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A curriculum that employs conceptuallyrelated materials and multiple communication systems helps children who are in the process of acquiring English fully participate in the educational experiences of the classroom.
If classrooms are to become genuine places of inquiry, the issue of equitable access to knowledge must be addressed. Too often, the manner in which knowledge and ideas are distributed in the classroom mirrors the social and economic stratification of the broader society. By this we mean, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Students whose backgrounds reflect the dominant culture and language, and/or whose intellectual abilities reflect the accepted "norms" of the school, typically have greater access to the significant meanings, ideas, and issues being explored within the curriculum. Students viewed as less capable because of their "limited" intellectual, linguistic, and/or economic resources receive the "welfare curriculum," a separate and unequal curriculum where significant or complex ideas are rarely encountered because of the perception that the children are not ready for such encounters. It is assumed that these students will eventually leave the welfare ranks and be brought into the mainstream curriculum. Unfortunately, it is well documented that they rarely leave the welfare curriculum except by dropping out altogether (Cummins, 1989; Garcia, 1994; Kozol, 1991).
Diversity, a wonderful part of the human condition, should not be a barrier to a more equitable distribution of knowledge within the classroom literacy curriculum. In considering equitable distribution of knowledge, our focus is second language learners because of the educational vulnerability of this group of students (Garcia, 1994). The educational experience of the language minority student typically amplifies the experiences of those student populations who have not been fairly served by the educational system. By proposing in this article ways of accessing knowledge, we hope to develop further an understanding of curriculum and literacy practices that is not only effective in terms of instruction for language minority students but that also can be applied to other contexts.
In this article, we propose a shared coversation curricular framework and two ways that diverse student populations can be brought into common curricular conversations. The parameters for the shared conversation call for a framework that is unified through the potential concepts and the generalizations that it employs. Although the...