Reconciling Equity with Literacy Standards in the U.S. Community College

• In Event: Navigating “Schooled Literacies” Across Contexts

Proposal

Community colleges in the United States have been historically tasked with improving literacy rates for the most disadvantaged students seeking higher education through a wide range of compensatory education programs, sometimes framed as “remedial” or “developmental” (Bailey, 2009). However, their ability to prepare students in reading and writing for college coursework has been hindered by increasingly restricted state funding and greater pressures of outcome-based accountability policies, two signature marks of “postsecondary racial neoliberalism” (Hamilton & Nielsen, 2021) driving reforms in compensatory education (Bailey & Smith Morest, 2006; Bickerstaff et al., 2022; Smith Jaggars & Bickerstaff, 2018). Despite being actors centrally involved in promoting equity and academic growth among struggling readers and writers, community college literacy instructors are rarely consulted about policies and reforms that affect their work directly (Finn & Avni, 2018; Hassel et al., 2015). In this complicated landscape, I draw on ethnographic work conducted over the past academic year (2023-2024) in a public two-year college located in the Midwestern region of the United States to examine literacy instruction for students perceived as “unprepared” for college work and instructors’ perceptions of and responses to the classed and racialized nature of literacy standards. To do so, I combine contributions from reproduction theory (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, 1979), language ideologies (Silverstein, 2018; Rosa, 2013; Flores & Rosa, 2015), and social justice theory (Fraser, 1995, 1997, 2000) to show how alliance and opposition to “college-level” literacy in a standard language straddles across redistribution, recognition, and representation lines. Ultimately, I seek to add nuances to the unresolved tension between broadening access to higher education and reproducing “the culture of monoglot standard” (Silverstein, 2018) as it unfolds in community colleges in the United States.

Author

• Antonella Pappolla, University of Wisconsin Madison