This case study is a closer look at a university-continuation high school collaboration, a postsecondary learning program that is the first to teach linguistics in public schools to underserved students through a team teaching model: university faculty, university students, high school teachers, and high school students. This program introduces high school students to the ideologies, methods, and topics of both sociocultural and anthropological linguistics via original youth research projects that center on cultural uses and meanings of both spoken and written languages in their local communities and lives (Bucholtz, Casillas, & Lee, 3015; Bucholtz et al., 2014). This specific group of individuals at Tesoro Continuation High School chose to understand how spoken and written languages, ideologies, and discourse within their surrounding communities, and lack thereof, interrupt and negatively affect everyday living: their guiding research question “Is Tesoro High School for ‘Bad Kids’?”
Exploring the experiences of ten students, youth ranging from grades 10-12, ages 16-18 years of age, this paper highlights the development of the research process, the class decision to ultimately draw not only on their shared identities as continuation high school students, but also their shared identity misrepresentations as people. Identified as “bad students” academically while also as “bad kids” morally by ways of their communities, these ten students worked to disprove stigmatized identities and deficit discourse. Such work ultimately ended with a published Youtube public-service announcement, pseudo first draft school documentary, outlining internalized perceptions of categorization and marginalization by ways of their surrounding communities. This video was then presented at a conference-like culmination of the learning program, where students were met with overwhelming recognition. This work was then shared with district teachers and university faculty and staff and is still in the process of being viewed by educators in the district.
A qualitative approach to fieldwork and ethnographic inquiry, works to make visible not only classroom discourse and interaction throughout the linguistics-based learning program, but more so the transdisciplinary nature of educational linguistics through team-teaching models and its attractive forces and relatable opportunities for students’ lives, learning, and research.
