From Metaphorical to Physical: How Early Literacy Assessments Fortify Borders

• In Event: 43.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 43.077-4 - Woven out of a Thousand Details: Approaching Affective, Racial, and Sociopolitical Boundaries in Educational Research

Abstract

As a tool and by-product of the nation-state, borders are both physical and symbolic, demarcating who is welcome within specific spaces (Popescu, 2010). In the United States, a neoliberal political economy further creates borders that divide cities, neighborhoods, and schools, and the resources within them (e.g., Anyon, 2014). They also divide intellectual spaces through definitions of achievement and proficiency. For example, in schools, achievement borders are drawn physically through segregation (via e.g., tracking) and symbolically through the assessment constructs that are used to justify such segregation. In literacy assessment in particular, borders define the linguistic subskills to be measured, yet these borders are artificial and contradict current theories on the highly contextualized and fluid nature of literacy itself (e.g., Reder & Davila, 2005; Street, 1984). Languages, which historically have extensive contact with and influence on each other, were originally divided according to geopolitical borders in order to serve nation-state interests (Urciuoli, 1995). They were sponsored and imagined as discrete precisely to erect an us-them border that would perpetuate the colonial racial hierarchy. This linguistic ideology has been further applied within languages, erecting microborders between otherwise fluid linguistic skills to “assign people a place, often opposing places between those who ‘have’ [] and those who do not” (p. 539). Considering these origins, then, we must ask “whose values are inherent in the hierarchies of performance embedded in [] measurement” (Dixon-Román & Gergen, 2016, p. 17), and what are the consequences?

In the present paper, I theorize how the metaphorical borders that are erected in early literacy assessment relate to borders in schools, cities, and the modern nation-state more broadly, with particular bearing on the lives of students of color, whose literacy practices might not reflect school-sanctioned literacies (Cook-Gumperz, 2006) but rather reside in the borderlands (Anzaldúa, 2007). I do this by drawing on theoretical and empirical evidence from critical geography (e.g., Crampton & Krygier, 2006; Kwan, 2002; Pacheco & Vélez, 2009; Schuurman & Pratt, 2002), border thinking (Mignolo, 2000; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012), decolonial feminism (e.g., Laurie, 2012; Lugones, 2010; Saldívar-Hull, 2000; Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert, & Koobak, 2016), political economy (e.g., Anyon, 2014), and linguistic borders (e.g. Urciuoli, 1995); the epistemological and ontological history of standardized and literacy assessment (e.g., Dixon-Román & Gergen, 2016; Shepard, 2000); and school tracking (Eder, 2006; Oakes, 1985). This work offers a new lens for understanding how dominant literacy assessment practices serve to maintain a colonial hierarchy while being marketed––quite lucratively––to do the opposite. I conclude with methodological recommendations for empirical research, drawing in particular on exemplars from scholars like Pacheco and Vélez (2009), who have demonstrated how integrating qualitative methods with geographical information systems can spur concrete results in the lived experiences of students of color.

Author

• Bryce Larkin Chessell Becker, University of California - Berkeley