Being and Becoming American: Triangulating Habitus, Field, and Literacy Instruction in a Multilingual Classroom

This case study research documents how one teacher’s personal language and literacy practices and the sociopolitical structures of her profession intersect in her literacy instruction for her multilingual third grade students. Centering my analysis on Graff’s (1987) notion of the “literacy myth,” I discuss how the dialectic between Bourdieu’s habitus and field unfolds in the performative space of the classroom, challenging this discourse in small but significant ways. Complimenting research exploring students’ out-of-school language and literacy practices, this paper addresses how a teacher’s literate life history is performed in the classroom and who stands to benefit from these discursive performances.


Introduction
Perhaps the most critical challenge facing educators is how to serve an increasingly multilingual and multiliterate student population amidst popular discourses and policies privileging monolingualism and narrow conceptualizations of literacy, including the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in the US (2001), and Australia's government policy document, Australia's Language (DEET, 1991). While a wealth of recent research has explored how students' and families' literate resources impact learning and student investment in schooling (e.g., Cruickshank, 2004;Dyson, 2003;Gregory & Williams, 2000;Moje, Ciechanowski, Ellis, Carrillo, & Collazo, 2004;Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003;Purcell-Gates, 1995), few studies have examined the language and literacy resources and assumptions that teachers bring to bear in multilingual classrooms. In this paper I present case study data of a "mainstream" 1 teacher (Joyce) and her efforts to meet the language and literacy needs of her multilingual third grade students. Taking a performative view of Bourdieu's social practice theory, and using instructional examples as a point of triangulation, I examine intersections between Joyce's personal language and literacy history and the sociopolitical context in which she works. The findings raise critical questions regarding instruction for multilingual students and directions for future literacy research.
Practices such as integrating students' native languages and home-community literacy practices into instruction may slow native language loss and support students' L2 development and academic achievement (e.g., Gersten, 1996;Gersten & Jimenez, 1994;Guerra, 1998;Heath, 1983;Robert T. Jiménez & Gámez, 1996;Lucas & Katz, 1994;Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003;Truscott & Watts-Taffe, 2003; Van den Branden, 2000). However, as McKay & Wong (1996) found in their research on Chinese immigrant students, factors affecting students' investment in learning a second language Volume 8 Number 3 Fall 2006 Page 3 extend beyond the curriculum and include powerful discourses of language and literacy that guide individuals' choices of language and literate practice, and similar forces are at play in teachers' pedagogical decision-making (New London Group, 1996). Accordingly, pedagogical change requires a consideration of how power is forged and negotiated through language use in multilingual settings (Luke, 2003;Pennycook, 2001).

Cultural and Linguistic Capital in Multilingual Educational Contexts
A useful theoretical frame for exploring issues of power and inequitable educational outcomes in language and literacy education is Bourdieu's (1991Bourdieu's ( , 1998 social practice theory, including the interrelated notions of habitus, field, and capital. Habitus, which consists of "dispositions which are impalpably inculcated, through a long and slow process of acquisition" (1991, p. 51) throughout one's life, disposes individuals to speak and act in certain ways that are linked to and reflect the social structure. In addition to being inculcated and generative, these dispositions are structured, reflecting the social conditions in which they were learned, and durable, in that they are "ingrained in the body" (1991, p. 13) so deeply that they endure throughout one's life history, operating at a pre-conscious level. Finally, they are transposable, capable of generating a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields other than those in which they were originally acquired. As such, habitus is socially and historically grounded, guiding individuals' daily behaviour while reinforcing the history and social structure in which it arose. Accordingly, individuals speak and act in complicity with the social structure. These (inter)actions take place within a given field, or network of positions defined by a particular distribution of capital (as in educational institutions or the political system) endowing that field with its own specific practical logic (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). Peoples' words and actions, according to the field in which these interactions occur, allow them to acquire more capital (social, economic, cultural) and recognitionsymbolic power. Although his theories have been criticized as overly deterministic (Pennycook, 2001;Schirato & Webb, 2003), Bourdieu argued that "habitus is creative, inventive, but within the limits of its structures, which are the embodied sedimentation of the social structures which produced it" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). While a handful of studies in the language and literacy field have approached their work from a Bourdieuian perspective, the majority of them have examined habitus, field and capital as separate entities, rather than as integrated concepts (Marsh's (2006) analysis of preservice teachers' perceptions of popular culture in the literacy classroom is a notable exception). Other recent studies analyzing language and literacy education include Fairbanks and Ariail (2006) and Jiménez, Smith and Martínez-León (2003). Jiménez et al. explored how the collective habitus of students and teachers in two Mexican schools reflects and reinforces societal structures marked by the inequitable distribution of capital, while Fairbanks and Ariail (2006) used Bourdieu's theories to frame how three adolescent girls utilized familial, social, and literacy resources to negotiate and acquire different identities and symbolic capital in school. The girls in Fairbanks and Ariail's study both positioned themselves and were positioned in ways that afforded them more or less symbolic power in school. They describe the girls' language and actions as "a set of improvisations through which individuals navigate their paths: It is not a 'free-for-all' environment, and students' trajectories are constrained by the ways in which institutional agents 'read' individuals' interactions" (p. 349).
Fairbanks and Ariail's argument regarding the gatekeeping power of institutional agents is also addressed by Carrington and Luke (1997), who claim that "there can be no product guarantees for the social consequences of school literacy" (p. 104). Rather, institutions or their representatives within a given field must recognize (or misrecognize) (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) capital as worthy of exchange for symbolic capital for that alchemy to occur. Rogers (2003) documented this phenomenon in her study of an African American family's (the Treaders) literacy practices and what she termed the "paradox of literacy": Despite the Treaders' literate proficiencies and their belief in the value of schooling, they have been unable to convert their "literate capital into social profit" (p. 144). As Rogers explains, "…what keeps the Treaders in their place is their quite complete acquisition of the ideology behind 'schooled literacy,'" (p. 145), which values and sanctions school literacies. The Treaders saw themselves "through the eyes of the institution" (p. 145), a complicity that worked to hinder their socioeconomic advancement.
While there is a consensus in the research that teachers and schools must tap into linguistically diverse students' linguistic and cultural resources, this consensus is drawn primarily from research focused on students' home and community language and literacy practices. Missing are examples of how teachers' home language and literacy practices are brought to bear on instruction, how teachers may see themselves "through the eyes of the institution," and how they navigate these structures as they attempt pedagogical change. A few studies examine pedagogical change in multilingual contexts (e.g., Clair, 1995;Enright, 1986). Others have investigated teachers' home communication patterns (Heath, 1982(Heath, , 1983 and the reading habits of preservice teachers (Applegate & Applegate, 2004). In addition, there is a large corpus of research on how teachers' beliefs and "personal practical knowledge," shape their practice and professional identity (e.g., Carter, 1990;Clandinin, 1985). However, these studies reveal little about how the personal, sociopolitical, and professional contexts of teachers' lives are mutually constitutive, how teachers' "literate life histories" (Evans, 1993) inform instruction, and who benefits from these performances. In this paper, I explore how Joyce's literacy instruction reflected her literate life history and larger structures (i.e., district curriculum, NCLB). That is, how did her habitus and the field in which she worked interact to inform her literacy instruction for her multilingual students? Social Practice, Discourse, and Performativity While I draw primarily on Bourdieu's social practice theory described earlier to address the above research questions, I integrate these understandings with discourse theory (Gee, 1996) and Butler's (1990) notion of performativity. Gee defines discourses as: "...ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of particular roles (or 'types of people')…that are always and everywhere social and products of social histories" (p. viii). But discourses do not exist outside of practice. Drawing from Butler's (1990) ideas on performativity and gender, I view discourses and identities not as static a priori determinations. Rather, they exist and take on power only as they are performed. Such a perspective aligns with Pennycook's (2001) call for a "poststructuralist notion of performativity whereby power in language is not always dependent on prior sociological notions of power but can have power in its utterance and performance" (p. 126). In other Volume 8 Number 3 Fall 2006 Page 5 words, performativity helps me to dismantle the naturalized status of identity and habitus, situating discourse as a site of struggle, resistance, and appropriation (Fairclough, 1992). These ideas are not far adrift from Bourdieu's theory of social practice. The system of regulation Bourdieu described with respect to habitus and field is dynamic, or performative; that is, practices are not products of habitus or field, but rather, habitus and field are performed (and possibly deformed) in practice. I apply the notion of performativity to Bourdieu's theories by conceptualizing Joyce's classroom as a glocalized performative space in which habitus (local) and field (global) triangulate to produce and reproduce discourses and structures of power.

