubric. Ollie told me that his final draft was assigned a grade of D by a physical education teacher but that Mr. Quinn disagreed and changed the grade to a B before grades were submitted. On one hand, Ollie’s case can be explained by literatures on White privilege and social capital; however, the particular experiences of Ollie are not easily captured by only one lens. Most literature on “mainstream” literacy would suggest that this middle-class White male student—a native speaker of English and the child of a teacher—would have internalized many of the literate behaviors and skills necessary to complete the Senior Exhibition project successfully without the kinds of subterfuge Ollie employed. How helpful, then, are the labels of mainstream, White, or native English speaker, if there is a possibility that these labels masked Ollie’s learning needs and prevented him from acquiring important aspects of advanced language and literacy?

Belinda’s Senior Exhibition

The title of Belinda’s Senior Exhibition project was “The Media’s Effect on Teen Body Image.” When I asked her how she chose her topic, Belinda said she had not considered any other topics, adding,

Actually, one of my friends last year, her sister did her Senior Exhibition on like, I think it’s something similar. I’m not sure, it’s the same or something similar and I went to go and see hers—because at the end you have to give that big presentation, with the teachers and stuff—and I went to see hers. And it was really good and I also, I liked it.

With 11 drafts, Belinda produced more iterations of her Senior Exhibition essay than any other student in the study, seeking written and oral feedback from her teacher and mentor (another English teacher) at regular intervals beyond the required 3-draft feedback schedule. Belinda referred to herself as a writer only once in the interview data, and even then indirectly and in comparison with friends whom she felt had more natural talent for writing. She described how she planned her writing time to avoid procrastination, explaining,

But my friend, see it’s all about how good of a writer you are, you know? I think, me, personally I need so much time to get things done, right? Some of my friends know, you know, they stay up all night and they get like, ten pages done. I can’t do that, I need time.

Certain words and constructs related to academic language and literacy were common in the data from Belinda’s case, including structure/format (both terms she used to talk about expectations for organizing her paper), correctness, and plagiarism. With regard to her inquiry process, consensus and typicality were the principles that guided her choices about how to choose a topic, how to evaluate sources and select information for inclusion in her essay, and how to approach next steps in her writing process (see Villalva, 2006a for more information about Belinda’s inquiry and writing process). In general, Belinda’s writing reflected a commitment to following the precise rules provided by her teacher and the handbook. Her final draft was 18 pages long (excluding bibliography) with 22 paragraphs. We see an example of the boldface/underlining/italics heuristic in Belinda’s paragraph below. This is paragraph 11 of Belinda’s final draft, selected for inclusion here because it is halfway through the paper and is typical of later paragraphs in terms of the use of the heuristic as well as development of ideas, stance, or argument:

Advertisers purposely normalize unrealistically thin bodies, in order to create a desire that can drive product consumption. By reproducing ideals that are absurdly out of line with what real bodies really do look like, the media creates an unending market for frustration and disappointment for young teenage girls. Customers will never disappear because advertisers will always come up with new products and people are never going to be perfect, so advertisers will always have more buyers. The diet industry alone generates $33 billion in revenue. Advertisers have been extremely successful with their marketing strategy (Mediascope 3). Women in today’s society struggle immensely to achieve the perfect body, but they don’t realize that buying products will never make them perfect because it is impossible to be perfect. Advertisers promote unrealistic hopes as to making teens think that they will be ideal and have excellent results. In reality, advertisers are just selling their products. The media is making money by making teens believe they will have heavenly results, when it’s all a scheme to get teens to buy their alluring products.

By adhering so tightly to the prescribed heuristics, Belinda was able to draft an essay that met the evaluation criteria in the schoolwide rubric. However, this approach also prevented her from developing an idea or argument beyond the one- or two-paragraph level since the tie-back sentences at the end of each paragraph returned her to the basic idea of the thesis statement on the first page. In this paragraph, like most others, Belinda includes one new source-based idea—that the diet industry is a lucrative one—and builds around it with restatements of her thesis from paragraph 2 (“The media affects a teenager’s self image through advertisements and magazines which portray beauty as the single and most crucial element necessary to thrive in our society”) and restatements of the new source-based idea.

