Based on subsequent investigations, I was awarded a Spencer Foundation Small Grant in 2002 to further examine the relationship between talk and thought across community and classroom. This second strand of my line of research examines the nature of the classroom instructional supports provided for students when reasoning in African American Vernacular English. The design of this study involves my own work as a Secondary, Language Arts teacher and my development of a curriculum based on the ideas of subsequent investigations in the context of the hair salon. This research argues for the replication of community norms for talk, argumentation and problem solving in classrooms through a close analysis of literacy related practices with the African American speech community.

Select papers based on this research

Majors, Y. (Forthcoming). Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Theory. In Ball, A.F. (Ed.), With more deliberate speed: Achieving equity in literacy: Realizing the full potential of Brown v. Board of Education. National Society for the Study of Education.

Majors, Y. (Forthcoming). “We as stylists actually become like psychiatrists”: Challenging notions of a literate context, who can read and who can be a reader. In Flood, J., Lapp, D., & Bryce Heath, S. (Eds.), Handbook on teaching literacy through the communicative, visual and performing arts. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lee, C.D, & Majors, Y. (Forthcoming). Cultural modeling’s response to Rogoff’s challenge: Understanding apprenticeship, guided participation and participatory appropriation in a culturally responsive, subject matter specific context. Paper submitted to Cognition and Instruction.

Lee, C. D., & Majors, Y. (2003). “Heading up the street”: Localized opportunities for shared constructions of knowledge. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 11(1), 49-68.

Majors, Y. (2002). Introduction: The landscape of literacy in seven portraits, portrait III. In Guzzetti, B.J. (Ed.), Literacy in America: An encyclopedia (pp. xvii-xviii). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Unpacking Repertoirs of Practice:
Problem solving and workplace functioning in apprenticeship

   My consideration of the role of language in reasoning processes of speakers of African American Vernacular English is extended into a third research strand supported through a Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant from the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation in 2004. The goal of this strand is to consider how, within particular workplace contexts, cultural resources correspond with specific skills to achieve work task related goals. The analysis of this work has focused on task related skills, interaction patterns, the role and structure of discourse, and the nature of task related problem solving. The design and analysis of this research documents the patterns of workplace practices and the nature of the scaffolded supports and training provided for youth apprentices for the application of skill over time. This framework has enabled me to consider learning, labor and language. First, through a consideration of goal-directed actions within manual activities, second through the consideration of the functional properties of thought in action, and third through the consideration of the cultural and linguistic underpinnings which mediate them. The research questions that guide data collection and analysis for this strand of the project include the following:

• What are the patterns of cultural socialization and participation that provide opportunities and supports over time for young adult apprentices within goal directed tasks and across occupations?
  
• In what ways does the relationship between action and language facilitate the accomplishment of work tasks within group (expert/novice) interactions?
  
• What roles can the literate artifacts of goal directed tasks play in supporting, extending and distributing opportunities to learn within this environment?

This work is a part of a multi-site, multi strand program of research that documents adolescent and young adult cultural socialization practices that occur in urban hair salons, peer groups, and Language Arts classrooms. This program of research revolves around community based, and culturally relevant socialization practices through structures of reasoning, strategies for problem solving and methods of coping for the purposes of workplace, social, political, cultural and multi-generational problem solving.