Participant and Setting
Joyce, the daughter of upper-middle class Filipino immigrants, was a 32 year-old novice teacher at the time of the study. Although she no longer spoke Tagalog, she spoke fluent Spanish, which she occasionally used with her students. Prairieland School served just under 300 students in a small ethnically and linguistically diverse Midwestern city. Joyce's 19 students included 12 African Americans (most of whom speak both Standard English and African American Vernacular English-AAVE), five Latinos of Mexican origin, one French/English bilingual from the Republic of the Congo, and one White monolingual English-speaker. Her five Latino students were at various stages of English language development, and received pull-out bilingual and ESL instruction for two hours a day, while her French-English bilingual student was exited from the ESL program the year prior to this study. However, most of their day, including their literacy instruction, was spent in Joyce's classroom. Although the study initially focused on her instruction for her Latino students, as presented in the findings later in this paper, Joyce also considered how her African American students' knowledge of AAVE might inform her instruction.
As mandated by the local school district, the teachers at Prairieland implemented a balanced literacy curriculum, including teacher-guided reading groups, explicit phonics instruction, and independent reading. In spring, however, Joyce and a number of other teachers joined a study group focusing on literature circles (Daniels, 1994) and on connecting the literacy curriculum with families, and in April, Joyce replaced her guided reading groups with literature circles. She continued to meet in small groups with students, but discussions were student-led, based on four student roles (i.e., Discussion Director, Literary Luminary, Illustrator, Connector).
Although Joyce spoke Spanish, she faced significant challenges as a mainstream teacher of multilingual students pertaining to learning inclusive instructional strategies, scheduling instructional activities, using equitable assessment strategies, and finding appropriate instructional materials. Joyce's experiences in this regard are common for mainstream teachers of linguistically diverse students, who often lack information to help them navigate these challenges (e.g., G. E. García, Montes, Janisch, & Consalvi, 1993). Joyce was selected for this study based on her interest in responding to her linguistically diverse students' instructional needs. Identified by her colleagues as enthusiastic, dedicated, and open to reflection and critique, she actively sought ways to mitigate these challenges. For instance, based on suggestions from colleagues, Joyce attempted sheltering strategies (e.g., restating students' responses and modeling and using gestures and other visual cues to mediate student learning). In addition, as the school year progressed, she modified her use of Spanish during literacy instruction, a change attributable in part to our work in this project.

Data Collection
I conducted six audio-taped in-depth minimally structured interviews (Mertens, 1998) with Joyce to glean information about her background, language and literacy practices, views of school policies, and perspective on teaching multilingual students. An additional seventh interview was conducted as we watched a videotape of Joyce's instruction. All interviews, including the video discussion, were relaxed in atmosphere and conversational in tone, typically lasting between 1.5 and 2.5 hours. I engaged Joyce in frequent conversations and e-mail exchanges about classroom events or questions that arose during transcription and analysis.
I conducted 60 classroom observations. Between August and November, my presence was only minimally participatory and consisted primarily of observing from the sidelines and taking field notes to document and observe discursive articulations of language and literacy during instruction. During the second half of the school year, however, my observations became more participatory. In addition to taking occasional field notes (and filling in further details after completing observations) I provided information and feedback to Joyce about lesson planning and working with multilingual students, monitored students while she worked with smaller groups, and occasionally led guided reading groups. As Joyce sought advice regarding literacy instruction, I suggested strategies documented in the research to be beneficial for linguistically diverse students. Data also included observations of four after-school Spanish language book clubs for Latino parents and families and a collection of relevant documents (i.e., the district curriculum, newspaper articles, lesson plans).
Complicating the researcher-participant relationship. My involvement in Joyce's classroom during data collection requires a brief discussion of the complexities of Joyce's and my relationship as participant and researcher. Although my status as a bilingual (Spanish-English), white university researcher and former bilingual teacher afforded me a certain degree of authority in Joyce's eyes, our performance of researcher and participant roles did not reflect traditional and static understandings of these categories. Despite Joyce's perception of me as instructional expert, I tended to defer to Joyce during my classroom participation, and Joyce often "directed me" to work with students or small groups in certain ways. Similarly, during our interviews Joyce turned questions on me regarding my own literate life history, taking on an interviewer role. While such "breaks" in the traditional interview neither erase nor fully mitigate power differences in the researcher/participant relationship, they do make the performative nature of these roles more visible. While an in-depth discussion of researcher and participant subjectivity and researcher reflexivity is warranted, such an analysis is beyond the focus of this paper. I have, however, presented on these issues elsewhere with regard to my work with Joyce (Handsfield, 2005

Data Analysis
Analysis was multimodal, including narrative inquiry and modified constant comparative analysis (CCA). Gudmundsdóttir (2001) described two levels of narrative: "the mediated actions that have been carefully selected out of a complex situation and have been fixed for inclusion in a narrative" (p. 230), and the story created from these actions. I used interviews and observations, including information about Joyce's background, personal literacy practices, and instruction (Gudmundsdóttir's first level of narrative) to construct Joyce's life history account, or "bio," and vignettes of her personal and professional literacy practices. Joyce provided written and verbal feedback, and when possible, I used Joyce's own words. Together these narratives comprise her "literate life history" 2 (Gudmundsdóttir's second level of narrative) and provide a window into Joyce's linguistic and literate habitus. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) describe these types of narratives as interim texts, bridging "raw" data and "finished" research texts. These narratives appear in italics. After constructing the narratives, I reanalyzed them along with the "raw" data (transcribed interviews, observation notes, relevant documents) using CCA (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) in order to examine patterns in Joyce's personal language and literacy practices, her professional context, and her instruction. Although in this paper I do not organize my discussion of this data on specific codes, a description of this analytical approach and its significance for this paper is warranted. As with traditional CCA, I sought out salient issues and events, which then became initial codes that guided further data collection and analyses (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). However, poststructuralists have criticized traditional qualitative analyses such as CCA for reducing complex meanings and events into simplified aggregates, or isolated and static codes (see Scheurich, 1997;St. Pierre, 1997b;St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). In light of these critiques, rather than seeing "convergence", data falling into more than one code, as a mark of a faulty classification system (Patton, 1990), I viewed it as a tension, or third space where dynamic and hybrid meanings are privileged. For example, when chunks of data that I coded as "model minority discourse" also reflected "salvation through literacy," rather than give one subset of data a code that erased the other, I allowed both, creating an axial code (such as the "gospel of literacy") that, in part, reflected the convergence. The axial codes serve as broader frames of reference through which I examined the more focused categorization of the data. I recognize these codes as dynamic, temporary, and interconnected. I attempt to illustrate the non-linear nature of our coding in Figure 1. The combined use of narrative analysis and modified CCA allowed me to systematically analyze the data while preserving the complexities and contexts of practice. While I do not organize my presentation of the data in this paper according to specific codes, my discussion of the data is centered around the axial codes of Literacy as Gospel, Discourses of Progress, and Being/becoming American. These axial codes come together in what Graff (1987) refers to as the "literacy myth," which I describe in the next section as I introduce my findings.

Findings: Complicity and the Literacy Myth
"Every night, one of the most special times we all look forward to is laying [sic] in bed and reading. Last night Eleanor said, 'I have this very special book.' I didn't know what it was at first, but it turns out it was Where the Wild Things Are. I thought, 'Wow, she just nailed it, right on the nose. She knows the value of that.' They love to read." Just as she said of her stepdaughter in the above vignette, Joyce "knows the value" of literacy. One of the most salient findings of this study was the degree to which Joyce, and the institutions in which she worked, subscribed to the "literacy myth" (Graff, 1987)the conventional wisdom (at least in many Western cultures) that literacy breeds socioeconomic development and individual intellectual development. As Graff explains, literate people are considered "…more empathetic, innovative, achievement-oriented, cosmopolitan, media-and politically aware, identified with a nation, aspiring to schooling, urban in residence, and accepting of technology" (1987, p. 382). These assumptions are typically expressed in terms of progress, and the transition from traditional premodern societies into the modern West. In both the 19 th century US westward migration and global colonial enterprises (Pennycook, 1998), English reigned supreme. Despite the fact that connections between literacy and progress are not well documented (Brandt, 2001, p. 11), literacy (and in particular English literacy) is considered not only functional, but "…an unambiguously positive thing" (Graff, 1987, p.  382), legitimized as a form of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991(Bourdieu, , 1998) that can be converted into other forms of capital-linguistic, economic, and symbolic. I focus here on how the literacy myth was performed in mutually constitutive ways in Joyce's literate life history and in the sociopolitical context of her profession. I triangulate these data to the third domain of Joyce's professional practice, showing how Joyce performed the literacy myth in her instruction for her multilingual students in both reproductive and hybrid ways.

