Religion, Literacy, and Power in Education: A Review of Literature

• In Event: Literacies, Identities, and Religious Faith Commitments and Communities in Dialogue

Abstract

Objectives
A literature review of religious literacies and power in educational settings maps research to date on the potential of religious literacy resources and calls for nuanced understandings of power relations in globalized educational contexts.

Theoretical Framework
I situate religious literacies within two complementary fields of scholarship- New Literacy Studies’ (NLS) voluminous work on community literacies (e.g., Barton & Ivanic, 1991) and Bourdieuan accounts of literacy and language (e.g., Bourdieu, 1999; Carrington & Luke, 1997; Luke, 1992). These bodies of work, when put into conversation with one another, suggest the broadened notion of a political economy of religious literacies. While NLS research has broadened and pluralized accounts of what constitutes ‘literacy’ in the academic imagination (e.g., Gee, 1996; Hull & Schultz, 2001), I argue – in light of the present conceptions of religious literacies rooted in local institutions--for the importance of bringing Bourdieuian insights to bear in conceptualizing religious literacies as forms of contextual capital that mediate and operate in complex political economies in and across various community settings, notably in an era of globalization.

Methods
I reviewed four social science databases, conducted bibliographic chaining to gather other relevant articles, and reviewed article abstracts from Anthropology and Education Quarterly (2000-present) and Religion and Education (1999-present).

Results
The search produced 40 suitable studies (35 empirical, 5 theoretical). Findings reveal a promising but nascent body of research conceptualizing power and religious literacies with regard to colonial legacies, religious sites as sponsors of religious literacies, and religion as producer of literate identities. The findings illustrate that as educational researchers bring religious frameworks into literacy research, they require a broader account of power that welds local interactional data to broad structural fields of power, including national networks of communities, migration, and trends of urban marginalization.

Significance
Findings suggest researchers must more broadly consider how the resources of religion and religious literacies are policed and streamlined through doctrinal and discursive accounts to ensure the production of literate identities that often transcends boundaries. Given the transnational capacitates of religion to distribute people, goods, services, literature, and literacy practices to a range of global spaces (Wuthnow & Offutt, 2008) , a sustained examination of the unifying and polarizing capacity of this distribution at the national and interactional level remains to be researched to recognize both the strength of state power and local interaction with religious resources for literacy education.


References

Barton, D., & Ivanic, R. (1991). Writing in the community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bourdieu, P. (1999). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Carrington, V., & Luke, A. (1997). Literacy and Bourdieu’s sociological theory: A reframing. Language and Education, 11(2), 96-112.

Clark, R., & Ivanic, R. (1997). The politics of writing. New York: Routledge.

Gee, J.P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis.

Hull, G., & Schultz, K. (2001). School’s out: Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wuthnow, R., & Offuft, S. (2008). Transnational religious connections. Sociology of Religion,
69(2), 209-232.

Author

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania