Literacies, Identities, and Religious Faith Commitments and Communities in Dialogue

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session explores how religion operates as a fundamental category of personal and communal identification shaping how persons know, learn, teach, and differentially value acts of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in a pluralistic world. Key questions include: a) Given globalization, how does religious faith and practice shape the literate lives, practices, and learning of teachers and students in communities? b) What is the place of religious faith in public schools and universities within and beyond pluralist democracies? c) What theoretical perspectives illuminate religious faith as it intersects with literacy practices, learning, and teaching? d) How do pedagogies in literacy teaching and teacher education interact with students’ religious literacies and identities to reproduce or disrupt entrenched societal and educational inequities?

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Jory J. Brass, Arizona State University

Papers

• Religion, Literacy, and Power in Education: A Review of Literature - Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania

• How Religious Faith Complicates Literacy Education for Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Schools: A Case Study of a Fundamentalist Christian Student in a Secondary English Classroom - Mary M. Juzwik, Michigan State University; Cori McKenzie, Michigan State University

• Future Literacy Teachers, Picture Books, and the Discourse of Religious Difference - Denise Davila, University of Georgia - Athens

• Devoutly Literate: Gee’s Primary and Secondary Discourses and the Literate Religiosity of Latter-Day Saint Teens - Christopher Parsons, University of Michigan

Discussant

• Anne Elrod Whitney, The Pennsylvania State University