Symbolic Domination and Complicity in Individual Language and Literacy Practices
According to Bourdieu (1990), "All symbolic domination presupposes, on the part of those who submit to it, a form of complicity which is neither passive submission to external constraint nor a free adherence to values" (p. 51). Rather, this complicity is inscribed in habitus, which is constantly being performed (and reinscribed) as individuals practice and acquire (or do not acquire) capital within given fields. This analysis of domination and complicity is useful for understanding Joyce's literate life history. Joyce's parents emigrated from the Philippines to a Chicago suburb two years before Joyce was born. As a small child she spoke Tagalog and English, but lost Tagalog by age six (although she understands a great deal of spoken Tagalog). Having learned Spanish as a teenager, she is currently a fluent speaker. Somewhere between bilingual and trilingual, Joyce's language history is marked by both folk and elite, and both subtractive and additive bilingualism (August & Hakuta, 1997;Cummins, 1989;Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). The dominance of English and Spanish (colonial languages in the Philippines and the US) is mirrored by Joyce's adherence to mainstream literacies.
Childhood practices: replacing vernacular literacies. Joyce's parents are highly educated professionals, literate in Tagalog and English. When I asked her about literacy practices in her home during her childhood, she consistently replied that her parents did not engage in such activities: "…that's the thing that's always…that I question now. It makes me think about what I want to be like for my children…. They did not even read books." Joyce's parents did not read the newspaper, novels or other books for pleasure, or write letters, and the importance Joyce placed on reading with her own children was articulated in relation to what she perceived as her parents' literate deficiencies. During one of our interviews, however, she acknowledged other literacy practices her parents engaged in, including using the Internet, emailing, and browsing catalogues: Joyce: My dad would research things. He'd look at catalogues or magazines if there was something he really wanted to buy. Lara: That counts, reading something for a purpose. Joyce: It does count. My mother had to spend a lot of her time maintaining paperwork because they own real estate…. If she had spare time she enjoyed doing that, so that's what she did. But they never really passed time just reading for pleasure, so I never had an example set for me. And now I think about what I want to do for my own children because I think it's so important in the home.
Joyce's complicity with dominant norms of literate practice is evident: Although her parents were not aliterate, Joyce conferred less value on these activities than on pleasure reading. Their literacy practices did not fit the mainstream mold, and accordingly, Joyce did not view her parents as positive literate role models for her. While Joyce did not explicitly characterize her personal literacy practices as "American," the data suggest such a characterization, and her performance of mainstream literacy practices is significant when viewed in the context of her parents' history of immigration. As Joyce explained, My parents came here, acclimated to the culture, got jobs, built themselves a life. I have the utmost respect for what they've done. But as far as providing us with parental support through our education and our schooling, I think because their background is so different, they weren't sure how to enrich our educational experiences.
Joyce's perception of her parents' involvement is problematic in that her understanding of involvement is limited to particular types of literacy practices, management of homework, and parents' physical presence at school. Her older sister, however, was a support structure and school-literate role model, a relatively common phenomenon in immigrant households (Cruickshank, 2004;E. García, 1994). Joyce and Emily often joined together in mainstream literacy activities, such as "playing library" and going to the public library (which her parents never did). The library, as a symbolic and material representation of mainstream literacy, contrasts with what Joyce considered her parents' literate deficiencies and, as Joyce explained, "triggered my wanting to read more." While Joyce was proud of her parents' accomplishments, she attributed these "deficiencies" to cultural differences, comparing them to her own literacy practices, which she framed using discourses of opportunity and individual effort.
Recall that habitus is a set of dispositions which become naturalized and unquestioned in everyday practice. The data presented here suggest that Joyce's habitus included the socially sanctioned (mis)recognition not of her parents' vernacular literacies and biliteracy, but of individualist "model minority" (McKay & Wong, 1996) achievements as the kind of cultural capital to be brought to bear on childrearing and school achievement.
Joyce's adherence to mainstream literacy practices is not attributable solely to Emily, however, or to a response to her parents' immigrant status. During two different interviews, when asked to describe a significant event from her schooling, Joyce provided the following narratives: Joyce's memories may be selective in this regard, but these selections are telling. Her focus on "acquiring" properties or "genres" and the notion of reading for selfimprovement reinforce the literacy myth: Books become capital, and as students read, they increase their personal worth-a "you are what you eat" philosophy of reading. Joyce's perceptions of students' multiple languages in her own education experiences resemble this same view: "We all spoke English. You know, it's not like [Prairieland], where you hear a lot of Spanish. It wasn't like that. We did have Hispanic students. We had all kinds of culturally different ethnicities in the school, but everybody spoke English." Although my data do not speak to the language patterns of youth in Joyce's own schooling, it is likely that students did use languages other than English with each other at her school, but that Joyce was simply unaware of it. According to Joyce, students were discouraged from using languages other than English at her school.
Adult and parental language and literacy practices. Although as an adult, Joyce expressed a belief in the merits of bilingualism, lamenting her loss of Tagalog, she continued to adhere to mainstream literacies, contrasting them to her parents' presumed "aliteracy": "I didn't read the paper as a child because my parents didn't read the paper. But… over the past seven or eight years I try to read the paper almost every day." Joyce also emphasized the benefits of literacy (in this case writing) for personal improvement, as evidenced in her reflections on keeping a journal for a year as a New Year's resolution: "I did that every day for a year. It was the most enlightening year of my life, being able to write things down and reflect on what I've done, …things that have happened and how I changed. So in that way, writing has really helped me." Joyce's assumption that literacy leads to self-improvement carried over into her parenting practices: "As far as children's literature goes, I am strict about reading books-every night. As a teacher, seeing what an impact literature can have on kids….I want them to love literature. I'm doing my best to get them to love to read."3 She felt that "quality children's literature" was "part of the culture" and would instil in her stepdaughters "moral value." That is, by reading "quality" literature (which for Joyce excluded books derived from television, popular movies, or "Disney"), children gain access to and acquire the cultural values they represent. This view was also found in how Joyce talked about the bedtime story ritual, which she performed religiously with their children: There were lots of times when Greg [Joyce's husband] wouldn't read a story, and they'd just talk, which is beautiful, too; just laying in bed and having a conversation. … When I was in Guatemala, they had been doing a lot of talking in bed. Then I came back thinking, "I've got a whole library in my access. I can bring home any book that I want." And that's what I started doing. I bring home books every day.
Joyce's statement strongly resembles advice given to parents in a U.S. Department of Education pamphlet titled, "Como ayudar a su hijo a ser un buen lector (How to help your child become a good reader)," distributed at one of Prairieland's Latino parent-child book clubs: Imagínese que sienta a su bebé en el regazo y le lee un libro por primera vez. !Qué tan diferente es de tan solo hablarle! Ahora le comienza a enseñar dibujos. Usted se los señala. Y con la voz llena de emoción le explica lo que representan los dibujos. Usted acaba de ayudarle a su bebé a dar el siguiente paso después del habla (Imagine that you sit your baby on your lap and read her a book for the first time. How different it is from just talking to her! Now you show her pictures. You point them out to her. And with a voice full of emotion, you explain what the pictures are. You have just helped your baby take the first step beyond talking.) (NCLB, 2002, p. 3).
Recognition of mainstream literacies such as reading the "classics" and the bedtime story as valuable cultural capital is firmly lodged within an unquestioned understanding of what is culturally desirable, what Bourdieu calls "the obviousness of ordinary experience" (1998, p. 36). Up until now I have focused my discussion on Joyce's linguistic and literate habitus and how Joyce is complicit with dominant assumptions about language and literacy practices. Next, I provide further examples below of how the literacy myth was articulated in the field, or the sociopolitical context in which Joyce works.

