Running Head: “JUST A WORD” 1

“Just a Word:”

What Happens When We Change the Ways We Conceptualize Our Students?

Piper Pugh

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Alesha Gayle

EDUC 606: Literacy Theory, Research, and Practice

May 2, 2022
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Story of the Question: “Just a Word”

In the field of literacy, we, fittingly, spend a lot of time with words–unveiling their

meanings, evaluating their use, inventing new combinations when the old ones don’t work, or

uncovering the power dynamics they obscure yet perpetuate. We, as literacy scholars, marinate

and chew on the words our discourse uses, or has used: “at-risk,” “diversity,” “parental

involvement,” “struggling reader,” “English Language Learner,” “loud,” and “culture,” to name

just a few of the many words that have gained, and secured, our scholarship’s attention in recent

decades (Simon & Campano, 2013; Williams, 1976; Ghiso et al., 2014; Morris, 2018; Valencia,

2010).

Contemporary scholars across the field of literacy are, in breadth and depth, attempting to

challenge the binaries and words enmeshed in our Discourse that promote static, monolithic, or

deficit-oriented understandings of our students (Gee, 2015; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). In protest

of these words and labels, preeminent literacy scholars have attempted to find new words and

reconceptualize old ones to reinstate the movement and dynamism of our practice, our students,

and of literacy itself. For instance, Canagarajah (2019) conducts a large-scale excavation into the

word “text;” derived from a word meaning “to weave,” “text,” he argues, must be conceived of

as more than a static, fixed object, but instead as something that is “always in the process of

becoming.” He connects this idea of “text” as “weaving” to problematize the Western world’s

focus on the “finished product,” rather than the process, as well as to decenter written “texts” and

to wonder whose texts, across time, have held power and why. Likewise, instead of “literacy

practices” or “literacy events,” nouns that feel moored to one time and place, Siegel et al. (2008)

conceive of a “literacy in motion,” through ethnographic research into a “shapeshifting”

kindergartner named Jewel.

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As a recent transplant into the field of literacy, I have become infatuated with this naming

and renaming of our theoretical concepts, our practices and ways of being, and, quite centrally,

our students. I am interested in how scholars attempt to find words that capture even a fraction of

the complexities and multiplicities that reside within literacy, and within our students’ practice of

it. Mostly, I am interested in more deeply exploring the why–the why any of this matters.

For me, these inquiries and discursive changes are as exciting as they are necessary, as I

believe, like so many scholars across literacy, anthropology, psychology, literature, and beyond,

that our words shape our realities (just as our realities, too, shape our words). However, in my

work with students and educators, and in my daily experience of simply existing in the world, in

conversation, in transit, or inside a text, I often encounter the claim that a word is “just a word.”

As a logophile with an educational background in Literature and Sociology, or even before then,

as a young person with an ever-growing and world-fed criticality, it became impossible not to

push back against this, not stare at words and think: what is the origin of this? How have the

meanings changed, why, and for who? What histories of power are implicated in its use? And of

course, what words, then, should I use instead?

My inquiry began with the intention of refuting this “just a word” argument, to establish

the impact of our power-laden language, of the silencing or mobilization of certain rhetoric, and

crucially, to explore the possible impact of consciously conceptualizing our students in new

ways, with new words. To see them as real-world “makers” of meaning, of reality, and of change.

I use the work of seminal ethnographic research, such as Vivian Vasquez’s (2004) work with

preschoolers, to understand the real impact of teacher philosophy that acknowledges students’

selves and real-worldness, whose knowledge as a maker is recognized, understood, and invited

in classroom spaces.
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My inquiry hinges upon the work of educational anthropologist Dory Lightfoot (2004),

who underscores the importance of words in our perception of reality, and therefore our

construction of it. The language we mobilize in reference to our students, their families, and their

practices is part of creating the “material conditions” of our classrooms, and is also part of

creating the “material conditions” of our students’ lives. Simply stated, our words fail to remain

“just words,” when they are implicated in constructing the spaces our students learn in, as well as

their own construction of themselves.

I acknowledge, as Lightfoot argues, that when power-laden terminology becomes so

widely used, it also tends to become invisible. My work seeks to render these words visible,

while negotiating new words and conceptualizations of students that support the construction of

spaces where they have power and agency in the classroom, where they are seen as vital sources

of knowledge and information, and where they can guide their own inquiries.

I argue that meaningful changes in our conceptualization of students–understanding them

as makers of meaning and researcher-activists–can engender meaningful and transformational

changes in our pedagogy, but most crucially, supports our students as they continue to critically

understand, reimagine, and transform their own social and material realities.

