From At-Risk to Excellence:Research, Theory, and Principles for Practice
From At-Risk to Excellence:This report describes the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE), a national research and development center operated under a cooperative agreement between the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education (USED).1 In the following pages, the principal intellectual and organizational structures of CREDE will be described: the premises, the mission, the principles, the theory, and the research design. We will also describe the conceptual and theoretical framework of the Center; the integration of the people, projects, and programs that constitute CREDE; and the scope, range, and scale of the topics covered by CREDE's research.
In many respects, CREDE is the successor organization to the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning, operated under a similar cooperative agreement from 1991 to 1996. CREDE's research and development program continues the preceding center's strong role in understanding and developing effective education for English language learners and for students from cultural minorities. CREDE includes three additional risk factors in its research responsibilities—race, poverty, and geographic location.
Our work is grounded in solid research achievements, but in this field, research has outstripped development. How can our research knowledge be enacted in scaled-up, reliable programs for all students? CREDE'S research plan is designed to uncover specific resistances and barriers to enactment and to develop detailed, practical models for overcoming them.
The CREDE plan provides a comprehensive framework for educational research and development that is strong, flexible, and inclusive of diversity among all individuals and communities. It is based on a theoretical framework that is sensitive to diversity of culture and language, and powerful enough to identify the great commonalties that unite people. We address educational excellence from preschool to higher education for students from all major linguistic, cultural, and ethnic groups, including those suffering all four identified risk factors for educational failure (limited English proficiency, poverty/economic disadvantage, race, and geographic location).
CREDE research projects are organized into six programs that share results, overlap sites and subjects where feasible, and meet and communicate regularly.
Each program provides a comprehensive view and definitive guidance for its topic. The projects within each program are listed in Appendix A.
We have also developed a comprehensive program of dissemination to important constituencies, using a broad range of communication media. Through powerful national partners,2 we offer a program of collaboration with other USED initiatives, other federal and state agencies, and private foundation-funded programs. Finally, we have organized these elements into an integrated and collegial Center. We are pledged to move issues related to education, diversity, and excellence of attainment to the forefront of national attention and action.
CREDE's plan of work flows from eight basic premises. Drawn from educational, psychological, and linguistic theory as well as from social philosophy and from deep American value commitments, they are not necessarily subject to proof, but are philosophical and value positions that guide our decisions and energize our work.
Regardless of risk factors, all children—through quality teaching and challenging curriculum—can achieve high academic standards.
When schools present high expectations and hold students to high standards for academic achievement, they are assisting at-risk students to reach their greatest potential. Our Center's work shows that language minority children and English language learners (ELLs) should be held to the same high standards as other children, and that their performance should be assessed accordingly.
English language learners have two major tasks in school—learning standard English and mastering academic subjects. But Center research shows that too many of these students are not challenged with the same content as mainstream children. This is possible because schools often treat English language learners as outside of accountability; that is, they are not tested for academic achievement because of their limited English proficiency. As a result, such schools hold neither themselves nor their students to high standards, and this in itself constitutes an additional risk factor for language minority students.
Exploring the effectiveness of different methods of helping students develop English-language proficiency remains one the Center's major research areas. We are in the forefront of research into two-way immersion or developmental bilingual programs, which outcome research tends to favor. Exemplary schools for English language learners, such as those studied by the Center, are flexible in order to accommodate students of varying ages, levels of fluency, and—where appropriate—different language backgrounds. Teachers adjust curriculum, instruction, and use of the primary language to meet the varying needs of students. They use a combination of approaches, including ESL instruction (in which students are taught to understand, speak, read, and write English) and sheltered instruction (in which mathematics or history, for example, are taught in English using special techniques to aid students' comprehension).
The exemplary schools we are studying build on—rather than replace—their students' native languages (Berman et al., 1995), using the native languages to develop literacy skills and to deliver content. Content area instruction is integrated into bilingual and sheltered programs for students with limited proficiency in English and is used as a means of providing a context for language production in English.
Research has shown that the achievement of proficiency in two or more languages through school-based programs is feasible and desirable for all students. Students from non-English-speaking backgrounds attain greater success in English proficiency and other domains if age-appropriate levels of first language development, especially literacy, are achieved (Collier, 1995; Hakuta, 1986). For them, bilingualism is a cognitive, academic, and social asset. Research also shows that English-speaking majority group students can attain high levels of proficiency in other languages at no loss to native language development or academic achievement (Genesee, 1987).
Thus, compared to monolingual students, bilingual students from both majority and minority groups often demonstrate enhanced levels of linguistic, metalinguistic, (Malakoff & Hakuta, 1991), and cognitive development. At the same time, bilingual proficiency better prepares students for participation in increasingly diverse local communities and in our ever-shrinking world community. Finally, dual proficiency in English and another language constitutes a national resource that supports our ability to participate in global economic, political, and cultural spheres.
