Private Practices
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Private Practices

Girls Reading Fiction And Constructing Identity

Meredith Cherland University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

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eBook - ePub

Private Practices

Girls Reading Fiction And Constructing Identity

Meredith Cherland University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

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About This Book

First Published in 1994. The study of literacy no longer focuses solely on psychological processes. In the past ten years, literacy has been reconceptualized as a social practice, or rather as social practices that make up the fabric of daily life. Using an anthropological perspective, Private Practices examines the broad fictional reading of middle-class pre-teen girls, and offers fresh insights into the place of literacy, both at home and at school, in the construction of gender. The author provides a wealth of evidence to support the central assumption of the book: Gender is a cultural and social construction, not a biological given. Gender is something that people create while interacting with each other in all the practices of their daily lives, including their literacy practices. The book also provides critical analysis and commentary concerning the role that reading fiction plays in cultural reproduction. In the hope that deeper knowledge of literacy as a social practice will support social transformation and eventually social justice, the author suggests compelling reasons for the fact that girls read more fiction and different fiction than do boys.

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Information

Year
2013
ISBN
9781135342654
Subtopic
Sociology
Edition
1
Chapter 1
A Constructed World
I stood at the book table at morning recess time. Kids were milling around this sixth-grade classroom, eating and visiting, strolling out to their lockers in the hallway and back again. I watched Leah and Sarah talking at their desks. Both had permed, chin-length hair, parted on the side and clipped with a pretty barrette. They wore pastel sweaters with knee-length black pants, spotless white socks and white runners. Leah had an apple, Sarah a muffin.
I straightened out the books on the table and tried to make the covers visible. Matt Peterson, the teacher, had pushed the table right up against the wall under a bulletin board displaying three large laminated illustrations of Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three. Matt had drawn the pictures himself, using pastels. Done in shades of rust and green and gold and brown, these all showed the character of Taran on horseback, fierce and heroic, drawn sword in hand, battling several ugly creatures at a time.
Leah wandered over to the table and picked up a paperback with a photo on the front. The title said Satin Slippers #1: To Be a Dancer. She told me, ‘I’ve read this one. You can get all these Satin Slippers books at Coles bookstore. I have the first six, and I’m going to be getting #7. My mother thought they looked good, so she started buying them for me.’
Sarah joined us. ‘She did? She just bought them for you?
‘Yuh,’ said Leah. ‘We were in the store, and she just said to me, “Oh, Leah, this looks like a great set!” And when I got to reading them, I liked them too, but first my mother just fell in love with the cover of them. She bought me the first three because she liked the cover so much.’
I looked at the cover. It was made from a photograph of a tall, slim young woman in pink tights and leotard with a gauzy skirt and toe shoes. She stood by a tall window in a graceful pose, long blonde hair flowing, arms extended. It was a hazy photo, in soft focus.
Sarah said, ‘I read this one, the first one, and it was okay. But I just love the cover too. I stare and stare.’
The end-of-recess bell rang and the two girls moved to their desks with everyone else. It was silent reading time. Sarah took Satin Slippers #1 with her and placed it flat on her desk. She sat, hands in her lap, gazing at the cover.
How does a researcher explain the meaning of a scene like this one? She writes a book. This is a book about gender and reading. It is about gender as a cultural construction, and about the reading of fiction as it happens within cultures. It is about the social negotiation of gender, and about the reading of fiction as a social practice. It is intended to engage those concerned with education in a consideration of how children’s lives, and their own work, are created and shaped by cultural forces.
This is a book about seven girls, and the year during which they were all 11 and 12 years old. It is about the affluent North American homes they came from, the school they attended, and the world they lived in. It is about the books they read, and about how they read them. This is a story of childhood, of aesthetic pleasure and psychic pain, and of growing up in a particular sociocultural context.
