‘We’ve been doing it your way long enough’: Syncretism as a critical process

Abstract

This article takes a new look at issues of marginalization and equity in literacy practice by focusing on the concept of syncretism and teachers' creation of opportunities for young children to draw on knowledge from multiple worlds as, together, they construct new texts, contexts and practices. Recognizing that the strengths and needs of too many students from minoritized communities are not being met, this piece draws attention to the importance of teachers' appreciation of syncretism as a powerful learning process for challenging discriminatory and exclusionary practices. Drawing on theories of syncretism, and critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, the authors introduce critical syncretism as a process in which teachers and children privilege traditions and practices typically marginalized in schools for the purpose of supporting achievement and broadening worldviews. The article provides examples from two primary-grade classrooms illustrating ways that the teachers made specific moves to change classroom power structures. Whereas White, middle-class, Standard English ways of knowing had been privileged by the school district's choice of instructional materials and recommendations for teaching practice, the teachers' new practices opened up possibilities for syncretism by embracing knowledge, languages, traditions and practices from students' homes, communities and African heritage, as well as from school.

Reifying and Resisting Racism from Early Childhood to Young Adulthood

“…Studies of young children's construction of race have been conducted primarily in school settings (Aboud 1988(Aboud , 2003Ausdale and Feagin 2001;Rogers and Mosley 2006). While there are many studies that focus on children's learning outside of school (Corsaro 2004;Long 2004;Martens 1996;Valdés 1996;Volk 2004), few center on young children's construction of understandings about race. Thus, we assert that a critical race paradigm, which uses race as the framing theoretical lens, is essential in order for children, teachers, and teacher educators to learn to combat the ''dysconscious racism'' (King 1991, p. 134) or limited and distorted understandings of race, that are so prevalent in early childhood spaces.…”

“…In relying in part on the cultural ways that whiteness can be understood within a larger system of oppression, I felt that critical ethnography could inform my study of race and young children, promoting awareness and self-critique of other white researchers, teacher educators, and parents. I continuously drew inspiration in terms of the advantages of my role from other parent-child(ren) ethnographers (Bissex 1980;Haddix 2014;Long 2004;Martens 1996;Shannon and Shannon 2014) whose positions as insiders in the worlds of their children led to studies that profoundly strengthened the knowledge base in their respective fields of study. Applying parent-researcher perspectives (Kabuto and Martens 2014) specifically within a critical race and critical whiteness paradigm, an unmined confluence of fields, I asked, What can I learn about the dominant discourses that shape three young while children's construction of race, particularly what it means to be white?…”

“…Presenting counter-narratives (Delgado 2000), through reading and inviting scholars of color into the classroom (virtually and in person) can be very helpful in countering assumptive and evaluative discourse, as can engaging in professional and theoretical readings about the syncretic (Long et al 2013) and cultural nature of children's linguistic and behavioral development (e.g. Boutte 2007;Boykin 1994a, b;Foster 1997;Rogoff 2003).…”

“No-one would sleep if we didn’t have books!”: Understanding shared reading as family practice and family display

“…As raised in the introduction, the advantages of shared reading are well documented, with research showing that children who engage in reading activity before they start school being more likely to learn language faster than those who do not, while they are also more likely to become successful readers at school (Bus et al, 1995; Mol et al, 2008). However, as discussed in the introduction, as literacy activity is often dominated by the school discourse (Kajee, 2011), literacy activity taking place in the home can become regarded as insignificant, or inferior to those practices defined by school curricular (Levy, 2008; Long et al, 2013).…”

“Contradictions, clashes, cominglings”: The Syncretic Literacy Projects of Young Bilinguals

“…In consideration of these arguments, critical syncretism is used here to embody young children's fluid, emergent, generative, complex, and contradictory construction of new literacy practices and texts and investigate these practices and texts situated within the relevant social and political histories of the children and their families. While issues of power and privilege have often been inherent in analyses of syncretism, a critical perspective accounts explicitly for the realities of oppression and subordination that are played out in cross‐cultural or border crossing encounters (Lewis, Enciso, and Moje ; Long, Volk, Tisdale, and Baines ).…”