Language and Literacy Assumptions in the Field: Legitimizing the Literacy Myth at School
Central to the literacy myth in the US context is access to the "American dream," particularly in the context of education for immigrant children and families. This is evident in the data with respect to the privileging of both mainstream literacy practices and English.
Mainstream literacies. Figure 2 shows the cover of the booklet cited above. In both its visual and textual signs it is emblematic of how the literacy myth is articulated on a national scale. Surrounded by red, white and blue stars, and text written in red and blue on a white background, a woman (likely Spanish-speaking and possibly an immigrant given the context of the document) reads to her young child while her older daughter spells "cat" with alphabet magnets. The NCLB logo in the bottom right corner depicts a child's head silhouetted against an American flag in the shape of a book. In addition to privileging English, mainstream school-sanctioned literacy activities (shared storybook reading, alphabet magnets, book discussions, and encouraging young children to compose their own stories) are emphasized throughout the document. Omitted is translating, or cultural brokering (Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003), doing paperwork, reciting religious texts (Cruickshank, 2004;Gregory & Williams, 2000), or other everyday literacies.  The cultural expectations are clear: By engaging in these mainstream literacy activities, you are not only helping your child to progress academically, but you are being a good American. These expectations were evident at the Latino parent-child book clubs I observed. The following vignette is from a book club meeting in which the above booklet was distributed: A social worker at Prairieland reads Gracias, Sr. Falker, by Patricia Polacco (1998), to the thirteen families in the multipurpose room.

Hanging above the doorway is a large banner reading "Today a reader, tomorrow a leader," and Polacco's book, which tells the author's own story of struggling to read as a child until a teacher, Mr. Falker, takes her under his wing, echoes this statement. After reading, the bilingual teacher, Melinda, announces that today Patricia Polacco "es una escritora muy bien conocida (is a well known writer)." She then directs parents' attention to the literature that she handed out at the beginning of the meeting, including the booklet "Cómo ayudar a su hijo a ser un buen lector (How to help your child become a good reader)." Melinda highlights some of the main points in the booklet, and explains that there are many things they can do at home to help their children read.
The banner overhead, the book, the NCLB pamphlet, indeed the entire context of the book club, send a powerful message about what qualifies as appropriate literate and cultural behaviour and how that relates to school and the American dream. In addition to being a preferred leisurely pursuit, mainstream literacies carry the burden of selfimprovement, an assertion that also appears in the district's literacy guide (Fountas & Page 14 Pinnell, 2001), which states that students "need and deserve a rich, joyful experience with quality literature" (p. 251) and that the teacher's goal is "to expand their reading power to more and more difficult texts" (p. 18). Reading for both pleasure and progress are conferred substantial capital in Joyce's school and in the larger context of US schooling.
These views of literacy were reinforced by the district's bilingual program director's (Dr. Sánchez) personal testimony as told at a school district forum designed to educate Latino/a parents about the bilingual and ESL programs at Prairieland: Dr. Sánchez told parents how she came with her family, "piscando en Illinois y en Michigan-el betabél (picking in Illinois and Michiganbeets)." She said she always knew how important reading is, adding, "Me encantaban los libros y leer (I loved books and reading)." She said as a girl, her parents told her she would go to college and get a Ph.D., which she did.
Dr. Sánchez's testimony is powerful and familiar, reflecting a personal (and grand) narrative of salvation via the American dream. Although she was not in attendance, her testimony echoes almost word-for-word another book club episode: A University professor is reading Tomás y la Mujer de la Biblioteca (Tomas and the Library Lady), by Pat Mora (1997), about a boy (Tomás Rivera) from a migrant family who loved books and regularly visited the librarian. After reading, she explains that the boy, Tomás, is a real person who traveled this country while his parents worked in the fields: "Pero a él le encantaban tanto los libros que siguió estudiando y estudiando. Y es Tomás Rivera quien creció a hacerse uno de los escritores más importantes de este país (But he loved books so much that he kept on studying. And Tomás Rivera grew to become one of the most important writers in this country.)" Reading is seen as more than an enjoyable experience; it is the key to success in life: "Sin esta llave, muchos niños se quedan atrás (without this key, many children are left behind)" (NCLB, 2002, p. ii).
Language domination. Also evident in the sociopolitical context of Prairieland School is the confounding of literacy with English literacy. Another NCLB pamphlet distributed at Prairieland's Latino parent-child book club, addressing "Limited English Proficient" (LEP) students and "adequate yearly progress" states that a primary purpose of NCLB is to "Hold SEAs, LEAs [Local Educational Agencies] and schools accountable for increases in English proficiency and core academic content knowledge for LEP students by demonstrating improvement in English proficiency and adequate yearly progress" (NCLB, 2001). It adds that English Language Learning (ELL) students "are eagerly trying to learn English to enjoy the opportunities our public schools and society offer." Similar statements appear on the district website. These statements position English as the legitimate language through which academic development and, by association, the American dream can be achieved. While English is a necessary form of linguistic capital, the assertion that it is the only language in which literacy should be practiced and measured negates research showing the benefits of L1 literacy for L2  (Cummins, 1981;G. E. García, 2000). This negation is prevalent at Prairieland, with its minimal ESL and bilingual programs and a curriculum that makes almost no reference to linguistically diverse students (Fountas & Pinnell, 2001). Joyce's habitus, for the most part, aligns with the structures of the field in which she works, and appears to reinforce the literacy myth-the presumed connection between mainstream, school-sanctioned literacy practices, individual effort and progress, and the dominance of English. Bourdieu refers to this alignment as "doxic experience," or the "coincidence between objective structures and embodied structures" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 73) that makes certain conditions or understandings appear natural. This finding is interesting in and of itself. However, if in the field of literacy studies and education we are concerned with equitable instruction, we must move beyond considerations of personal dispositions (micro level analyses) and larger sociopolitical structures (macro level analysis) to examine how these both come together in "glocal" contexts of practice, and how Bourdieu's notion of doxa is potentially both reproduced and challenged. In the following section, I describe how Joyce performs (and reproduces) the literacy myth in her instruction, and then I trouble a purely reproductionist view of social practice by highlighting how Joyce veers from the dominant structures of her field.

Spreading the Literacy Myth in Professional Practice
School-sanctioned literacies and progress for progress' sake. Joyce's disposition toward the school-sanctioned literacy practice of shared storybook reading is apparent in her instruction and in her attempts to get her students to read at home. One afternoon, for example, Joyce announced to her class, "I really hope you take these [library] books home and that they don't just sit in your book boxes." On another occasion, before taking her students to the library, she proclaimed, "Many of you aren't taking your books home. That tells me you're not reading at home. The reason you check out library books at school is so you can read at home." While Joyce's goal was to encourage home literacy, her statement suggests that just as her parents' other(ed) literacy practices did not count, neither did the non-school literacy practices her students may have engaged in at home.
Joyce also enforced reading for individual improvement, or even progress for progress' sake, by discouraging reading texts that were "too easy" or rereading books. This was documented consistently both in class and during class visits to the school library: When Christopher shows Joyce his book, she asks, "Haven't you read it before?" He nods yes, and she asks him why he checked it out if he's already read it. Christopher responds, "Because I like it." Joyce announces to the class, "Many of you can read chapter books, but are checking out picture books that only take you ten minutes to read." She tells them that they should be making "wise choices." I later asked Joyce why Christopher should not check out books he has already read, and she replied that she wants students to "challenge themselves." While there is nothing wrong with students selecting challenging reading material, Joyce's privileging of this practice discourages rereading, which may improve fluency (Stahl & Heubach, 2005). Page 16 Literacy as English literacy. Although Joyce used some Spanish in her instruction, she privileged English and English literacy, and even when using Spanish, English took precedence, as demonstrated in the following vignette. It is one of the ELL students' first literature discussions within the literature circles format: Joyce begins by stating that they are going to review in Spanish what happened in the chapter they read, and asks, "¿Quién es el director? (Who is the director?)" Sandra is, and Joyce asks, "¿Sabes que es el trabajo más importante, verdad? (You know that it's the most important job, right?)" She reminds Sandra that she's in charge of leading the discussion and asking the others questions about the text. Garibaldi asks, "So, she's going to get to pick one of us?" Joyce responds, "Sí. Ella es la directora (Yes, she's the director)." Sandra asks Garibaldi a question in Spanish, and he answers in English. Sandra asks Mariana a question in English, but then asks in Spanish if she understood the question. Mariana does not answer, but Garibaldi offers an idea in Spanish. Joyce then says, "Okay. Para la próxima pregunta, quiero que respondan en inglés (Okay, for the next question I want you to respond in English." Garibaldi immediately says, "Oh, I did it in Spanish!" Joyce says, "It's okay if you did it in Spanish, but I want you to practice your English, too, so let's go." Sandra asks, "What was the most exciting part of this book?" Garibaldi begins in Spanish, "Este… (Um…)" and Joyce reminds him, "In English." Garibaldi hesitates, then asks Sandra, "Qué era… what was the question?" Sandra repeats it but he answers haltingly and with few details. Dagoberto starts to respond in Spanish, but then has difficulty restarting in English.
Although Joyce reminded the students to use English on two different occasions, she did not remind them to use Spanish when students broke into English. This is significant because, as Joyce later explained in an informal interview, she explicitly asked that her students use Spanish at the start of the lesson. Despite her strategic use of Spanish, her implicit goal for the lesson appears to be as much English development as literacy. 4 This was also evident in an interview discussion regarding Garibalidi's literacy development. Joyce stated that he was "low" in literacy, but when asked about his Spanish literacy, she replied, "I don't even know how he is in Spanish. But he's a low reader and a very low writer." Joyce essentially equates literacy and English literacy.
By privileging certain literacies over others, and limiting the purpose of literacy to personal improvement or academic achievement, alternative literacies are swept aside. Despite the fact that connections between literacy and progress are not well documented (Brandt, 2001, p. 11), expectations of a mythical alchemy of mainstream literacy practices (i.e., pleasure reading, the parent-child storybook experience, journal writing), individual effort, and English as forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991(Bourdieu, , 1998 translating into other forms of capital (i.e., linguistic, economic, symbolic) persist. The standardization and maintenance of inequitable social arrangements that the literacy myth Volume 8 Number 3 Fall 2006 Page 17 produces become invisibilized, hidden behind the cloak of the American dream. This likely has real effects, or material consequences (Luke, 2004), on students as they implicitly learn what it means to be or become American and to be literate in America. In a short paragraph at the end of the year, Mariana wrote, "Reading makes me get more and more English. Writing makes me learn more. When I learn more of these things, I remember to read more so I can not forget my English." At what price do some students acquire mainstream literacies? In a political landscape marked by standardization and unproductive binary (mainstream-other, American-immigrant) social categorizations, the cost of acquiring such cultural and linguistic capital may be the loss of native languages and vernacular literacies and/or their exchange value in contexts other than school.
For the most part, the dialectic of Joyce's linguistic and literate dispositions and those that are encouraged and enforced by the structures of the field in which she works appears to unfold in the wholesale reproduction of the literacy myth, rendering mainstream language and literacy practices not only supreme, but "natural." As Bourdieu (1998) explains, "when the embodied structures and the objective structures are in agreement, when perception is constructed according to the structures of what is perceived, everything seems obvious and goes without saying" (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 81). While these findings are interesting in and of themselves, to leave the discussion of Joyce and her teaching here would constitute a misrepresentation not only of Joyce, but of Bourdieu's theory of social practice. While the literacy myth permeated Joyce's instruction, she also adapted her instruction in ways that challenged that gospel in small but significant ways.

