Disrupting Deficits: Encountering Adult Language Learners' Literacy Practices Through Participatory Action Research

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

Abstract

This paper, drawing from eighteen months of qualitative data, reports on a study of a peer-taught, prison-based, language and literacy program. Based on participatory action research (PAR), the incarcerated men and I conducted classroom observations, in-depth interviews, and collected classroom documents to explore how language ideologies influenced classroom practices and policies. This study demonstrates how autonomous ideas of literacy, monoglossic language ideologies, and the positioning of language as a reified object contributed to the reproduction of oppressive social and linguistic hierarchies and to the erasure of how the adult learners engaged with language and literacy in their daily lives. Additionally, this study provides insight into how PAR can create space for educators to critically question language teaching practices and policies.

Author

• Jim Sosnowski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign