Navigating “Schooled Literacies” Across Contexts

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Literacy, traditionally defined as the ability to read (or to decode written language) and write (to code language into a visual form), is often widely considered a universal good, leading to positive cognitive, social, and economic outcomes. This belief, linking literate societies to modernization and economic development and literate individuals to higher-order cognitive thinking, is often referred to as the “literacy myth” because it endures despite disconfirming evidence (Gee, 1996; Graff, 1991; Scribner & Cole, 1981). The spread of mass schooling across the globe has been complicit with this mythical narrative, playing a decisive role in consolidating a universalistic, normative, and technical version of literacy – or what Cook-Gumperz (1986/2006) has called “schooled literacy – assumed to be conducive to development.
In challenging this conceptualization, scholars that draw on social, cultural, and historical dimensions understand literacy to be ideological social practices that must be contextually situated (Freire & Macedo, 1987; New London Group, 1996; Street, 1984). Anthropological views of literacy emphasize plurality, favoring the terms “literacies” and “multiliteracies” over a singular and stable notion of literacy (Street, 1997). This approach has expanded beyond printed alphabetic text to include other representations, multimodal, and digital literacies (Gee, 2013). Moreover, such sociocultural approaches not only draw attention to who engages in literacy practices, what those practices are, and the circumstances, but also “literacy’s connections to power, to social identity, and to ideologies, often in the service of privileging certain types of literacy and certain types of people” (Gee 1990/2008, p. 67; see also Heath, 1980). The social and ideological nature of literacy, alongside its multiple manifestations, makes any attempt to regulate it via schooling far from neutral but a deeply political matter.
Critical analyses of schools’ role in society have argued that literacy instruction and evaluation have further stratified society across socioeconomic and racial lines. A central contribution of the sociology of education has been demonstrating that schools, alongside other normative agents, reproduce existing power relations by protecting and disseminating the cultural norms of the dominant classes, including arbitrarily demarcated “standard” language practices (Bourdieu, 1994). Historically, the standardization of European languages and the decision to elevate them to the status of “official” languages and/or languages of instruction during colonization and modern nation-state formation was crucial to ensure the epistemic and material domination of white-speaking subjects and those associated with whiteness (Flores, 2013; Flores & Rosa, 2017). In other words, by regulating written language, schools have actively maintained linguistic hierarchies, which are always class and race-based systems of power. Critical scholars, who point to the transformative potentials of literacies, including identity development and learning about oppression, similarly contend that written text cannot be separated from peoples’ social, political, and economic environments (Freire & Macedo, 1987)
Building on these anthropological, sociological, and critical approaches, the papers in this panel draw on ethnographic research to show how schools and school-embedded actors reproduce, contest, and redistribute power in literacy classrooms across three national contexts: Brazil, Guatemala, and the United States. Ethnography, as both a methodology and epistemological stance, is well suited to explore the culturally situated nature of literacy and its imbrication with larger power structures (Bartlett, 2008). Collectively, the papers illuminate different dimensions of “schooled literacy” across the early grades, high school, and higher education. Their projects highlight literacy educators’ responses to dominant language and cultural practices in contexts of linguistic diversity and social disadvantage. One paper advances the concept of "classed literacy” by exploring how, through school routines and literacy evaluations, a working-class student at a private school in Brazil negotiates discriminatory practices. Another paper examines varying approaches to multilingual literacies in schools in Mayan communities in Guatemala. In centering the experiences of teachers and coaches, the paper highlights how educators navigate quotidian language and literacy realities, beliefs, and practices with official discourses and models of bilingual education. Another paper looks at the case of open-access community colleges in the United States serving a new majority of students with great social and academic needs. The paper shows how literacy instructors leading “compensatory” classes for students perceived as “unprepared” for college writing navigate the tensions around promoting equity and maintaining literacy standards while dealing with the challenging conditions imposed by the neo-liberalization of higher education. By bringing together three empirically-grounded analyses around literacy, which are tied to theoretical developments and political challenges for these sociocultural contexts, this panel offers insights into debates of comparative education across the Americas.

Sub Unit

• Cultural Contexts of Education and Human Potential SIG

Organizer

• Ariel Borns, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Chair

• Claudia Triana Ipinza, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• A hidden “classed literacy” in a Brazilian privileged school: how a working-class student navigates his middle-class school routine - Ricardo Boklis Golbspan, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

• Multilingual Literacies in National Guatemalan Schools - Ariel Borns, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Reconciling Equity with Literacy Standards in the U.S. Community College - Antonella Pappolla, University of Wisconsin Madison

Discussant

• Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison