Inquiring Through Community: Reframing Literacy Practices Through Collaborative Inquiry

• In Event: Activist Literacies: Theorizing Literacy in and Across Communities of Practice

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the ways a third grade class of students, their teacher, and I joined together through inquiry to investigate issues deeply impacting the students’ school and surrounding community. Specifically, this paper proposes Community As Curriculum (CAC) (Cummins, 2006) as a framework for understanding the literacy practices involved by making the classroom, school, and home community the “texts” of study. In other words, CAC raises questions about what happens when the contexts of where the students live and attend school become the content for learning literacy in the classroom. Furthermore, this paper suggests the need to value the various features embedded in this kind of work as legitimate forms of literacy practice.

This paper draws on critical (Freire & Macedo, 2003; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993) and feminist epistemologies (Collins, 2000; Dickens, 2000; Harding, 2004; Hollingsworth et. al, 1993) to understand the social, political, and cultural implications for teaching literacy through CAC in the classroom. Essential features of CAC include: 1) Viewing one another as being linked through conscientization (Freire, 1993), which involves understanding relationships as a vital source for developing the production of knowledge; 2) Recognizing how the built environment shapes the social processes located within it, which requires acknowledging how identity is linked to place and how learning must nurture this relationship; and 3) Observing and critically engaging the relationship between the local and the translocal.

The students and myself formed an inquiry community to investigate questions related to social justice and positive change, as identified by the students themselves. Over the course of the year, students formed different committees and researched topics such as historical accounts of the neighborhood, homeless shelters, and the refurbishing of a community park; their literacy inquiries included historical research, interviews, photography, and documentary-making. Through analysis of student written work, student-produced video clips and photographs, and class conversations, I examine how a class of third grade student embraced literacy learning through CAC. The third graders carried meanings of their inquiry through a deep sense of place as they connected their inquiries to historical and cultural events significant to their community. They collected testimonies and conducted interviews to enrich their work and form a collective base of lived experiences. The students regularly engaged in “life sharing” and viewed this practice as a sacred and valuable part of their research praxis. By tracing literacy practices such as these through the students’ participation in CAC, I seek to widen the definition of literacy, and expand its conceptualization to include the intellectual domains inherent in collaborative inquiry.

Author

• Lenny Sánchez, University of Missouri