A College of Education faculty member, Yolanda J. Majors, was one of only three scholars in the nation to be named 2002 winners of the Promising Researcher Award by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

    Majors, an assistant professor in language education, received the honor for her dissertation titled: “Shoptalk: Teaching and Learning in an African-American Hair Salon.”

    The dissertation examines what it means to know and to teach within an African-American hair salon. Majors argues 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 was to draw a better understanding of how learning takes place outside of the classroom,” she says. “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.”

    Majors’ research examines the socio-cultural foundations of literacy across school and community, with a special interest in African-American communities of practice, teacher development and preparation, and the cultural contexts for learning and teaching in her research. Her work involves long-term ethnographic investigations with a close analysis of literacy related practices within the African-American speech community, looking specifically at: 1) understanding the reasoning process of speakers of AAE within genres of oral discourse across community and classroom settings; 2) strategies used by children and adolescents in school setting to construct meaning from written texts within genres of oral discourse; and 3) the design of instructional environments which support learning and reasoning through culturally relevant strategies for reasoning.

    Majors, who joined the UGA faculty in January of 2002, received her Ph.D. and masters from the University of Iowa. She received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Illinois.

Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Writer: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
Contact: Yolanda J. Majors, 706/542-5674, ymajors@coe.uga.edu