This is a story that I have constructed. I am the story’s narrator, the person who tells the story from a certain vantage point and with a certain voice. I am the person who has chosen the events that comprise the story. I have arranged them and shadowed them with my meanings to support my own values and serve my own vested interests and intents. In this way, I have done what every researcher and every storyteller does: I have seen people and events in the light of my own belief systems, experiences, and discourses, and I have told what I hope is a compelling and authentic story that is consistent with what I believe about the world.
A researcher cannot be ‘objective’. Yet she does have choices about whether, and how, to make her political and other beliefs visible to those who will read her work. What follows is an explanation of my theories — that have shaped this book — and my ways of talking about the world.
A View of Reality
What is real? Where in the world does meaning reside? Where and how do people assert agency in everyday life? I believe that reality is different for different people, and that meaning is created by people in social interaction. This sociological theory of symbolic interactionism suggests that both reality and the social order are created by people as a process of joint action (Blumer, 1969).
According to symbolic interactionism, people live in a world of objects which become meaningful according to how others relate to them — according to how others act in ways that reveal the meanings they attach to those objects. The early-twentieth-century sociologist George Herbert Mead put it this way (1934): living things are involved in relationships of mutual determination with the environment and are not merely responsive to the preexisting world around them. In other words, living things negotiate the world’s meaning together. Working from these assumptions, when I enter schools and classrooms as a researcher, I expect to see people negotiating meaning, and in that process constructing their shared social and cultural reality.
I expect to see people — in interaction — creating a context for real events, and I expect to see the language events they create in turn creating the context. Thus I see reality as reflexive. I believe that while a social order exists, ‘its existence always appears within interaction’ (Mehan and Wood, 1975, p. 184). That is to say that most of the time, people feel and experience the privileges and the restrictions of their place within the larger social order in their interactions with other people. It is not, therefore, any abstract knowledge of how society is structured that makes real the existence of societal structure. What makes these structures real are all the concrete details involved in dealing with other people.
And yet, it is clear that while individuals create the social order by enacting it, they do not personally invent it. Not every form of social interaction will do. Particular social interactions are required that display, and are constrained by, a knowledge of ‘an other and prior and independent world’ (ibid. p. 186). The world, in other words, is both of our making and beyond our making (Mehan and Wood, 1975). When I enter elementary-school classrooms, I listen to a conversation, see the larger social order at work in shaping it, and, at the same time try to see how that conversation is in fact creating the social order before my very eyes.
I do not regard what goes on in classrooms as completely improvisational and emergent in nature. Obviously, patterns of belief and action do persist over time. The concept of ‘aligning actions’ (Stokes and Hewitt, 1976) explains this persistence. Aligning actions are actions by which participants align their individual patterns of acting to one another so as to create joint or social acts. Such actions are felt to be ‘normatively appropriate or required, typical and/or probable with respect to the people and the situations involved’. By this account, cultures consist of such recognized and preferred ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. I enter elementary-school classrooms prepared to see the culture influencing people in interaction, and expecting also that I will eventually be able to discern these patterns both of ‘aligning actions’ and of shared cultural meanings. In the case of this study, I expected that some of those shared meanings would concern, and shape, what counts as ‘gender’, and that still others would concern, and shape, ‘reading’.
When you undertake research from this view of reality, it is questions of meaning that become focal. My work grows out of interpretive research traditions in anthropology and sociology, insofar as it focuses on individuals’ meanings. But in addition I scrutinize these meanings, looking for ‘aligning actions’ and asking questions about group identities, group beliefs and group actions. These are the questions of ethnography, which deals with the description of individual cultures.
Ethnography is consistent with a symbolic interactionist view of reality as something that people create in social interaction. Ethnographers spend a good deal of time with the people they study, working to understand and document the shared meanings of the people they describe, as well as attempting to acquire an insider’s viewpoint. Ethnographic traditions in anthropology and sociology have thus required the ethnographer to move beyond his or her own cultural viewpoints to see the world as the people they study see it.
