ABSTRACT
In “Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep: Modeling the ‘Scientific’ From the Everyday as Cultural Processes,” Carol Lee offers a lucid analysis of “cultural modeling” to bridge high school students' out-of-school arts and in-school literary reasoning. Moreover, Lee emphasizes educators' responsibility to build a bridge for students, especially in schools “serving Black and Brown youth living in low-income communities.” With a comparison of “the everyday” and “the scientific,” Lee focuses on the higher order skills inherent in artistic media used by young people in their daily lives and crafted in literary reasoning in standard high school English curricula. Lee argues, furthermore, that a major catalyst for bridging across everyday and scientific cultures is “identity work.” In order to master the values and tools of mainstream culture, according to Lee and others (Fisher, 2004; Mahiri, 2006), young people from minority backgrounds must shift the identities they have developed with everyday arts to those embedded in the disciplinary sciences of mainstream schooling. Because mainstream identities are, by extension, required for graduation from high school, progress to college, and successful participation in professional employment, we can consider the contribution of multicultural flexibility as a catalyst for development.
