Journal of Latinos and Education

ISSN: 1534-8431 (Print) 1532-771X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hjle20

Communities of Caring: Developing Curriculum

That Engages Latino/a Students’ Diverse Literacy
Practices

Rosario Ordoñez-Jasis, KaiLonnie Dunsmore, George Herrera, Carlos Ochoa,

Laura Diaz & Elizabeth Zuniga-Rios

To cite this article: Rosario Ordoñez-Jasis, KaiLonnie Dunsmore, George Herrera, Carlos Ochoa,
Laura Diaz & Elizabeth Zuniga-Rios (2016) Communities of Caring: Developing Curriculum That
Engages Latino/a Students’ Diverse Literacy Practices, Journal of Latinos and Education, 15:4,
333-343, DOI: 10.1080/15348431.2015.1134538

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2015.1134538

Published online: 06 Apr 2016.

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JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION
2016, VOL. 15, NO. 4, 333–343
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2015.1134538

Communities of Caring: Developing Curriculum That Engages

Latino/a Students’ Diverse Literacy Practices
Rosario Ordoñez-Jasisa, KaiLonnie Dunsmoreb, George Herrerac, Carlos Ochoac, Laura Diazc,
and Elizabeth Zuniga-Riosc
a
Department of Literacy and Reading Education, California State University, Fullerton; bNational Center for Literacy
Education; cRowland Unified School District

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This study investigates the learning and work of a community of practice Curriculum; Latino/a
that engaged in a specific inquiry around family/community literacy and the children and families;
development of a culture of caring that would connect family/community/ middle; multiliteracies;
school literacies in ways that allowed their mostly Latino/a students to parent and community;
develop positive student identities, enhanced personal connections to qualitative research
their peers, and stronger experiential responses to literacy instruction.

My inquiry expanded my world and my view of the community I teach in. My eyes are open to
what’s around me, the culture of the children, their lives, their environment, the parents. It’s changed
the way I look at how I teach.—Linda (teacher, community of practice retreat, May 2011).
The teacher quoted here was a member of a teacher-led community of practice (CoP) that focused
on family and community literacy(ies). This team of 10 teachers talked about their work as a way of
building “cultural proficiency” among teachers so that new “reciprocal” relationship with families
and communities were developed at their school sites. Borrowing the definition set forth by
Noddings (as cited in Velasquez, West, Graham, & Osguthorpe, 2013) that caring involves authentic,
reciprocal, and ongoing relationship building rather than singular acts or feelings, the team knew
they wanted to move beyond traditional notions of parent and community involvement but lacked a
theory of how engaging families and communities in new ways would lead to the development of
literacy curriculums that would promote positive student literacy identities and increase student
engagement. Their efforts were guided by a deep desire to create a curriculum that was more
personal, equitable, and accessible to their mostly Latino/a working-class students.
The data for this article emerge from a larger, multiyear inquiry into how one district moved to
conceptualize and implement a strategy that was at various times described as building “partner-
ships,” “connections,” or “engagement” with families and communities. We have written elsewhere
(see Dunsmore, Ordonez-Jasis, & Herrera, 2013) about the language and literacy community-
mapping process and tool set used in classroom contexts to support professional learning. In this
article, however, we are very interested in the learning and work of a CoP as a professional learning
community that engaged in a specific inquiry around family/community literacy and the develop-
ment of a culture of caring that would serve as the basis for a literacy curriculum that validated
home-based knowledge and community resources. This then provides a context for a closer
examination of how one middle grade teacher, “Antonio,” attempted to examine the situated
literacies in the immediate community around his school and how he worked to connect family/
community/school literacies and practices in ways that allowed his sixth-grade students to develop

CONTACT Rosario Ordoñez-Jasis Arordonez@fullerton.edu California State University–Fullerton, Department of Reading

Education, P.O. Box 6868, Fullerton, CA 92834-6868.
Color versions of one or more figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/hjle
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
334 R. ORDOÑEZ-JASIS ET AL.

positive student identities, enhanced personal connections to their peers, and stronger experiential
responses to literacy instruction.

Theoretical framework
A review of the existing research on student engagement framed within a pedagogy of caring in the
middle grades, and CoPs as an alternative model for teacher growth and development, converges
on these two themes that informed our study and is briefly summarized here. First, we selected the
middle grades to focus on because it is a time when parents often begin to report feeling
disconnected from the school and curriculum (Hill & Tyson, 2009; Jasis, 2013) and students’
interest and motivation in school and their sense of an affective and authentic connection to the
school curriculum appear to lag (Guthrie & Davis, 2003; Zenkov, Harmon, Lier, & Tompkins,
2009). The research on student engagement in the middle grades is extensive (Ivey, 2010; Ivey &
Johnston, 2013). More specifically, the research on literacy engagement and motivation—defined as
the extent to which a student holds a positive regard toward literacy-based activities (Brozo &
Mayville, 2012)—supports both short-term benefits (Guthrie & Davis, 2003) and long-term gains
(Guthrie, Wigfield, Metsala, & Cox, 2004). However, Brozo and Mayville (2012) offered an
important reminder that engagement “cannot be detached from social contexts, such as families,
communities and families [for] an individual youth’s motivation to read and learn is linked closely
to the social worlds that are a part of the adolescent’s daily life” (p. 12). Thus, it is argued that
middle school literacy educators have the task of building bridges between adolescents’ outside-of-
school interests and literacy practices and the learning expectations teachers have for them within
academic settings (Hull & Schultz, 2001; Moje, 2004).
Indeed, reconciling students’ social, emotional, and cultural community/home contexts with
school-based curricular expectations can be challenging for the middle school educator. Authentic
instruction, or pedagogy that has some “connection to real-life tasks outside the classroom” (Willems
& Gonzalez-DeHass, 2012, p. 10), can serve as a means of bettering student engagement and
motivation in the middle school years. Willems and Gonzalez-DeHass’s (2012) review of the research
on authentic instruction revealed how students benefit from a curriculum that “embeds real-life
context into school related subjects” (p. 15). They argued that a disconnect often exists between the
knowledge students acquire in school and an understanding of its application in the home and
community. According to these researchers, instruction that draws on authentic tasks contextualizes
academic learning and, as a result, may enhance a deeper understanding of and greater connection
or engagement with text.
Much has also been written on the need for caring and engaging pedagogy (Velasquez et al., 2013)
that is culturally and linguistically responsive to the complex and ever-changing emotional, social,
and academic identities of diverse student populations (Ladson-Billings, 2010; Moll & Gonzales,
2004). A caring pedagogy that relates students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge, prior experiences,
and frames of reference to academic knowledge is positively correlated with the development
successful learning environments and student performance outcomes (Gay, 2010). For example,
Ladson-Billings’s (2010) work with successful African American teachers demonstrated that the
teachers were concerned with both the academic growth and the social/emotional development of
their students. According to Pang, Stein, Gomez, Matas, and Shimogori (2011), the development of
caring, trusting relationships is key to the creation and implementation of effective, student-centered
multicultural instruction in which students’ identities are affirmed and their community connections
are used as resources to mediate their own learning.
For Latino/a students, engagement with school-based literacy activities is enhanced when knowl-
edge of their identities and sociocultural contexts is accounted for in the school curriculum (Flores-
Duenas, 2004). Conversely, Garcia and Gaddes (2012) warned that a curriculum devoid of cultural
relevance for Latino students can help explain the common lack of engagement of Latino youth in
their schooling. Jimenez (2004) conducted a year-long study on the contextual factors that
 JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION 335

