The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies

Jennifer Rowsell, Kate Pahl, Jennifer Rowsell, Kate Pahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510604
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies offers a comprehensive view of the field of language and literacy studies. With forty-three chapters reflecting new research from leading scholars in the field, the Handbook pushes at the boundaries of existing fields and combines with related fields and disciplines to develop a lens on contemporary scholarship and emergent fields of inquiry. The Handbook is divided into eight sections:

• The foundations of literacy studies

• Space-focused approaches

• Time-focused approaches

• Multimodal approaches

• Digital approaches

• Hermeneutic approaches

• Making meaning from the everyday

• Co-constructing literacies with communities.

This is the first handbook of literacy studies to recognise new trends and evolving trajectories together with a focus on radical epistemologies of literacy. The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies is an essential reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students and those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and language and literacy.

Part I
The foundations of literacy studies

1
The Social and Linguistic Turns in Studying Language and Literacy

David Bloome
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Judith Green
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

Introduction

Shifts in the fundamental framing of intellectual inquiry can alter both the conduct of scholarship and the practice of everyday life (cf., Kuhn 1962). Here, we consider the implications of two such shifts in the study of literacy. The first is the social turn in the study of language and literacy (see Bartlett 2008; Baynham and Prinsloo 2001; Gee 1999; Street 2003) and the second is the application of the linguistic turn in the social sciences (cf., Benjamin 1996; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Habermas 2001; Pecheux 1982; Rorty 1992; Said 1978; Wittgenstein 2009 [1953]) to the study of language and literacy (cf., Baker and Luke 1991; Cazden et al. 1972; Cook-Gumperz et al. 1981; Gumperz 1982, 1986a, 1986b; Hymes 1974, 1980, 1981).

We begin this chapter by discussing the implications of these “turns.” We then briefly discuss implications of framing literacy education as marketization and commodification as opposed to a framework of dialectics and dialogue.

The social turn in the study of literacy

Definitions of literacy vary widely; and as historians (e.g., Ginzburg 1980; Graff 1979), sociologists (e.g., Luke 1995, 2003), anthropologists (e.g., Bartlett 2008; Collins 1995; Collins and Blot 2003; Heath 1982b, 1983, 2012; Long 1993) and others have shown, the interpretation of texts has been a cultural, social, political, and theological matter in which the stakes can be severe (e.g., Ginzburg 1980; Lankshear 1998; Macedo 1996). Nonetheless, in modern educational institutions in the U.S., Europe, and regions influenced by them, literacy (reading and writing) has overwhelmingly been defined as a set of cognitive processes and skills. It is a definition of literacy that has been enforced by the state, and upon which literacy education curricula, instruction, and evaluations are often based (Allington 2002; Goodman et al. 2013; Krashen 2001; Prendergast 2003). Until recently, research on literacy, especially that connected to schooling, has overwhelmingly focused on identification of the psychological processes within the individual that constitute being able to read and write. It is a view of literacy widespread in popular culture and media (e.g., Johnson and Finlay 2001; Williams and Zenger 2007), so much so that, with the exception of perhaps the academic field of literacy studies, this definition of literacy has become hegemonic.

This view is challenged by the social turn in the study of literacy, a turn that can be connected to the social turn in the study of language more generally. Rather than viewing language as an idealized and abstract system (cf., Chomsky 1961; Saussure 1959 [1915]) or as a set of cognitive and psycholinguistic processes located in the mind of the individual (cf., Fodor et al. 1974; Miller 1965; Pinker 1994), language (spoken, written, signed, etc.) is viewed as essentially social and situated in the interactions among people; that is, as more so a set of contextualized social practices and social events than a thing in-and-of-itself. From the perspective of the social turn in the study of literacy, literacy is viewed as the non-trivial use of written language in a social event (cf., Heath 1980) or social practice (cf., Street 1984). Therefore, literacy cannot be separated from what people are doing, how they are doing it, when, where, under what conditions and with whom they are doing it; metaphorically, there is no separation of the dancer from the dance¹ (cf., Yeats 1962).

Street (1984, 1995) describes these views of literacy as a distinction between an autonomous model of literacy and an ideological model. In an autonomous model of literacy, the individual employs cognitive and linguistic skills, strategies, and processes that are mostly autonomous of the social context in which the reading or writing occurs. A person has, or does not have, those cognitive and linguistic skills, strategies, and processes that enable him/her to read or write; and is thus literate or illiterate, respectively. Literacy education is the acquisition of those cognitive and linguistic skills, strategies, and processes that define reading and writing. What has been called a ‘Great Divide’ exists between those societies that have achieved literacy and those that have not, involving fundamental differences in thinking processes, the organization of knowledge, and engagement in modern civil organization including orientation to law and government (Goody 1986; Goody and Watt 1968; Havelock 1982, 1991; Ong 1982; for criticism of the ‘Great Divide’ see Gee 1996; Reder and Davilla 2005; Scribner and Cole 1981; Street 1995; Tannen 1982).

By contrast, an ideological model is defined as situated, shared cultural frameworks and models that inform when, where, and how written language should be used (i.e., what counts as appropriate use within the social event) as well as how written language means within and across social situations. Considered within an ideological model, literacy does not exist as a thing in-andof-itself. Rather it is the situated, contextualized use of written language by people as they interact with each other within the social institutions and social spaces in which they live their lives. Literacy practices and events are embedded in, and constitutive of cultural ideologies. That is, a cultural ideology informs, and is informed by, what literacy practices are used in what social situations when, by whom, with what meanings, and with what social consequences.