Literature Review

Matter(ing): Relationship Between Words and Reality

My research is based on the assertion that our words and our conceptualizations of our

students matter (matter: to be of importance; have significance) and have tangible effects. I

argue that our language and our ideology–our ideas and manner of thinking–are not purely

imaginary entities or confined within our own minds or bodies (Street, 1984; Althusser, 1971;
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Simon & Campano, 2013; Bloome & Green, 2015; New London Group, 1996). Instead, our

language and our ideologies are implicated in constructing our material and social realities, as

well as the material experiences of others (Zizek, 1989; Lightfoot, 2004). Lightfoot describes this

phenomenon quite aptly, asserting:

“Our ways of understanding and of talking about ourselves and others create lines of

power that are as real as any material reality. Our discursive, or language-based,

understandings not only result from, but also create, material conditions. In this case, the

way we use words to understand various people, and the way they are expected to

behave, may, in itself, shape that behavior, and certainly creates differential

understandings of various groups of people.”

The understandings we possess about other people, and “the way we use words” to express these

understandings, do not exist in an ideological vacuum. They have real-life, tangible, and often

deterministic implications on our students. In this way, words operate as the building blocks of

our material world, as well as the architectural blueprints/maps for the continued reproduction of

it. To clarify, our language impacts how we perceive and move through reality (and how we

perceive others), but also helps us construct it. In this way, our words matter, and actually

impact the matter (matter: physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; that

which occupies space and possesses mass) of our lives.

In fact, Simon and Campano (2013) argue that “ideology is concretized in, and

coextensive with, material reality,” while Žižek (1989), whom these authors quote, poignantly

asserts that “ideology structures reality.” Lightfoot (2004) writes that “in a very real sense, words

are concrete, and by their weight and gravity they construct the world as we understand it.”

These three examples, taken from the fields of literacy, philosophy, and anthropology, similarly
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demonstrate the connection between language/ideology and material reality by utilizing

“building” metaphors. They invoke similar language, utilizing words like “construct,”

“concretize,” and “concrete,” in order to make tangible the way that language literally maps out

on and manufactures our reality–and to clarify the physical and symbolic “weight” of this

assertion. They demonstrate the matter(ing) of our words.

Simon and Campano (2013) also clarify the implication of this on our students. In their

work exploring the impact of, and the need to deconstruct, “normal curve ideologies,” they

emphasize how the logic of the normal curve impacts the material realities and futures of our

students’ lives. The normal curve ideology, which goes hand in hand with deficit notions of

students, stipulates that students exist on a distribution, meaning that while some are “normal,”

others are greater than normal–“gifted” with extra offerings or abilities–or are less than

normal–endowed with “deficits.” This ideology is, the authors argue, “deterministic” (as well as

unbelievably problematic and harmful). They quite aptly describe this “deterministic”

relationship, writing:

“The ideology of the normal curve reinforces conceptions of individual aptitude,

standards, curricula, tracking, and assessment. These practices ‘hail’ or interpellate

(Althusser, 1971) individuals as particular kinds of students, which can shape their

self-conceptions as learners, their performances on various measures that claim to

objectively depict their learning or competency, and ultimately their life changes.”

Our conceptualizations of our students can operate like a sort of “self-fulfilling prophecy,” in

which our understanding of students as “deficit” or “failing” can become real, physical

obstacles to students’ success and self-concept in schools, and to their future. On one hand, it can

damage our learners’ self-conceptions, but on the other hand, our ideology shapes the classroom
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culture and structure that guides their learning and measures their performance. We can imagine

that our ideologies and conceptualizations of students play a key role in constructing the tangible

classroom environment; they dictate our classroom practices, standards, discipline practices, our

lesson plans, curricula, text sets/materials, assignments, and our assessments, tracking guidelines,

referrals to disabled student programs, and grading. In this way, we map out conceptions onto the

bodies of our students, like blueprints, and we have the power to build classroom environments

and educational cultures in ways that attempt to reinforce these conceptualizations (often

restricting/sequestering our students and denying their whole selves). These have the power to

damage (or alternatively, to support) students’ self-conceptions, school performance, and access

to pathways and opportunities for their futures.

For instance, author and activist Ibram X. Kendi (2019) recounts his experience with his

White third grade teacher, who routinely ignored the hands and input of students of color, and

selectively called on the only three white students in the classroom. In this recollection, he, at

seven years old, watches how a young black female student in the class receives the teacher’s

“racist abuse” (Kendi’s renaming of “microaggression”), and begins to physically retreat into

herself because of her teacher’s repeated “silencing” (Castagno, 2018). In this example, the

White teacher enacts her deeply embodied White Supremacist ideology by devaluing the insight

of the young Black student. The racist/deficit-oriented ideology does not remain within her; it

moves out of her through (and is reaffirmed by) her actions. By failing to allow the knowledge

and insight of her Black students to be entered in the classroom space, she is engaging in

repeated silencing. Her conceptualization of this student, as an individual who does not have

“funds of knowledge” or valuable insight to offer to the classroom, manifests into a reality in

which this student’s insight is literally unable to enter in the school environment (Moll et al.,
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1992; Castagno, 2018). Her understanding of the student as unable to offer knowledge has in

effect created a material condition in which the student is physically unable to (denied the

ability to) offer her knowledge. This student, Castagno (2018) argues, will also learn to remain

silent in future learning environments. This example, despite being a “small” piece in a larger

mosaic, reveals how teacher conceptualizations and ideologies are unimaginably and

incalculably dangerous in their real ability ​to “delimit the learning and life changes of diverse

students” (Simon & Campano, 2013).

Methodology & Methods

This paper is a grounded theory research essay, which utilizes scholarship from across the

fields of literacy, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. I rely heavily on seminal scholars’

ethnographic research, conducted in schools and in communities, to support my inquiry.

The discussion I engage in and the conclusions I draw are primarily supported by, and

grounded in, comprehensive, semester-long research into discursive choices, etymology, power

reproduction, literacy curriculum, meaning making, and student activism. I conduct textual

analysis for research across disciplines in order to identify discursive trends and changes across

academic fields. I use methods of literary criticism in order to identify commonalities,

continuities, and commonly mobilized terms, phrases, and metaphors. In particular, I scout out

ways that teachers and researchers conceptualize their students in order to understand the effects

their conceptualizations have on classroom practice, routines, pedagogy, and power structures.

I also draw upon my work as an English/Reading/Writing/Literacy tutor. On occasion, I

use specific examples from my 1-on-1 tutoring and discussion with students. However, even in

segments of my paper without overt references to this work, the perspective and analysis offered
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in the entirety of this paper have been deeply grounded in and enriched by the wisdom and

insight of my students, who continue to challenge who I am, and who I hope to be as a literacy

educator.

Positionality

I am entering into this discussion as a Literacy scholar, with an educational and research

background in English, Creative Writing, and Sociology. My background as a writer, student of

Literature/English, and social science each have taken part in welding my lenses and my

approach to the study of Literacy. My paper therefore utilizes key tools and terms from each

discipline in my investigation of how conceptualizations of students impact our practice and our

students’ material experiences in schools.

I am also approaching this discussion (and my educational practice/academic work) as a

White, female educator and researcher. Earlier, I discussed the importance of illuminating,

addressing, and reconfiguring power dynamics in schools and societies, writing: “I

acknowledge…that when power-laden terminology becomes so widely used, it also tends to

become invisible. My work seeks to render these words visible.” It is then also crucial to address

how Whiteness, both as an ideology and my physical reality, impact my practice, pedagogy, and

perspective as a researcher. Scholars like McLaren (1998) and Castagno (2008) would argue that

“the ideology of Whiteness also serves as ‘a form of social amnesia’ that allows White people to

forget or ignore how we are implicated in the maintenance of systems of privilege and

oppression” (Castagno, 2008). My positioning as a White educator is a visible, material reality of

any classroom I enter into, and is also a piece of my ideology and pedagogy that needs to be

addressed, not left unacknowledged. This is especially important as much of the labeling and
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language-use I interrogate as problematic is mobilized to condemn students of color who do not

live up to White norms and standards indoctrinated into formal schooling. Alim and Haupt

(2017) write that “intentionally or not, Whiteness [is] frequently and uncritically positioned as

the unmarked norm by which all others are measured.” Students who act in ways out of

accordance with the norms and ideology of Whiteness are often the students who are

conceptualized in harmful ways by teachers, or who are the recipients of language that corrals

their selves and deters their future (Blanchett, 2010).

Findings

Scholarship

In my review of literacy scholars and scholarship, I analyzed the work of

teacher-researchers who wielded transformative ideologies and activist conceptualizations of

their students. I hoped to understand how these orientations impacted actual classroom culture,

or if they engendered real change to students, classroom structure, and the atmosphere and power

differentials in the learning environment. In particular, I was drawn to the work of literacy

scholar Vivian Vasquez (2004), who documents how her transformative pedagogical orientations

impacted her preschool classroom, but also allowed her to witness and support the ways that her

preschool students were changing and negotiating the classroom, too. Her work is particularly

impactful as it attends to the ways that students are capable of making meaningful change, in and

out of their classroom. I argue that she sees her preschoolers as researchers and real-world agents

of change, as she encourages her students to wield the critical literacy and inquiry stances

deemed invaluable for us as educators (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1998; 1999). For instance,

Vasquez (2004) endows students with powerful agency as she describes the investigative and
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inquiry-based work of the preschoolers as “[engaging] in research both at home and at school.”

Her students' work to thoughtfully explore their communities and schools is not reduced or

minimized; it is described, authoritatively, as “[engaging] in research,” elevating these inquiries’

importance to the status of “research” conducted in other educational spheres. These

conceptualizations of her students’ influences her organization of the classroom’s physical space,

curricular activities, and daily structure of school life. For instance, Vasquez (2004) allowed her

students to work as a “chairperson” of the class, endowed with the overt authority to lead

classroom conversation and activities.

The transformational nature of her conceptualization of students as capable of engaging

critically with the world and school culture engendered equally transformative classroom

activities. Students, repeatedly, enacted their real-world status as meaning makers and activists

by facilitating student-led dialogues, critiquing the school system, or identifying and addressing

community injustices. For instance, her students wrote letters to members of the community

asking for donations for flood victims and advocated for their inclusion in a foreign language

club, “French Café,” typically restricted to upper classmen.

Similarly, Ghiso et al. (2011) describe what can happen when students are positioned as

researchers, with important, individual inquiries and interests worth investigating and learning

from. They underscore the importance of encouraging students to adopt a “critical inquiry

stance,” just as we, as teacher-researchers, do, too. They argue that this critical inquiry “means

inviting children to explore and raise questions about broader social issues, looking across

individual experiences to investigate patterns of inequality they might notice and consider how

things could be changed for the better.” This situates students as both capable of noticing and
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analyzing the injustices and inequalities, but also as capable of (re)imagining ways and worlds

that challenge these systemic inequalities.

In their study, elementary school teachers invited their students to engage in critical

inquiry in their communities through a series of photography and literacy-related projects.

Positing students as researchers and communities as “transnational locals” and “resources,” the

classes entered into the students’ communities with cameras and their own unique lenses to

conduct “research;” they engaged in student-led inquiries into what they personally identified

important–as well as what they identified as “just” or “unjust.” Through such framing, one

student, Mateo, noticed that several buildings near school had been torn down; he later reflected

on the same geographical space, noting that new high rise buildings were being constructed

(Ghiso et al., 2019). With his teacher’s support, he investigated this change as an “injustice”

happening in his community, and was asked to consider what should be done. Mateo identified

that displacement of families who lived in the destroyed homes was an injustice, and suggested

that these families should then be able to move into the new “fancy building.” Without the

teachers and researchers in this study conceptualizing students as researchers with important

knowledge, they may have missed how Mateo witnesses and analyzes his community changes;

they would have also not been attentive to supporting the development of his critical inquiry

lenses. The authors argue that “children from historically minoritized backgrounds have deep

expertise, allow children to demonstrate critical insights about systemic injustices and inhabit

roles as advocates for their communities.” Understanding students as being uniquely capable of

research and advocacy does not catalyze their involvement in these activities; it allows us to

witness the ways our students are already engaging in this real-world work, and enables us to

support their continued development as meaning makers and researcher-activists.

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Ghiso et al. (2019), similar to Vasquez (2004) refer to the investigative work their

students engage in as “research,” writing that “children…used their research to make arguments

about what they felt needed to change.” The conceptualizations that these teacher-researchers

possess of their students renders visible the type of awe-inspiring work, research, and advocacy

that children are engaging in within their homes and communities.

Findings through Student Ethnography

For two years, I have worked with 17-year-old Odin1, a Black student living in the

suburbs of Los Angeles, as his English and History tutor. The first year of our tutoring, he was

enrolled in a notoriously expensive, predominantly White private school in Los Angeles, where

the majority of his English assignments involved “classical” and canonical literature texts and

associated curriculum. Since re-enrolling in a public school, his workload and text-sets have

changed, allowing Odin and I much more time for conversation and exploration during our

meetings. In this time, we relate his school texts to his life, discuss justice-oriented themes and

ideas, ground historical events in his present-day knowledge, explore his critiques of his school’s

curriculum, text-sets choices, and practices, and review the language of the Dominant Discourse

as Odin articulates his evolving perspective on school and the world (Gee, 2015).

