Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times

Rahat Zaidi, Jennifer Rowsell, Rahat Zaidi, Jennifer Rowsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138225169
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315400846
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Combining language research with digital, multimodal, and critical literacy, this book uniquely positions issues of transcultural spaces and cosmopolitan identities across an array of contexts. Studies of everyday diasporic practices across places, spaces, and people's stories provide authentic pictures of people living in and with diversity. Its distinctive contribution is a framework to relate observation and analysis of these flows to language development, communication, and meaning making. Each chapter invites readers to reflect on the dynamism and complexity of spaces and contexts in an age of increasing mobility, political upheaval, economic instabilities, and online/offline landscapes.

1

Introduction

Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times

Rahat Zaidi and Jennifer Rowsell

Over the last three decades, scholars have given serious thought to issues of globalization and the creation of diasporas as people migrate from different parts of the world to develop identities in new places or to reinvent themselves in familiar ones. When people ‘go global’, they do not pull their former lives by the roots but instead integrate, mediate, even disrupt aspects of their environments, reimagining familiar contexts where they have come of age through a global lens. This collection represents efforts by a group of scholars to consider what happens when transculturalism and cosmopolitanism are made central to language and literacy research.

The main rationale for focusing on transculturalism and cosmopolitanism as opposed to other terms or simply one of them is that together they collapse silos in helpful ways so that linguistic researchers can dialogue with semiotic researchers to have productive, generative conversations about larger implications dealing with globalization, diasporas, identities, spaces, texts and pedagogy. However, before unravelling these binaries, let us first define transculturalism and cosmopolitanism as concepts that embody culture and linguistic diversity as much as they embody semiosis and multimodality, because these are flexible terms that mould to research questions and varied methodologies.

Being transcultural and cosmopolitan involves being local as much as it does being global; being ready to constitute transcultural spaces as much as it does forging dynamic identities. Where the transcultural piece foregrounds cultural diversity and global landscapes, cosmopolitanism takes care of the naturalized ways that identities are dynamic, plural, connected, local and global. The disparate pictures of transculturalism and cosmopolitanism presented in this book show how prismatic and polemical the terms are, depending on the place and people involved, and on the researcher and her or his theoretical gaze. Many of the studies show the power of stories and place/context in displaying transcultural-cosmopolitan practices. Chapters in this collection uncover identity practices that are complex and that draw on many, disparate discourses and ideologies that make for cosmopolitan identities that are transcultural and that exhibit transliteracies (Orellana, 2016).

Our use of the term ‘transculturalism’ refers to migrational flows that have taken place over decades and how countries around the world have become more linguistically and culturally complex. This complexity has materialized in different types of literacy and language practices and different meaning making dispositions. For example, thinking about the work of Stornaiuolo and Jung, their research in Write4Change brings together educators and their adolescent students interested in collaborating, sharing and circulating their writing with international peers around the world. They are particularly interested in how socially networked online spaces offer opportunities to learn from and draw on diverse cultural resources and navigate boundaries between nations and cultures. In their chapter, they look at how educators engage with participatory forms of digital authoring in these spaces and how it helps young people marshal multiple transnational resources to catalyze change in and across communities. Another example is the chapter by Whitty, who situates her thinking about transculturalism and cosmopolitanism as place-based – she theorizes the land of her childhood and of her present-day workplace as the land of the Wolastoqiyik peoples, and she locates their stories and readings of transculturalism within/on this land. Reflecting on what these very different small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2006) tell us about transculturalism and cosmopolitanism, it is clear that both illustrate concepts that seep into the everyday, often rendered invisible, but nevertheless they create fissures that can be found if researchers look hard enough. Transculturalism can be seen in urban secondary English classrooms in Minnesota (see Chapter 12 by Crampton, Lewis, & Tierney) as much as in images drawn for researchers visiting rural Uganda (see Chapter 4 by Early & Kendrick; Kendrick, 2015). During our discussions leading to this book, pinning down how different cultures, faiths and ways of being and knowing (Vasudevan, 2011) circulate, shift and alter when they relocate to a new place became a predominant way of thinking about the notion of transculturalism.