Revising the Gospel
In March, after I initiated a discussion about the kinds of language and literacy practices that may occur in her students' homes and communities, Joyce developed the idea of distributing a home literacy survey to her students and using the data to integrate home literacy practices into literature circles. Four of her students' parents reported that family members regularly translated documents or conversations, and Joyce began to consider how she might use students' knowledge as cultural brokering in her instruction. Similarly, when Joyce found that family members in all but one of her students' homes performed or wrote music, she began encouraging literature circle groups to integrate their musical knowledge into their class presentations. In this way, Joyce began to challenge the assumption that only mainstream literacies "count" at school, and her attempts in this regard included the integration of both Spanish and AAVE into her instruction.
Strategic use of Spanish. At the beginning of the year, Joyce's use of Spanish was haphazard and primarily for affective purposes. Although she typically privileged English, as the school year progressed she began to use Spanish more strategically. In the vignette discussed in the previous section, for example, Joyce purposefully instructed her students to use Spanish to improve their English reading comprehension. On other occasions, Joyce used Spanish to clarify meaning, such as when Garibaldi asked, "What's a diagram?" Codeswitching, Joyce responded, "A diagram can be, por ejemplo, un mapa de cuento (A diagram can be, for example, a story map)." Joyce also used Spanish to access students' prior knowledge of how to make connections while reading: J: ¿Recuerdan como hacemos conexiones (Do you remember how we make connections)? Texto a texto, text to self, text to world? It makes me think of… S: …Mexico?
Joyce also began modeling other bilingual reading strategies, including using cognate knowledge to figure out unfamiliar words. During a whole-class lesson introducing the literature circle student role of "Literary Luminary," Joyce said to Garibaldi, "Habla de la palabra 'luminar' (Talk about the word, 'luminar')." Garibaldi responded, "Like una luz (Like a light)?" Joyce then explained to the class how the Literary Luminary's role is to select a passage and explain its significance or "shed light on it." By encouraging Garibaldi to talk about the word "luminar", Joyce invited him to use his linguistic knowledge to enhance his and other students' understandings of the literature circle role. I documented this type of cognate use by Joyce three times during a three-week period. These data show Joyce's developing understanding (at least implicitly) of cross-linguistic transfer (G. E. García, 2000) and the value of students' native languages for second language literacy, a significant professional development. While this change was likely due in part to my collaborations with Joyce, I documented AAVE in her classroom from the beginning of the study.
Integrating AAVE into instruction. Joyce's students often used AAVE in the classroom, both socially and during instruction, as in the following lesson on silent e: J: What makes these e's special? S: 'Cause they silent. J: They're silent. We don't say 'comee.' As opposed to "correcting" students when they used AAVE grammar (i.e., "they silent" as opposed to the Standard English "they are silent), Joyce responded to the content of their statements and/or modeled Standard English grammar in her response.
Joyce also integrated communicative structures common to some African American communities into her instruction. Although I documented this only a handful of times, I believe they are significant. In the following example, Joyce used choral response during a phonics lesson in which the students were to categorize words according to common word endings: Joyce holds up a card with the word "pain" on it, and asks which column it belongs in. Adrienne says, "pain," and Joyce has her put it on the pocket chart under the word "train." Joyce says, "Everyone say 'pain'!" The students respond chorally, "pain!" Joyce says, "train, pain," and students respond, "train, pain!" Joyce shows a new word, "sprain," and says, "What does it look like? Where are you going to put it?" A student spontaneously responds, "On the train!" On the surface, this excerpt reflects an Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) participation structure, which is predominant in mainstream classrooms (Cazden, 1988). However, the placement and rhythm of the student's response, "On the train!" also resembles call and response, a common participation structure in many African American churches (including those attended by her students) in which texts are jointly constructed (Moss, 2001).

Volume 8 Number 3 Fall 2006
Page 19 The following vignette shows another example of call and response in Joyce's instruction: Joyce is reading Green Eggs and Ham (1960) during a lesson on contractions. Her reading is very animated-you can really tell the text is a conversation between two characters, which is not always the case with Dr. Seuss books. Every time she comes across a phrase with a potential contraction (i.e., "I would not, could not in a boat…"), she pauses and students shout out the contraction (wouldn't, couldn't). Some students recite the text along with Joyce, and others occasionally make one or two word comments. They are clearly familiar with the text, and the students' recitation and comments seem to enhance Joyce's reading. At a point in the text where one character insists that he does not like green eggs and ham, Danny chimes in: "Just give it a try!" His response to the text is not disruptive. Rather, it fits with the rhythm of Joyce's reading. In the next part of the book the character gives in and does try it, and discovers that he likes it.
In addition to showing school sanctioned practices such as prediction, the coperformance of the text is reminiscent of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's reading of Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live in 1992 as a tribute to Dr. Seuss after his death. Joyce later stated that she was influenced by Jackson's performance and had described it to her students before the lesson, cueing them into the use of call and response and indicating that she herself was cued into that communicative structure.

