Language across Difference Ethnicity, Co

Language across Difference Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools Django Paris

And, finally, it is a book about how the search for linguistic and cultural affirmation within and between ethnic groups at times maintained ethnic divisions and at other times created conditions for intereth- nic unity. (1)

Understanding the experiences of young people in such chan- ging multiethnic communities and schools should be a top priority for all of us in the social sciences, particularly those concerned with language and education. (3)

Gaining such insider trust and grasp of the cultural meanings of participants is the major purpose of ethnographic and cultural social language research.10      -> To what extent is this available to me as a researcher, when I haven’t been through it in the same way?

They demanded that I claim identities and experiences in the ways I was continually asking them to in the somewhat dialogic process we call ethnography. This sharing of self in dialogic process, I believe, led youth to share their selves in more genuine and honest ways. This genuine and honest sharing led to richer and truer data than the model of the somewhat detached, neutral researcher that echoes across the decades from more positivist-in uenced versions of inquiry in applied cultural anthropology. (8)

 I began to  fix my research gaze on the thriving multi- ethnic youth cultural space. It was here that language and literacy was practiced and contested between youth both inside and outside the classroom. It was here that youth strove for power and voice in ways so crucial to our notions of teaching and learning in multi- ethnic contexts. It was here that difference was enacted and chal- lenged through moments of everyday interaction. (10)

Contemporary approaches to the study of mind and culture begin with the understanding that our identities and social practices are situational, fragmented, and in a dialogic relationship with cul- tural context. (10)

References to check out

Pratt, M. L. (1987). Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, and C. MacCabe (eds.), The linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature (pp. 48–56). Manchester University Press.