In the book, cosmopolitanism represents a process of identity formation that entails gathering up and assembling disparate properties into an identity that people project out into the world (Gee, 2003/2007). There is an assembling and materializing process (Burnett, 2015) that has become naturalized through participatory architectures like Snapchat and Instagram wherein young people project identities as a composite of different ideologies, discourses and forms of becoming. Cosmopolitanism has been taken up by a variety of scholars (Stornaiuolo et al., 2011; Vasudevan, 2011), and we view it as a generative way of talking about how people forge identities. Framed as a commitment to humanity over nationhood (Nussbaum, 1996, 2008), cosmopolitanism has conventionally signified globally oriented beliefs, convictions and goals as opposed to being rooted in one nation. There was a rarefied, almost elite tenor to the word ‘cosmopolitanism’ that has changed with the passage of time. Presently, the term exudes more of an active, animated feeling as in living, enacting, doing cosmopolitanism as opposed to a normative sense of being cosmopolitan. Hansen (2011) talks about people’s capacities as cosmopolitan agents. Vertovec (2007) and Blommaert and Rampton (2011) talk about ‘superdiversity’ as in the ways in which texts, ideas and people rapidly circulate that relates to our definition, but we prefer to think of cosmopolitanism as a verb – like Street’s argument that “culture is signifying process – the active construction of meaning” (Street, 1995, p. 23). We think of cosmopolitanism as a forging or framing of identity in complex ways and as projecting identities (Gee, 2003/2007) through linguistic, discursive, and multimodal practices in physical and online spaces. The children, youth and adults presented in this book do not lead simple, uniform lives – no one does – and the ways in which they exert agency through technology and social media (Collier; Wohlwend & Medina, this volume), with materials (Honeyford et al.; Kuby; Early & Kendrick, this volume), through practices (Darvin & Norton; Stornaiuolo & Jung; Yaman Ntelioglou; Smith et al.; Street, this volume), within place and space (Whitty, this volume), and through emotion and affect (Crampton et al., this volume) throw into relief how transliterate, critically cosmopolitan (Hawkins, 2014) and culturally diverse people really are when researchers listen and document their lives.

Hawkins (2014) calls for critical cosmopolitan education. Such a perspective demands that not only do we learn about difference and others in this world but also that we engage in ethical integration with them. Hawkins describes such pedagogies as opportunities where youth have equitable and communicative exchanges with global peers. Within these exchanges they learn about how people live their lives and develop relationships of caring and trust with each other. If such contexts are scaffolded with what Hawkins refers to as critical reflection, we might offer global learning (learning about) through collaboration (learning with) that leads to dispositions of caring and openness (learning from and for), as global affiliations and citizenships are reimagined.

Moving to Cosmopolitan Learning

Cosmopolitan learning depends on “a pedagogically open framework that explores the dynamics of cultural interactions in an on-going fashion” (Bernstein, 1990, p. 267). In Bernsteinian terms, this ‘openness’ would suggest a weaker (less hierarchic, less fixed) classification of what counts as valued knowledge, and the loosening of centralized control over how that knowledge is to be relayed (Bernstein, 1990).

Insider knowledge matters and is represented through minoritized voices in this collection (Smith et al.; Yaman Ntelioglou). These authors present voices that are directly connected to specific communities. However, that said, as editors, we are focusing on providing a collection of scholars who believe in building new affirmative directions (see also Orellana, 2016). So while we acknowledge an imbalance in the minoritized voices represented in this volume, we also underline the vantage points chosen by all contributors who in essence are highlighting new and innovative strategies engaging powerfully with issues of decolonizing theory and practice. This book argues that we live in an age when, by definition, the teaching of language and literacy is transcultural in nature.

Turner (2002) suggests that cosmopolitanism “does not need a strong or hot version of otherness, because its own identity is not profoundly shaped in conflict with others” (p. 57). Indeed, Rizvi’s (2009) ‘cosmopolitan learning’ aims to encourage reflexive responsibilities about the changing relationships within and between national borders. It could therefore carry the potential to appeal to democratic participation within a national democracy. Turner (2002) provides an elaboration of this kind of cosmopolitan virtue which proceeds on the assumption that “the ability to respect others requires a certain distance from one’s own culture, namely an ‘ironic distance’” (p. 55). He explains that “cosmopolitan virtue also requires self-reflexivity with respect to both our own cultural context and other cultural values” (p. 57).

For children of migrants, there is so much more complexity, contradiction and outright oppression/repression within the migrant community that gets written off, ignored or even ‘celebrated’ by white liberals who want all ethnic cultures to be seen as having equal valency. There is plenty wrong with mainstream white hegemonic culture, but there are also plenty of problems with varied, local, regional and national ethnic cultures, and giving up on the possibilities of ‘human’ values is as much a problem as their uncritical application. For example, whether it is an analysis of inequality or a moral panic around Muslim fundamentalism the question that begs to be asked is: How can the notion of cosmopolitanism/transculturalism be used as a theoretical tool to improve the lives of students and educators alike?

Nesting Literacy and Language in Transculturalism and Cosmopolitan Flows

With dramatic environmental changes, financial variabilities, rapid technological innovations and global terrorism, literacy and language researchers have seen fit to reframe literacy to complicate how people communicate meanings. Scholars have done so in a variety of ways: by acknowledging the role of objects with a posthuman turn (Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016); examining the emotional (Lewis & Tierney, 2013) and embodied (Leander & Boldt, 2013) nature of literacy; and recognizing that there needs to be a process of unknowing what we know as a way forward (Vasudevan, 2011). Thinking about the linguistic/semiotic tensions, merging language research with literacy research throws into relief different framings of meaning-making across sites. As editors we take seriously this fundamental difference in theoretical and methodological approaches and in response we apply Appadurai’s (1996) conceptual framing of globalization to structure the collection. Capturing a series of flows and disjunctures that course through meaning making and communication makes literacy and language research more entangled within our global contemporaneity (Somerville, 2008). Small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2006) are always and everywhere situated within larger structures that provide a wider optic to see the issues at stake in literacy and language teaching and learning. The New London Group (NLG) (1996) captured these flows and disjunctures through their multiliteracies pedagogy by arguing that literacy is as much about linguistic and cultural diversity as it is about multimodal and semiotic designs. As a collective, we capture these entangled flows, disjunctures and mobilities that circulate and run through literacy as scapes (Appadurai, 1996). Literacy seldom stands alone because it is so often nested within modern realities like media, technology, trends, contemporary ideas and discourses, and even finance. Chapters in this book touch on every one of these realities and often combine one or two.

According to theorists across the fields of language and linguistics and literacy studies, in these times of globalization, what we understand as ‘local’ should account for ‘superdiversity’ (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2007), migration, global technological networks and the plural identities and the funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005) that arise from transnational movements. To understand local and global dynamics, attention needs to be paid to global cultural flows so that we can reimagine schools as cosmopolitan spaces. Scholars who have contributed to this collection discuss such issues and tensions as: 1) overlaps and divergences of the concept of cosmopolitanism; 2) research accounts of how individuals materialize cosmopolitanism in their production of texts; 3) linguistic diversity, literacies and creating inclusive, cosmopolitan spaces; and 4) teaching and learning through multimodality to reimagine transcultural spaces. All four issues and tensions are present to varying extents and certainly play out in all of the chapters in the book.

Appadurai (1996) claims that the ‘global now’ is less about being bounded to a national identity and more about how identities materialize nationalities across spaces and places. As he articulates it, “ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 5). In this collection, authors present: an online participatory writing project that spans across developing nations and first-world nations to children living in poverty in rural towns outside of Delhi to young children in Missouri engaged in multimodal compositions to adults sharing names in Ethiopia. Such stories as these and many more anchor the local in the global. As a group, contributors and the author of the preface move and reflect on how the global and local serve as liminal, fluid spaces where ordinary people use language and symbolic systems to communicate and to represent themselves.

For the purpose of our work as literacy and language scholars, we have chosen to situate the debate about the utility of a vision that builds on cosmopolitanism, transculturalism and previously the much-used term ‘multiculturalism’ within the context of empowerment. There has been an upsurge in debates about cosmopolitanism not only as a philosophical ideal but also as a socially grounded concept animating individual or collective stances towards world openness. According to Leinius (2014), cosmopolitanism continues to symbolize a privileged discourse being articulated by primarily Western scholars and researchers while the voices of the East are not heard as much.

Delanty (2006) distinguishes critical cosmopolitanism as an emerging direction in social theory that reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. From this perspective the onus is on the internal developmental process within the social world rather than globalization. Delanty further describes critical cosmopolitan sociology as a methodology that makes sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities. These definitions connect well with Appadurai’s (1996) scapes with their emphases on ‘a world of flows’. That is, larger global forces are in relation to each, they are entangled and to separate them out understates, even elides, the urgency to see them as networked and amalgamated. We feel that this collection goes some way in illustrating the entangled nature of flows, disjunctures and mobilities within small stories about literacy and language learning.

Looking across the Collection

Throughout the collection, scholars discuss the ‘crosscutting’ that their participants did in physical and virtual spaces to mediate and indeed project their identities. Many of the research studies present families and individuals who moved to Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom from other parts of the world. These migrations force people to adapt to the politics, culture and social practices of new environments “which are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 6). Social media such as Facebook and Twitter and other platforms are probably the best examples of speaking directly to this imagination by allowing people to talk across nations, cultures and religions broadly speaking and families, friends and networks more particularly (Rowsell & Burgess, 2014).

Reflecting on chapters in this collection, we adopt Appadurai’s (1996) notion of ‘scape’ as a way of grouping chapters and anchoring them within a core argument that transculturalism and cosmopolitanism involve being local while also being aware of a global land ‘out there’ ready to constitute dynamic identities with all of their linguistic, racial, cultural, place-based complexities. Viewing language and literacy through a scapes optic adds to broader concepts like media or finance, therefore exposing fluid, irregular shapes that drive mobility, or as Appadurai describes it:

these terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors, nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities…

(p. 33)

In Appadurai’s (1996) terms, sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times
• Ethnoscapes
• Technoscapes
• Ideoscapes
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index