Reading Summary: Lessons from Research with Language-Minority Children

Moll and Gonzalez (1994) use four language minority examples to explore and advocate for utilization of various literacies for accessing knowledge resources and extending beyond the limited, learning boundaries of the “typical” classroom. The author’s first, and ideal, example of such an approach is represented in the intricate, pedagogically innovative, and resource rich Spanish-English bilingual, elementary school in Arizona. Students jump between different linguistic mediums to “accomplish personal, academic, or intellectual tasks” (440). Although likely spruced up by the authors’ wording, students are conducting practices crucial to even higher education. Such examples force me to reflect on my own education in comparison and wonder what the heck I was doing.

The structure of this educational program seems to push students to take advantage of all social, cultural, and literate resources to expand beyond the limitations of the classroom. To encourage broader and more practical knowledge, Moll and Gonzalez explain that it’s necessary to take advantage of the “funds of knowledge” located within local communities.

These “funds of knowledge” are represented in the rich and diverse range of skills and knowledge held by members of the community, ranging from gardening, to mechanical work, to music, to cultural traditions, to medicine, etc. Spurred by a variety of needs/purposes, it was discovered that some innovative students from working class backgrounds picked up mechanical or mercantile skills. In one instance, one parent’s musical abilities were gradually incorporated to improve the educational experience of students. These examples emphasize the “potential that can be harnessed by transcending the boundaries of the school and making inroads into the funds of knowledge of the community” (446).

The second example explores how instructors guided (through questions and discussion facilitation) students use of language to access various sources of knowledge and help them “develop a collaborative approach to science” (446). These resources of knowledge were not only instructors, but also fellow students. Similarly, the third example delves into how instructors facilitated cooperation between students and teachers for research practices. Students were “shown the ropes,” given responsibility and respect of peers to execute an educational, class-external, purposeful task.

The authors’ fourth example takes a look at another, bilingual (English and Navajo), student-centered curriculum aimed at developing “the children’s concept and problem-solving abilities in the context of culturally salient experiences and topics, while promoting competency in Navajo and English” (450). Through the bilingual approach of inquiry-based tasks, “it allowed children, through their own interactions and explorations to use their knowledge to solve new problems” (450). Through this culturally integrated and learning-active approach, researchers were able to more effectively encourage multiple literacies and respect learners’ identities.

The authors assert that “none of these innovations will last unless teachers are able to overcome the intellectual limits of traditional schooling for these children” (451). Teachers and students need to go beyond the walls of the classroom, take advantage of various “inside” (imagined) and “outside,” (real) knowledge resources and create innovative, practical and meaningful ways (like projects) to apply them (452). With these wide arrays of literacies, language minorities need to be seen possessing assets, rather than deficiencies. Their backgrounds should be acknowledged, respected and incorporated into the learning process if we intend to improve the effectiveness of education.

Personal Thoughts

Even with English as the lingua franca of the world, the U.S. will gradually learn how much it’s missing out on economically, and personally by not becoming better acquainted with the rest of the world, its languages and associated cultures.

In particular, the authors emphasize this approach for the “working class,” but I can’t help but feel that this approach should be seriously considered for all socio-economic and educational levels. Perhaps the authors were implying that those of a higher ‘class,’ receive or have access to such resources and “working-class” do not, or those on the ‘upper’ scale either receive it and/or have such entitlements later that such skills aren’t necessary later in students’ futures.

While I agree with the advocation of the authors, I can’t help but think that this dated mentality should now be pretty common in education, even though there are not as many funded programs exercising this ideal. As someone who is more pedagogically focused, I agree with the authors’ viewpoint, but I can’t help but feel it’s necessary to express how groundbreaking but demanding such a program would be for educational institutions, their instructors, students, and parents. To support the demands of such a program, participation of the local community would be essential in promoting its success.

I’m all for the innovation of educational approaches, “mainstream” and for language minorities, but the mere fact that we are having these conversations about learning forces me to ask: have we have become so embedded with pedagogically time and cost efficient practices of standardized education that we’re so distanced from the actual purpose of education and diverse, equally beneficial (if not potentially better) alternative approaches to facilitating purposeful and fulfilling learning? Should we not then be directing bigger questions toward our educational system?

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Class response to article.

