Toward a Collaborative Praxis of Multiple Literacies

Abstract

Margie (Margaret Gallego) and I (Sam-or Sandra Hollingsworth) are collaborative colleagues and good friends. Margie is a Latina woman who, brought up in mainstream schools in Arizona, was surprised to discover that she had a special gift for Spanish discourse in high school. I am a Caucasian woman, born in the South and raised in part in Europe, who was surprised to discover a special attraction to feminist discourse as a new professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Our life stories connected in East Lansing, Michigan, where-sitting on the carpeted, hardwood floors of my home in the late afternoon autumn sun five years ago-we found that we. both had hopes of creating a community-based teacher education partnership for urban schools in Lansing's Latino community. We saw the project as an example of a critical praxis-or the dialectical relationship between thought and action/subjectivity and objectivity/theory and practice (Freire 1972; Weiner 1994)-intended to make literacy opportunities in schools more sociallyjust. Although the plan did not go as we had hoped, we learned quite a bit about the dimensions of collaboration and praxis to reform urban schools for literacies-a term we initiated that afternoon in East Lansing in our attempt to frame our collaboration. The major intent of this article is to define and elaborate a nested set of multiple literacies that have been useful for our work as teachers, women, and scholars with personal and professional concerns for social justice. Through a critical exploration of the theoretical and personal experiential perspectives that inform our views of literacy and through the use of a case example of the failure of our work, we hope to give energy and direction to future conversations about the centrality of literacy in school reform efforts. One important comment about authorship before we begin: as I have already indicated, this article grew out of conversations and contemplations about our work together as collaborative colleagues. I (Sam Hollings-