But what happens when an ethnographer approaches the research task with a strong political orientation and an education in Neo-Marxist, feminist and other critical theory? What if the ethnographer sees the culture she is studying in the light of her own personal beliefs about power relations and authority? A category of research called ‘critical ethnography’ has grown out of a dissatisfaction with those social accounts of structures — such as class and patriarchy — in which real human actors never appear, as well as out of a dissatisfaction, on the other hand, with those cultural accounts of human actors in which broad structural constraints, like patriarchy and racism, never appear (Anderson, 1989). Although critical ethnography puts an interpretive focus on human agency and local knowledge, so as to keep the researcher’s pre-existing theory from entirely determining the findings of a study, it also suggests that the participants’ own meanings explain and perpetuate social phenomena.
It is perhaps most illuminating to view the critical ethnographic project as amounting to a ‘negative critique’ performed by an undeniably interested researcher (Brodkey, 1987). Its purpose is to describe consistencies and contradictions, and to give a critique of different perspectives for change. Here, I want to follow Brodkey’s advice in making my own stance clear: I do not pretend to be an unbiased, ‘objective’ and disinterested researcher. I believe that people, both the researched and the researcher, create reality in their social interactions, and that various power relationships, as well as my own vested interests, serve to shape the way I interpret the interactions between the people I study. And I am certain that the story presented here is one story of the interaction of my own views of the world with those of the girls, the families, and the teachers of one individual community.
A View of Reading
This book is not a report located in the mainstream of reading research. Reading research in the past decade has diverged along two distinct paths, each one throwing a different light on reading. The established tradition of reading research, rooted in cognitive psychology, assumes that reading is a universally similar psychological process that exists within the minds of individual people. A newer line of reading research, rooted in anthropology and sociolinguistics, looks at reading as an external, social act, performed by people in interaction and in a particular context. Whereas the disciplines of education and psychology have most often focused on discrete elements of reading and writing skills, and have conceptualized literacy as an individual and autonomous form of technology, anthropology and sociolinguistics, on the other hand, have focused on shared social practices and shared conceptions of reading and writing (Street, 1993). This book forms part of the second line of research.
I do not mean to imply that the two streams of research are neatly divided. Within each line of research there is a range of perspectives. Those who highlight the psychological aspects of reading take a variety of positions on the extent to which the psychology of reading is socially shaped, while those who highlight the social practices that constitute reading take a variety of positions on the extent to which a psychology of reading exists. Each line of research contributes to the creation of a discourse which emphasizes certain characteristics of reading over others.
It is misleading to think of reading as a purely psychological process, but quite profitable, on the other hand, to think of it as a social practice. So much is missed when researchers ignore the proposition that no one reads in a social or cultural vacuum. So much is learned when researchers embrace the idea that every person is part of a culture, part of a society, and that each person participates in cultural norms that determine how they act as readers. Research in anthropology has helped to make the point by making visible the cultural norms that shape reading (Heath, 1983; Fishman, 1991; Bloome and Solsken, 1988), while research in sociolinguistics, for its part, has shown us how people create meaning, create reality if you will, through the conversational structures of their talk, giving evidence both of what reading means to them and of their cultural norms for reading (Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Michaels, 1986; Au, 1980). In work informed by these ideas, Bloome and Bailey (1989) have suggested that literacy ought to be studied as an event — that is to say, as inherently social and ‘other oriented’. In this interpretation, the meaning of literacy is located in the event rather than in people’s heads. By examining the relevant events, we can come to view reading not as a cognitive process but instead as ‘varied forms of visible social, cultural, and political practices’ (Luke and Baker, 1991). This book examines the literacy events and visible practices associated with one particular group of people in order to understand what reading is for them.
