ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we share how our team was inspired by Carol Lee’s Cultural Modeling tradition: specifically, her notion of youth cultural data sets as tools for non-dominant student learning. We extend her work to consider how youth cultural data sets can also facilitate teachers’ exploration and learning about leveraging the communicative repertoires of non-dominant youth in schools, in respectful and humanizing ways. We argue that teachers must engage in learning experiences that allow them to reflect on what counts as language in their classrooms, and how their views about youth communication can become either affordances or constraints for non-dominant youths’ full participation in content area learning. We do this by sharing previously collected data from a Los Angeles classroom, with teachers involved in our current research in Northern California. This generative use of data seeks to shift how teachers engage in reflection to shift the ways they leverage youth language as resources for learning.
