Literacy, Education, and Inequality: Assimilation and Resistance Narratives From Families at a Homeless Shelter

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-10 - At the Crossroads of Policy and Poverty: A Critical Look at Homelessness and Youth in American Schools

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the literacy practices and beliefs of families who resided at a homeless shelter and the stories parents told about their lives to examine the challenges of homelessness. Based on the narratives that emerged from the parent stories, families believed their lives were not finalized, but could improve despite struggles with steady employment and secure housing. Parent optimism for the future was strongly supported by their common belief that education played a key role in changing their children’s lives for the better. In this article, I draw on data from a qualitative study of the literacy practices of five families who resided in a homeless shelter to complicate the relationship between literacy, education, and inequality.

Homelessness is examined through the lens of sponsorship to understand the differential access the families have to powerful sponsors of literacy and how schools and the marketplace may dismiss existing literacies that families use in their everyday lives (Brandt, 2001). The author of this paper situates the narratives of homeless parents and children against a backdrop of neoliberal education policy that purports to promote “a level playing field” to narrow the so-called achievement gap between students of differing cultural and class backgrounds. Concurrently, this contemporary reform agenda masks the encroaching privatization of public schools shaped by penalties of reduced funding, sanctions, school closures, and corporate takeovers largely represented in school reform policies. These penalties overwhelmingly burden children and families who are economically, socially, and politically marginalized (Lipman, 2011).

This qualitative study affirms the theoretical notion that literacy cannot be separated from the material conditions and social relations in which individuals make sense of their lives (Street, 2001). Literacy events happen within a social context, in a particular place and time (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). Reducing literacy to a neutral set of skills is dismissive of context, privileges particular literacies, rigidly defines what is proper, and marginalizes the diverse ways people use literacy. Participants in this study illuminate the complex ways in which material realities impact the literacies of homeless children.

Furthermore, through participants’ assimilation narratives, it is revealed that the parents believed strongly in the promise of education to change the life trajectory of their children. Parents engaged in literacy for social and cultural purposes as well as middle class literacy practices that are valued in schools. Despite these attempts to assimilate, the parents and the children in the study did not benefit in significant ways and continually struggled against and resisted deficit perspectives surrounding homelessness and the inner city neighborhoods from which they came. The wide gulf between the official portrait of homelessness—largely defined by statistics and influenced by deficit perspectives—and the counter-portraits of the lived realities of the families in this study, suggests that educational reform must address the larger context of inequality in the United States as a whole if it is to ever achieve its life-changing promise.

Author

• Meg Jacobs, Cornell College