Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities

Religion in Young Lives

Vally Lytra, Dinah Volk, Eve Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317581260
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities showcases innovative research at the interface of religion and multilingualism, offering an analytical focus on religion in children and adolescents' everyday lives and experiences. The volume examines the connections between language and literacy practices and social identities associated with religion in a variety of sites of learning and socialization, namely homes, religious education classes, places of worship, and faith-related schools and secular schools. Contributors engage with a diverse set of complex multiethnic and religious communities, and investigate the rich multilingual, multiliterate and multi-scriptal practices associated with religion which children and adolescents engage in with a range of mediators, including siblings, peers, parents, grandparents, religious leaders, and other members of the religious community. The volume is organized into three sections according to context and participants: (1) religious practices at home and across generations, (2) religious education classes and places of worship and (3) bridging home, school and community. The edited book will be a valuable resource for researchers in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, socio-linguistics, intercultural communication, and early years, primary and secondary education.

PART I Religious Practices at Home and across Generations

1 Home Worship Service/Bible Reading/Reading Lesson: Syncretic Teaching and Learning in a Puerto Rican Family

Dinah Volk

DOI: 10.4324/9781315740805-1

While many Latino families in the United States are defined in schools and in popular discourse by their alleged deficits and constraints (Flores 2005; Villenas and Deyhle 1999), there is substantial research that frames them as active agents who seize opportunities, make choices, and access resources to resist the poverty and racism many confront (Arzubiaga et al. 2000; García and García 2012; Nieto 2012). For some families, religion can support agency and provide spiritual, human, and skill- and knowledge-based resources.

This chapter will examine some ways that one Latino family—living in the Midwest and belonging to a Spanish-speaking, Pentecostal church ¹ —drew on religious and secular texts in Spanish and English in interactions at home that integrated literacy teaching and learning with religious lessons and school events. The protagonist was Benny Santos, ² a six-year-old bilingual Puerto Rican, who used these texts to enrich his emerging bilingualism and biliteracy, often with the expert mediation of his grandmother, Nydia. Syncretizing a range of resources and privileging none, they co-constructed literacy and moral learning. For Benny and his grandmother, the languages, texts, and practices formed a single rich reserve of resources that they drew on to enact their religious beliefs, communicate, construct meaning, and resist their constraints jointly and with expertise.

Concepts Guiding the Investigation

The data I discuss here were drawn from an investigation into the literacy lives of two six-year-old first graders, Benny and another boy, Miguel, at home and in school and community settings (Volk 2011). This work was guided by a critical sociocultural perspective that frames human activity as situated in social and historical contexts and reveals issues of power and privilege. Constraining social forces are addressed, as well as participants’ agency (Lewis et al. 2007). Investigations of literacy from this perspective often explore multiple literacies, the diverse meaning-making practices that people construct in the contexts of their lives (Li 2008). Recent research urges that such studies be multi-sited, describing literacies “that flow in and out of context[s]” (Pahl and Burnett 2013, 7) conceived as linked, permeable, and dynamic locations.

My work on syncretism, much of it with colleagues (Gregory et al. 2013; Volk 2013), also provided guidance. Grounded in anthropology, syncretism refers to the process of social, cultural, and cognitive transformation as people blend resources from distinct contexts and create new forms and practices. This highlights agency and creativity as people bring diverse elements together, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes in contradictory ways.

The research on Latino families was also relevant. While some educational materials propagate a deficit perspective, framing Latino families as deviations from a White, English-speaking norm, there is substantial research describing families’ strengths, funds of knowledge, and support for children’s school learning (García and García 2012; González et al. 2005; Olivos et al. 2011; Zentella 2005). Writing about Latino families, Arzubiaga et al. (2000) argue that they “can and do make choices that often maximize the resources available to them despite their ecological constraints” (94–95).

Some research has closely analyzed the literacy teaching strategies used by Latino families (Janes and Kermani 2001; Moreno and Cisneros-Cohernour 1998; Reese and Gallimore 2000). This work suggests that Latino parents tend to teach as they were taught, focusing on letter naming and sounds, emphasizing repetition, memorization, and decoding accuracy rather than meaning. Research on teaching practices with diverse families in several different religions (Kapitzke 1995; McMillon and Edwards 2004; Moore 2011) has found an emphasis on the same strategies. In addition, Kapitzke (1995), in her study of literacy in an Adventist church, noted a contradiction between church teachings emphasizing personal engagement with texts and adults’ assertion of a “privileged and authorised” meaning for children to accept (253).