Schools themselves place children at risk for academic failure if they are content to blame race, poverty, geography, or language for poor learning rather than vigorously experimenting with and evaluating alternative teaching and schooling practices. The knowledge, languages, and sociocultural practices of local communities are a major social and intellectual resource that can be mobilized to enhance teaching and learning in schools. Education for at-risk students is effective when their ways of knowing, talking, valuing, and interacting are taken as the basis for patterning classroom activity and talk and when student participation is elicited rather than limited. These patterns enable students to gain mastery over English, literacy, science, mathematics, and humanities (Au & Jordan, 1981; Boykin, 1986; González et al., 1993; Heath, 1983; Lemke, 1990; Mehan, 1992; Mehan, Hubbard, & Villanueva, 1994; Moll, 1992; Philips, 1983; Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992; Scollon, 1981; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1992; Warren, Rosebery, & Conant, 1994).
Because we presume that language and cultural diversity are assets, we do not presume that every difference needs accommodation. Careful research can identify those specific accommodations necessary for at-risk children to be successful. For example, Haitian children's culturally based joking argumentation can be a platform for teaching scientific activity. Recent studies of scientists' activity and talk suggest that they transform their observations into findings through argumentation and persuasion. Through analyses of bilingual Haitian science classrooms we have developed a teaching approach that coordinates the culturally and linguistically based patterns of argument with those used by professional scientists (Warren, Rosebery, & Conant, 1994).
Cultural, language, and community groups are not homogenous and unvarying. Effective programs require enough flexibility to accommodate diversity within at-risk groups. To stereotype children, even within risk groups, leads to rigid programming that gives all children the same remedy, whether needed or not. We presume variability within groups and require assessment of individual needs, not mere classification by race, family income, geographic location, or language.
At-risk students need the same education as all children, although they may also need schools to provide some of the experiences that mainstream children find within their own families and community institutions. Consider the well-established finding that children who have multiple early literacy experiences, such as frequent bedtime stories, are better prepared for typical U.S. schools; by the end of first grade they are likely to be reading at or above average levels. Families read to their children for many reasons: because they want to engage their children in religious study of sacred texts; because reading leads to employment; or just because children love the activity. Because such customs are passed down through generations, parents who were read bedtime stories are more likely to read to their own children. This and many other sociocultural activities have profound consequences in preparing children cognitively with the pre-literacy skills that schools assume.
In the United States today, many children live in households without such sociocultural experiences. Their families may provide similarly rich activities, such as storytelling, in which cognitive, social, and moral development takes place. However, these parents are often less likely to practice early literacy activities, not because they are indifferent to their children's development and education, but because awareness of the crucial influence of pre-literacy activities is not part of their cultural heritage. If children are not provided with experiences that prepare them for what schools expect, then the schools must provide a program that does. Research suggests that the remedy is not to put these children in a separate program, but to provide classrooms rich with literacy-relevant activities, activities that parallel those that give an academic advantage to middle-class children.
This theory must be based on scientific study of human development, language, cognition, culture, history, and values. Further, it must provide a view of culture that enables us to study the effects of culture in the individual, thus leading to instructional programs that work for individual students. Many theories generalize from the group average to the needs of each child. While these may ensure economy of implementation and operation, they cannot produce a strong, flexible, and inclusive educational reform design that is responsive to individual, community, cultural, and linguistic diversity. We have such a valid general theory, to be described later in this report. (See Conceptual and Theoretical Framework, p. XX.)
The overall mission of the Center is to assist the nation's population of diverse students, including those at risk of educational failure, to achieve to high academic standards. To accomplish this, CREDE does the following:
We are designing, developing, and disseminating a comprehensive framework for educational systems that is strong, flexible, and inclusive of diversity among all individuals and communities.
Through a research program with concrete connections to practice, we are discovering, developing, and disseminating fundamental knowledge about the ways that diverse at-risk students can attain excellence in education, with a focus on these areas:
As part of its mission, CREDE attempts to bring issues related to diversity and educational risk groups to the forefront of national discussions concerning educational research, educational practice, and educational policy. In the past, educators concerned with diversity have too often been relegated to the side rooms, where we spoke largely to ourselves—just as happens to at-risk students. Discussions of diversity must be moved to center stage, becoming a focus of national attention. Meeting the needs of diverse student groups must become a major issue not only for the American Educational Research Association, but for legislators, the media, and other national decision makers.
Our studies provide a focus for these discussions of diversity. Our dissemination of findings and implications is designed to produce a national consensus and thus an intellectual force.
We base our comprehensive research program on a theoretical framework that is not only sensitive to the complexities and nuances of culture and language, but is also powerful enough to identify the great commonalties that unite people and to specify the risk factors that must be addressed for all children to blossom.
Conditions are changing so rapidly in the United States that more and more communities and families may be at risk in the future. Many communities in the Rust Belt, for example, are depressed and declining after generations of providing stable employment. Many families who less than a generation ago took the American dream for granted now find their children and grandchildren placed at risk by their economic inability to provide support for academic development. CREDE aspires toward an understanding and a set of principles that are inclusive enough to accommodate everyone— "they" who are at risk today, and "we" who may be there tomorrow.
Innovative programs of school reform and research for diverse students have tended to concentrate on specific cultural, linguistic, or ethnic populations and on specific local communities. For many years, the research community concerned with at-risk students has conducted studies on a variety of at-risk populations, including Native Americans; Korean, Chinese, and Southeast Asian Americans; Haitian Americans; Latinos of many national origins; Native Hawaiians; economically disadvantaged and geographically isolated European Americans; rural and inner city African Americans; and many others. The field has also shown continued energy in the study and development of model school programs for a variety of mixed racial, linguistic, and cultural groups.
For many years, the author of this paper and his associates have attempted to integrate these studies into literature reviews encompassing thousands of studies conducted worldwide. These reviews (and reviews prepared by others) have uncovered a core list of "generic" findings that transcend specific groups, localities, or risk factors (Collier, 1995; Garcia, 1991; Tharp, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994; Tharp, Dalton, & Yamauchi, 1994).
General principles are, of course, less detailed than findings for any specific community. And no matter how valid, general recommendations must be modified to fit local circumstances (Cazden & Mehan, 1989; Goldenberg & Gallimore, 1994 ). The principles below do not purport to be exhaustive; rather they reflect only those findings upon which there is strong current consensus in the field. In addition, research at our previous Center consistently verified these principles. Thus the consensus is broad enough to make these principles an organizing structure, both for continuing research and for immediate implementation into programs for at-risk children.
Learning takes place best through joint productive activity–that is, when experts and novices work together for a common product or goal, and during the activity have opportunities to converse about it (Moll, 1990; Rogoff, 1991; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Wertsch, 1985). In the natural (nonformal) settings of family, community, and workplace, shared ways of understanding the world are created through the development of language systems and word meanings during shared activity. Even the youngest children, as well as mature adults, develop their competencies in the context of such joint activity. Schools do not typically do it this way; there is little joint activity from which common experiences emerge, and therefore no common context that allows students to develop common systems of understanding with the teacher and with one another.
Joint activity and discourse allow the highest level of academic achievement: using formal, "schooled," or "scientific" ideas to solve the practical problems presented by the real world. The constant connection of schooled concepts and everyday concepts is basic to the process by which mature schooled thinkers understand the world. These joint activities should be shared by both students and teachers. Only if the teacher also shares the experiences can the kind of discourse take place that builds basic schooled competencies. Joint activity between teacher and students helps to create a common context of experience within the school itself. This is especially important when the teacher and the students are not of the same background.
Language proficiency—in speaking, reading, and writing—is the royal road to high academic achievement. Whether in bilingual or monolingual programs, whether instruction is in English, Spanish, Navajo, or Chinese, language development in the language or languages being used for instruction is the first goal of teaching/learning.
The current literacy movement in cognitive and educational research is revealing the deep ties among language, thinking, values, and culture. Studies of English as a second language indicate the firm links among language development, academic achievement, and cognitive growth (Collier, 1995). Language development at all levels—informal, problem-solving, and academic—should be a metagoal for the entire school day. Language and literacy development should be fostered through use and through purposive conversation between teacher and students, rather than through drills and decontextualized rules (Berman et al., 1995; Speidel, 1987). Reading and writing must be taught both as specific curricula and within subject matters. The teaching of language expression and comprehension should also be integrated into each content area.
Language and literacy development as a metagoal also applies to the specialized language genres required for the study of science, mathematics, history, art, and literature. Effective mathematics learning is based on the ability to "speak mathematics," just as the overall ability to achieve across the curriculum is dependent on mastery of the language of instruction.
The ways of using language that prevail in school discourse (such as ways of asking and answering questions, challenging claims, and using representations) are frequently unfamiliar to English language learners and other at-risk students. However, their own culturally based ways of talking can be effectively linked to the language used for academic disciplines by building learning contexts that will evoke children's language strengths.
A consistent recommendation of our research field is an increase in contextualized instruction. Schools typically teach rules, abstractions, and verbal descriptions, and they teach by means of rules, abstractions, and verbal descriptions. Schools need to assist at-risk students by providing experiences that show how rules, abstractions, and verbal descriptions are drawn from and applied to the everyday world.
Three levels of contextualization must be addressed:
At the pedagogical level, it is necessary to establish patterns of participation and speech that are drawn from family and community life and bridge to the sociolinguistic conventions of school participation (Au & Jordan, 1981; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988).
At the second, or curriculum level, cultural materials and skills are the media by which the goals of literacy, numeracy, and science are contextualized. The use of personal, community-based experiences as the foundation for developing school skills (e. g., Wyatt, 1978-79) affords students opportunities to apply skills acquired in both home and school contexts.
At the third, or policy level, the school itself is contextualized. Effective school-based learning is a social process that affects and is affected by the entire community. Longer-lasting progress has been achieved with children whose learning has been explored, modified, and shaped in collaboration with their parents and communities (John-Steiner & Osterreich, 1975).
All three levels of contextualization have this common premise: The high literacy goals of schools are best achieved in everyday, culturally meaningful contexts. This contextualization utilizes students' funds of knowledge and skills as a sound foundation for new knowledge. This approach fosters pride and confidence as well as greater school achievement.
At-risk students, particularly those of limited Standard English proficiency, are often forgiven any academic challenges, on the assumption that they are of limited ability; or they are forgiven any genuine assessment of progress, because the assessment tools don't fit. Thus both standards and feedback are weakened, with the predictable result that achievement is handicapped. While such policies may often be the result of benign motives, the effect is to deny many diverse students the basic requirements of progress: high academic standards and meaningful assessment that allows feedback and responsive assistance.
There is a clear consensus among researchers in this field that at-risk students require instruction that is cognitively challenging, that is, instruction that requires thinking and analysis, not only rote, repetitive detail-level drills. This does not mean ignoring phonics rules or not memorizing the multiplication tables, but it does mean going beyond that level of curriculum into the exploration of the deepest possible reaches of interesting and meaningful materials. There are many ways in which cognitive complexity has been introduced into the teaching of at-risk students. There is good reason to believe, for instance, that a bilingual curriculum itself provides cognitive challenges that make it superior to a monolingual approach (Collier, 1995).
Working with a cognitively challenging curriculum requires careful leveling of tasks, so that students are stretched to reach within their zones of proximal development, where they can perform with available assistance. It does not mean drill-and-kill exercises, and it does not mean overwhelming challenges that discourage effort. Getting the correct balance and providing appropriate assistance is, for the teacher, a truly cognitively challenging task.
Basic thinking skills—the ability to form, express, and exchange ideas in speech and writing—are most effectively developed through dialogue, through the process of questioning and sharing ideas and knowledge that happens in the instructional conversation.
The instructional conversation is the means by which teachers and students relate formal, schooled knowledge to the student's individual, community, and family knowledge. This concept may appear to be a paradox; instruction implies authority and planning, while conversation implies equality and responsiveness. But the instructional conversation is based on assumptions that are fundamentally different from those of traditional lessons. Teachers who use it, like parents in natural teaching, assume that the student has something to say beyond the known answers in the head of the adult. The adult listens carefully, makes guesses about the intended meaning, and adjusts responses to assist the student's efforts—in other words, engages in conversation (Ochs, 1982). Such conversation reveals the knowledge, skills, and values—the culture—of the learner, enabling the teacher to contextualize teaching to fit the learner's experience base. This individualizes instruction in the much the same way that each learner is individualized within a culture (Dalton, 1993).
In U.S. schools the instructional conversation is rare. More often teaching is through the recitation script, in which the teacher repeatedly assigns and assesses. True dialogic teaching transforms classrooms and schools into "the community of learners" they can become "when teachers reduce the distance between themselves and their students by constructing lessons from common understandings of each others' experience and ideas" and make teaching a "warm, interpersonal and collaborative activity" (Dalton, 1989).
How will the Center's research agenda advance the understanding of these issues over the 5-year grant period? The consensual, generic principles discussed above provide a basis for our 5-year research program. Our sequenced research agenda includes research into the enactment and unpacking of these basic principles.
Research has outstripped development. That is, the research community knows far more about what to do than about how to get it done. Despite the consensus on the generic principles above, their enactment is rare and occurs almost entirely in small, local "hand-crafted" programs under strong researcher/theoretician influence, or in single classrooms of individual outstanding teachers. Such programs rarely survive withdrawal of the key research or teaching personnel. Large-scale programs enacting these principles are largely unknown.
Thus the first crucial research question now facing the field is this: How can our research knowledge be enacted in scaled-up, reliable programs for large numbers of at-risk students? While the general literature on restructuring, reform, and upscaling offers some guidance, effective teaching that is attentive to linguistic and cultural characteristics of students presents significant challenges for enactment. These include challenges in teacher professional development, managerial and organizational principles, and school-community relations that hinder up-scaling even of the conventional sort. The projects of CREDE are designed to uncover specific resistances and barriers to enactment and to develop detailed, practical models for overcoming them.
The enactment of the principles will also make possible their refinement. Because enactment has been infrequent in real schools, it has not been possible even to test the validity of these principles definitively. No matter how confident we researchers may be, we still must put our findings to empirical tests, and this cannot be done until the principles are enacted in a wide range of real classrooms and schools.
Once we have enacted and tested the principles, we can then proceed to unpack them—that is, to see how they work internally, refine their statements, and determine their limitations. These principles are necessarily and intentionally generic, but in all likelihood there are situations and individuals for whom they must be modified. The principles are now almost like "black boxes," and the next stage of research will be to open those boxes, to refine and deepen our understanding and our prescriptions for development.
The majority of the studies in the Center focus on one or more of these principles, and by studying their enactment in a variety of settings and linguistic and cultural populations, we will come to understand them better. For example, researchers are in consensus about the value of teaching at-risk students in the context of family and community relationships. Our studies examine, for example, how peer relationships are formed; how friendship networks affect academic achievement; how grandparents and parents assist with homework; how teachers and parents can work together on curriculum reform; how informal and formal community-based organizations can work effectively with schools and families for academic achievement. At the end of this research program, we will be able to make much more complex, conditional, and clear statements about effective means for familial and community contextualization. A similar process will be followed for each of the generic principles.
We expect that the CREDE projects, in communication with the work of the national research community, will advance research consensus and result in additional clear recommendations for reform directed at the needs of at-risk students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The generic principles discussed above are applicable not only to linguistically and culturally diverse students, nor only to at-risk students; the Center's research agenda will significantly advance the understanding of issues central to all of U.S. education, covering the entire range of responsibility of OERI. Research in the diversity field is the foundation for research on education for all students, because it is based on the full range of variance necessary for the widest range of applicability. Research exploring only mainstream students, schools, teachers, and policies is actually far too narrow in scope to allow full generalization to universal principles.
This often goes unrecognized by mainstream communities of educators and policy makers. The universal need for our generic conditions is masked, because mainstream families or communities provide their children with those conditions, so schools need not do so. Contextualized teaching, instructional conversation, joint productive activity with literate discourse, exposure to scientific, commercial, and professional language conventions—these are provided in the bedtime stories, car-pool driving, dinner table conversations, family homework projects, little league coaching, and other activities of the middle class and prepare students for the literacy activities of school. These sociocultural activities occur much less often in the families and communities of impoverished at-risk students. Therefore the schools must increase the frequency of such activities to a level of equity, basing them on sociocultural resources of the students' communities.
This situation, once understood, further emphasizes that the most fundamental discoveries about quality education are being made by studies such as those being carried out by the Center. Even though mainstream students can prosper in conventional schools, every student's academic performance can be enhanced by creating effective educational sociocultural activities in schools. Thus our research agenda will ultimately improve education for all children.
The sociocultural theory of education is the organizing conceptual structure for CREDE, as it was of our predecessor, the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. The sociocultural approach is among the most significant contemporary themes in a wide range of intellectual disciplines worldwide, including philosophy, literary and aesthetic criticism, theology, and the social sciences. Along with cognitive science, it is a contender for the dominant paradigm in contemporary psychology and education. Because sociocultural theory is so basic to the study of developmental and educational issues, its consequences for teaching, schooling, and public policy are profound.
What is this theory? Like all vigorous intellectual movements, it is undergoing a process of rapid expansion and clarification. However, there is a set of basic positions that distinguish the approach and guide its research and development work. For example, the individual learner is viewed not as a "receptacle" into which knowledge is poured by teachers nor as an "acquirer" who seeks and seizes new knowledge through individual effort. Rather, the learner is an active participant in teaching and learning; the learner and the teacher are participants in sociocultural activity (Rogoff, 1995).
While we value and use the explanations offered by cognitive science as to the structures, processes, and mechanisms of thinking, education must be concentrated on cognitive development. Sociocultural theory explains the cognitive development of all individuals—of any age, culture, or level of sophistication—through the same basic principles. In fact, the applications of the theory in schools have been based on the natural socialization of children by their parents and caretakers. The key to development lies in participation in sociocultural activities, activities often seen as so mundane that their powerful role in development is not noticed.
A study of poor Latino families in Watsonville, CA, examined the questioning behavior of young children. Maria (age 3) asks, "Why does the ocean have so much water?" Miguel (age 4) asks, "How is fog made?" And 5-year-old Roberto asks, "Why do people die?" Their parents attempt to answer these questions with accurate information. Just as in middle-class families, these parents are pleased with their children's curiosity and do their best to foster this eagerness and engagement (Callanan, 1994).
Our socioculturally based school programs use this innate curiosity to construct miniature communities of scientific practice.
Students in a Cambridge, MA, eighth-grade science class for Haitian immigrants decided to investigate a persistent and contentious school rumor, that the water from the third-floor drinking fountain tasted worse than the downstairs water. The science class interviewed other students and analyzed the chemical properties of the water from each fountain. These classes were conducted in the Haitian Creole language by bilingual teachers trained in science teaching by Center researchers (Warren, Rosebery, & Conant, 1994). The Water Taste Test has been included as an exemplary project in the Massachusetts State Science Frameworks, in the USED/OBEMLA (Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs) profile of academic excellence programs, and is being considered for inclusion in the National Academy of Science's National Science Education Standards.
Participation in sociocultural activity occurs on many planes or levels of interaction. Rogoff (1995) suggests that research can be divided into three general types, depending on the plane of focus.
The personal plane involves cognition, emotion, behavior, values, and beliefs. In education research, this might correspond to studies of individual student or teacher actions or competence.
The interpersonal or social plane includes communication, role performances, dialogue, cooperation, conflict, assistance, and assessment. In education this plane might be addressed through studies of teaching/learning interactions, activity settings in teacher education programs, or cooperative learning groups.
The community plane involves shared history, languages, rules, values, beliefs, and identities. In educational research, the community plane corresponds to studies of entire schools, districts, professions, and polities, as well as neighborhoods, tribes, and cultures.
To understand any area of human development, all planes must be taken into account. For example, even the most personal values, beliefs, or expectations are, in part, reflections of the values, beliefs, and expectations of the families or communities to which each person belongs. And when we analyze a community or culture, we see that it consists of the values, beliefs, and expectations held by individuals in that community. Furthermore, those values, beliefs, and expectations are learned and taught in the interpersonal plane of parenting, schooling, and apprenticing.
Sociocultural theory emphasizes that the personal, interpersonal, and community planes are truly inseparable. Vygotsky (1978) expressed this unity in his famous phrase, "everything that is psychological was first social." It is through participation in sociocultural activity that mind, community, and culture mutually create one another. As a practical matter, the three planes are investigated in many successively contextualized organizations or layers. McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) represent these multiple, contextualized planes diagramatically (see Figure 1).
- Figure 1 -
Language is the primary force that defines and connects these planes. Through signs and symbols—primarily linguistic—meaning and interpretation are carried from communities, through interpersonal activity, into the individual mind. Reciprocally, the creation of new forms and symbols of expression by individuals shapes interaction and culture.
Language is the primary mark of identity for nations, cultures, regions, trades, professions, disciplines, and clubs. Languages and speech registers mark people, enable performance, integrate or separate, and are absolutely necessary for participation in any community. This is true not only within entire cultures, but within "communities of practice." For example, scientists, mathematicians, and construction workers all have a language specific to their group.
Dalton and Sison (1995) studied the use of instructional conversations to develop the language of geometry in resistant, excluded middle-school Latinos. Their data showed that joint activity with the teacher and dialogic instruction transformed the language performance of these severely at-risk students in just four sessions. Student participation became more confident, frequent, vigorous, and correct. These findings proved statistically significant.
Given the complexity and unity of sociocultural activity, how can disciplined research and inquiry proceed? In sociocultural theory, the basic unit of analysis is the activity setting. Participation in sociocultural activity occurs in regular patterns, ordinarily in daily routines. Each daily routine consists of separate "paragraphs," or activities-with-a-purpose, such as making and eating breakfast, car-pooling, the classroom's morning business, first-period geometry, volleyball practice, a four-hour shift at MacDonald's, or homework with sisters. Each of these units is an activity setting, and it has regularities of who, what, when, where, why, and how. Because each activity setting encompasses all planes, a study of a specific reading lesson, a specific self-help seminar for teachers, or a specific school board meeting can reveal the personal, interpersonal, and community planes in simultaneous operation—in every comment about the novel being studied or about the motion before the board. For any single study, a focus on one plane is often desirable, but in the sociocultural perspective, the background of other planes must also be considered in any explanation. Successful school reform requires an integration of all three planes.
These principles were reflected in the Center's work at a bilingual school in Los Angeles (Goldenberg & Gallimore, 1991). The project included an extended case study of a single teacher's development, focusing on the personal plane. Data collected included interviews, her journals and diaries, and observations of her classroom performance. A crucial activity setting for her professional development was the joint weekly work/discussion sessions with other teachers and the Center researchers, organized for mutual assistance and cooperative production. Data on this aspect of her development were from the interpersonal plane and were collected from the joint productive activities with these teachers and staff developers. This included content analysis and a microethnographic study of videotapes of the meetings. Such productive activity settings, however, cannot long survive unless the community plane of the school creates and sustains it and unless there is coherence among the community, interpersonal, and personal goals. Data for study of the community plane included interviews with participating teachers, charts of supporting activities designed (or allowed) by the building principal, and a record of his decisions that affected school climate. Thus a comprehensive view of this school reform effort was compiled and useful ideas distilled for the up-scaling project being conducted by CREDE.
Within activity settings, assisted performance is the hallmark of teaching, learning, and effective productivity. Just as in natural work groups and in natural child socialization, participants who are more skilled in certain tasks assist those less able—who can in turn assist others when their own expertise is developed. Assistance can be of many kinds, including direct instruction, demonstrations, practice sessions, as well as careful exploratory instructional conversation.
A major focus of sociocultural research has been to detail the integration of various means of assistance, in order to produce a comprehensive theory of pedagogy. Effective assistance is sensitive to the developmental levels of the learner; it occurs within the context of joint activity; and regardless of roles in that activity, each individual's contributions (and capacities to assist others) are valued and encouraged.
Small groups of students with different talents and needs can be assigned to work together on a project. Students who need help on a task can learn from a peer who has mastered the task, and the "masters" benefit cognitively and emotionally from organizing and explaining what they know. Accomplishing a cooperative task successfully requires students to engage in meaningful communication about the task at hand, which is the optimal context for language learning. In discussing their ideas, students come to a more complex understanding. This arrangement can apply to students with different levels of English proficiency.
Daniela has unsuccessfully tried several strategies to get her group members focused on the task at hand. Finally, she says the answer to one of the questions out loud in Spanish. This gets George's attention; he responds in Spanish and the two of them write the answer down in English. The children return to individual work until Davina speaks in English, prompting the students to focus as a group once more. The studies of Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz concluded that this language switching often does not arise from a lack of English proficiency, but is a signal to rally the group to work collectively, and to marshal mutual assistance (Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz, & Szymanski, 1995)
To understand and reform education we must study the actual activity settings of classrooms, schools, and communities, including the personal thoughts and feelings of individuals; the interpersonal patterns among all participants; and the cultural and historical contexts that provide the values and expectations of individuals. To understand and reform education, we must understand the patterns of effective assistance in activity settings, whether those activities are in kindergarten classrooms, teacher education programs, or parent/teacher cooperative programs. To understand and reform education, we must give primary attention to the acquisition of languages—speaking, reading, and writing—including Standard English, as well as the languages of mathematics, of science, and of literate discourse concerning industry, the marketplace, and government. Because language is the very stuff of human activity, only by effectively using the proper languages can students gain access to the communities of power and success.
This theory has great potential to assist diverse, at-risk students. Because daily routines, activities, and languages vary sharply for different communities, so do values, expectations, skills, and beliefs vary among children. Even schools that are sincerely committed to broader service may be baffled by to how to teach children so different from those assumed by our traditional schooling methods and settings.
Scarcella & Chin (1993) investigated homework activity settings of Korean immigrant children and parents and contrasted them with similar activity settings of European American families and with homework-review activity settings in schools. Korean parents tended to give corrective feedback as soon as the child made a mistake: "This one's wrong. You missed this one here," and then told the child how to do it right: "You colored the face blue. You need to use this crayon. Don't use that color. Use this one." In contrast, parents from European American backgrounds (not recent immigrants) tended to withhold comment until the child finished: "Good. You missed three out of twenty. See, these three are wrong," and to encourage children to correct mistakes by themselves: "Okay, you made a mistake. See if you can figure out what you did wrong." Theirs was similar to the comparable activity setting in school. Even this simple mismatch illuminates the kinds of challenges faced by those teaching diverse groups of students.
Sociocultural theory offers the hope of creating more effective activity settings in which assistance will occur, languages will be learned, and risk factors will be transcended.
Sociocultural theory allows the development of unified conclusions and recommendations from its research agenda because it considers education at all levels of inquiry. The integrated concepts and theoretical language assure that each project relates to all others. Thus our coherent Center program flows organically from the theory that unifies it. This allows each study in our Center to contribute substantially to its own topical field and simultaneously to feed back into the development of general sociocultural theory.
This pattern of integrity-within-topics as well as contributions-to-the-whole also applies to disciplines and methods. Certain disciplines and methods are more appropriate for the study of certain planes of inquiry than others. For example, sociological concepts of attitude formation—and survey methods for measuring it—have strength for studying communities. Microethnography has demonstrated value for studying interpersonal teaching/learning activities, and culture theory is useful in interpreting these results. Psychological theory and methods are often appropriate to the study of the personal plane. In the sociocultural approach, the disciplines and methods of history, psychology, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, education, and theology have all contributed to the understanding of particular topics. Likewise, these topical investigations have fed back as influences on their particular disciplines and methods.
CREDE is an interlocking set of people, projects, and programs. As in a geodesic dome, each inquiry is a panel that both supports and is supported by the whole structure. Several design features tie these elements together into a single Center.
Some projects are comprehensive, whole-school programs that involve family and community members, provide professional development for school staff, and include out-of-school supports (e.g., Project 1.5, Goldenberg et al.; Project 4.2, Civil et al.; Project 4.4, Stoddart; Project 5.2, Stringfield et al.; Project 5.5, McIntyre et al.; Project 5.6, Tharp et al). These inquiries provide data at multiple levels ready for integration. However, merely organizing multiple projects at the same site does not ensure useful integration of findings. This can occur only with the integration of concepts, data, and explanations. Our theoretical foundation and plan of operation guarantee such integration, through one or more of the following strategies.
In sociocultural theory, each research project focuses on, or "foregrounds," one or more of the sociocultural planes. But each study also takes into account the planes that are "backgrounded."
For example, in our Native American Zuni project (Project 5.6, Tharp et al), the foregrounded plane is the interpersonal. Teacher/parent focus groups are designed to change the perceptions and actions of the school community and the parent community. The richest data will be collected in the focus group activity settings and by objective measurement of the subsequent interactional behavior of teachers and parents. But we will interpret these findings through background data on the individual plane, for example, by measuring changes in attitudes, individual teacher performance, and student achievement. In addition, we might understand errors in organizing the seminars, or resistance to them, by gathering data (through attitude surveys and interviews) on historical community values that might contribute to conflicting discourse styles and rules for participation.
Our underlying theory allows cross-over generalizations from project to project because all are based on shared concepts. For example, we are conducting studies that focus on the individual development of capacities (the individual plane), such as Padrón's study of teaching resilience (Project 5.4); on the role of the interpersonal plane in teacher development for sheltered instruction (Project 1.3, Echevarria & Short); and on whole-school upscaling and school reform (the community plane), such as the study of school transformation for English/Spanish transition bilingual programs (Project 1.5, Goldenberg et al.). Because our studies are fully integrated, their separate results allow the Center as a whole to make recommendations about how individual teaching and learning, teacher development, and systemic reform affect one another, and thus determine how these changes can all be fostered by sound policies.
All Center projects are organized into program groups by topic area. The projects within each program group have been selected and designed in coordination, so that each plane—personal, interpersonal, and community—in the topic area is foregrounded by one or more projects. This guarantees a comprehensive view of each topic area and ensures that the knowledge generated will be greater than that produced by each project separately.
This unifying framework ties our work together within projects, across projects into programs, and across programs into a genuine research center. Our unified plan of work addresses all four of the topics listed under OERI's Priority Topic list for Meeting the Educational Needs of a Diverse Student Population.
Our unifying theory, our research design, and our concrete operational plan thoroughly integrate these four priority topics into a comprehensive plan of work. Through the integrated research design just described, each recommendation made for one priority topic will be informed by what we know about other topics. For example, in recommending certain professional development activities, we will be able to speak to the policy issues that enable or limit those recommendations. We will recommend certain instructional practices with an awareness of how they may be enabled or limited by professional development decisions. We will understand the family and community contexts that must influence the choice of content for professional development activities.
Achieving success for all students in a rigorous curriculum of study demands integrated attention to teachers and students as well as content and standards—to all components of the classroom core. Meeting the nation's educational goals requires a policy frame that moves beyond a (project mentality), and away from a (one thing at a time approach) to reform to consider simultaneously the policy issues central to all three aspects of the classroom core: content, students, and teacher. (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993, p.19)
The majority of our studies involve teacher/researcher partnerships. Except for archival analyses, all studies are shaped by the voices of teachers, parents, or community members. A primary repository of CREDE's knowledge capital is in our teacher/researchers. We intend to grow that capital, to involve our cadre of knowledgeable teachers in teaching other teachers, and to use their experience as working partners in upscaling to systemic reform.
The USED program under which CREDE is funded calls for "research and development on meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, including students who are at risk of educational failure because of limited English proficiency, poverty, race, geographical location, or economic disadvantage." Figure 2 displays CREDE's coverage of topics by listed risk factors. We provide excellent balanced coverage of all four factors, with every project involving students suffering more than one risk factor, and most including students from more than one culture or language group.
- Figure 2: Risk Factors -
CREDE's research program is designed to provide a broad overview of groups to ensure that conclusions are drawn from sufficient diversity of students and evidence. Figure 3 displays the coverage of our projects by the following general cultural/ethnic/language groups: Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, Native American (Indian), African American, poor European American, and Other (including Haitian American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan). As can be seen, the Center provides excellent coverage of our national diversity, including those students at risk.
- Figure 3: Groups -
Figure 4 displays the coverage by our projects of these four topic areas:
CREDE provides balanced and integrated coverage of all four of these priority topics.
- Figure 4: Priorities -
Figure 5 displays in map form the geographic scope of our work. Each dot represents Center presence; that is, either an individual researcher or research institution or a location where studies are being conducted.
- Figure 5: Center Presence 1996-2001 -
1Award #R306A60001-96, from July 1, 1996 through June 30, 2001.
2See Appendix B.
The work reported herein and the editing and production of this report were supported under the Educational Research and Development Centers Program, Cooperative Agreement Number R306A60001-96, as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.
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CREDE Dissemination Center for Applied Linguistics 4646 40th Street NW Washington, DC 20016 202-362-0700 202-362-3740 (fax) crede@cal.org www.cal.org/crede |