Cultural Practices of Literacy

Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power

Victoria Purcell-Gates, Victoria Purcell-Gates

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149470
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Educación general

This volume presents case studies of literacy practices as shaped by culture, language, community, and power. Covering a range of contexts and exploring a number of relevant dimensions in the evolving picture of literacy as situated, multiple, and social, the studies are grouped around four overarching themes:
*Language, Literacy, and Hegemony;
*The Immigrant Experience: Language, Literacies, and Identities;
*Literacies In-/Out-of-School and On the Borders; and
*New Pedagogies for New Literacies.It is now generally recognized that literacy is multiple and woven within the sociocultural lives of communities, but what is not yet fully understood is how it is multiple--how this multiplicity plays out across and within differing sociocultural contexts. Such understanding is critical for crafting school literacy practices in response to the different literacy sets brought to school by different learners. Toward this end it is necessary to know what those sets are composed of. Each of the case studies contributes to building this knowledge in new and interesting ways. As a whole the book provides a rich and complex portrait of literacy-in-use. Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power advances sociocultural research and theory pertaining to literacydevelopment as it occurs across school and community boundaries and cultural contexts and in and out of school. It is intended for researchers, students, professionals across the field of literacy studies and schooling, including specialists in family literacy, community literacy, adult literacy, critical language studies, multiliteracies, youth literacy, international education, English as a second language, language and social policy, and global literacy.

Chapter 1

Complicating the Complex

Victoria Purcell-Gates

University of British Columbia

A revolutionary paradigm shift has taken place over the last 10 or so years in literacy studies and literacy educational theory, and this shift has complicated and challenged notions of what literacy is. The ongoing pedagogical and theoretical debate regarding how people develop literacy is affected by this theoretical shift in new and interesting ways. Previously, albeit from differing disciplinary bases, the prevailing beliefs about the nature of literacy converged around the notion that literacy is reading and writing, that is, people who can read or write are literate, and those who cannot are not literate, or illiterate. Relatedly, people became literate by learning to read and write in school, or within some type of intentionally instructive context. People who did not have access to schooling, thus, were not literate in the generally agreed-upon sense.

In retrospect, this was a simple world. It is true that there was disjunction, if not disagreement, on what was meant by literacy level, or degree of reading or writing ability that was needed to qualify someone as literate—able to read and write. However, this issue was of import, for the most part, only to those compiling statistics for national and international policy and political purposes.

Although this rather straightforward and simplistic (or at least, simplified) view is still prevalent, I believe, among the majority of educators, political leaders, and the general public, another, more complex one has emerged. As for all complex theories and paradigms, this one reflects the convergence and cross-fertilization of experience, theorizing, and research from a number of disciplines and takes unique form within each. Within the literacy studies and education discipline(s), we have experienced this “new” perspective on literacy as falling under such labels as multiple literacies, literacy as social practice (or social literacies), and new literacies. The basic, most obvious distinction, and one to be recognized immediately on the surface lexical/morphemic level, is the recognition that literacy is now pluralized to literacies. Many books and articles have been, and are presently being, written, theorizing, explaining, describing, and arguing this multiple and social literacy paradigm. I limit my discussion here first to a brief gloss of the basic principles of this theoretical perspective on literacy and, second, to raising some issues that result from this new view that appear to complicate and add complexity to how we think about the relationships between schooling, literacy, and literacy development.

THEORETICAL MOVES TOWARD THE COMPLEX

The move toward considering literacy as multiple must first be viewed within the larger theoretical shifts over the last half century. We have moved with philosophers along an epistemological path from Enlightenment theories, through Marxism, structuralism, and modernism to postmodernism and poststructuralism. From a belief in the autonomy of the individual mind and its ability to understand an objective reality, the structuralist and modernist perspectives led us to view individuals as shaped by dominant systems such as the economy or religion. These so-called “grand narrative” frames positioned individuals as subject to powerful forces that crossed contexts and did not recognize in the lens such factors as individual agency.

The ideological (Althusser, 1969, 1971) and social reproduction models (Bourdieu, 2001; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) were heavily influenced by structuralism (Canagarajah, 1999). Although Marxism gave control over the individual to the material dimension, structuralism moved us to view the individual as constructed more by the social symbol system.¹ Within these models, schools were seen as agents of social and cultural reproduction, ensuring the continued grasp on social and political power, status, and privilege by those who held it, at the cost of ongoing marginalization of the underclasses of the world.

According to an analysis by Canagarajah (1999), structuralism cut loose the Marxist tie of the institutions to the economy with its focus on linguistic mediation. This led to increased awareness and focus on the fluidity and relative independence of institutions from larger, basic forces. It still held, however, that linguistic and discourse codes were socially constructed and beyond the control of the individual. Thus, looking back, we can see the path we have traveled epistemologically from the assumption of complete autonomy of the individual and individual thought of the Enlightenment frame, to the view of thought and development as constructed through socially constructed codes and discourses.

