Reframing Sociocultural Research on Literacy

Identity, Agency, and Power

Cynthia Lewis, Patricia E. Enciso, Elizabeth Birr Moje, Cynthia Lewis, Patricia E. Enciso, Elizabeth Birr Moje

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This landmark volume articulates and develops the argument that new directions in sociocultural theory are needed in order to address important issues of identity, agency, and power that are central to understanding literacy research and literacy learning as social and cultural practices. With an overarching focus on the research process as it relates to sociocultural research, the book is organized around two themes: conceptual frameworks and knowledge sources.
*Part I, "Rethinking Conceptual Frameworks, " offers new theoretical lenses for reconsidering key concepts traditionally associated with sociocultural theory, such as activity, history, community, and the ways they are conceptualized and under-conceptualized within sociocultural theory.
*Part II, "Rethinking Knowledge and Representation, " considers the tensions and possibilities related to how research knowledge is produced, represented, and disseminated or shared—challenging the locus of authority in research relationships, asking who is authorized to be a legitimate knowledge source, for what purposes, and for which audiences or stakeholders. Employing the lens of "critical sociocultural research, " this book focuses on the central role of language and identity in learning and literacy practices. It is intended for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in literacy education, social and cultural psychology, social foundations of education, educational anthropology, curriculum theory, and qualitative research in education.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Reframing Sociocultural Research on Literacy

Cynthia Lewis

University of Minnesota

Patricia Enciso

The Ohio State University

Elizabeth Birr Moje

University of Michigan

This volume is an apt example of Volosinov’s (1930/1973) oft-quoted line that the sign is a “site of struggle.” In this case, the struggle represented is over the word sociocultural. Prompted by attention to Vygotskian theory in the early 1960s (see Vygotsky, 1978), the word sociocultural has taken on both great prominence, and, we would assert, some lack of clarity in application. In this volume, we consider what counts as sociocultural theory and research and explore ways of rethinking what counts through examples of our own conceptual, methodological, and empirical work in literacy studies.

As contributors, we came together first in a symposium that was the result of a collaboration grant we had received from the National Academy of Education with funding from the Spencer Foundation. We were compelled to work together because of our common concern that despite two decades of increasing interest in sociocultural research, this research appeared to have little impact on policy. We also shared a reflexive stance about our roles and responsibilities as sociocultural researchers, a stance which shaped many of our conversations about our histories of participation (Rogers, 2003) in relation to participants, sites, and the results of our research—the knowledge produced. This volume grew out of that symposium, which included some of the most challenging and dynamic conversations any of us had ever experienced in the academy. We shared an orientation toward reflexivity, but were a diverse group in terms of race, ethnicity, and social class backgrounds, with very different histories of participation as researchers and scholars. These histories permeated our talk throughout the symposium, and as we moved toward this volume, the concept of histories of participation and the shaping effect they have on the production of knowledge became touch-points for the group in terms of how we view the limits of sociocultural theory as it has been understood and applied.

The contributors to this volume all describe ourselves as sociocultural theorists and researchers. We each turned to sociocultural theory to study aspects of literacy practice and learning because we were dissatisfied with purely cognitive or behavioral explanations of how people use and learn reading and writing. At the same time, we are all interested in questions related to literacy learning, and purely sociological, linguistic, or anthropological theories also failed to address completely the questions we asked. Sociocultural theory seemed to represent a useful merging of disciplines, drawing on education, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics to examine, as Wertsch (1995) argues, “the relationship between human mental functioning, on the one hand, and cultural, historical, and institutional setting, on the other” (p. 56). Sociocultural theory has allowed us to explore the intersection of social, cultural, historical, mental, physical, and, more recently, political aspects of people’s sense-making, interaction, and learning around texts.

In recent years, however, each of the contributors has yearned for versions of sociocultural theory that would better address the issues of power, identity, and agency that we have struggled to interpret and explain in our own work on literacy learning and practice. As a consequence, we have turned to poststructural, cultural, feminist, critical race and discourse theories to inform our understanding of the social, cultural, mental, physical, and political. Most sociocultural research and theory does not attend closely to the issues of power, identity, and agency that we articulate in our own work. Thus, the term sociocultural is a site of struggle, a struggle over what it means to identify oneself as a sociocultural theorist or researcher, and a struggle to integrate new forms of theory that may seem far afield from the origins of sociocultural. And yet, we believe that this struggle, and the continued development of sociocultural theory, is important to pursue for myriad reasons. Moje and Lewis (this volume) call the expanded form of sociocultural theory that does this work “critical sociocultural theory.”