Studying literacy events and practices in one particular local setting is a worthwhile enterprise because it deepens and broadens one’s knowledge of what reading can signify. Membership in a community is partly defined by the process of knowing and participating in the shared literacy practices that are characteristic of that community (Barton and Ivanic, 1991). The reason for this is that such local literacy practices are inextricably bound up with the social history and social organization of a community, and reveal much about the relationships that exist among different subgroups. In one early study of literacy in a specific community, Scribner and Cole (1981) constructed an ethnography of literacy among the Vai people of Liberia. They found that many Vai men possessed three forms of literacy: they could read and write in Vai — the language they used at home, in trade, and in other everyday settings; they could read and write in Arabic — which they used in religious contexts; and they had acquired English literacy in order to participate in school. However, few Vai women learned Arabic or English literacy, because they were not allowed to participate in reading the Qur’an, and they did not (with a few exceptions) attend the secondary English schools. Literacy thus both grew out of and contributed to creating the gendered social structure of the community.
In another such study, Heath (1983) constructed the story of how three culturally different communities in the Piedmont Carolinas of the United States came to use language, and of how teachers in those communities learned both to understand the locals’ ways with language and literacy and to legitimate those ways in their classrooms. Two of the communities, ‘Trackton’ and ‘Roadville’, were literate communities, but each had its own history, and its own traditions of structuring, using, and assessing reading and writing. In Trackton — a Black working-class community descended from sharecroppers — children learned an oral tradition of creative storytelling, not tied to any literal facts, that provided an arena for oral competition involving both exaggeration and the stressing of the strength of the individual against an adversary. In Roadville — a White working-class community involved, for four generations, in the work of the local textile mills — children learned an oral tradition of storytelling that involved an assertion of community membership and agreement on acceptable behaviors. Roadville stories were ‘true’ — that is to say, accurate in their retelling of events — and they culminated in a particular point to be made, or lesson to be learned. Trackton and Roadville children came to school with different conceptions of what a ‘story’ is, conceptions that were in conflict with those promoted by the school. It was also the case that, in both Roadville and Trackton, people shared a variety of literary traditions. In Trackton, people did not accumulate printed material but instead read primarily for instrumental and social-interactional purposes. In Roadville, on the other hand, children were given books, and were read to, at home, before they attended school, and yet, despite this, reading and writing in school were seen primarily as appropriate acts of compliance. Neither community’s literacy practices were consistent with the school’s.
Analyzing the educational implications of the acquired knowledge of a community’s shared literacy practices can have positive consequences for children’s lives in schools. In her Piedmont study, Heath found that the school’s literacy practices were a better match for those of the townspeople, Black and White, who had been exposed to many of the cultural discourses available to other mainstream middle-class groups across the United States, and who were not as tied to the local literacy uses of any specific community. It is not surprising that the children of the townspeople found it easier to succeed in school than the children of Trackton and Roadville who had to learn to negotiate the differences between the school’s ways with words and their own. The teachers of Heath’s study were able to use her descriptions of local language and literacy practices to redesign the school’s literacy experiences, at least temporarily, in ways that were less alienating and more meaningful for the children.
Other ethnographies have also centered on a community’s meanings for literacy, and on mismatches between the literacy practices of a community and the literary practices of its schools. For example, in a study of the literacy practices of the Amish people, Andrea Fishman (1991) found that Amish girls would not participate in those school literacy activities, such as dialogue journals, that challenged Amish conceptions of identity and knowledge. Self-assertiveness was regarded as improper for girls, and writing was regarded only as a means of recording information. As a consequence, the girls saw dialogue journals as too self-assertive by their community’s standards, and the kind of writing required by such journals as an improper use of literacy.
More often, it is the school that rejects the literacy practices of the community, rather than the community which rejects the literacy practices of the school. In a study of the vernacular writing of Philadelphia high school students (Camitta, 1993), it was found that teachers thought of students’ writing to each other as deviant or non-standard, and did not see at all the social purposes served by such writing. Because teachers would not recognize its value, vernacular writing went ‘underground’ and became artificially discon...

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