Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory
Many members of the Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory: Educational Research and Inquiry (CLCERI) have their roots and routes as teacher-researchers within two professional communities: The Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group (SBCDG,1992a & 1992b), the South Coast Writing Project and the National Writing Project. As a member of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group at UC Santa Barbara, Ralph Córdova grew up teaching (Schoonmaker, 2002) and inquiring into his 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. Ralph, in Collaboration with founding members of the Center for Teaching for Social Justice (now LINC) established the Cultural Landscapes project, which evolved into the international Collaboratory it is today and is co-directed by Drs. Córdova, Kumpulainen and Krokfors.
The theoretical and pedagogical perspective of the Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory (CLCERI) is co-constructed and comprises the perspectives of our members. These shared and overlapping perspectives (see Members & Partnerships) contribute to our shared understanding of how to learn within and across spaces as places for powerful learning. When we account for lived experiences as potential texts to be read that are situated within particular settings, we can build a view that these settings can potentially interact with and transform each other. Further, when we view classrooms as cultures (Yeager, Floriani & Green, 1998) concurrently interacting with out-of-school communities, and by paying attention to the spaces where they overlap, we can construct ways with our students to develop literacy practices with which to mediate these border crossings. I argue that these places are cultural landscapes with their lived experiences, or texts, that can be navigated, interacted with and learned from.
Figure 1 illustrates the conceptions of cultural landscapes and their overlapping borders wherein the literate practices of students enable them to interact with and learn from the multiple literacies and practices of members of the cultural landscapes outside of school. For example, (see Ralph Cordova's project) classroom members learn to become artists by unpacking what counts as visual art, in particular plein air painting, by painting and seeing their school playground in new ways, through the eyes of plein air painters. Students then interact with and learn from professional artists, drawing on interdisciplinary approaches within visual arts, social science and the natural sciences, to interview and learn from more experienced members of disciplines. In doing so, students further define and elaborate their mediating practices of inquiring, writing, painting and so on by understanding their own practices in relationship to those of others, in this case professional landscape painters. Further, because students’ development of these practices are situated within their classroom, homes and the playground, they are learning to be with text in particular ways within and across these particular landscapes. Ana Floriani (1993) pushed our thinking to unpack context as a way of being with text, or con texto (Spanish for ‘with text’), and consequentially we extend her understanding in order to view these contextual experiences as potential texts and resources for learning. So, when students embark on their border crossings outside of their school settings, and when they interact with painters, groundskeepers, moms and dads, they are interacting with others and with others’ particular ways of being with the particular texts of their respective cultural landscapes. In doing so, students navigate the borders of overlapping worlds of everyday life, textualize and create new texts, from which to learn.
María Franquíz (1999) drew on Gloria Anzaldúa’s (Anzaldúa, 1987, 1993) conceptualization of Nepántla, a Náhuatl word meaning a non-physical state of in-betweenness, that people create as they navigate between and across borders. The implications for Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of struggling within and across spaces as a positive phenomenon was brought into educational settings by Franquíz (1999) in order to explore how students’ learnings emerge transformed when afforded opportunities to struggle or grapple with complex ideas. Franquíz took an interactional sociolinguistics and ethnographic approach to examine student-to-student interactions of learning about the Holocaust in the context of a fifth grade classroom. She showed how students assisted each other in navigating the complex terrain of these social issues and how they applied understandings of inequity and racism to their everyday lives. I extend Franquíz’ conceptualization to take into account the dynamic nature of actions within and across overlapping cultural worlds of where students and community-based members live and work. Nepántla provides a way for understanding the transformative nature of what can happen for individuals as they are both shaped by their environments and are simultaneously shaping them as they struggle with complex ideas and issues.