In “The Right (Write) Start: African American Language and the Discourse of Sounding Right,” Anne Haas Dyson and Geneva Smitherman discuss how dialect, particularly African American Language (AAL), plays into a classroom where a standardized version of English is valued. Their outline of their research discusses their goals of the article and tells readers that they are questioning the system that is in place, while asserting that they understand students having an understanding of Language of Wider Communication (LWC).

Dyson and Smitherman present a case study of Tionna, a 6-year-old who has a good grasp of the language that her cultural dialect (AAL) values and this tends to transfer into her writing. When asked to write about why her teacher is the best, she has to meet with the student teacher to edit the piece. Or, as Tionna calls it, she has to do her “fix-its.” When the teacher stumbles into a sentence that does not follow her standardized version of English, she repeats Tionna’s writing back to her, “‘She is nice but if you be bad’ – let’s listen to how that sounds. Do you think that sounds right? ‘But if you be bad?’” (974). Since Tionna has grown up with sentence structures like “but if you be bad,” she does not understand that it needs to be corrected.

Dyson and Smitherman go on to point to the popular character Junie B. Jones. Junie B. Jones speaks in a way that “would fail to meet basic standards” (977) of standardized English based on her dialect in the Junie B. Jones novels. They point out that Junie B. Jones is seen as having “innocence and naivete” (977) based on her dialect, and show the discrepancy between this and an “at-risk” child like Tionna.

The research shows that children use the “voices of families, friends, media figures, and teachers” to “find their way into writing” (978). They argue that teachers need to have the understanding that students come from different cultural and dialectical backgrounds and that a mastery of “the so-called proper way [to speak] is not a precursor to learning to write” (978). Correcting a child will not help the student if they do not see the problem or if they do not have the problem in their dialect.

Although AAL is widespread across the globe, they give the example from Orlando Taylor where he shows that when “someone speaks with a French accent, it’s perceived to be very positive because the people are perceived positively . .The problem is that African American people and Black people around the world are perceived by dominant societies to be inferior, and so their language is perceived in a similar way” (980-981). They show that this mindset is contributing to students like Tionna being corrected for their dialect.

The article goes on to give more examples of how Tionna’s dialect was “fixed” in her writing, but Dyson and Smitherman show how it is correct in AAL. They point out that since Tionna’s teachers did not have an understanding of AAL, they were unable to help Tionna see the difference between dialect, instead just correcting her to their “right” way of speaking and writing.

When Anne Dyson went back to visit Tionna a year after their initial data collection, she brought a book that Tionna had loved called Three Wishes (990). This time, when Tionna read the book, she corrected all of the AAL examples from the book to be in the standardized version of English she had learned in school, adopting the idea that AAL was “wrong” or “incorrect.”

At the end of their article, Dyson and Smitherman argue that we need to value bilingualism and bidialectalism in the educational system. They argue that “the language(s) should be taught with a broad stroke, that is, including the culture, history, values, experiences, and sociopolitical realities of the speakers of the language(s)” (994) as a way to understand and engage in other cultures within the classroom.

In class, we looked at this piece in connection with Luis Moll and Norma González’s work with bilingualism in schools. We created posters that put these articles into conversation with each other. Both pieces valued cultural incorporation, social background, broad understandings of literacy practices, overcoming standardization present in traditional schooling, and embracing differences in the classroom. Although Smitherman and Dyson dealt more with bidialectalism, we agreed as a class that these were all important values for understand literacy across cultures.

Some questions that I still have after reading this piece are: how can we begin to incorporate a system that values bidialectalism? What kind of training can we implement for educators to have a better understanding of different dialects? What can we do to help children communicate across dialects while still being valued for their dialect?

 

Dyson, Anne Haas and Smitherman, Geneva. “The Right (Write) Start: African American Language and the Discourse of Sounding Right.” Teachers College Record, Vol. 111. 2009. 973-998.

Brandt and Clinton- “Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice”

In the introduction to this piece an important quote stood out as defining the goals of Brandt and Clinton. “To open new directions for literacy research we suggest more attention be paid to the material dimensions of literacy. Drawing on the work of Bruno LaTour (1993, 1996), we seek to theorize the transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy – particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure. Finally, we propose a set of analytical constructs that treat literacy not solely as an outcome or accomplishment of local practices, but also as a participant in them. By restoring a ‘thing status’ to literacy, we can attend to the role of literacy in human action. The logic of such a perspective suggests that understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting” (337). This perfectly introduces and summarizes what they set out to do in their research on literacy. They go on to discuss how they want to push against the “great Divide” or “autonomous model” which treats literacy as decontextualized and a decontextualizing technology.

