Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory
Dr. Ralph Cordova, DirectorMy scholarship draws on and integrates socio-linguistic, interactional ethnographic and literary theoretical research traditions to examine the social construction of learning communities’ development of disciplinary knowledge. Learning to teach and teaching from learning was the focal point of my own teacher-preparation program where I was expected to critically examine, modify and share my practice in the company of peer professionals. Later, as a member of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group (SBCDG, an internationally known university-community based research group focused on the discursive construction of knowledge in classroom/community-based settings), I continued this collegial peer-driven perspective in my own doctoral work at UC Santa Barbara where I conducted the first ethnographic study examining the face-to-face and moment-to-moment discursive construction of how teacher-candidates navigated their university, school-placement and supervisory experiences to co-construct principles of practice in relationship to their university supervisor’s (me) language-in-use and professional beliefs and practices.
Building on my scholarly routes and roots, in 2004, colleagues and I founded the the Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory Educational Research & Inquiry (CLCERI). CLCERI has grown into a collective of diverse university, school and community based stake-holders who jointly examine their teaching practices, disseminate knowledge, harnessing inquiring perspectives and video research tools in order to study the social construction of disciplinary knowledge within and across their cultural landscapes.
CLCERI's theoretical and pedagogical perspectives reflect its members who continuously shape it as well as are shaped by our community. In particular, my perspective has its roots and routes in my historical work as a teacher-researcher with two professional communities: The Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group (SBCDG, 1992a & 1992b) and the National Writing Project. As a member of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group at UC Santa Barbara, I grew up teaching (Schoonmaker, 2002) and inquiring into my classroom practices and learning to see learning (Yeager, Floriani & Green, 1998) recognizing the roles teachers’ and students’ discourses play to shape the kinds of cultures our classrooms could become. If we jointly construct particular classroom lives and cultural practices, I asked myself what sort of classroom life and culture do we as teachers want to create with our students? Later, becoming a member of the South Coast Writing Project and then working among the leadership level within the National Writing Project’s New Teacher Initiative, I further developed how to view the broader national landscape of literacy educators and our challenges as puzzles to engage with to drive inquiries rather than ignore or blame. My own histories with these two organizations, over time, informed and shaped my own growing conceptual understandings of how and why my students and I “got into” our writing. I learned to argue why we as teachers must enable ourselves and our students to interact with and learn from the multiple communities of school, home and the cities where we live as spaces for learning and drawing on the resources for academic and social action.
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