¹Of course, language and discourse never exist outside of an economic system, and this differentiation of structuralism from Marxism is seen as a specification as it related to issues of discourse, rather than a repudiation of Marxist theory.

The deterministic and generalistic aspects of structuralism have given way in more recent decades of postmodernism and poststructuralism to theories of specificity, localism, and indeterminateness. This is the result of powerful critiques of structuralist perspectives by subjects representing positions of marginality who argue that structuralist analyses continue to privilege dominant discourses and ideologies and leave little room for other realities that are often hybrid, flexible, and fluid (Foucault, 1980; hooks, 1989). In the postmodernist world, grand theories no longer hold, and local contexts are seen as wholes, providing ground for “little theories” that reflect local cultural contexts. As I will discuss further in the last chapter, this theoretical move has opened the door to greater exploration of individual agency and resistance as regard linguistic and discourse domination.

Literacy as Multiple and Social

It was within the epistemological landscape just described—somewhere between structuralist and poststructuralist theorizing—that the notion that literacy, itself, could be viewed as more than just a unidimensional construct, free of contextual constraint. Street’s (1984) book, Literacy in Theory and Practice, was among the first of the scholarly works to be taken up by educational theorists that challenged the dominant view of literacy as singular and autonomous. Street, a British anthropologist, challenged the assertions of language theorists (Hildyard & Olson, 1978; Olson, 1977) and social anthropologists (Goody, 1968, 1977) that literacy itself was responsible for such cognitive development as the development of rationality and the ability to think in decontextualized ways. Drawing on his work with non-western cultures, Street argued that literacy itself does not possess isolable qualities nor confer isolable, decontextualized abilities. Rather, literacy is always embedded within social institutions and, as such, is only knowable as it is defined and practiced by social and cultural groups. As such, literacy is best considered an ideological construct as opposed to an autonomous skill, separable from contexts of use. Its ideological nature, according to this view, reflects the fact that literacy is always constructed and enacted within social and political contexts and subject to the implications of differing power relationships. It is best, Street suggested, to think of literacies rather than literacy. Being ideologically bound, different literacies are recognized by the established institutions of time and place as more and less legitimate. Some literacies provide access to power and material well-being, others are marked as substandard and deficient.

Within this frame, there are many literacies—discursive literacy practices with their texts and purposes for reading and writing those texts²—and each of these is shaped by and interpreted within the sociocultural/sociolinguistic contexts within which they occur (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1984, 1995). This highlights the fact that different texts are written and read for varied purposes within specific sociocultural/sociolinguistic contexts by literate people. Meaning in written language, as for oral, is never autonomous, and free of contextual constraints (Bakhtin, 1981). From this perspective, literacy development is not seen as linear, building in skill and fluency toward one type of literacy, nor as hierarchical (e.g., low, functional literacy to high, educated literacy). Rather, it is seen as multiple, occurring across the complex plane of life itself.

Within this frame of literacy as multiple, and socially and culturally bound, school literacy, or academic literacy, is but one of many literacies. The forms and functions of academic literacy are shaped by the social and cultural suppositions and beliefs of the academic community. The academic community is intricately linked to state dictates, composed by the powerful and enfranchised, who decide which literacy is to be valued, taught, and assessed. By nature of the social and political power wielded by this community, the manners and modes for how literacy is to be defined and assessed throughout sanctioned society is decided within the frame of literacy as autonomous and academic, rendering this practice of literacy (academic, schooled literacy) perhaps the clearest example of the ideological nature of all literacies.

Research Spawned by the Construct of Multiple Literacies as Social Practice

With this new lens through which to view literacy, a number of research studies were launched to elaborate on the theory and to explore its ramifications. The everyday practices of literacy were now interesting, and several to-become-foundational studies were conducted, documenting what came to be known as local literacies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998), literacy practices, and their embedded literacy events (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanič, 2000; Purcell-Gates, 1996; Purcell-Gates, Degener, Jacobson, & Soler, 2002). Researchers documented people reading store signs while purchasing food and clothing for their families, reading print on food containers as part of nurturing their children, reading notices of meetings while participating in local governance of their communities, reading news articles as part of their developing a political stance in preparation for upcoming elections, reading essays in church materials while participating in their religious lives, reading bus schedules for transportation to work sites as part of providing for their economic well-being, reading personal letters from friends and relatives while maintaining personal relationships across time and space, and seeking relaxation at day’s end by reading novels, magazines, poetry, and short stories.

² Here I focus on reading and writing, or print literacy. However, this view is embedded in a larger frame for literacy that includes other semiotic systems, including oral language mode. This is not to privilege print literacy over other literacies like visual literacy, digital literacy, or oral literacy. It merely reflects a bounded area for purposes of research related to practice (teaching of reading and writing) that is of personal interest to me.

Similarly, research documented people regulating their lives by writing memos, reaching out to friends with written ...