influenced the engagement and literacy development of Latino/a students. He found that student
identity influenced students’ access to, and stance toward, literacy. This means that for the Latino/a
middle school students in his study, identity was rooted in an adolescent’s ties to a particular
community. Thus, one’s literacy identity is potentially affirmed or negated during classroom literacy
events. Jimenez argued that a literacy curriculum should allow diverse students to discover and
explore these ties and connections, including the discourses and learning interests and styles that
students bring with them. He concluded that “the ability to make connections between their lived
experience and textual information [has] some of the most far-reaching potential for altering the
relationship between themselves and literacy” (p. 220). Indeed, positioning students as “expert
informants” and engaging their literate identities—including their “outside-school literate lives”—
will allow students to feel like they are a part of a caring learning community that is comfortable,
relevant, and interesting to them (Skerett & Bomer, 2011, p. 1269).
Second, ample research supports alternative professional learning models in developing teachers
who are responsive to the learning needs and interests of diverse students. Professional learning
communities, for example, have been utilized by schools and districts as a way to promote shared
inquiry and collective learning by promoting mutual respect and trust among their members
(Teague & Anfara, 2012). The potential of CoPs in particular derives from having educators come
together with “a common interest, passion, or need who commit to learning with and from each
other in order to become more effective in their practice” (Communities of Practice: An
Introductory Guide, Ball Foundation, 2009). The explicit rationale for CoPs is built on a theory of
action in which sustained change in literacy achievement for all students is premised on creating a
professional culture in which collaboration, inquiry, and shared agreements about practice char-
acterize the daily work of teachers. Based on the research and theoretical grounding of Etienne
Wenger (1999), CoPs reflect ways in which people learn together around areas of common interest—
through self-directed and shared inquiry, with a focus on developing individual and collective
expertise. Teague and Anfara’s (2012) review of the existing research in this area revealed that the
power of professional learning communities, including CoPs, is their ability to increase the capacity
of members by breaking the isolation educators sometimes feel around issues of diversity, social
justice, and inclusive education.
These two lines of inquiry—(a) a pedagogy of caring and responsivity as a foundation for student
engagement and (b) CoPs to support teachers’ growth and development toward new understandings
for change—inform this study. Specifically, they provide a frame for understanding how educators
coconstructed new understandings for authentic literacy instruction that built on students’ diverse
family and community contexts and facilitated Latino/a middle school students’ engagement and
meaningful learning of academic subject matter.

Methods
This analysis of the development and pedagogical enactment of a theory about the relationship
between family/community engagement and student literacy learning draws from data gathered as
part of a longitudinal (4-year) study of one teacher-led CoP that focused on community literacies. As
part of their work in a CoP, teachers engaged in rigorous inquiry and identified a question around
which they would gather data. In doing so, the CoP members mapped the local communities
surrounding their school sites. Members visited local religious, cultural, civic, and commercial
sites to identify the literacy practices that were typical and the ways in which families and commu-
nities engaged with them; they met with parents in focus groups and interviews to discuss literacy
routines, practices, and events; and they created physical and conceptual maps delineating the values
and knowledge in the community that could be an effective resource for supporting school-based
literacy learning. The teachers took field notes and maintained a journal to record new findings or
discoveries that questioned previous understandings about families and/or the community. The CoP
met monthly and collectively reflected on their new findings.
336 R. ORDOÑEZ-JASIS ET AL.

The researchers were given access to teachers’ reflective journals and action research field notes as
well as permission to attend and take field notes on CoP meetings, conduct semistructured inter-
views, video/audio record CoP meetings and calls, and log e-mails for later analysis. Data sources
also included teacher, parent, and student semistructured interviews; targeted teacher and student
follow-up interviews; parent and teacher focus groups; analytic memos from researchers’ conversa-
tions; and the collection of artifacts, such as student writing samples and videotaped instruction. In
this formative design experiment (Reinking & Bradley, 2007), the researchers collaborated to
systematically document and investigate the work of the CoP and the learning and actions of
individual members while simultaneously discussing ways to strengthen and guide it. Five members
of the CoP served as the design team and worked closely with the researchers in the ongoing data
collection and analysis.
This district is located in a mid-size urban city in southern California. It has nearly 16,000
students in 23 schools, 58% of whom are eligible for free and reduced lunch and 34% of whom are
English learners. In terms of ethnicity, the district is approximately 60% Latino and 30% Asian, with
very small numbers of Euro-Americans, African Americans, and other ethnic/racial groups. The
majority of the CoP members self-identified as Latino/a; half had a personal connection to one of the
school communities. Although most of the teachers viewed themselves as having strong relationships
with the Latino families, they felt that there needed to be new ways of engaging students that
welcomed their voices and experiences.
The “Data and Interpretations” section is framed around two themes that grew from the analysis
of teachers’ beliefs and practices as enacted both in conversational roles in the CoP and in interviews,
in focus groups, and as part of design teams as well as their enacted curriculum in the classroom,
analysis of student learning artifacts, and follow-up interviews with targeted students and teachers.
These themes address the role of community in learning and argue that literacy identities give
powerful motivation for owning and effectively wielding new tools and practices. Collectively these
themes emerged in our data as crucial cognitive shifts in our analysis of individual teachers’
evolution in their theories and rethinking of curriculum in ways that had long-term implications
both for middle grade student engagement in school as well as on the literate identities students used
to describe their experience with various literacy practices.
The following research questions served to frame our inquiry:

(1) What are the CoP’s theories about the role of family and community literacy on students’
in-school literacy learning?
(2) To what extent do these theories change through participation in collaborative, systematic
inquiry in community/family literacy?
(3) What are the CoP’s theories about the role of a community of caring in student
engagement?
(4) What impact do these theories have on middle grade students’ literacy development?

Data and interpretations

Literacy learning is rooted in community
Working in a community of practice has changed me. Number one, learning from my peers, collaborating with
my peers . . . .it’s that collective piece that was most powerful for me . . . .we bring it all together and we find the
theme in all of our learnings.—Antonio (sixth-grade teacher, interview, May 2011)

The CoP provided a space for reflection, interrogation, and action for its members. However, it
also served as an overarching metaphor for their evolving theory about the relationship between
family engagement and student learning. In the district, CoPs were one of the core intervention
structures created to support teacher professional learning. The intention was to create a structure
 JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION 337

that allowed teachers to self-identify their own inquiry and integrate learning through a clearly
articulated action plan. The goal was to give teachers voice and ownership of their own professional
learning by, as sixth-grade teacher Antonio noted previously, learning from and collaborating with
their peers. Community mapping became the organizing structure for the work of this CoP. The
teachers described their primary goal for their inquiry as identifying the kinds of literacy practices in
the family and surrounding community that could be integrated into the curriculum as a way to
engage students, validate the knowledge that they held, and build positive student literate identities.
CoP meetings provided an opportunity for teachers to share what they had learned from the
activities they had selected to map in the weeks between meetings and coconstruct with their
colleagues meanings that they committed to immediately applying to actions as teachers.
The teachers’ learning about family and community literacy(ies) occurred not in isolation but in
collaboration with other educators, who each expressed a similar desire to create caring and
reciprocal relationships and who each identified, as a Latino/a, with the population of students he
or she was teaching. Through their learning, some members of the CoP were becoming increasingly
sensitive to the fact that they did not fully understand, and had never fully appreciated, the expertise,
resources, and experiences students brought with them. For example Gustavo, a middle school
administrator, shared this perspective:

To my surprise and because of collective inquiry, it really made me take a step back at my own assumptions of
my community. After working so many years here, I think I felt in that comfort zone, where I felt that I
understood them already. And I came to realize I really didn’t. It really pays to put on a specific lens and step
out into our community and purposely view it through that lens. We can always learn something new from the
community we serve. (Interview, October 2013)

The development in their collective conversation is further analyzed here as a way of examining
how their learning was contextualized in collaboration with colleagues; the learning of the CoP gave
rise and meaning to their evolving theories and practices. During a full-day spring retreat, members
of the CoP shared their data or artifacts and subsequent analysis of home and community literacies
uncovered through their inquiries. After this activity, the CoP members settled around a large table
to reflect on, and exchange ideas about, the process of community mapping and the impact it had on
their understandings of literacy, the role of communities and families in the development of
students’ literate identities, and implications for their pedagogy and practice. Serving as facilitator,
Antonio opened the discussion by noting that one of the critical pieces of community mapping is
“the willingness to allow ourselves to exist with information that is not, that’s not totally cohesive
with what we know so that we can learn something different” (CoP meeting, May 2010). The
teachers moved back and forth between reflection on how their own CoP was supporting their
individual learning and how students’ literacy development in school was integrally connected to the
communities in which they lived outside of school.
Through a collective analysis of their findings, several themes began to emerge for the group that
led them to question, and later reject, a binary view of homes and schools. In this discussion one
begins to see the group’s desire to move beyond a paradigm that emphasized home/school disconti-
nuities toward one that better reflected their emerging dispositions:
Gustavo: One of the things that keeps reappearing is the whole concept of the school and commu-
nities being a separate entities . . . We keep seeing this theme come up, whether it’s
interviews or the teacher surveys or the home visits, where in reality, it is just one
community. There shouldn’t be this invisible wall that a school is this thing that the
parents can’t access . . . As teachers in that school, you are part of that community.
Antonio: There are the words and worlds inside the classroom and those outside but one of the
themes that I see surfacing is again that connecting, bridging. Bridging the words and
worlds inside the classroom and outside the classroom. That’s been very powerful for me
. . . it’s almost like they can’t be separate.
338 R. ORDOÑEZ-JASIS ET AL.