When asked what she thought her teachers knew about her topic, she noted that it was a typical topic and that they had read other papers on the same subject. Then she responded, “But maybe not much. I mean, I’m sure after they’ve read the whole paper, they get an idea, you know?” Overall, though, Belinda was most concerned with fixing the “corrections” that her teacher and mentor asked her to make. Her concern with “structure” and correctness motivated Belinda to select another English teacher as the outside mentor for her project, even though students were encouraged to choose adults from outside the high school, preferably experts in their topics. Belinda explained her choice by saying,

I felt like I wanted an English teacher because that way, writing my paper, she can help me a lot in my structure and stuff, so I know exactly what I need to do. And yeah . . . that some teacher can also help but I think it would be more appropriate for an English teacher.

Belinda, a case of . . .

So what, exactly, is the experience of Belinda a case of? What and whom does she represent? Clearly, when she entered the school system as a kindergartener, Belinda was identified as a student outside the mainstream as her teacher sought any number of services and their corresponding labels to find instructional supports based on Belinda’s various differences or deficiencies. Ultimately, language services were the only supports for which she qualified, and after one year of pull-out ESL classes, Belinda was officially designated as fluent in English. However, simplistic notions of language remained the reasons cited for Belinda’s struggles in school. Her 8th-grade mathematics teacher noted her bilingualism and “limited” English proficiency as the reason for her struggles in his class, even though she was not “limited” in her English according to standard school-based criteria. In her 12th-grade English class, the teacher noted Belinda’s writing as an area of struggle, saying that “she writes like she talks.” To help Belinda write more coherently, the teacher focused on issues of text organization in ways that emphasized “structure” over argument or message. During a writing conference, for example, Belinda asked Mr. Quinn a question about “paragraph structure” to clarify a notation he made in a margin comment that said, “Eating disorders all together.” Belinda pointed to the comment and said, “There we go! That paragraph’s all together.” The teacher noted her misunderstanding and replied, “Oh, what? Good. Let’s make sure we understand what that means. When I said eating disorder paragraphs all together, I don’t mean to put them all into one big paragraph.” The emphasis in their discussion of her writing, then, was less on the message and argument and more on how to chunk the text and where to place each chunk. In other words, the emphasis was on the structure of the text. Likewise, their discussions of citing expert sources also revolved around structure over meaning. Belinda reported that Mr. Quinn noted her copying from sources by telling her, “‘Belinda, you need to fix this plagiarism!’ Blah, blah blah. He was a little upset. And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry,’ I’m like, because I did cite them like, right after every paragraph.” Academic language and literacy in Belinda’s experience, then, were rooted in English-only contexts and involved understanding the rules and following them appropriately. Features of text were more important than the underlying meaning of the text, and experts were required to avoid mistakes and make necessary “corrections.” Belinda’s case, then, was the case of a Generation 1.5 student whose experiences with academic language and literacy emphasized form over function, product over process, and gist over argument. Like many Generation 1.5 students, her bilingualism was flagged in her earlier years as the primary obstacle to school success; by her senior year in high school, however, her bilingualism had been made invisible. Her teacher described Belinda’s writing by saying, “She writes like she talks,” without acknowledging that she also talked in Spanish and that her experiences in Spanish might inform her development of academic language and literacy in English if acknowledged and explored in school contexts. Neither approach, then, captured the nuances of Belinda’s language and literacy repertoire, nor did either approach help teachers to identify and address her specific needs. Her final draft was a product of instruction that emphasized following prescribed rules, and it followed these rules quite successfully, to the detriment of cohesion and argument. Many of her writing patterns were illustrative of the needs of monolingual English-speaking “basic writers” (Emig, 1997; Shaughnessy, 1977) rather than issues related exclusively to bilingualism and English proficiency. Like the writing of many basic writers, Belinda’s texts contained “common errors” (Shaughnessy, 1977) such as issues of subject-verb agreement, problems with proper citation, and issues of syntax and punctuation. Many monolingual English-speaking students struggle with these issues in high school and college classrooms. No label, then, was adequate to identify and meet all of Belinda’s strengths and learning needs.

Leesa’s Senior Exhibition

The focus of Leesa’s Senior Exhibition project was to research the history of misnaming and stereotyping Native Americans in the U.S. while also documenting her social action group’s efforts to change to the name of “Indian Springs Park” to more accurately reflect the actual tribe that had once inhabited local lands. She explained that she felt the Senior Exhibition should be “something that people can do” and remarked, “I don’t think it should be like, ‘Oh, go and do some research on something.” As an exceptional English learner, Leesa often benefited from relaxed deadlines on her assignment in ways that drew attention and complaints from her classmates. Mr. Quinn did not relax deadlines for Leesa’s bilingual classmates who were known to have been in the country since early childhood. Belinda quoted a mutual friend of the girls as saying, “I don’t understand how Leesa turns things in way after they’re due and she gets good grades on it, and I don’t understand it.” She also noted that Mr. Quinn did deduct points for lateness but that Leesa still did very well considering her tardiness.

Leesa’s profile of academic language and literacy around the Senior Exhibition was exceptional in many ways. She embraced the “personalization” aspect of the project in a way that excited the teacher, who abandoned the formulaic approach of heuristics (as in Belinda’s writing conference above) that he usually used to scaffold writing, perhaps partly because Leesa already had a purpose and argument in mind as she drafted her paper. Also, the nontraditional approach of her paper—which focused on a real social outcome—did not lend itself to the traditional forms that teachers (and district standards) had in mind when the rubric was designed. The connections between research, writing, and action facilitated a focus on research and writing for a specific purpose and goal. Rather than focus exclusively on the composition process as he did with other students, Mr. Quinn focused equal or greater attention to Leesa’s inquiry process: Whom should she approach for information on city processes? Would involvement of local media support or hurt her cause? Leesa welcomed complexity and differing perspectives in her research and wove these into her text. She mentioned a local historian whom she interviewed for her project, saying, “Without him, I’d be further along, but I wouldn’t know as much.” In talking about various interviews for her project, Leesa said, “I think I really learned a lot from seeing different views.” She explained how her own position on the naming and protection of the park changed based on each interview, ending with one interview that “totally changed my viewpoint . . . so, talking to people is definitely important.” For this particular type of project, Leesa was able to produce sophisticated academic English in writing, with occasional nonstandard conventions and flaws in mechanics. Her writing was coherent, and her argument was well supported with details and the integration of expert sources, both print and interview. Still, Leesa said, “I have a lot of problems writing essays . . . it’s definitely not my strongest point. . . . I’m not good at writing.” She explained, “I don’t know like verbs and adjectives . . . it’s kind of like you skip over all the basic stuff which is really important to build on for that next level.” Leesa’s greatest writing challenge was spelling, although her word-processing program’s spell-checking tool corrected most of her mistakes on her Senior Exhibition drafts (homonyms remained a problem).

Although Leesa did attempt to mark most of her paragraphs according to the typeface heuristic suggested by the teacher and handbook, her essay was unconventional in many ways and unlikely to fit the standard expectations of the rubric. Since her project had a real-world social outcome—to promote changing the name of a local park—her paper synthesized literature and expert opinion on her topic but also reported on her firsthand experiences of learning how to have the name officially changed by the city. Her written draft reflects this shift from the first half of the paper into the last half; the traditional portion of the paper reflects more standard expectations for academic writing, while a style closer to her oral discourse is evident in the later portion. In paragraph 6 of her 17-page, 20-paragraph final draft, Leesa develops her argument, provides local and national examples, and integrates citations from three Internet sources. She opens her argument with a broad claim, inviting her audience into the “problem” of her project with a rhetorical question about racism and ignorance. She continues to develop her argument about school names reflecting stereotypes of Native Americans by referencing a local high school as well as a local but nationally recognized university. Although the writing has minor flaws, such as the typo of the word “from” (written as “fro”) or the slightly awkward placement of the Squaw Valley example amid a discussion of schools, the paragraph is sophisticated in its synthesis of ideas and development of argument and reflects traditional norms for academic writing of argument in expository text.

A school is supposed to be a place where lives take shape, where people grow and learn and have the opportunity to become better people, but how are they do that if the representation of their school is based on racism and pure ignorance? Just as there are sports teams named after Native Americans, there are also many schools that are named in “honor” of indigenous people. Some of them are within the Bay Area. For example, the mascots for Sequoia High School used to be the Cherokees, and Stanford University used to be the Stanford Indians. . . . There are also geographical places that follow this cycle, for example Squaw Valley in Tahoe. The actual meaning behind “Squaw,” is prostitute and in other languages it is a vulgar term for female genitalia (www.main.nc.us). The root for the word comes fro the Mohawk tribe “. . . squaw derived from the Mohawk word ojiskwa meaning vagina (to be politically correct) in Mohawk” (www.traightdope.com). If we continue to misinterpret natives and disrespect their people, and culture, we are still supporting ignorance. Barbara Munson says, “Indian logos and nicknames create, support and maintain stereotypes of race of people. When such cultural abuse is supported by one or many of society’s institutions, it constitutes institutional racism” (www.iwchildgren.org). Though some of these schools/organizations have realized the negative connotation behind these names and have changed them, still more changes need to occur in order to stop the ignorance and stereotyping of indigenous people.

In paragraph 10, however, the voice and style of the text change as Leesa reported on her inquiry process into changing the park’s name. The text in this section of the paper approximates Leesa’s oral discourse style much more closely. This paragraph includes the following sentence: “Mr. Russell was able to provide us with great ideas and he helped the group get started in the right direction.” Other sentences began with, “So we decided that since our goal was to educate the community” and “So we are going to write a friendly informative letter to the community.” Leesa was not penalized for this shift in her writing, however, since there were no established norms for writing up this type of process within the Senior Exhibition.

Leesa, a case of . . .

The case of Leesa reminds us how dangerous it can be to try to capture the history, performance, or experience of a student within a particular category or label. School personnel unequivocally identified Leesa as a case of the exceptionally successful English learner, building all conceptions of her student identity and performance from her earliest identification as a newcomer immigrant student. Many researchers would consider Leesa a case of a transnational young adult, transporting and extending literacies learned from one context into another. Even if one acknowledges the incredible heterogeneity of transnational Mexican migrants, Leesa’s case is still unique among them, however, due to her bilingual upbringing with American, English-speaking stepfathers; her access to several years of bilingual schooling; and the attention to developing biliteracy throughout her childhood and young adulthood. Ultimately, then, Leesa is an extreme case of exceptionality and hybridity in terms of her schooling, her language development, and her literacy experiences, and the transnational label is insufficient to capture the nuances of this hybridity. While it is easy to note how her transnationalism and hybridity may have contributed to the development of remarkable language, literacy, and inquiry skills, it is also important to consider how the unpredictable and varied nature of these experiences could also have been blamed for school failure had she been less successful. In fact, her misrepresentation of her newcomer status—which her mother required in order to conceal their previous years as undocumented residents in the United States—was most likely a key factor in Leesa’s success since it allowed her to “use cultural resources during local social interactions in ways that contribute to the on-going production of categories like success and failure” (Bartlett, 2007, p. 217). In Leesa’s case, this subterfuge allowed her to interact with the teacher and school officials as a model of the successful newcomer student in situations where her tardy assignments might have framed her as an unmotivated or lazy student, an ill-prepared Latina student, or any number of other undesirable forms of school failure. It is also remarkable that Leesa chose, with her teacher’s enthusiastic support, a nontraditional approach to the assignment by selecting a topic with an actual community outcome as its goal. This choice resulted in a written draft that pushed the limits of standard expectations for writing of a Senior Exhibition essay. For Leesa, this resulted in extra flexibility and a chance to move beyond the constraints of the prescriptive writing “supports” given to other students.