Hidden in Plain Site: The Active Presence of School Histories

• In Event: Sites Unseen: Reimagining Literacy Sites for Just and Equitable Futures

Abstract

How do the histories of sites, such as schools, condition their present-day enactments of literacy, curriculum, and schooling? In this paper, we take up this question through studies of two urban schools undergoing curricular reform, pairing archival and field-based research to trace how the histories of each were read, interpreted, and invoked by its present-day stakeholders. In doing so, we show how “history” itself came to function as an actor in these sites – as something administrators and teachers put to work when shaping and legitimizing particular approaches to literacy teaching and learning. We conclude by mapping some conceptual and pragmatic challenges for taking seriously the histories of sites in literacy research, and by articulating the ethical stakes for researchers in adopting such a stance.

Our project builds on sociocultural literacy studies that have examined the near-and-distant actors that contribute to the spatial and material production of literacy events (e.g. Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Stornaiuolo, Smith, and Phillips, 2016). Such scholarship has been instrumental in opening the “container” of the classroom (Leander et al., 2010); however, it has also strained to find language and frameworks that adequately account for the temporal flows that, too, animate literacy activities (cf. Lemke, 2000) and condition the contours of classroom-worlds (Author, 2019). As such, we augment these perspectives with those of anti-imperial traditions that have long attended to the work of history in shaping the present – from Rodney’s (1973) meticulous historicizing of African underdevelopment; to Glissant’s (1989) “poetics of landscape,” which makes legible histories of domination and resistance that our transparent surroundings elide; to Sharpe’s (2016) “wake work,” as a process for enacting grief and memory in the ongoing afterlife of imperial violence and chattel slavery. Following Baldwin’s (1998) assertion that “history is literally present in all that we do,” and must, therefore, be actively confronted, our study examines how histories are actively revived and revised in sites of literacy learning, and how acknowledging such processes has implications for ethical and equitable literacy research and practice.

To do so, we juxtapose two studies: (1) a three-year ethnographic study of literacy learning in a non-selective, public “innovation” school in Philadelphia; and (2) a one-year case study of literacy curriculum in a New York City public elementary school returning to its century-old roots in “progressive education”. Pairing archival and field-based research, our findings show how administrators and educators mobilized curated histories of “innovation” and “progressivism,” respectively, to ratify particular literacy practices and curricular reforms, while blanketing over portions of those histories, bound up with the enduring inequities of public schooling, that continue to impact surrounding communities and neighborhoods. Such a perspective forces us to ethically reconsider the presence of site histories in research, often something relegated to background sections within methodology statements, to histories “which are unfolding still” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 20), when read through the present.

Authors

• Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University