For instance, Odin recently reflected on his frustration about what he has and has not

been taught in school, stating: “[I realized] there is still a huge amount of American bias within

history. I have usually learned history from a white male’s perspective.” Similarly, as part of a

letter writing assignment, he chose to advocate against the construction of a monument to honor

pioneers. He wrote that it would be “unethical,” particularly as “it promotes the history of those

of White heritage and history, and those who have power, and completely demotes the histories
1
A pseudonym. My student’s name and personal details have been removed or changed.
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of people of color, and people of other races and religions.” He was particularly concerned about

the symbolic importance of the statue–what this statue would communicate to people in the

community, expressing that it would be dangerous “evidence” that White histories are factual

and superior. His inquiry into the statue reveals how Odin engaged in “artifactual critical

literacy,” by considering how an object would be “read” as a text by the community,

investigating what meaning might be conveyed, and finally deciding to challenge its

development as a form of “everyday resistance” (Freire, 1970; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Cruz,

2011).

After several months of these kinds of discussions, Odin chose to write about an instance

of “racist abuse” in response to an assignment asking to explain “cultural conflict” (Kendi,

2019). He confidently centered his knowledge in response to this question, and engaged in

“rereading” the focal incident, which he mined for new meaning. In his response, he described

his semester-long engagement with a racist teacher, which culminated in the teacher denying that

another student called him “the N word” in class, and attempting to punish Odin for “being a

liar.” I typed as he eloquently articulated:

“Looking back on this situation, I feel absolute shame that nothing was done and that

nothing was taken care of after what I went through. I learned that even people that

you’re supposed to trust, like principals or deans, aren’t always people you can go to

because they might have things against you that are out of your control. Biases and

prejudices still exist all over the place, even especially with regards to people in power.”

Odin’s work evaluating this critical incident, “reading” it, analyzing it, making meaning from it,

and connecting it to broader social/political contexts and power relations is not dissimilar from

the work we engage in as literacy scholars, researchers, and activists. Odin demonstrated a keen
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ability to question, inquire, and resist the ways he was being understood by “people in power.” In

fact, after reviewing the paragraph, he, without a word spoken out loud, highlighted the word

“even,” stared at it for several seconds, then deleted it, and replaced it with the word

“especially.” This incident reveals how Odin negotiates his role in schools, and seeks to disrupt

school hierarchies by questioning the positionality and authority of those who are endowed with

power and “supposed” to be trustworthy. This critical incident underscores how Odin, even

though especially because he is a teenager, engages in ethnographic research, critical inquiry, and

resistance as a political agent, even in “tight” spaces. In the work Odin participates in the

everyday, he engages in research-activism and meaning making on par with what we do as

literacy scholars. Additionally, I argue that his evolving comfortability to engage in these

discussions was in part catalyzed by his new school’s introduction of texts about and written by

authors of color, assignments that encourage critical literacy engagement and situate students’

knowledge as crucial sites for engagement and exploration, and, hopefully, through the

development of a safe, inquiry-focused tutoring environment. Odin’s stories and experiences

reveal that he has been engaged as a political agent, as an activist, and as a student who engages

in everyday resistance, whether or not it is readily recognized by school personnel.

Conceptualizing him as a researcher-activist or as a meaning maker enables us to witness what is

already occurring, as well as to allow the school environment to be enriched by his troves of

knowledge. In this way, our language can be mobilized as the lenses with which we’re able to

more appropriately and attentively witness our students’ brilliance, and to encourage its place in

our classrooms.
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Discussion

Students’ Real-Worldness

Defining students as “researcher-activists” centers their knowledge and inquiry in the

classroom space, but it also acknowledges them as wholly situated within academic and political

contexts. It centers their real-worldness–that is, it recognizes how our youth exist and function as

meaning makers and political actors outside the classroom.

Across literacy research, and within my own essay, the most common way of naming

these brilliant and constantly evolving individuals that spend time with us in the classroom, or in

other formal learning spaces, is “students.” “Student,” “a person who is studying at a school or

college,” is a noun, commonly used to describe youth, that positions their existence in the

school/classroom as central to their selfhood and identity. It also positions school as central

to–and really the mediator of–their learning.

By so frequently mobilizing this word, we reiterate something about what is expected of

our youth in the classroom (to fulfill the dominant/normative/White-defined expectations of the

role of “student”), and something about youth’s position in relation to us (as it emphasizes the

student/teacher dichotomy and classroom hierarchy). Even when our learners aren’t in the

classroom, we, often, still think of them as our “students;” we still define them in relation to their

place within the school walls. This practice is common throughout research and ethnographies,

even when they focus on out of school contexts (Kinloch, 2017; Bucholtz et al., 2017; Simon &

Campano, 2013; Ghiso, 2011).

