Literacy, power, and affective (dis)encounter: An ethnographic study on a low-income community in Spain.

Elena Guichot-Muñoz,María Jesús Balbás-Ortega,Eduardo García-Jiménez

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0252782

Abstract

In areas of social exclusion, there are greater risks of facing discrimination at school. The teaching-learning processes may contribute toward the perpetuation of this inequality. This research analyzes a literacy event that takes place in a low-income school in Southern Spain. The new literacy studies have come to examine how power relationships and affective bonds work in such literacy practices. An ethnographic method was followed to facilitate a deeper understanding of multimodal literacy. Further, a social semiotics multimodal approach was adopted to analyze the meaning-making social process that takes place in the classroom. The participants comprised two teachers and 17 children, whose ages range from 5 to 7 years. Data were collected in the form of reports, audio recordings, video recordings, and photographs over a two-years period. The results obtained have revealed that the children have been taught writing and reading through a dominant orthodox model that fails to consider the community’s and families’ cultural capitals. They also show that the literacy process does not grant any affective quality. Neither is there an authentic dialogic space created between the school and the community. This lack of dialogue generates an inequality in the actual acquisition of comprehensive reading and writing skills at school, with instances of groups exclusion, owing to the anti-hegemonic practices of knowledge acquisition.

Highlights

In disadvantaged environments where cultural capital and “knowledge funds” [1] are disregarded in schools, a systematic practice of “colonial difference” is established [2]
At the beginning of the year, the teaching staff determines each of the program themes and the dates when these programs would be broadcasted for each group of students
A look at all these aspects in connection with power allows us to assert that, at the interpersonal level, social roles are well established: dominant and dominated, with the latter being supported at an ideational level for configuration of the event’s instructions; and at the textual

Summary

Introduction

In disadvantaged environments where cultural capital and “knowledge funds” [1] are disregarded in schools, a systematic practice of “colonial difference” is established [2]. In line with the work carried out by Leander & Ehret [16], this study analyzes the humanizing and dehumanizing influences that literacy exerts on schools and examines the affective aspects of the literacy teaching role at the individual and community levels The purpose of such kind of research is to find the movements, rhythms, atmospheres of social life that go beyond the theoretical scope offered by constructivism alone [16]. The question that arises is “Why did the radio program fail to attain its objective and end up causing a conflict between the family and the school?” Given this theoretical framework and context, we formulated the following research questions: RQ1: How is power exerted in classrooms to impose a dominant literacy model?. RQ 3: With the literacy event being broadcasted on a radio program, what form does the affective encounter between the text, the students, and the spaces (school, home) take?

Study design

Participants

Results and discussion

Conclusions

What happens always exceeds that which is conceived and perceived