Methods for Data Collection and Analysis

To understand the children’s literacy lives, I used ethnographic methods to study literacy as a sociocultural practice (Barton et al. 2000). Data were collected for one year using participant observation in the classroom, homes, and community, as well as interviews with the teacher, parents, and community members. I conducted audio recordings between January and June during monthly visits to the homes, and the parents completed network maps indicating the people who mediated their child’s developing literacy and the community locations where they practiced literacy.

Two cultural insiders, both Puerto Rican and one the classroom teacher, participated in the analysis of selected data excerpts with me and the study’s consultant. (I am a White, Spanish-speaking teacher educator who has lived in Latin America, and the consultant, an education professional and researcher, is originally from Argentina. We both have worked and conducted research in the city’s Puerto Rican community.) The memoirs of Latina writers (Alvarez, cited in McClellen 2000; Ortiz Cofer 1990) added to our understandings of the data, as did the insights of Puerto Rican and Mexican-American research assistants.

To analyze the participants’ construction of literacy, I drew on the tenets of linguistic ethnography, which asserts that “close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in everyday activity” (Rampton et al. 2004, 2). To do so I used a multilayered process (Gregory and Williams 1998) to embed the language use of Benny and his grandmother (inner layer) in literacy events (middle layer), which are embedded in social and historical contexts (outer layer). Consistent with a critical perspective, the identification of themes synthesized my perspectives, the participants’, and those of cultural insiders (Anderson 1989; Orellana 2007). For this chapter, I provide information on Benny’s school, home, and church contexts, analyze one literacy event during which Benny read from a Spanish Bible, and discuss elements of all three layers.

The Broader Contexts

The Latino community in the city where Benny lives has grown rapidly, increasing by 13.8% between 2000 and 2010 (Gratereaux 2013). Latinos represented 10% of the city’s total population by 2010 (U.S. Census 2010) and are now, at 17%, the largest so-called minority group in the United States (Krogstad 2014). As of August 2014, the city’s school district provided services to 3,091 children identified as English Language Learners, who made up 8% of enrollment. Of those, 75% were speakers of Spanish as a home language, and 44% of the Spanish speakers were Puerto Rican (Multilingual Multicultural Education Office, Midwest City School District, email to author).

The Latino community in this city and across the country is characterized by the phenomenon of “Protestantization” (Pantoja 2001, 168). A report by the Pew Research Center (2014) notes that in 2013, 24% of Latino adults were former Catholics and had become evangelical Protestants or unaffiliated. Specifically, 55% of adult Latinos in the United States were Catholic, down from 67% in 2010, and 22% were Protestant, up eight percentage points. Of those who identified as Protestant, 16% were evangelical, up from 12% in the same three years.

The Pentecostal Movement has been described as “the single-most significant development in twentieth-century Christianity” (Reid 1990, 885). Pentecostals are evangelical Protestants who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God and that the personal experience of being saved through acceptance of and communication with the Holy Spirit is central. As a consequence of the former belief, Bible reading is an important element of church services and a frequent at-home activity. The director of Benny’s church’s religious school explained: Participation and oral expression through personal testimonies about times when Jesus has answered prayers reflect the second belief and are common elements of church services, as is repetitive and collective oral prayer and singing (Reid 1990). For exampl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Prologue
• Introduction
• PART I Religious Practices at Home and across Generations
• 1 Home Worship Service/Bible Reading/Reading Lesson: Syncretic Teaching and Learning in a Puerto Rican Family
• 2 Easter Celebrations at Home: Acquiring Symbolic Knowledge and Constructing Identities
• 3 Coming of Age: Amish Heritage Literacy Practices of Rumspringa, Adult Baptism, and Shunning
• PART II Religious Education Classes and Places of Worship
• 4 Socialization into Religious Sensation in Children’s Catholic Religious Instruction
• 5 “The Responsive Reading” and Reading Responsively: Language, Literacy, and African American Student Learning in the Black Church
• 6 Heavenly Entextualisations: The Acquisition and Performance of Classical Religious Texts
• 7 Moving across Languages, Literacies, and Schooling Traditions
• 8 Children’s Representations of the Temple in Text and Talk in a Tamil Hindu/Saiva Faith Community in London
• PART III Bridging Home, School and Community
• 9 Joseph … Yousouf: Changing Names, Navigating Spaces, Articulating Identities
• 10 The Semiotic Ideologies of Yiddish and English Literacies in Hasidic Homes and Schools in Brooklyn
• 11 Engendering ‘Dispositions’ through Communicative and Semiotic Practices: Insights from the Nishkam Nursery Project
• 12 Supporting Children’s Learner Identities through Faith: Ghanaian Pentecostal and Bangladeshi Muslim Communities in London
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index