Cultivating hybrid texts in multicultural classrooms: Promise and challenge

Recent studies have demonstrated the hybridity of young children's oral and written texts and argued for the relevance of hybridity to culturally resp onsive pedagogies that seek to make school practices move congruent with th e practices of children's home cultures as a way of bridging to school prac tices. This paper explores the potential of hybridity for also supporting c ritical pedagogies that seek to transform the knowledge, texts, and identit ies of the school curriculum. Two university researchers and a school based teacher researcher collaborated in developing and researching hybrid langu age practices in a 1(st)/2(nd)-grade classroom serving a heterogeneous urba n community The new practices evolved in the context of family visits to th e classroom, where students' families shared their community based language practices and ways of knowing. Using ethnographic methods and textual micr oanalyses famed by sociolinguistic, critical, and poststructural conception s of language and hybridity, we examined language practices during family v isits and other language arts activities. This paper draws on microanalyses of oral and written texts constructed by a Latina student who was perceive d to be struggling academically. The microanalyses show the student interwe aving home, school, and peer language practices to serve a variety of socia l and personal agendas; they also reveal hybrid texts that are more sophist icated and situationally appropriate than was recognized or acknowledged in the classroom. While the new classroom language practices provided importa nt support for the student's literacy learning and for transforming the lan guage arts curriculum our failure to recognize and value the hybridity of h er texts at the time constrained the possibilities for more fully supportin g her literacy learning and move fully realizing a transformative pedagogy. We examine the barriers to recognizing and valuing hybridity in children's texts and argue that because these barriers ave located in discourses that are deeply rooted in schools and society, tensions are inescapable and mus t inform the construction of pedagogical spaces that value uncertainty and reflection.