Conclusion and Implications: Social Practice as Dynamic Performance
The data presented here are significant in two ways. First, unlike the research base on non-school sanctioned language and literacy practices, they suggest the ways in which a teacher's language and literacy habitus is brought to bear on instruction for multilingual students. Second, they support a view of Bourdieu's social practice theory not as a reproductive economic metaphor, but as a performative theory; one that has potential for conceptualizing the dynamic nature of practice as personal histories and societal structures interact. I summarize each of these points separately.
Joyce began to revise the gospel of literacy by learning about students' home language and literacy practices, using Spanish as a resource for native Spanish and English speakers' literacy development, and integrating and inviting the use of AAVE during instruction. It is worth noting that her pedagogical decisions were not merely methodological or technical, but ideological, focused not only on enhancing student literacy performance, but also on recognizing and integrating alternative practices in ways that challenge dominant paradigms of what constitutes schooled language and literacy. However, to classify Joyce's changing literacy instruction as a counter-discourse or as "non-standard" would be a misrepresentation. What I would like to highlight is not necessarily how these adaptations countered the literacy myth, but rather how Joyce blended alternative and standard practices. Using Spanish to mediate comprehension of English texts, or integrating call and response into a lesson on a Standard English grammatical construction, are less counter discourses than complimentary and converging practices (Gregory & Williams, 2000)-a reinscription and expansion, rather than an all-out rejection, of heretofore narrow conceptualizations regarding what it means to be literate in America. Stated differently, Joyce's habitus and the field interact in the performative space of the classroom in ways that neither reproduce the standard at face value, nor simply insert non-standard practices into the field. In Joyce's case, while the partial alignment of Joyce's habitus and field produced doxic experiences with regard to mainstream language and literacy practices, this doxa was not reproduced, but rather produced differently.
These findings complicate reproductionist models of how power is produced in instruction. Bourdieu asserts that "…the definition of the symbolic relation of power which is constitutive of the market can be the subject of negotiation and that the market can be manipulated, within certain limits" (p. 71). In this sense, Bourdieu's theories are open to the notion of performativity. However, Bourdieu also states, "…it goes without saying that the capacity to manipulate is greater the more capital one possesses" (p. 71). This carries strong implications for issues of power and equity in teaching multilingual and multiliterate children, especially when one considers teachers as institutional authorities who have the power to recognize (or misrecognize) certain forms of capital. Ironically, this requires teachers to view themselves not "in the eyes of the institution" but as curriculum "redesigners" (New London Group, 1996). Novice teachers are often presumed to lack the capital resources to reorganize the discursive structures of their field, let alone teach reflectively (Kagan, 1992) despite scholarship indicating otherwise (Grossman, 1992). But despite Joyce's adherence to mainstream language and literacy assumptions, aspects of her literate life history may have disposed her to trouble mainstream discourses such as the literacy myth. Moreover, in performing (and deforming) the literacy myth, she may also be rewriting her own literate life history, or habitus.

Implications for Practice
It is important to recognize that I was both a resource and a motivating factor for Joyce in questioning and adapting her instruction. These experiences may have afforded Joyce a certain degree of symbolic capital and the accompanying power to begin redesigning curriculum. But how can other (particularly monolingual) teachers be supported to manipulate the market and map out new pedagogical trajectories in order to better support the literacy development of their multilingual students?
Because multilingualism is a mainstream phenomenon, all teachers, as opposed to just bilingual and ESL certified teachers, need to be familiar with instructional strategies that support second language acquisition and literacy-something that Joyce may have implicitly understood at a personal, experiential level. Universities and local school agencies can begin by integrating this type of professional knowledge into sustained teacher development programs in ways that encourage teachers to integrate socially and professionally into communities to learn about community language and literacy practices. Pairing mainstream teachers with experienced bilingual teacher-mentors might be particularly helpful, especially for novice teachers like Joyce. Through this project Joyce became more conscious of how her own language and literacy habitus impacted her instruction and in turn her students. Needed are instructional and professional support structures that encourage teachers to move beyond simple acknowledgements of racial and socioeconomic privilege and critically examine how their personal backgrounds influence instructional practices that maintain this privilege.

Final Thoughts and Directions for Future Research
In this paper, I illustrated how Bourdieu's social practice theory might be recast in terms of theories of performativity in the context of language and literacy instruction and Joyce's articulations of the literacy myth. This marks a shift from the bulk of the research on instruction for linguistically diverse students, which has tended to focus on technical aspects of language acquisition and instructional methods (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000). While a growing body of literature has analyzed student and community language and literacy practices within a critical frame (Cruickshank, 2004;Gregory & Williams, 2000;Guerra, 1998;Hagood, 2004;Moje, Ciechanowski, Ellis, Carrillo, & Collazo, 2004;Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003), my work with Joyce extends this line of inquiry to the complexities of teachers' personal language and literacy backgrounds and the instructional context. However, further theoretically nuanced and methodologically rigorous research is needed to understand how teachers' own linguistic and cultural resources interact with the sociopolitical contexts of their professional worlds, what sorts of language and literacy practices are (re)produced through this dialectic in the glocalized spaces of multilingual classrooms, and who stands to benefit from these practices. In addition, future research might also investigate how subtle instructional shifts, such as the ones Joyce began to make, influence students' language and literacy development and achievement and investment in multilingualism. Such a project would be easily situated within the current climate of high stakes accountability in education while having the potential to push the boundaries of both pedagogy and research practice. Combining critical narrative analyses of instruction, such as that provided in this research, with quasi-experimental and quantitative analyses of student achievement, for instance, may shed light on literacy instruction in compelling ways that both work within and begin to redefine standards for educational research.