They deal with looking at the local contexts of literacy aside from just local practice. Literacy itself participates in social practices as an object or technology, but studying it in this context has been an undertheorized practice. Brandt and Clinton, in response to this, set out to dissolve the dichotomies of the local and global, agency and social structure, and literacy and its technology by treating it as a participant in local practices rather than just an outcome. In other words, literacy, as LaTour would say, is an actant (actor) not just a result.

Moving into a discussion of preceding literacy theorists, they critique Jack Goody, Walter Ong, and David Olson for the oral literate dichotomies produced from their work such as oral cultures being primitive and writing and reading cultures being civilized. Brandt and Clinton criticize this way of thinking about literacy, bringing up the fact that there are many other studies that have been performed which push against that sort of dichotomy. Scribner and Cole, for example, claim that what literacy does to you depends on what you do with it. Another critic of those scholars, Brian Street, whose work in the New Literacy Studies has been important to the field of literacy studies, felt their theories were methodologically overreaching and ideologically suspect. According to Street’s perspective, social context organizes literacy, rather than the other way around. Context is important to revisionist thinking because it illuminates the agency involved in literacy use. Agency itself ties heavily into the social practice perspective, and this is evident when local readers and writers are observed making meaning of literacy on their own terms.

The oral societies that have received so much criticism and been viewed as lacking civility, among other things, upon reexamination, reveal that without technology of literacy oral people exhibit logical reasoning, historical consciousness, skepticism, differentiation, and complex organization- all of which had been reserved for describing literate societies from the “Great Divide” theory. Now, orality has emerged as a powerful technology, and talking is the primary form of teaching reading and writing, as well as in negotiating understanding of written language. With that in mind, it is easy to realize that Goody, Ong, and Olson had too much stock in reading and writing, and not enough in the importance of orality as coming alongside the two. Instead, they were feeding the dichotomies which have so often positioned the West against the East or Other. This reversal shows that we need to move from text to context and unify orality and literacy, which can also be described as the literacy event and literacy practice.

What is the difference between a literacy event and a literacy practice? According to Brandt and Clinton, literacy events are seen as discrete and observable happenings and practices are abstract, enduring, and not completely observable. Out of this concept came ethnographic studies which paid attention to what individuals read and write, when, where, how, and why. In other words, their focus shifted to the flow of literacy in and around daily activity and its relationship to other social practices. Much of these studies countered the claims about literacy that came out of the autonomous model. At the same time though, Brandt and Clinton are concerned with if it is possible to recognize and theorize the transcontextual aspects of literacy without calling it decontextualized. They ask, “Can we not approach literacy as a technology – and as an agent – without falling back into the autonomous model?” To wrestle with these questions they move on to discuss expanding perspectives on social practice. However, I am not quite sure that this question is fully answered.

Through studying local contexts to understand local literacy we can also look to the local literacy practices to understand what organizes local life. An example of this is seen in Besnier’s ethnography, “Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll”, on the Nukulaelae people who wear American t-shirts with slogans they don’t understand, some of which are offensive or risque. The print on the shirts fell outside local relevance, and they had no interest in what the shirts say because they didn’t play a part in any recognizable literacy events. At the same time, these t-shirts entered into the cultural and historical facts of the island without a local literacy event mediating permission. The slogans themselves demonstrate the reach of a global market economy into family gift-giving and personal possessions. The Nukulaelae ignore the print, but the print also ignores them while incorporating them into Western commercialism, thus demonstrating that the technologies of literacy have the capacity to travel, stay intact, be visible and animate outside the interactions of immediate literacy events.

This is where LaTour truly enters the picture, and we end up seeing that a huge problem with literacy events, as defined by the social practice perspective, is that it comes across as overwhelmingly particular and situated under the ethnographic gaze. The issue we often fail to consider is that the objects in literacy events are contextually active participants, and we generally think of them only in terms of their function locally and interactively. The social practice perspective asserts that human agents, whether individually or collectively, mediate literacy practices whenever they take them up and use them to fulfill the needs at hand. Additionally, objects as active mediators imbue, resist, and recraft. At the same time, LaTour emphasizes that everything is local and made of local interactions, but local events can have globalizing tendencies and globalizing effects, accomplished through the mediation of globalizing technologies (347). The point he is getting at is that we need to take on a perspective that acknowledges how extensively literacy plays into building networks across time and space with de-localizing and re-framing social life, and with its centralizing power in which the social world is organized and connected, all of which can be accomplished by investigating local life.

