Books and Special Issues by Ruth Harman
Culturally sustaining systemic functional linguistics: Embodied inquiry with multilingual youth.
The purpose of our book is to share our vision and enactment of what we call a Culturally Sustain... more The purpose of our book is to share our vision and enactment of what we call a Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (CS SFL) Youth!Art praxis. Our approach aligns closely with recent educational and sociological research that highlights the power of performance, community research, visual artmaking and multilingual literacy practices to position youth as civic agents of change and artistic designers of new knowledge (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014). Informed by Halliday’s theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), our approach complements this recent research by paying special attention to the meaning making resources and creative re-mixing and reflective processes of youth engaged in this relational and civic work (Heath, 1993; Humphrey, 2008, 2010).
Simultaneously, our program supports apprenticeship of pre-service teachers and emergent researchers in the field of first and second language and literacy development. The approach encourages youth and adults iteratively and generatively to engage with issues connected to their world and community, with an eye towards designing innovative, equity-centered solutions to real-world problems. Educators who participate in our programs consistently interact with students to support youth engagement in multimodal projects and most importantly to develop their own capacity as multicultural participatory teachers and researchers. The hope, in this book, is that we can share with readers how and why embodied literacy practices support both the multi lingual and civic literacy development of adolescent youth and the culturally sustaining pedagogical practices of educators.
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International Journal of …, Jan 1, 2012
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ABSTRACT
This volume explores how educators conceptualized and implemented critical approaches to... more ABSTRACT
This volume explores how educators conceptualized and implemented critical approaches to systemic functional linguistics that support bilingual students in appropriating and challenging dominant knowledge domains in K-16 contexts.The researchers exhibit a shared commitment to enacting a culturally sustaining SFL praxis that validates multilingual meaning making, pushes against social inequity, and fosters creative re-mixing of available semiotic resources. It should prove a valuable resource for students, teachers and researchers interested in applied linguistics, education and critical theory.
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Page 1. SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS AND THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE IN URBAN SCHOOL CLASSROOMS... more Page 1. SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS AND THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE IN URBAN SCHOOL CLASSROOMS A Dissertation Presented by RUTH HARMAN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION May 2008 Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies School of Education Page 2. © Copyright by Ruth Harman 2008 All Rights Reserved Page 3.
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Peer Refereed Journal Articles by Ruth Harman
Research in Science Education
Here’s the link to the online version of our paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs... more Here’s the link to the online version of our paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11165-019-9846-8 We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today’s education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students’ emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments. Within the context of these workshops, we used discourse analysis to explore how three different groups grappled with the new reform-oriented relationship between science and language: (1) the research team’s emergent understandings of how to create improved resources for teachers to better integrate science and language; (2) students’ emergent understandings as expressed in their assessment responses; and (3) teachers’ emergent understandings of how to integrate science and language in their instruction as expressed in interviews in the teacher writing workshops. Implications for curriculum designers, assessment developers and professional learning facilitators are discussed.
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TESOL Quarterly
This paper conceptualizes the notion of embodiment in systemic functional linguistics by highligh... more This paper conceptualizes the notion of embodiment in systemic functional linguistics by highlighting the interplay between the body and language in the meaning-making process. Accordingly, it argues that learning happens through an interrelated range of modalities that physically engage students, support shifts in their conceptual understanding of disciplinary materials, and foster their investment in learning. It also illustrates how the SFL teaching-learning cycle can work simultaneously on two planes: one that deconstructs and reconstructs disciplinary practices through embodied activities and one that deconstructs and reconstructs disciplinary language through dialogic talk.
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As part of a youth summer program—a partnership between a large Southeastern university and the l... more As part of a youth summer program—a partnership between a large Southeastern university and the local school district—middle-school-aged youth, preservice teachers, and doctoral candidates interested in arts-based literacy practices spent their mornings in June 2016 engaging in activities that both explored and expanded thinking around their communities, schools, and families. Whereas the youth were enrolled in a monthlong creative arts and tentative unschooling experiment that ran roughly the length of a typical school day, university faculty and graduate students were engaged in a course on the application of youth participatory action research (YPAR). This article is an examination of the experience of preservice teachers, through an analysis of their reflections on events within the course, to suggest ways forward through the promises and perils of project-based, clinical preservice teaching experiences. In our exploration of the experiences of focal preservice teachers when engaged with youth coresearchers in a monthlong YPAR project, we found the work to have been filled with contradictions, unexpected shifts, and moments of great understanding, community affiliation, and suffering.
I don’t understand how I’m supposed to interact with these kids. And all these studies I’m reading are like, “and then we interacted with youth and then results happened.” HOW? How do you do this? How do you build trust? This is just so complicated in reality. (Julie,1
1 All names have been changed.
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preservice teacher engaging in YPAR work)
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Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, May 1, 2018
he purpose of our paper is to discuss the theoretical and pedagogical premises of our critical sy... more he purpose of our paper is to discuss the theoretical and pedagogical premises of our critical systemic functional linguistics praxis. Our approach developed because of the deficit discourses about immigrant students prevalent in our New Latin@ Diaspora state. As multilingual educators from postcolonial Ireland and India, our theoretical framework has helped us conceptualize and design interventions that support the incorporation of the linguistic and cultural repertories of our multilingual immigrant students while acknowledging that disciplinary literacy needs an overt form of linguistic instruction. Our pedagogical and professional work, which we illustrate through excerpts from one of our ethnographic studies, has encouraged our students to code switch among registers and languages while accessing academic discourses in a high stakes testing culture. It has supported bilingual students in challenging normative discourses about immigration and other burning social issues that arise because of social and academic inequity.
