Submitting, Resisting, and "Getting By": Literacy and Ideology in a Remedial Reading Program

• In Event: Language, Identity, and Power: Literacies of Resistance Across Spaces

Abstract

Reporting on a semester-long ethnographic examination of a remedial reading program and the literacy ideology that provides its curricular and pedagogical directives, this paper describes the program’s embrace of what Street (1984) has called an “autonomous model of literacy,” one that positions literacy as a linear, neutral technology whose utility is closely linked to a market system. This view of literacy works to deny the value of students’ own literate practices, even ones that closely mirror in content and form the literacy skills they are supposed to be learning in class. Three students’ reactions to this literacy ideology, submitting to it, resisting it, and seeking to “get by, are described, though none of these tactics proved successful for the students.

Author

• Jessica Masterson, Washington State University - Vancouver