The word “student,” as my frequent usage might suggest, can be a helpful one to utilize,

especially as it is perhaps the most formal, codified way of talking about our learners. However,

as language sustains and constructs our realities, using this term alone will certainly influence
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our conceptualizations of our kids. It might limit us from witnessing and recognizing a fuller

scope of our students–to invite their out-of-class literacy practices, to acknowledge their

experiential knowledge, to honor and emphasize their “funds of knowledge,” and to see how

their learning takes place in familial and communal settings, not just in formal classroom spaces

(Moll et al., 1992; González et al., 2006). Words also can lock our students into certain ways of

being and existing in the classroom.

The word “student,” just like most terms we mobilize in discussing groups or individuals,

is laden with expectation. To illustrate the performative expectations of studenthood, for

instance, it’s helpful to think about “student” as “role” (Ogburn & Nimkoff, 1940). A “role,”

defined by Sociology, but perhaps most recognizable from theatrical discourse, is the “behaviour

expected of an individual in a certain group or situation,” or “who occupies a given social

position or status” (Lundberg, 1939; Britannica, 2020). This term, a useful tool for

conceptualization, allows us to distinguish between the “person” and the “part” being played in a

social situation. When our learners come into the classroom, they intuitively understand what it

means to be a “student;” they understand the sets of social norms and behaviors that are expected

of them in this role: deferring to teachers, remaining seated at their desks, remaining quiet during

lessons, raising their hand, or trying to find the “correct” answer to a teacher’s questions (Siegel

et al., 2008; Butler, 1991). Siegel et al. (2008), for instance, document how kindergarten students

“clearly…knew what it took to be counted as literate” in school, as the “classroom required that

children demonstrate particular ways of talking, acting, and interacting” in order to “signal” their

“role” as good, literate students (Gee, 1996). How can we disrupt the way we confine students

within words that operate as roles: “at-risk,” “‘struggling’ literacy learners,” or “‘low’ ability”

(Siegel et al., 2008; Simon & Campano, 2013)?

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To understand our students as “researchers” is to respect the knowledge and perspective

they already possess, to elevate this expertise to the status of university-situated “researchers,”

and to center youth’s continued inquiry and innovation as integral (not just for their growth or

development, but for its real-world significance and potential for change-making). Mobilizing

the word “research”–meaning “creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of

knowledge”--centers students’ real ability to actively add to and improve upon our world’s

“stock of knowledge” (National Science Foundation, 2018), not just to complete assignments

that test their knowledge of “ready-made” and sanctioned school-defined knowledge (Freire,

1970; Collins & Bilge, 2016). Students-as-researchers positions students as creators and

knowledge generators, rather than the “empty receptacles” that the “banking culture of

education” purports them to be (Freire, 1970). This conceptualization of students forces them

into the center of classroom knowledge-creation.

To understand our students as “activists” is to recognize them as political agents, and to

identify their actions as inherently “political.” Students, as I’ve previously considered, often exist

in school spaces where their actions are heavily monitored and highly regulated. These

environments often also involve disproportionate punishment, suspensions, and expulsions for

disabled students and students of color, further dissuading students from resisting unfair, abusive,

discriminatory, and racist treatment and school structures. However, this does not stop students

from meaningfully engaging as political agents and activists. Cruz (2011) considers how students

engage in “everyday resistance” in “tight” and “impossible spaces” She suggests the need for

educators and researchers to “[learn] to read the subtle signs of [youth’s] identities;” in the case

of LGBTQ youth, she mentions “reading” “the small rainbow bracelets, the body language

between students, a movement of the hands, the coded languages – wherein the body became a
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sign” as moments of daily resistance. These forms of “talking back” are invaluable “everyday

forms of resistance;” they show how students engaged as activists even when “in tight spaces.”

Conceptualizing our youth as activists helps us notice and attend to these methods of resistance,

and also to cultivate environments where youth can resist with less restriction and suffocation.

Christensen (2009) writes of teaching literacy: “I want students to examine why things are unfair,

to analyze the systemic roots of that injustice, and to use their writing to talk back.” Literacy

teaching, in particular, is a crucial site in which students can engage as political agents to use

their voice, creativity, and literacy practices to “talk back” against systems of oppression. She

underscores the need to encourage this resistance by allowing students' lives to exist at “the

center of the curriculum,” to allow them to make their outside lives and realities visible and to

mine these stories, memories, and community artifacts as sites of unparalleled knowledge.

Students are already engaged in the work of research, activism, and meaning makers constantly;

we have to create classroom spaces that position this knowledge and activism “as worthy of

study.”

Therefore, this word, “activist” is attentive to the ways that youth in other spaces outside

of school engage politically in opposition to structures, societies, and individuals who attempt to

suppress their rights, deny their realities, or harm their communities. Even if schools are

sincerely “tight spaces,” physically and symbolically, identifying students as “activists” readies

us to observe and attend to how youth continue to act in both overt and covert methods of

resistance. “Researcher-activist” is a combination of these terms, and is newly utilized by

seminal literacy scholars, particularly Bucholtz et al. (2017). It centers our students’

“real-worldness” in and out of the classroom, by invoking the political and academic contexts

our students are already actively engaged in.

“JUST A WORD” 20

Students as Meaning Makers

Understanding our students as “meaning makers” serves multiple functions. By

acknowledging that our students are capable of creating their own meaning, we are liable to

decenter our role as the disseminator of knowledge or the decider of importance. Postman and

Weingarnter (1969) elucidate that “in short the [child as] meaning maker metaphor puts the

students at the center of the learning process. It makes both possible and acceptable a plurality of

meanings, for the environment does not exist only to impose standardized meanings but rather to

help students improve their unique meaning making capabilities.” When we incorporate this

“meaning maker metaphor” into our ideology and stance as educators, we challenge hegemonic

classroom structures and processes, by promoting horizontal, rather than vertical, knowledge

generation, and challenging banking education’s false narrative of single answers (Simon, 2015;

Campano, Honeyford, Sanchez, & Vander Zanden, 2010; Freire, 1970). Understanding students

as meaning makers disrupts education’s expectation and reproduction of a one-way transmission

of information, of a “banking culture” that imagines students as empty receptacles waiting to be

filled with information from their teachers. The “banking culture” positions teachers as the

holders of knowledge in the classroom, suggesting that it is teachers who are endowed with the

power to assign “correctness” and determine the validity of student input and knowledge. If

students are understood as being uniquely positioned to make meaning and interpret the

word/world, the idea that there are a limited number of correct answers and interpretations is

problematized (Freire, 1987). Recognizing that students are absolutely and uniquely capable of

finding and asserting their own meanings necessitates the intentional reduction of teachers’
“JUST A WORD” 21

authority in classroom spaces. Therefore, meaning maker, too, centers students’ out-of-school

practices, necessitating a broader image of students’ lives, selves, and literacy practices.

Critically, understanding our students in ways that reveal their real-world capabilities

should mobilize us to (re)create and co-create classroom environments, curriculum, text sets, and

activities that honor and further cultivate this “real-world” brilliance (Christensen, 2009). This

can be supported by: using students’ community/family artifacts, objects, and stories as “texts,”

prioritizing critical literacy development, honoring multimodality, facilitating creative writing

workshops in our communities, and exploring how our students’ literacy practices interact with

activism (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Christensen, 2009).

Trusting Students

The act of understanding students in these “real-world” ways is perhaps, in part, a

meditation in trust. Traill (1993) aptly reminds us that “Children come into our care having

already demonstrated extraordinary ability to make sense of the world around them, to construct

their own meaning and knowledge, and to create their own realities.” It is our obligation, then, as

teachers to conceptualize our students according to this reality and, armed with this

understanding, embark on the process of co-constructing classroom spaces that “nurture and trust

children as natural learners” (Traill, 1993). Trusting them involves allowing them to guide their

own learning and supporting their inquiries by building “educational environments that are

responsive to [their] diverse interest and learning preferences” (Traill, 1993). Conceptualizing

our students in this way eschews deficit orientations, and is instead attentive to the ways that

students shape our classrooms and their learning experiences. Siegel et al. (2008) describes that

while students “are shaped by the literacy curriculum,” they also help shape it. Seeing students as
“JUST A WORD” 22

“real-world” makers and agents of change reiterates this relationship, centering students’ impact

on the school environment and flow of ideas, information, and knowledge.

Terms as Teacher Orientations, Rather than Fixed, Student Descriptions

Throughout this discussion, I have referred to students as “meaning makers” and

“researcher-activists.” I have underscored the importance of “facilitating students’ access to the

language and culture of institutional power,” to the language of the academic Discourse

(Bucholtz et al., 2017; Gee, 1990). However, it is both certain and fortunate that students are not

simply willing to just accept the labels or distinctions that we give them.

Meaning makers and researcher-activists are two ways to conceptualize students that

allow for, and perhaps invite, this possibility of pushback. If we know that students are capable

of making meaning in their own ways, and these practices and processes are valuable and valid,

then we should in fact assume that learners will find their own words to make/assign meaning,

make sense of the world, and to resist other insufficient (or often deficitizing) labels,

assumptions, or ideologies. These terms are therefore not fixed or prescriptive; they are, instead,

helpful stances to adopt as educators. If we operate with the expectation that our students do and

will make their own meanings, and will negotiate their resistance and change-making in “tight

spaces,” we allow students to engage with the process of understanding and defining themselves

(Cruz, 2011).

Conclusion

Conceptualizing our students in ways that deny their brilliance and personhood, with

labels like “at-risk” or “struggling reader,” are not only upsetting or uncomfortable; they are
“JUST A WORD” 23

perilous. This type of language and ideology have real implications on the material construction

of the classroom, and therefore the material realities of our students lives in and out of the

classroom. Teacher education programs, like the Graduate School of Education at the University

of Pennsylvania, often spend a considerable amount of curricular space on adjusting teacher

ideologies and orientations towards their students. While this might be posited to be purely

theoretical, these discursive changes to teachers' stances are important pieces of changing the

material and social conditions of classrooms.

Thinking of our students as researcher-activists and meaning-makers can have real

impacts on our pedagogies, practices, and philosophies as educators. These words remind us to

center our students’ knowledge in the classroom. They position students as real-world makers, of

meaning, of art, of reality, and of change. They refute the idea that students’ primary identity is

as a listening body in the classroom. They force us to consider the ways that students exist when

they are not in front of us–how they negotiate the world, push back against injustices, and make

meaning of the words and worlds around them. Transformative conceptualizations of our

students reiterate the absolute reality that there should be no hierarchy of knowledge.

Ideally, it will also help us, as educators, cultivate environments that empower students'

continued exploration and development as researchers, activists, and makers of meaning.

Vasquez’s (2004) work exemplifies the possibility of transformative classroom change when

teachers conceptualize students in ways that are true to their actual capabilities and selves. Her

students were understood to be capable of real-world change, and they lived up to the

expectations–challenging the norms of their school, providing aid to community members, and

advocating for their inclusion in school groups that denied them entry because of their age. The

language that we use to talk about our students, and the ways we conceptualize them, have
“JUST A WORD” 24

tangible effects on the material and social conditions of our students’ lives, on their conceptions

of themselves, and on their futures.

The labels–researcher, activist, and meaning makers–are not lifeless words, or arbitrary

changes. They have the potential to reproduce ideologies that endow students with power, rather

than with deficit, and to serve as a mental heuristic to help us remember the exceptional

brilliance and knowledge that is embodied in every corner of our classroom or learning spaces. It

exists there, undoubtedly, with or without our acknowledgement, and I believe that it is our

responsibility as educators to find ways to invite this knowledge and capability in, to support its

growth. To attempt–however impossible it may seem–to provide our students with a classroom

space and classroom support that lives up to their insurmountable “personal knowing,” their

gifts, their unique dispositions, their joy, their thoughtfulness, their curiosity, and their selves.

Words, I argue once more, are not “just words.” They, however covertly or invisibly, are

structuring our world, working to confine or liberate our students, identifying and supporting

student agency, or attempting to strip it. Our words and our conceptualizations matter, and

impact the matter of our world, shaping the material and social conditions of our students’ lives

and futures. If they are the building blocks of reality, then we, as the wielders, analyzers, and

manipulators of language–and of the Literacy Discourse–have a role in deciding what it is that

we build with our words. Do we construct structures that bridge, connect? Do we follow our

students’ blueprints or our own? Do we lay bricks that enclose our students’ imaginations,

selves, and opportunities? Build along lines that reproduce and legitimize the same, old

structures?

We, certainly, for starters, have the responsibility to examine our blueprints, render them

visible, and remain perpetually critical of what it is we’re building–what it is we’re maintaining.
“JUST A WORD” 25

We, as educators of young people, also have the responsibility to allow our students to

understand the architectural tools and language we wield. Conceptualizing them as

researcher-activists and meaning makers nods to their already exemplified ability to mobilize the

language of Dominant Discourses to reclaim their “Knowledge of Self,” “[revive their souls],”

push back against dominant/deficitizing narratives, advocate for themselves and their

communities, and create new realities and structures (Gee, 2015; Alim & Haupt, 2017). When

we engage in laying out blueprints, pouring over what we’ll need to rethink, annex, demolish,

and rebuild, our students should be at the table with us, as we collectively imagine, reimagine,

structure, and restructure our words, and our worlds.

“JUST A WORD” 26

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