"Serious Talking": Metapragmatic Catholic Identities in Literacy Practice

• In Event: Revisiting Literacies and Identities: Agency, Intertextuality, and Positioning in Learning Spaces

Abstract

This presentation examines students' literacy practices during Catholic religious services at St. Dominic Savio , a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia. Drawing on the traditions of New Literacy Studies (Street, 1985) and linguistic anthropology of education (Wortham & Rymes, 2003), I closely examine social interaction in urban Catholic school, with a particular focus on the emergence of students’ identities as Catholics and immigrants in and through heavily regimented practice (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001). In doing so, I conceptualize ‘culture’ as an interactionally developed, historically sedimented, circulating trope (Silverstein & Urban, 1996), and ‘identity’ as a performative process (Levinson, Foley, & Holland, 1996).
From October to June, I conducted literacy-focused ethnographic research (Heath & Street, 2008) in a Grade 8 class at St. Dominic Savio, with concentrated observation and audio-recording from January to June. All together, data collection produced approximately 10 hours of audio data each week. These audio-recording data were supported by ethnographic fieldnotes providing additional information about context and micro-culture (Lillis, 2008). I further collected instructional documents, textbook pages, or religious texts used during the school day.
Analysis reveals religious literacy practice at St. Dominic Savio to be a site of metapragmatic regimentation (Reyes, 2011), a space in which certain practices of language and bodily resources, dispositions, and orientations are produced, regulated, and given value as capital, and which are subject to contestation and unequal distribution among different actors. In the parents, teachers, and priests’ structuring of reading and orientations to the liturgical texts within the local religious services, they outline what practices count and which help constitute the legitimate ideal (Heller, 1995; Levinson, Foley, & Holland, 1996) of a ‘good Catholic student’, typically through direct instruction, reproach, and correction, supported through overlapping social relations between church and school. This is accompanied by prescriptions for the students’ bodily orientation, grouped around a series of school-specific categorizations (serious/play, church/street). Much of this plays out with regards to the circulating trope (Silverstein & Urban, 1996) of ‘serious talking”, an emic category from both students and teachers/priests that regiments interaction. While these are codified practices, both Catholic and non-Catholic students use these structures to enact identities favorable to the school (Foley, 2010), to convert various forms of cultural capital associated with the Mass into an assemblage of rewards, and to undermine these same structures (including ‘serious talking’), often in peer-only interactions through parodic performances.
This study builds on research of interaction and schooling (Rampton, 2006; Reyes, 2011), and seeks to contribute a nuanced account of how the production of identity in and through literacy practice is mediated by Catholic schooling, an institution which has seen little study to date in the literacy field. In focusing on urban Catholic schools, I hope to reveal the unique metapragmatic regimentation (Heller, 1995) of discourse and literacy practice in Catholic schooling, but equally the ramifications for this regimentation in relation to contemporary Catholic school’s confluence of Catholic and non-Catholic students in all its proceedings.

Author

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania