This dissertation strives to bring two areas together that often are separate, the world of applied linguistics and the world of culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP). Through the cross-pollination of CSP (Paris & Alim, 2017), youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2010), and systemtic functional linguistics/critical systemic functional linguistics praxis (SFL) (Harman, 2018; Halliday, 1978)), this dissertation bring these world views together to create a figurative and a literal third space (Gutiérrez, 2008). This third space aims to serve several different purposes:
1. Nourish, sustain, and value the languaging, literacies and multimodal knowledges of racialized children for itself not as a bridge to whiteness
2. Provide a framework from which iterative and culturally sustaining languaging and literacies curriculum can be developed
3. Promote intergenerational participatory action research
4. Apprentice racialized youth and their adult allies into the use of explicit languaging and literacies tools that they can use to advocate for equity.
Throughout this dissertation, I bring together the work of civil rights activists, scholars and activist-scholars whose work has laid a foundation for mine. Conceptually, my work lays out that by infusing CSP into SFL, it contributes an explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial lens. It also shows how SFL’s tools of genre and register among many more (i.e., expanded mode continuum, embodied teaching learning cycle) can be used to purposively design a curriculum to apprentice youth and teachers into learning to critically examine dominant and community generated texts and various modalities. Lastly, this dissertation shows that when youth and pre-and in-service teachers jointly create and inhabit a third space that was purposively constructed as a space for them to learn from and with each other, they are able to begin the process of constructing a more equitable society.
1. Nourish, sustain, and value the languaging, literacies and multimodal knowledges of racialized children for itself not as a bridge to whiteness
2. Provide a framework from which iterative and culturally sustaining languaging and literacies curriculum can be developed
3. Promote intergenerational participatory action research
4. Apprentice racialized youth and their adult allies into the use of explicit languaging and literacies tools that they can use to advocate for equity.
Throughout this dissertation, I bring together the work of civil rights activists, scholars and activist-scholars whose work has laid a foundation for mine. Conceptually, my work lays out that by infusing CSP into SFL, it contributes an explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial lens. It also shows how SFL’s tools of genre and register among many more (i.e., expanded mode continuum, embodied teaching learning cycle) can be used to purposively design a curriculum to apprentice youth and teachers into learning to critically examine dominant and community generated texts and various modalities. Lastly, this dissertation shows that when youth and pre-and in-service teachers jointly create and inhabit a third space that was purposively constructed as a space for them to learn from and with each other, they are able to begin the process of constructing a more equitable society.