As such, a literacy practice (like any social practice) exists not in isolation but rather is intimately connected to a field (cf., Bourdieu 1977; Grenfell et al. 2012), such that participants in a particular situation could expect to find particular orthographies, texts, configurations of people, participation structures, physical and material environments, etc., as well as expectations for particular ways of using and making meaning with written language. Thus, what constitutes a literacy practice is not just a mental framework or cultural schema for using written language that an individual might hold (perhaps in common with others). Rather, what constitutes literacy practices are the in situ and particular constellation of actions and interactions in and of the material environment.

Literacy practices, therefore, are realized in literacy events, as the actual embodiment, engagement, and interaction among people in real time as they make their everyday lives within institutional, social, cultural, and economic contexts. Within a literacy event, a literacy practice is adapted to the in situ circumstances in which people find themselves. This may include interactions with others of diverse cultural backgrounds, who may not fully share specific literacy practices, or who may have different goals for the social events. It may also include multiple layers of diverse and even contradictory contexts and social agendas. Additionally, it may include unusual and changing situations influenced by other events near and far; and/or, it may involve shifting power relations among people and among social institutions. And, all of this is material (cf., Volosinov 1973 [1929]; see also Pahl and Rowsell 2010). That is, the actions people take both individually and collectively are embodied, and located in a particular place at a particular time within a particular material environment. The words they use have material presence either as sound waves, body and hand movements (i.e., sign language), or as marks on a surface (whether it is a screen, a piece of paper, a wall, or a rock, etc.). Out of this material presence and place (what Scollon and Scollon (2003) call geosemiotics), people act and react to each other, creating meaning, social relationships, social identities, aesthetics, histories and futures, change and continuity as well as the broad range of human emotions and feelings that constitute social life.

From the perspective of the social turn in the study of literacy, the teaching and learning of literacy is better characterized as the teaching and learning of a set of literacy practices and the cultural ideologies and fields that a particular set of literacy practices index. The teaching and learning of literacy are not culturally or politically neutral endeavors (cf., Luke 1988). In those cases where teaching and learning cross cultural boundaries, the teaching and learning of literacy may involve the attempted imposition of a set of literacy practices by one group upon another (e.g., Kulick and Stroud 1993). In such instances (cases), those members of the dominant group, holding an autonomous model of literacy, may assume that they are being beneficent in bringing literacy and its accompanying benefits of ‘literate thought’ (cf., Olson 1977; Ong 1982) to the illiterate, non-dominant group. To the extent that non-dominant groups accept an autonomous view of literacy, like the dominant group, the non-dominant group may view themselves, their way of life, and their society as deficit and needing to be ‘saved’ (cf., Scribner 1984).

By contrast, framed within the social turn in the study of literacy, literacy education in cross-cultural contexts requires a more complex and nuanced understanding. Even in cases where there may be the supplanting of the cultural practices and ideologies of a non-dominant group by those of the dominant group, Kulick and Stroud (1993) show that people do not necessarily adopt the imposed literacy practices. Rather, they adapt them in ways that reflect their indigenous way of life, even if they do so in ways that are invisible to the dominant group.

Educators sensitive to the deficit-oriented assumptions of an autonomous model of literacy may bring a different set of foundational assumptions to literacy education in a cross-cultural situation. People, and the communities in which they live (perhaps defined by race, class, language, ethnicity, language, or geography), may be viewed as already having and engaging in literacy practices and literacy events (e.g., Kirkland 2013; Rabi et al. 2009). From this perspective, literacy education, built on that foundation, develops ways that enable people to cross cultural and institutional boundaries without denigrating their own cultures, histories, and cultural identities (e.g., González et al. 2005; Lee 2007; McCarty 2010; Moll and Diaz 1987). Such a literacy education may also involve teaching and learning a set of literacy practices that foreground the use of written language to critically interrogate the world in which people live in order to make visible, and act on, oppressive power relations (e.g., Blackburn 2005; Blackburn and Clark 2007; Freire 2000; Freire and Macedo 1987; Willis 2008). These directions, guided by the social turn, have led literacy researchers and educators to seek ways of generating new, hybridized literacy practices at a nexus of the diverse groups that create new interpretive frameworks and social contexts (e.g., Gutiérrez 2008; Souto-Manning 2010).

To summarize this section, we quote Robinson on the impact of the social turn in literacy studies:

It will no longer do, I think, to consider literacy as some abstract, absolute quality attainable through tutelage and the accumulation of knowledge and experience. It will no longer do to think of reading as a solitary act in which a mainly passive reader responds to cues in a text to find meaning. It will no longer do to think of writing as a mechanical manipulation of grammatical codes and formal structures leading to the production of perfect or perfectible texts. Reading and writing are not unitary skills nor are they reducible to sets of component skills falling neatly under discrete categories (linguistic, cognitive); rather, they are complex human activities taking place in complex human relationships.

(1987: 329)

Viewed in this way, the social turn in defining literacy has had, and continues to have, profound implications for the study of literacy, most especially in how history, culture, personhood, place, social relationships, and conceptions of the ‘mind’ are taken up as a framework for the study of literacy practices and literacy events in educational contexts (e.g., Bloome et al. 2005; Gee and Green 1998). The social turn in the study of literacy is a shift from a view of autonomous skills and of written language as a tool that influences (or determines) what people do, how they think, and who they are (literate or illiterate) to a view of written language as actions that people take with others and in relation to others as they make and re-make the events, structures, institutions, and interpr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction1
• Part I The foundations of literacy studies
• PART II Space-focused approaches
• PART III Time-focused approaches
• PART IV Multimodal approaches
• PART V Digital approaches
• PART VI Hermeneutic approaches
• PART VII Making meaning from the everyday
• PART VIII Co-constructing literacies with communities
• Index