As was mentioned in the introduction to this piece, Brandt and Clinton suggest that understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting. They add to this by discussing how LaTour states that things are actors themselves– they can serve as “comrades, colleagues, partners, accomplices or associates in the weaving of social life” (348).By taking on this view, it becomes possible to explore many other important questions. By replacing the literacy event, which privileges human actors of non-human actors, with the “literacy-in-action” concept we can look analytically at the objective trace of literacy in a setting whether or not they are taken up by local actors. An example of this would be the Nukulaelae with the t-shirts in which residents do not act to incorporate the slogans messages into their immediate interpretation, while at the same time the print communicates the incorporation into the global market system of the Nukulaelae.

Brandt and Clinton then go on to discuss sponsors of literacy, the ideas which we read about in week 3 of our course. In this section, they discuss how identifying sponsors at scenes of reading and writing links humans and things in two important ways: It allows us to always ask about the literacy materials in a setting and it helps to clarify the multiple interests or agents that are usually active when writing and reading are taken up. Attention to sponsors provides insight into how literate practices can be shaped out of the struggle of competing agents and interests, and also how multiple interests can be satisfied by one literacy event. More importantly, in my opinion, it allows us to see the correlation between the literacy practice and social relationships while answering distant demands demonstrating the agency is oftentimes multisourced.

In the subsequent section they introduce a series of LaTour’s terms that bring new perspective to literacy as a social practice. The first term: Localizing moves encompasses actions of humans and things in framing or partitioning particular interactions. Since literacy objects in action often localize a context by framing it or holding it in place, they can also perform other localizing moves like the sharing of cultural habits or by mediating a local social structure. The second term: Globalizing Connects, which can be accomplished by human and nonhuman actors, is identified as the shift out of individuals and the knitting together of interactions. We look to the technologies of literacy to accomplish globalizing connects as they carry reading and writing actions in and out of local contexts or consolidate them in one place (352). The third term: Folding expresses ontological relationships between people and things. In other words, a person can fold an act of doing into an object. The example used for this was the ability of the journal to travel and endure in one pieced and its ability to interact across space and time. The authors fold themselves into the Journal of Literacy Research which disseminates their article to readers while they are doing other things. By folding into the non-human, the sponsors of literacy indirectly interact with other humans.

To conclude their theoretical work, the point Brandt and Clinton are getting at from establishing these aspects of the social practice perspective is that, they can help us to consider how and how much local literacies involve importing and exporting literacy across contexts and the role of managing these movements. This leads us into questions about which contexts import and export and from where, which maintain a balance of trade, what sponsorship patterns exist across contexts, comparing differences in sponsoring power and costs, and changes in patterns of sponsorship. We can begin mapping these relationships and networks to better examine which processes sustain diversity and iniquity in literacy. Additionally, we can examine how more localized literacy networks may have less agency or power than those whose networks are more expansive. From understanding and applying these concepts, we can begin to address how forms of literacy disrupt, tear up, and destabilize patterns of social life. They believe it is necessary to focus on the material dimensions of literacy, it’s durability, capacity to connect, mediate, represent, and hold together multiple interests to accomplish these complex ways of analyzing literacies function in the world and approach the ideological struggles that accompany it.

One interesting way to look at the material dimensions of literacy and its capacity to connect, mediate, represent, and hold together multiple interests is that of the hashtag example we discussed in class. Twitter, in particular, took up the hashtag, and it now acts as a representation of different things like the black lives matter movement. It mediates multiple interests in that movement, represents multiply-configured meanings, and holds together the interests of various intersections of human identities and interests. Through the literacy object of the hashtag one can analyze these various literacy functions and visibly see the connections between what localized literacies move through time and space, and across the contexts in which it is globally situated. The hashtag is acted upon and is an actant, mediating literacies for humans, acting with globalizing tendencies, and connecting and sharing localized practices.

 

New Literacy Studies in Practice

Street’s argument is positioned in direct conversation with Brandt & Clinton’s (2002) “Limits of the Local,” in that it illuminates the divide between local and global literacies. Street (2003) acknowledges that Brandt and Clinton (2002) create a “helpful way of characterizing the local / global debate in which literacy practices play a central role” (80). He notes that their qualms about the difficulty of making generalizations based on small analyses of local literacies is a valid concern. However, he argues that Brandt & Clinton’s (2002) attempt to label “distant” literacies as “autonomous” adds too much neutrality to the theory. Street’s piece is essentially an attempt to continue to see literacy, both locally and globally, as being embedded in social practices. He resists Brandt & Clinton’s attempts to neutralize the literacy practices that occur outside of local contexts.

