ABSTRACT
For educational researchers who explore the needs of nonmainstream students, unblocking the pores so that students' innermost souls will breathe freely in classroom settings is a most pressing issue. In her review of the research on responding to the needs of nonmainstream students in terms of literacy instruction, Farr (1991) noted that information from ethnographic studies has been utilized to enhance classroom practice in two distinctive ways. The first addresses “local ways of using language,” and may be seen as a concern with process. Notable in this line of research have been the efforts of the Kamehameha Early Education Project (Au & Jordan, 1981), which modified classroom reading instruction, aligning it more closely with a Hawaiian speech event known as “talk story,” thereby minimizing the discontinuities between native culture and schooling. The second use of information from ethnographic studies has been to design appropriate content. Farr cited the works of Heath (1983) and Diaz, Moll, and Mehan (1986); both used information from the local community as content to increase student participation.
