Leveraging Students' Communicative Repertoires as a Tool for Equitable Learning

Leveraging is often described as the process of using the home and community languages of children and youth as a tool to access the "academic" or "standard" varìeties of languages valu in schools. In this vein, researchers have called on practitioners to leverage the sngmarized...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Review of research in education 2017-03, Vol.41 (1), p.477-499
Main Authors: Martinez, Danny C., Morales, P. Zitlali, Aldana, Ursula S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bilingual Education
Classroom Communication
Classroom Techniques
Communicative Competence (Languages)
Concept Formation
Culturally Relevant Education
Discourse Analysis
Interpersonal Communication
Language Research
Language Usage
Literacy
Literature Reviews
Multilingualism
Sustainability
Teaching Methods
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Summary:Leveraging is often described as the process of using the home and community languages of children and youth as a tool to access the "academic" or "standard" varìeties of languages valu in schools. In this vein, researchers have called on practitioners to leverage the sngmarized language practices of children and youth in schools for their academic development. In this review, we interrogate the notion of leveraging commonly used by language and literacy scholars. We consider what gets leveraged, whose practices get leveraged, when leveraging occurs, a whether or not leveraging leads to robust and transformative learning experiences that sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of children and youth in our schools particularly for student of color. We review scholarship steeped in Vygotskian-inspired research on learning, culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and bilingual education research that forefront the notion that the language practices of children and youth are useful for mediating learning and development. We conclude with a discussion of classroom discourse analysis methods that we believe can provide documentation of transformative learning experiences that uncovers and examines the linguistic resources of students in our twenty-first-century classrooms, and to gain a common language around notions of leveraging in the field.
ISSN:0091-732X
1935-1038
DOI:10.3102/0091732X17691741