Yolanda Majors

How Are They Going to Know They Can Be More Than a Basketball Player if You Only Ever Give Them a Basketball?" Exploring Community Voice Within Urban School Design

Proceedings of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting

A Multivoiced Response to the Call for an Equity-Based Framework

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2006

“We As Stylist Actually Become Like Psychiatrists”: Problem Solving in Public Performance

Learning on the Blue Line: Crossing Borders of Race, Class and Social Relations

Critical, nimble, and human: The historical urgency of “alternative facts”

Journal of Literacy Research, 2017

In this Insights column, four authors address the question: Given current and potential shifts in... more In this Insights column, four authors address the question: Given current and potential shifts in education policy, what should literacy educators keep in mind to move forward with exceptional literacy research and practices? Majors and Lewis urge white scholars to reach out to scholars of color in learning how to generate counter-arguments that speak back to alternative facts. Tierney encourages the field to learn from scholars who are engaged in community based participatory research and activism, especially those who are engaged as allies with groups of people who are indigenous, marginalized, transnational, and cross-cultural. Beach calls on the field to consider research that examines implementation of the Common Core State Standards, such as argumentative writing and translanguaging.

Cultivating Literacies: New Lenses and New Possibilities

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2018

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciat... more Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and attitudes.

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Meaningful and Expansive: Literacy Learning Through Technology‐Mediated Productions

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2018

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciat... more Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and attitudes.

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Silence as Indicator of Engagement

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2017

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciat... more Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and attitudes.

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Moving Forward with Exceptional Literacy Research and Practice Amidst Educational Policy Changes

Journal of Literacy Research, 2017

In this Insights column, four authors address the question: Given current and potential shifts in... more In this Insights column, four authors address the question: Given current and potential shifts in education policy, what should literacy educators keep in mind to move forward with exceptional literacy research and practices? Majors and Lewis urge white scholars to reach out to scholars of color in learning how to generate counter-arguments that speak back to alternative facts. Tierney encourages the field to learn from scholars who are engaged in community based participatory research and activism, especially those who are engaged as allies with groups of people who are indigenous, marginalized, transnational, and cross-cultural. Beach calls on the field to consider research that examines implementation of the Common Core State Standards, such as argumentative writing and translanguaging.

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A Dance of Bars: Rethinking the Role of Literacy Education in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2016

This essential resource explains the key points of the Common Core State Standards reading standa... more This essential resource explains the key points of the Common Core State Standards reading standards, aligns each standard with appropriate researchbased strategies, and then shows you how to use those strategies to teach your students. The authors delve into important topics such as assessment, implementation, and curriculum-as well as the implications of the Common Core for beginning readers and special student populations.

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Starting Over One Word at a Time: Useful and Dangerous Discourses

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2016

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Finding the Multivoiced Self: A Narrative

Journal of Adolescent Adult Literacy, 1998

Heading Up the Street:" Localized Opportunities for Shared Constructions of Knowledge

Pedagogy Culture and Society, 2003

Chapter 10 A Multivoiced Response to the Call for an Equity-Based Framework

Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 2006

Yes, the miners' canary, as Gutiérrez and Jaramillo remind us, is a warning of approaching danger... more Yes, the miners' canary, as Gutiérrez and Jaramillo remind us, is a warning of approaching dangers (this volume, pp. 173-189). Cloaked in yellow, it lifts its voice in protest and critique, a warning that perhaps also signals resistance to impending dangers that lurk ahead.. .. As we write this piece, it is the end of the Fall term. "The Hawk" (how many Chicagoans refer to winter's wind) has arrived with familiar ferocity and chill. Within and beyond the slightly ajar university classroom door we recently shared, it is quiet, except for a few lingering footsteps in the distance of Eddie, our service engineer.. .. (Yolanda) Eddie reminds me so much of my uncle Joe though they look nothing alike. Perhaps it is less the embodiment of my uncle and more my imaginings of him in his current job as the day-shift doorman of a high-rise nestled within the downtown skyline that I am reminded of. My uncle had worked over 35 years (after returning from Vietnam with a Purple Heart), supporting a wife and two daughters as a state postal service employee. Shortly after retirement, however, he found it necessary to return to work "in order to make ends meet." Though according to him, the pay "does what it does," my uncle makes the most of his new position, and like Eddie, I imagine, he does so in quiet, masked dignity. His life, to me, illuminates a lived tension in the lives of many minority faculty who grapple with negotiating culture, class, and race across the life span.

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Cultural Community Practices as Urban Classroom Resources

The SAGE Handbook of African American Education

‘Heading up the street:’ localised opportunities for shared constructions of knowledge

Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2003

Success and failure in school is contingent upon one's ability to regulate and situate identities... more Success and failure in school is contingent upon one's ability to regulate and situate identities, utilise culturally-developed semiotic tools and negotiate models of meaning in shared social activity. However, many language minority students lack such success, struggling with conflicts between their primary-and community-based identities, and existing personal models of the world instantiated through community-based Discourses on the one hand, and discrepant new constructs and literate Discourses, on the other. We compare and contrast linguistic and nonlinguistic components of ways of speaking, being, performing and reasoning, within an urban African-American secondary classroom and an African-American mid-western hair salon. We identify culturally-shared interactional norms that inform knowledge building across both sites. We analyse how the Discourse norms and structures of argumentation evident in the hair salon provide participation structures that invite engagement with complex problem solving tasks in both sites. The semiotic potential of these participation structures is heightened in the classroom context by providing scaffolding tasks where students draw on tacit conceptual knowledge constructed from their home/community experiences and that is analogous to the target academic task.

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Shoptalk: Teaching and Learning in an African American Hair Salon

Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2003

This study examines ways of speaking, performing, and reasoning within an urban, African American... more This study examines ways of speaking, performing, and reasoning within an urban, African American hair salon. I argue here that participants within the salon, through participation, collaboration, and negotiation, construct and transmit their understandings of the world within systems of activity. By identifying how members of the community hair salon use cultural resources and institutional technologies, co-construct knowledge, and change and develop through their participation in activity, my aim is to draw a better understanding of how learning takes place outside of the classroom. By identifying the labor-related activities within the hair salon, the participation structures which support these activities, and the socially shared, cultural funds of knowledge, I hope to make visible certain mediating structures that support culturally relevant learning and teaching in the African American community.

Joy and the “Smart Kids”

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2014

The language of schooling, while appearing neutral, facilitates Joy ' s construction of an identi... more

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Reports From Division Nominating Committees

Educational Researcher, 2007

Narrations of cross-cultural encounters as interpretative frames for reading word and world

Discourse & Society, 2007

This article describes how a group of African-American women read social relations as socially co... more This article describes how a group of African-American women read social relations as socially constructed texts. Such reading, I think, is a literacy skill, rehearsed and developed within classrooms and communities that cultural border crossers1 develop through their participation within specific discourses communities, as well as through their movement across different kinds of communities (Majors and Orellana, 2003). I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in an African-American hair salon to both illuminate and challenge notions of texts, literacy, literate contexts, and the permeability of such contexts with regards to skills acquisition and use. The study focuses on the public performances and social discourse of the women as well as their readings of these performances. Researchers of language and learning have argued that success and failure in school is contingent upon one's ability to successfully navigate processes of meaning-making through discourses (Cazden, 2001...

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