Mrs. Martinez, the first parent to join the CoP, joined the conversation:
Mrs. Martinez: But then again, we’re always using the word “connect.” So maybe we’re using it
wrong because if we say “connect” we’re always assuming it’s two separate things
that you have to connect . . . we have to start using another word besides
“connecting.”
Antonio: Understand perhaps? Understand how they are connected? But you know the reality
is that sometimes they are not connected. That’s a lot of what we’ve been talking
about . . . but they’re not separate for the child. I think we as professionals some-
times see them as disconnected or we don’t connect them for whatever reason.

This conversation highlights the group’s attempts to rethink terms such as connected and
disconnected and critically interrogate how language holds the power to define reality. In this case,
commonly used words to describe home/school relations were problematized by this group of
teachers because, as Gustavo pointed out, their use assumed an essential separation between
homes and schools and may have unintentionally perpetuated the negative notion that teachers
are inevitable outsiders to the communities surrounding their school sites.
For members of the CoP, the implications of viewing schools as inherently disconnected from
students’ homes and communities negatively impacted curricular decision making. As they proble-
matized this issue, the CoP’s roundtable discussions gradually began to include issues of power
access, communities of caring, and action:
Rosa: We bring in separate curriculums and stories and we set the tone. And when I say we, I mean
“we” as a whole not just the teachers in the classroom but as a district and state. We don’t
stop to think about [how] everybody’s language and everybody’s cultural experiences are
important. And why is this more important than this? So if we have that political power to set
what’s important then we need to make sure that we’re making those choices with a lot of
knowledge of understanding of our cultural community that we’re working in.
Antonio: And being mindful of, “What am I doing to allow their world to come in? To validate their
experiences?”
Gustavo: When you care about your community you take the time to find out about families. You
become empowered to step out of the box. The anxiety level goes down [and] you’re able
to share with your parents, with your students, and community . . . you are better able to
build that capacity for the learning.
Antonio: I’m also beginning to see it as making a community of caring actionable through [inquiry]
. . . You must participate actively and that’s how your perspective changes. That’s how you
make the connections. I mean that’s how you tap into the world. That’s how you get to
know your community.

In this CoP members’ collective conversations became both a key way to support one another as
learners as well as an organizing concept for their shifting view of how learning (their learning as
well as that of their students) necessarily occurred in communities that were interconnected,
responsive, and caring. Their own literacy learning, like that of their students, was integrally tied
to personal, critical, and sometimes affective conversations and practice with other people. Through
this ongoing process of critically reexamining and reinterpreting their own (and their colleagues’)
ideas about the power teachers hold to decide whose experiences count, these educators were able to
gain a stronger grasp of how their inquiries as a CoP could shape their pedagogy so that it would be
more inclusive of students’ diverse cultural and linguistic experiences. In addition, for the CoP
members, school and family connected for them and they embraced a community of caring, but the
question they began asking themselves was how to make these ideas “actionable” and how to do it
officially through the school curriculum.
 JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION 339

Literacy is both identity and practice: The curriculum should support both
I realized that books, they actually connect to the life . . . what you do in real life is in books . . . Things in the
past they [are] like a bunch of facts but they connect to how you live right now.—Daisy (seventh grade, follow-
up interview, May 2012)