One reason for arguing over and expanding sociocultural theory is that few other theories attempt to account for such a wide range of mediators in human literacy learning and practice. Expanding sociocultural theory, at the same time that we attempt to better specify what it means to do such work, will help to generate more sophisticated and plausible theories to guide education policy and practice. Second, few other theories have shed so much light on the education of people whose language, literacy, and very being have traditionally been marginalized or disenfranchised in schools and societies. Sociocultural theories have refocused education researchers away from often well-intentioned, yet deficit-oriented, research agendas to research programs that seek to understand the social and cultural practices of people from many different backgrounds and experiences (see, e.g., González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Gutiérrez, 2002; Lee, 2006).

Finally, in light of a policy context in the United States and other Western nations that is often dismissive of qualitative sociocultural research, this volume claims the significance of such research and proposes new directions to strengthen its impact on the field of literacy. The official authorization of “scientific” research, narrowly defined, has threatened the viability and impact of sociocultural research. At a time when the state views reading and writing as neutral skill-based behaviors, it is even more important to conduct research that reveals the roles that identity, agency, and power play in the production of knowledge about literacy. We argue that the theoretical frameworks currently informing sociocultural research do not overtly address issues of identity, agency, and power in the production of knowledge. Gutiérrez and Larson (1994) point out that sociocultural theory is very useful for understanding the relationship between culture and learning but that the additional framework of critical pedagogy was needed to fully understand the relationship between power, ideology, and schooling. Making issues of identity, agency, and power visible is essential at this historical moment, a decade later, with political discourse about “scientific” research having persuaded the public that literacy is a neutral skill and that “achievement gaps” can be addressed without attention to histories of power relations or group and individual struggles for identity.

In this introduction, we address such limitations and suggest new directions that involve reenvisioning elements of the research process (such as “site,” “participants,” and “researchers”) as well as components of activity settings (“individuals” or “actors,” “community”). Closer attention to identity, agency, and power can play a role in this process. For example, a close look at power relations in a research setting, may call into question the established roles of “participant” and “researcher.” Participants may bring their knowledge (community knowledge, lived knowledge, text-based knowledge) to a research community, thus interrupting the usual role of participants as people that researchers study. The chapters in this volume challenge the meaning of “participant” and “researcher” and offer fresh ways of enacting these roles that move the production of knowledge about literacy in new directions, while calling attention to the complexities of understanding one another’s histories and interests.

Understanding how research produces knowledge is important because the production of knowledge is integrally related to learning and to the opportunities that young people have for learning. Scholarship on students’ “opportunity to learn” is often concerned with leveling the playing field. By contrast, our contributors are concerned with redesigning the playing field. This process of redesign is undertaken in collaboration with participants. It is not a process that can be done for or to participants. Rather than merely consuming knowledge, participants who collaborate with researchers engage in the production of knowledge.

Because identity, agency, and power are taken up in different ways in contributors’ chapters, we do not want to limit their use by offering, here, specific and fixed definitions. Yet, it is important that we provide general overarching explanations of how we are using the terms. With this goal in mind, power is used throughout the volume, in the Foucauldian sense, as a field of relations that circulate in social networks rather than originating from some point of domination. Foucault saw both resistance and dominance as part of the same discourse constituted in particular regimes of power. Thus, the macro and micro are mutually constitutive. The research that contributors to this volume have conducted suggests that power does not reside only in macrostructures, but rather it is produced in and through individuals as they are constituted in larger systems of power and as they participate in and reproduce those systems.

Identity, from the perspective of social psychology, is often associated with a stable, internal state of being. Although contributors to this volume use the term as it is best applied to their specific theoretical perspectives and research contexts, they all view identity as a fluid, socially and linguis tically mediated construct, one that takes into account the different positions that individuals enact or perform in particular settings within a given set of social, economic, and historical relations (Bucholtz, Liang, & Sutton, 1999; Gee, 1999; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). In this sense, even as attachments or enactments of identity can be generative and creative, they instantiate economic and social structures.

Building on this view of identity, our overarching use of “agency,” as put forth by Moje and Lewis (this volume), is “the strategic making and remaking of selves” within structures of power. Several chapters in this volume reveal the ways in which power circulates to afford degrees of agency that resist structural constraints, and, at times, lead to transformative practices. In line with our commitment to reflexive research practices, we want to underscore the word “strategic” in our definition of agency. We do not see agency as stemming from an internal state of mind, but rather a way of positioning oneself so as to allow for new ways of being, new identities. As Jones and Norris (2005) point out, in the research context, researchers cannot simply observe and ascribe agency to participant actions without also being aware of their own interpretations and explanations of what it means to be agentic in particular situations. Thus, the researcher is part of the process of determining what counts as agency.

Sociocultural Research: Gaps and New Directions

Although there are many strands of sociocultural theory, including activity theory (Engestrom, 1999), distributed cognition (Rogoff, 1995), situated cognition (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997), communities of practice (...