Decolonizing Literacies as the Interstices Between Writing the Word and Reading the World

• In Event: 77.026 - Toward Just Forms of Language and Literacy Learning Re-Mediating Pedagogies of Reading and Writing

Abstract

This study provides an interpretive analysis of the mediation of literacy and the formation of a critical social consciousness within a youth participatory action research course. The context is a 6-week writing and research course that serves Chicanx youth from a major urban center in Southern California. The focus is on the mediation of a critical social consciousness and how this is accomplished using close-text analysis (Author 2, 2014). Specifically, I look at the development of writing genres (defining, counter-storytelling) as vehicle for reading the word and the world (Freire & Macedo, 2005). In sum, I argue for the study of literacy learning within decolonizing pedagogical spaces; and the need for ethnographic investigations in which researchers are also participant-educators.

The study identifies key strategies that help facilitate a critical reading of text and students’ social worlds: meta-reflection upon themselves as students and writers; concept formation; and meta-analysis of language in texts and conceptual nudging. Challenging traditional and monological approaches to consciousness, these three major strategies are framed as practices toward epistemic openness (Colleague & Author 2, 2018). The study concludes with students’ reflections on literacy and learning within this course. The themes that emerge through student interviews include: proximity to texts; spaces for openness; the need for guided practice; and action research as rehumanizing praxis.

We cannot understand close text analysis, here the engagement with Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, as an exercise in close readings devoid of two important, intersecting contexts. First, the curricular and pedagogical mediation should be recognized as spaces that position close text readings in relation to concept formation. Understanding complex concepts like development and underdevelopment is a process that takes form via intentional spaces created as we grapple with the actual text; but it is also facilitated via writing (the extended definition of poverty as a clear instantiation of this process), which serves as a dialogical bridge in the analysis of poverty later in the course.

Author

• Miguel Zavala, Chapman University