Daisy was a Latina student in Antonio’s sixth-grade class who “struggled to include her voice in her
writing” (Antonio, written reflections, June 2012). In this interview Daisy reflected on her emerging
awareness that literacy is more than “a bunch of facts” and that history can “connect to how you live
right now.” When given the opportunity to express herself and connect the knowledge constructed
from active membership in her home and community to school-based instruction, she was able to
see the connection between Antonio’s curriculum and her present-day realities. Antonio reported
that he also struggled, as a teacher, to fully engage Daisy and his other students with various reading
and writing assignments. He continually strived to create literacy projects that were authentic and
contextualized in his students’ families and communities. In Spring 2011, Antonio thought deeply
about his CoP’s lengthy conversations over the previous 2 years about the need to engage students by
validating the social worlds that were a part of their daily lives. For Antonio, the development of
Daisy’s voice in her writing became central to larger issues related to equity and students’ ability to
access his curriculum. As mentioned earlier, from the beginning Antonio viewed himself as a
“culturally responsive” teacher, one whose strong ties to the Latino community served his students
and their parents well. Yet the process of reaching out to map the community, sharing it with others,
and constantly asking the question “So what impact does this have on your teaching?” helped him to
rethink what he knew as appropriate and effective strategies for engaging middle school students and
families. He began to see that “connecting” to the community could not just involve ancillary or
supplemental discussions but inform curriculum design and act to construct both the meaning and
practice of literacy learning.
After repeated weeks of sharing single vignettes with the CoP of how his inquiry was informing
individual responses to students, he took the initiative to reframe a curriculum unit that he had taught in
the past in a way that was intentionally designed to be built around students’ home, community, and cultural
experiences as well as engage them in literacy practices that connected their personal and emotional lives to
literary tools and frames within a community of caring. His inquiry into the community had suggested that
“memorials” had strong cultural and family importance (shrines in and out of homes and communities;
memorabilia and artifacts of those who had passed; photographs and texts written about, for, and by
deceased family members) and were daily and cherished parts of family life. They also often went
unacknowledged in the daily fabric of schooling. He explained that even in the school there were places
in which memorials had personal importance but little function in the official curriculum. As part of an
integrated social studies and English language arts unit in the district curriculum, Antonio was supposed to
teach about the Vietnam Memorial. He thought very hard about how to do this in a way that would allow
students to draw from their experiences and values to engage in the required literacy and subject area goals.
Antonio explained how he reconstructed this unit:

Several years ago, our office manager’s son lost his life in a car accident. A memorial tree was planted next to
the office in memory of Alex. Students were given the opportunity to draw Alex’s tree. More than a few
students suggested that we create our own memorial in the classroom similar to the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. It felt like a noble way to harness their energy, enthusiasm, and learning by creating a structure
that would support them. (Follow-up interview, June 2012)

The next week Antonio’s sixth-grade class brought in photographs, realia, candles, medals, flowers,
and other personal items and memorabilia and built memorials for deceased family members (see
Figure 1). Antonio asked his students to write essays, letters, speeches, and poems as part of the unit.
Although there were 4.5 days of school left in the year, Antonio reported that the students’ energy
and enthusiasm was “unparalleled.” In addition, the middle grade students in his classroom,
especially those who struggled most with academic writing, suddenly had personal motivation,
340 R. ORDOÑEZ-JASIS ET AL.

Figure 1. Sixth-grade memorials.

often drawn from family experiences, to meaningfully engage in school-based literacy. Several
students wanted to write letters to the office manager, Corina, who had lost her son. Daisy had an
opportunity in class not just to send her letter to Corina but to sit with her face to face and share it
(videotape, June 2011):

Daisy: “Dear Ms. Corina, I am writing this letter to tell you how sorry I am for the tragic accident
that happened to your son Alex, who was only 23 years old. I would like to say that Alex
was loved dearly and that every time I pass by the Pepper Tree Memorial Tree I would
forever remember him, and I’ve seen that Pepper Tree since kindergarten!” [smiles at
Corina]
Corina: Oh wow!
Daisy: “Ms. Corina, your son is a great honor to this school and [looks intently at Corina] I want
you to know that.”
Corina: Thank you. [smiles]
Daisy: “Every Saturday of the Memorial [weekend] he will be on my mind 24/7 and I will think of
all the good things about him and what he’s done in the past years. So, Ms. Corina, I hope
you know that your son is amazing [Corina wipes away a tear from her cheek] and will be
remembered through a lot of years to come and will never be forgotten by me.”
Corina: Thank you. I appreciate this! [Hugs Daisy]

Daisy was one of five students in Antonio’s class who initially were weakest academically as
writers yet showed powerful engagement and highly skilled literacy practices in this memorial unit.
Daisy and the other three students were interviewed 1 year later to have them reflect on both their
literacy practices and instructional activities themselves (see Table 1). All of them talked about this
curriculum unit as structure that allowed them to create a classroom voice that was both officially
recognized as literate but personally viewed as having meaning to them and resonance with their
family/community life out of school. Antonio himself discussed this unit as a pivotal development
for him in recognizing that he could draw from his growing knowledge of the families and
communities of his students to create a curriculum that had the potential to expand the repertoire
 JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION 341

Table 1. Targeted student follow-up interviews: Antonio’s sixth-grade students’ connection to literacy.
Student Student Literacy Work (1 year later: May 2012)
Eduardo Letter to Corina “I put more energy into it . . . it was more emotional for me . . . [The writing assignment] was
different because it was real life. We had to experiment outside the classroom [and] inside.
We had fun activities and got to do some good research, not just from the book, but we
were actually creative about it. I think that was good doing this instead of getting it from
the book and just reading and writing about it.”
Daisy Letter to Corina “The memorial [projects] was different from other things because I realized that books, they
actually connect to the life, and what you do in real life like is in books . . . things in the past
they [are] like a bunch of like facts but they connect to real life and how you live right
now.”
Susana Essay “We brought in things to the classroom that we don’t [usually] do. We brought candles,
flowers for the people [who died] and we talked. We did a big circle . . . We talked about
each life. It was real feelings about us . . . [Stories don’t] touch me that much. But when
Corina came in it touched me because it was real.”
Anthony Speech for deceased “I brought the pictures, candles, medals for my grandpa. I brought his hat from Vietnam.. . .
grandfather It was important to me and exciting to share what he had done in the past . . . I had happy
feelings . . . This [project] was different [than others] because it talked about family and real
life . . . I put my heart into the [speech]. I took my time. It was important to me and I know
he was important to my mom . . . It felt good to have a chance to say what I wanted to
about my grandpa.”

of voices recognized as valid in a classroom and help students develop literacy identities that
were new.
In her follow-up interview 1 year later Daisy, then a seventh grader, was shown the letter she
wrote and asked to talk about the curriculum unit and the activities that prompted this writing, her
best and strongest from a school standard perspective. She was given her letter and then prompted
generally to talk about “what stands out” about the Memorial unit:
My grandmother, she had passed away . . . and so as I was thinking about her and how much I missed her . . . I
remember reading my poetry to Ms. Corina, I remember I felt really connected to her. As I was reading it aloud
I got kind of teary-eyed because I felt a good connection since her son passed away and that was about the time
—like a month [before]—that had my grandma had passed away. I felt that what I was doing was important. It
gave me the liberty to express myself . . .

Although Antonio saw the power in letter writing, he attributed the emerging literate identities of
the adolescent Latino/a students in his classroom not to a particular genre or function of the writing
but rather to the opportunity the task provided to bring in values, traditions, and experiences from
outside of the classroom as not merely sanctioned but essential to engaging in the writer’s craft. Both
Daisy’s voice and the content of her written piece drew from not a school-based literacy identity,
within which she and Antonio viewed her as struggling, but rather a powerful personal identity in
which literacy could be owned and had meaning across multiple communities and contexts. In the
postinterview, Daisy acknowledged,
It was like a part of me coming into the school. I think nowadays, every time I get an opportunity to write
something from home or about my family I take it more seriously. So it really changed how I look at things.

For Daisy literacy became a tool for her to enact a set of values and practices that reflected personal goals,
motivations, and experiences. It was not merely a tool, however; it became the foundation for a new
identity in which literacy had function and importance to her. She owned the meanings and saw a way
that she could use language to be and do things that mattered to her. For Antonio the increased
engagement of students in learning was powerful—students who had rarely done homework or showed
little effort were suddenly fully present and involved in the learning activities. They also, however,
showed improved language practices. The writing many of them did was far superior to anything they
had thus far demonstrated in required writing projects, and the English language skills surpassed those
on a recently administered district assessment of English language fluency (using a constructed response
assessment). In reflecting on this unit, then, Antonio (personal communication, December 22, 2011)
342 R. ORDOÑEZ-JASIS ET AL.

talked about how the curriculum helped to develop literate identities and created opportunities to bridge
the gap most students had thus far experienced between home and school. The event fully represented
the fluidity and overlap among the multiple literacy worlds of students. It was also a dramatic example,
he thought, of the educational potential of challenging prevailing, scripted notions of engagement and
knowledge validity and exploring, including, and sharing the literacy-rich world of the students, their
families, and their communities. In addition, by inviting in students’ literacy worlds, he created a learning
space in which motivation and engagement were high and the literacy practices surrounding the event
captured students emotionally as well as intellectually. Their literate performance in many cases
surpassed those in which the practices had less authentic or personally meaningful connections.

Implications
Members of the CoP participated in a focused inquiry on family and community-based literacy,
utilized ethnographic tools and methods to map the community of their students, and then used that
knowledge to build a curriculum that connected to the authentic contexts of students’ lives. The CoP
model used as part of this work provided teachers with an opportunity to analyze the sociocultural
structures existing outside school walls so that there was a greater degree of parallel between the
official school curriculum and the topics and tasks that were most meaningful to and held relevance
for students in the middle grades. It is believed that this close alignment facilitated students’ ability
to access academic subject matter.
Investigating the literacies present in the lives of their students transformed the CoP’s theories
about the connection between instructional pedagogy and family/community engagement: Teachers
learned to place the literacies of the students’ homes—and hearts—at the center of instructional
design and literacy practice. Engagement became more than an affirmation of the perspective of
households—it became a space to create new voices for students through helping them develop
identities in which literacy had personal, community, cultural, and school-based meanings.
Initially the teachers talked primarily about the affective benefit to students when they were
“engaged” in schools. Students would feel “heard” and “included.” The teachers were not able to
articulate how these relationships would change their own practice of teaching. Eventually the CoP
members shared ideas to help construct new curricular units. Antonio in particular viewed his
memorial unit as a “success” because it increased student engagement and literacy learning (a
primary pedagogical aim) through what he saw as incorporating the meanings and values students
developed through participation in their family and community life out of school (the CoP focus)
within a community of caring. Throughout this project, members consistently talked about how
teachers who understood family and community literacies could better support student learning.
Initially, however, the teachers had few practical ideas about how these “connections” might inform
curriculum development. They were very conscious that their participation in a CoP was key to
supporting their own learning; they also began to see how their students’ learning occurred in
community and that by intentionally creating structures that connected the in- and out-of-school
learning practices they allowed for the creation of new literate identities and, importantly, more
effective learning. Antonio’s inquiry, for example, enabled him to challenge deep-seated beliefs about
curriculum development and pedagogy. By the end of the year, Antonio’s sixth-grade students were
more engaged and demonstrated striking improvements in their writing as Antonio was able to tap
into interests and experiences that had lain dormant and was able to give rise to the writing voices
that were submerged. Antonio and the others began creating spaces that invited students to bring the
artifacts, meanings, values, and resources of their home and community into the real work of
classroom learning, and he did it as part of their ongoing exploration. The CoP’s recognition that
learning occurs in and through community and that literacy has meaning in families independent of
school-based assessments and goals led them to recognize ways in which they could intentionally
design pedagogical activities that helped students meaningfully draw from the values and goals that
motivated them out of school to engage in literacy practices in school. This approach is especially
 JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION 343

important for teaching middle grade students, for whom successful literacy instruction requires
attention to how students themselves understand literacy tasks to hold authenticity and ownership in
their own world.

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