Literacy, Religion, and Citizenship in an Urban Catholic Parish

• In Event: Immigrant Families and Literacies: Collaborative Research and Advocacy in a Diverse Faith Community

Abstract

1. Objectives:
This poster examines how religious life at St. Frances Cabrini parish and school facilitates civically-engaged literacy practices for students who are often denied those opportunities by exclusion from systems of power (Vieira, 2011). We look at how religious spaces and networks facilitates opportunities for students to use literacy to move across temporal and spatial scales (Kell, 2009).

2. Theoretical framework:
Contemporary research on the religious life of immigrants in the United States has highlighted several key functions that churches play in helping people become more politically engaged (Ramakrishnan & Bloemraaad, 2008), often in ways beyond simply casting a ballot. Churches provide opportunities for practices like public speaking, leadership, and close textual analysis for democratic engagement, as well as connections to local, national, and international networks such as immigrant rights groups. These can be of great use in civic spaces as well, to advocate, to participate, and to position oneself as an activist (Moya, 2013). For literacy scholars, churches have been viewed as crucial sponsors of immigrants’ literacy practices, including by providing opportunities to speak and read publicly as a member of a global group and using the Bible to critique immigration policies (Mora, 2013; Vieira, 2011).

3. Methods/Data sources:
We examine a single meaning-making trajectory (Kell, 2009) of Francisco, a student at the parish school over the course of several months, including the completion of a fundraising project for Philippines disaster relief and a presentation to a Global Solidarity workshop. To do so, we utilize Kell (2011) to conceptualize how meaning-making across time and space is produced through literacy practices. This draws on data developed during a year of ethnographic immersion (including interviews, field notes, and documents), and ongoing practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

4. Findings:
For Francisco, access to the discourse and complex social network of the parish enabled him to move his community leader identity across multiple scales, from the local (classroom), neighborhood (through the parish bulletin), national (through Catholic Relief Service), and international (as affecting disaster relief efforts in the Philippines). These opportunities are ones that Francisco might be otherwise denied in absence of an intermediary association like the parish (Ramakrishnan & Bloemraaad, 2008).

5. Significance:
This scalar capacity of the church offers Francisco and other politically-engaged parishioners a network and set of social ties that extend beyond one’s immediate family and friends. By joining together multiple constituencies, ethnic and linguistic groups, through discourse, long-established networks, and various documents, spaces, and artifacts (Kell, 2011), the Catholic Church reveals itself to be contain a set of flexible resources for members to engage and use for activist projects.

Authors

• Bethany Welch, Aquinas Center

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania