Students’ Critical Meta-Awareness in a Figured World of Achievement: Toward a Culturally Sustaining Stance in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research

Abstract

Students’ academic experiences are often shaped by normalized conceptions of literacy that do not honor the interrelatedness of multiple identities, languages, and literacies. This qualitative case study in an urban middle school highlights students’ critical meta-awareness of their identities-in-practice in the figured world of their classroom via a narrative analysis of students’ writing, interviews, and focus group discussions. The author focuses on students’ internalization and/or resistance of the curriculum as a basis for developing culturally sustaining stances toward curriculum, pedagogy, and research that actively disrupt cultural, ethnic, racial, and epistemological hierarchies of power in academic contexts and beyond.