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99 ERC SES 04 G: Inclusive teaching practices
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99. Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Paper In the Search for Cosmopolitan Literacies: An Intrinsic Case Study of an Expatriated White Teacher Turkish Ministry of Education, Turkey (Türkiye) Presenting Author:Immigration brings about the matter of living harmoniously in places both for immigrants and for the host country’s citizens. Teachers are pivotal in creating safe spaces for immigrant and local students in classrooms. Moral cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2006) offers a framework in which the experiences of immigrants and local people are contingent on one another to build a healthy community. Hansen (2017) identifies a task for teachers to be inquisitive about different cultures to accomplish their role. The experiences that immigrant students bring into the classroom create valuable input for teachers. While American teachers are criticised for being primarily monolingual and monoracial, local American teachers’ efforts to fulfil their tasks for teaching immigrant students are overlooked in the literature. Cosmopolitan literature constituted a detailed and well-studied corpus in the scholarly literature. There are three trends in the cosmopolitan literature. First, book or movie clubs that people interact with other cultures at the representational level. The second is documenting immigrant individuals’ literacy practices as cosmopolitan agents, which places a burden on a small group, even a single person, to represent an entire culture. The third is connecting different groups of youth around the globe and exchanging media, which is very challenging to conduct. Hence, I problematized the literature from the point of view of the participants’ profiles. The participant profile in these three trends is skewed towards the individuals who participated in transnational travel (Canagarajah, 2011; Oikonomidoy, 2018). More importantly, local individuals and those with varying levels of travel experience (e.g., expatriates) are underrepresented in the literature. Thus, this study focuses on the teaching practice of a White American teacher who spoke three languages and lived in Yemen for six years. She presented a profile that both represented the overlooked population and challenged the common criticism of American language teachers. As a Muslim student from Türkiye, working toward a doctoral degree in the US, I experienced being an immigrant. Although I agree with the critics of American teachers being predominantly white and monolingual, I was introduced to a teacher who lived in Yemen for a long time as a White American woman during my piloting studies. Hence, I departed on my experience to build an intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995) to draw on Erica’s (pseudonym) teaching practice. I spent one year with Erica and her assistant teacher in her sheltered ESOL classroom, church, and at social occasions. To build Erica's account, I collected three semi-structured interviews, two paired in-depth interviews, nine stimulated recall interviews, observational data, and personal artefacts. Additional interviews with her assistant were also collected. I will draw only on the artifactual analysis of two materials for this presentation. The leading research question of the study was: How does a formerly expatriated ESL teacher locate artefacts as cosmopolitan materials? Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used Intrinsic case studies (Stake, 1995) focus on the instantiated version of a phenomenon within a case (Compton-Lilly, 2021). Because intercultural interaction in a classroom can be a site of cultural flow, an intrinsic case study is best suited to capture the case. To apply the method effectively, I employed various data collection tools. Silent observation (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) was the primary tool for understanding the context and nature of interactions in the study setting. Three types of interviews accompanied the silent observation in the data. The first was a series of standard interviews I conducted with the focal participant, Erica (pseudonym) and the secondary participant, Lucy (pseudonym). The second was stimulated recall interviews, which were used to examine cultural interactions in depth. The third is artifactual interviews that focus on specific artefacts in Erica’s living spaces and on their metaphoric representation. The participant profiles were also important for the intrinsic nature of the study. The focal participant presents as a White American woman who taught a sheltered ESOL class in a middle school. She had 9 years of experience in expatriation in Yemen and spoke Arabic fluently. Upon her return, she began teaching in the US and conducting cultural activities in her social life. She mainly worked with immigrant students who were at certain language comprehension in her teaching. The secondary participant was the assistant teacher who worked closely with the focal participant every day. She was a paraprofessional who was named Employee of the Year by the district. She was a heritage Spanish speaker and learned the language later in life from her grandparents. She primarily worked with newcomer students with lower language comprehension. The study's context was important for understanding the nature of the intrinsic case. Due to the nature of the topic, intercultural interaction, the interaction occurred through the bigger context and the smaller context. The broader context that led to the shelving of the study was a middle school in a southern U.S. state. The state's stereotypical Southern features of American culture were reflected in the school's daily life. The smaller context was the sheltered class, in which students from different language levels met and received instruction. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings The first artefact, the frame, was the Arabic version of Matthew 6:9-13. It sparked a discussion among Erica's social circle about religion and stereotypes in the Middle East. During her time in Yemen, Erica lived in a primarily Muslim country and met with local Christians who the government oppressed. The frame presented a Bible verse in Arabic that could be mistaken for a Quranic verse. Interviews about the artefact revealed that her experience in Yemen “crystallised” (Roswell & Abrams, 2019) into a concrete account of immigration and became a memoir of lived experience. Erica emphasised that her background in immigration informs her commitment to teaching immigrant students. Hence, the artefact and the interaction surrounding it were closely related to the broader context that shaped people’s reactions. The second artefact was related to Erica’s time in expatriation in Yemen. The artefact was a handmade basket that represented Erica’s Jewish heritage. Although the material was not expensive, it held an important place for her. She obtained it from a Yemeni Jewish family and retained it because she was half Jewish on her father’s side. During the interview, she emphasised that she was proud of her heritage in a hospitable manner. Drawing on the remarks about the first artefact, she developed a harmonious perspective in which two or more opposing views could live together. Thus, the second artefact was closely related to a smaller context in which Erica performed a harmonious life as she wished. The two artefacts illustrated how macro- and micro-level contexts shape her practice. The stereotypical representation of the Arabic alphabet shadowed the existence of Arabic Christians. While she welcomed all comments on her engagements with other cultures, her hospitality stemmed from a personal item. Grounded in genuine attention to learning from one another, Erica embodied a cosmopolitan profile. References Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World. London: Allen Lane. Canagarajah, S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied linguistics review, 2(2011). Compton-Lilly, C. (2021). Turtles, tortoises, ethnographies, and case study: Nuances of difference and design. Literacy research methodologies, 7-26. Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (2005). On the case: Approaches to language and literacy research (an NCRLL volume). Teachers College Press. Hansen, D. T. (2017). The teacher and the world: A study of cosmopolitanism as education. Routledge. Rowsell, J. M., & Abrams, S. S. (2019). Immateriality Redux: Tacit Modalities and Meaning across Timescales. In Negotiating Place and Space in Digital Literacies: Research and Practice (pp. 242-259). Stake, R. (1995). Case study research. thousand oaks, CA: Sage. Oikonomidoy, E. M. (2018). Critical cosmopolitanism in diverse students’ lives: Universal and restricted expressions. Routledge. | ||