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Informed by performance studies and an interactional sociolinguistics orientation to meaning-maki... more Informed by performance studies and an interactional sociolinguistics orientation to meaning-making, this paper investigates how performing, analyzing, and reflecting on reenactments of classroom experience supported our thinking about how we negotiate institutional, societal, and global challenges in multilingual contexts. Two implications for language education and research are discussed: the potential of performance as an instructional tool in fostering reflexivity among teachers and students, and the potential of collaborative critical discourse analysis to support educators in stepping out of their everyday lives to analyze the multifaceted nature of bilingual education.
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Recent arts-based research has explored how instructional use of performance supports participant... more Recent arts-based research has explored how instructional use of performance supports participants in embodying and challenging social equity issues. Informed by performativity theories (e.g., Butler, 1999) and a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective on meaning making, this paper investigates how multilingual educators in an arts-based language education course analyzed and negotiated language teacher identities. Specifically, the paper explores if and how a performance process, which included storytelling, performance and discourse analysis, supported the focal participants in developing awareness of interaction as discursive negotiation of institutional, cultural and agentive factors. Two implications for language education and research are discussed: the potential of performance as an instructional resource to support critical discourse awareness among language educators, and the potential of SFL as a resource to research arts-based processes in multicultural education contexts.
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International Journal of Multicultural …, Jan 1, 2012
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Journal of Second Language Writing, Jan 1, 2011
Education reforms in the United States have placed new demands on English language learners (ELLs... more Education reforms in the United States have placed new demands on English language learners (ELLs) and their teachers in K-12 public schools. In response, many teachers, teacher educators, and literacy scholars are reexamining genre theory and genre-based pedagogy as a way of supporting the academic literacy development of the growing number of ELLs attending primary and secondary schools in the United States. In this article, we briefly describe the impact of federal reforms such as No Child Left Behind legislation on L2 literacy practices in K-12 schools. Next, we outline some core epistemological and methodological assumptions informing different perspectives of genre and genre-based pedagogy and how these concepts and methods have relevance for supporting L2 academic literacy development in K-12 contexts. We conclude by outlining the components of a research agenda aimed at supporting K-12 teachers in critically using genre-based pedagogy to support the academic literacy development of ELLs over time.► Implications of No Child Left Behind legislation for L2 literacy. ► Relevance of different genre theories for K-12 literacy practices. ► Critical genre-based research agenda to support L2 literacy in K-12 schools.
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Equity & Excellence in Education, Jan 1, 2011
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Language Policy, Jan 1, 2009
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Language Arts, Jan 1, 2007
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Books and Special Issues by Ruth Harman
Simultaneously, our program supports apprenticeship of pre-service teachers and emergent researchers in the field of first and second language and literacy development. The approach encourages youth and adults iteratively and generatively to engage with issues connected to their world and community, with an eye towards designing innovative, equity-centered solutions to real-world problems. Educators who participate in our programs consistently interact with students to support youth engagement in multimodal projects and most importantly to develop their own capacity as multicultural participatory teachers and researchers. The hope, in this book, is that we can share with readers how and why embodied literacy practices support both the multi lingual and civic literacy development of adolescent youth and the culturally sustaining pedagogical practices of educators.
This volume explores how educators conceptualized and implemented critical approaches to systemic functional linguistics that support bilingual students in appropriating and challenging dominant knowledge domains in K-16 contexts.The researchers exhibit a shared commitment to enacting a culturally sustaining SFL praxis that validates multilingual meaning making, pushes against social inequity, and fosters creative re-mixing of available semiotic resources. It should prove a valuable resource for students, teachers and researchers interested in applied linguistics, education and critical theory.
Peer Refereed Journal Articles by Ruth Harman
I don’t understand how I’m supposed to interact with these kids. And all these studies I’m reading are like, “and then we interacted with youth and then results happened.” HOW? How do you do this? How do you build trust? This is just so complicated in reality. (Julie,1
1 All names have been changed.
View all notes
preservice teacher engaging in YPAR work)
Simultaneously, our program supports apprenticeship of pre-service teachers and emergent researchers in the field of first and second language and literacy development. The approach encourages youth and adults iteratively and generatively to engage with issues connected to their world and community, with an eye towards designing innovative, equity-centered solutions to real-world problems. Educators who participate in our programs consistently interact with students to support youth engagement in multimodal projects and most importantly to develop their own capacity as multicultural participatory teachers and researchers. The hope, in this book, is that we can share with readers how and why embodied literacy practices support both the multi lingual and civic literacy development of adolescent youth and the culturally sustaining pedagogical practices of educators.
This volume explores how educators conceptualized and implemented critical approaches to systemic functional linguistics that support bilingual students in appropriating and challenging dominant knowledge domains in K-16 contexts.The researchers exhibit a shared commitment to enacting a culturally sustaining SFL praxis that validates multilingual meaning making, pushes against social inequity, and fosters creative re-mixing of available semiotic resources. It should prove a valuable resource for students, teachers and researchers interested in applied linguistics, education and critical theory.
I don’t understand how I’m supposed to interact with these kids. And all these studies I’m reading are like, “and then we interacted with youth and then results happened.” HOW? How do you do this? How do you build trust? This is just so complicated in reality. (Julie,1
1 All names have been changed.
View all notes
preservice teacher engaging in YPAR work)
Our paper describes how an arts-based community was developed at Coile Middle school to engage youth and adult participants in storytelling, poetry writing, photography and public presentations during the year 2013-2014. Our third author, Edgar Escutia Chagoya a bilingual newcomer from Mexico at Coile Middle School in 2013-21014, reflects over the course of the chapter about what he experienced in our after school arts group.