One of Street’s more convincing and relatable examples of the socially embedded natures of both global and local literacies is actually a small example that he mentions, almost in passing. Street briefly explains Kulick & Stroud’s (1993) research of a New Guinea tribe that adapted literacy received from missionaries to fit their local circumstances. He points out that such an example shows how a mesh of local and global literacies usually results in a hybrid practice rather than a pure form of either version. There is no clear delineation between what is local and what is global in such a circumstance.

This is a concept that we can see play out in our own experiences. When new technologies enter schools, for example, they get repurposed to fit the literacy needs of that social group. Academic literacy practices such as the Twitter essay (Stommel, 2012) or writing with blogs are examples of global literacies (social media) being repurposed and hybridized to fit the literacy needs of a local group (a classroom). This makes me question whether social media (or any literacy platform) can truly ever be classified as “global?” After all, isn’t New Literacy Studies all about arguing that literacy is always localized and embedded in social practices because individuals who infuse their literacy practices with the social values of their local context?

If one is to argue that literacy can be “global,” one must also argue that there are practices that transcend local contexts and can be generalized. This is what Brandt and Clinton (2002) attempt to do when they say that global literacies are “any things associated with unified communication systems”  (p. 352). However, at best, it seems to me that so-called “global” literacy is actually hybrid of local literacies. Let’s use the example of the missionaries who brought literacy to New Guinea. In this example, the literacy of the missionaries is the “global” literacy while the practices of the New Guineans localize the literacy to fit their needs. However, Bartlett & Holland (2002) would argue that, the missionaries’ literacy was sponsored and shaped by historical and social forces that influenced their “linguistic habitus” and practices (p.6 as cited in Street, 2003, p. 81). Therefore, although the literacy of the missionaries was certainly “distant” to the practices of the New Guineans, wouldn’t it be quite a leap (and quite colonial) to say that the literacy of the missionaries was “global,” not only because the word “global” has amorphous, universalist connotations, but because the literacy practices of the missionaries were also embedded in their own unique, local context. Similar to Street, I would argue that a hybrid literacy did form, but that it was the result of a local literacy melding with another local literacy rather than global literacy transforming a local literacy.

Before I digress too much further, let’s return to another interesting point in Street’s argument. After establishing his position in relation to that of Brandt & Clinton (2002) and several other scholars, he moves on to “develop positive proposals for interventions in teaching, curriculum, measurement criteria, and teacher education” (p. 82). To Street, this sort of practical application is the true test of the viability of New Literacy Studies as a theory that can accomplish  real work in the world. One point of conflict that Street addresses is the divide between the diversity of local needs and the broader demands of policy makers and funding agencies. He points out that rigorous, scientific research is one way to bridge this gap, which brings me to a discussion of the fascinating research presented by Dr. Erin Whitney in class.

Whitney’s research is a beautiful example of certain generalizations that can be made about how junior high students express their literacies. Her research showed that, even though some students are diagnosed with learning disabilities because of low reading and writing test scores, these students can be very capable when using literacy in different genres and purposes than those that are tested in school. A student who struggled with the essay format was adept at expressing her knowledge by writing and performing plays and poems. Just as the New Guineans were able to adapt literacy to fit their community’s needs, the students that Dr. Whitney studied were able to adapt the literacies of their classrooms to fit the needs of their social groups and contexts. As Streets (2003) notes, unfortunately, the relationship between academic and lived literacies are quite strained, which could be a contributing factor to students’ difficulty with academic routes to success (p. 83).

So how does Dr. Whitney’s research fit in with New Literacy Studies? Her data and interpretations show that multimodal projects, collaboration, and digital pedagogies give students, particularly those with disabilities, the chance to demonstrate their knowledge using a wide array of available literacy practices that carry weight in their worlds outside of school.In the experiences of her students, literacy is not an autonomous set of skills that is neutrally given and received; literacy is instead an ideology that is embedded in local cultural and social practices of their community. Therefore, literacy pedagogy must be kept as open and fluid and possible in order to allow for the wide variety of interpretations and demands that are placed upon it by different contexts and communities.