Literacy Ideologies Research Articles

Expanding Literacy Horizons: Inclusive, Diverse, and Innovative Approaches

The spring 2023 issue of the Georgia Journal of Literacy, “Expanding Literacy Horizons: Inclusive, Diverse, and Innovative Approaches,” aims to inspire and inform K–12 literacy educators, researchers, and stakeholders by offering valuable insights, research, and resources. The issue emphasizes collaboration, creativity, and critical reflection and is divided into sections by article type, including a literature review on inclusive literacy ideologies; practitioner articles exploring interdisciplinary approaches, reading aloud, and the use of cluster texts to celebrate diversity in education; and teaching tips offering guidance on organizing author visits, fostering classroom community, and transitioning to digital interactive journals. The issue encourages readers to reflect on how inclusive, diverse, and innovative approaches can be integrated into their practices to create more equitable, dynamic, and engaging learning environments.

The caving in and the crawling out: creating intergenerational vernacular food literacies

ABSTRACT Competing ideologies of literacy are well documented in the literature, articulating the gap between everyday literacies in people’s lives and formalised literacy norms. Despite this recognition of literacy as ‘situated’, the gap in perceptions across generations regarding knowledge content and learning forms remains underexplored. This article attempts to bridge this gap by investigating the effects of intergenerational learning on indigenous farming communities in western India from a vernacular food literacy and agricultural perspective. Examining what social meanings are ascribed to literacy using a qualitative case study, it investigates the value attached to different knowledges across the generations. Problematising literacy, it explores what knowledge is considered valid and worth preserving for sustainable development. The author argues that intergenerational knowledge and everyday literacy practices contest the hierarchies of learning and call for an urgent reconstruction of literacy from a vernacular food perspective.

Literacy as a Race, Students as Machines: Conflicting Metaphors in a Remedial Reading Class

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition, one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis () to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker, a seasoned remedial reading teacher, and his ninth-grade student Angelica, three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE, LEARNING TO READ is a journey, and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

Coloniality of language and pretextual gaps: a case study of emergent bilingual children’s writing in a South African school and a call for ukuzilanda

ABSTRACT Framed by decolonial theory, this paper explores how language and literacy ideologies, including Anglonormativity, or the expectation that children should be proficient in a standardised version of English and are deficient if not, shape language and literacy practices in South African classrooms. While not legitimised, the use of fluid language practices in classroom discourse in the Global South is well documented. Less explored is the impact of language ideologies on children’s written text production. Using the tools of linguistic ethnography, I focus on the literacy practices emergent bilingual children are engaged with in a Natural Science lesson in year 4, the first year of their transition from ‘home language’ language of instruction (LOI) to monolingual English LOI. A close analysis of the practice of learners making notes in the lesson shows a pretextual gap between the expectations of the activity: that the children will be proficient in the ‘English’ used for note-making as well as orthography and layout conventions of written notes, and the heterographic writing they are able to produce. I examine the written products of note-making against a contested history of the use of African languages for writing fiction, and the exclusion of African languages from formal education, thus within a context of coloniality of language. I argue that the concept of ukuzilanda can inspire the expansion of literacies in African languages in education, enabling us to build from an existing literate and oral tradition.

“I Am a Parrot”: Literacy Ideologies and Rote Learning

Widely prevalent in a variety of educational contexts around the world, rote learning practices entail repetition techniques to acquire new knowledge. These practices have long been critiqued because of the emphasis on recall rather than deep understanding. Less attention has been directed, however, at the literacy ideologies underpinning such practices: specifically, how such practices shape what students perceive as learning and how they see themselves as learners. In order to examine this, I draw on data from an 8-year investigation into the language and literacy socialization of six young boys who lived at an orphanage and attended a village school in suburban New Delhi. In addition to uncovering ideologies related to rote learning practices, I show how students acted as “bad subjects” by discursively resisting socialization into passive learner subjectivities. The findings are then related to the reproduction of inequality within the educational system through literacy practices.

Gateway Moments to Literate Identities

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized language and literacy ideologies; authoritative literate identities engaged youths’ full cultural and linguistic repertoires to create and critique knowledge. Occasionally, youth enacted authoritative classroom literate identities alongside or in response to dominant deficit frames of their literate abilities during planned and spontaneous classroom interaction. We note in each type of gateway opportunities for teachers to open space for youths’ authoritative knowledge-producing literate identities. We aim to illustrate how a single instructional choice or classroom interaction ranges in effect from maintaining and reinforcing oppressive legacies and deficit literate identities to centering youth and their language and literacy repertoires in learning experiences for more socially just interactions and learning.

Submitting, resisting, and getting by: literacy and ideology in a remedial reading program

Our current political moment has raised critical questions surrounding the efficacy of public education to deliver on its promise of social uplift. This ethnographic case study utilizes Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology--which insists that the way to dismantle systemic injustice is first to recognize its imprint on our everyday actions--to examine the material practices of two high school remedial reading classes. Findings indicate the negative impact of an ‘autonomous model’ (Street, 1984) of literacy on students’ own literate activities, as well as their multiple methods of engaging with this literacy ideology. Ultimately, this analysis urges more consideration of the (literacy) ideologies at work in public education today, and suggests that efforts at the curricular level to equalize educational outcomes may be prone to fail if larger ideological questions remain unexplored.

Challenging the Autonomous Wall: Literacy Work in an Urban High School

This article explores how one urban high school under threat of state closure developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. Analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data illustrate how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as a consequence of generative frictions which produced changes in the program and some indication of changes in understanding of literacy and of students’ needs. We weave a story of multiple layers of changed curriculum, scheduling, assessments, and pedagogy to argue that we need to rethink the continuum of autonomous and ideological literacy to focus more on what the intersections of literacy ideologies generate.

Crafting a pedagogical third space in a transnational teacher education project

This study documented a month-long study abroad project in Oaxaca, Mexico during the summer of 2018 for twelve, K-12 pre-service and in-service educators from New Jersey, where they studied Spanish, literacy, and culturally responsive pedagogical practices. Using notions of third spaces as theory and pedagogy, the findings challenge and expand notions of US transnational teacher education and suggest that transnational teacher education may be particularly useful for facilitating third spaces for pre-service and in-service educators to confront inequitable practices and question their language and literacy ideologies and pedagogical practices.

Opening up ideological spaces for multilingual literacies at the margins of the Portuguese education system? Ethnographic insights from a Russian complementary school

AbstractEastern European migration to Portugal is a relatively recent yet significant phenomenon due to its impact on national legislation and discourses about language, citizenship and identity. Along with other migration movements to Portugal, it has also brought about changes in state policies. The monolingual order within the Portuguese education system has been reinforced through the adoption of the notion of ‘Portuguese as a non-native language’ and the creation of different categories of speakers of ‘other’ languages. While these discourses predominate within the national educational system, other discursive spaces (such as complementary schools and playgroups) are being constructed, on the margins of Portuguese society, where other languages and literacies are being learned and used, alongside Portuguese. This paper presents some insights from longitudinal ethnographic research (2004–2013) that was carried out in a complementary school for Russian-speaking children in Portugal run by their parents and grandparents. It looks into the complex ways in which literacy ideologies and practices were reproduced, contested and negotiated in this particular discursive space. It also shows how students drew on the language, literacy and semiotic resources within their communicative repertoires in different ways as they responded agentively to tasks set by the teacher. The paper concludes with reflections on the potential of the complementary school as a “safe space” for fostering flexible multilingual pedagogies.

Indigenous Cosmopolitics and English Literacy in the Pacific Northwest

ABSTRACTWestern ideologies of literacy continue to affect outsiders’ understanding of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. The acquisition of print literacy and even the Christian beliefs of the main literacy teachers – missionaries – did not, in fact, assimilate Indigenous people in the ways the ideology promised. They have their own uses for and theories of literacy. As they combine two worlds and two powers – that of literacy and modernity and that of tradition and nature – they engage in what has been called cosmopolitics. However, early signs of this activity were erased by anthropologists who defined authentic stories as pre-contact and often filtered out signs of modernity, literacy, English language knowledge, and any content likely to offend their readers. However, a few seriously inauthentic early stories which explain Indigenous understandings of the centrality of ‘paper’ for colonial rule made it into print, and these stories are now being used to revitalise oral cultures. Western ideas about literacy and authenticity absorbed by contemporary non-Indigenous scholars and our ‘expert’ literacy skills continue to make it difficult for us to understand oral stories, even those about literacy aimed directly at us.

Recent Trends in Literacy Studies and Their Application to China

Established views about literacy's role in the making of the modem world have come under increasing attack in recent years by a new scholarship which seeks to relate the literacy "myth" to the actual uses of literacy within a wide array of social and historical settings. In this paper I contribute to the revisionism in literacy studies by applying its main theoretical premises to the greatly neglected subject of literacy in the People's Republic of China. I examine the social construction of literacy in China after the communist revolution in 1949, showing how official literacy ideologies contributed to the formation and reproduction of rural-urban differences in Chinese society.

Introduction: Literacy ideologies

This special section explores contexts in which established ways of using written language have been retooled to support indigenous or “non-mainstream” ideologies of authority, including the incorporation of novel literacies into existing local language practices. This collection of papers addresses potential conflicts between historical and/or hegemonic literacy ideologies and novel literacy practices by illustrating ways in which authoritative semiotic modalities can be utilized to legitimize a form of literacy that was non-existent or has historically been positioned as inferior to standardized, hegemonic forms of writing. This introduction provides some relevant working definitions, points to common themes in the collection, and summarizes the ethnographic contexts explored by contributors to the special section.

Those Who Know and Are Known: Students Using Ethnography to Interrogate Language and Literacy Ideologies

AbstractFraming ethnography as a form of democratic inquiry, this study examines how the author worked with a group of Mexican and Vietnamese American adolescents to learn and apply ethnographic tools to interrogate language and literacy ideologies in their school and community. Examination of the students’ findings reveals circulating ideologies and narratives of English monolingualism in schools, as well as their own complex literacy repertoires that worked against Standard English deficit models. This study demonstrates the democratic potential of welcoming diverse students into their own ethnographic research for literacy learning. The study equally provides insights for teachers and researchers into the mundane ways that literacy and language ideologies are produced schools and how students work to resist these through their own practices.

Infusions and Fumigations

Written texts, especially sacred texts, can be handled in different ways. They can be read for semantic content; or they can be materially experienced, touched, or even be inhaled or drunk. I argue that literacy ideologies regulate social acceptability of specific semantic and somatic text practices. Drinking or fumigating the Qurʾan as a medical procedure is a highly contested literacy event in which two different ideologies are drawn upon simultaneously. I employ the linguistic model of codeswitching to highlight central aspects of this event: a more somatic ideology of literacy enables the link to medicine, while a more semantic ideology connects the practice to theological discourses on the sacredness of the Qurʾan as well as to the tradition of Prophetic medicine. Opposition to and ridicule of the practice, however, comes from representatives of an ideology of semantic purity, including some Islamic theologians and most Western scholars of Islam. Qurʾanic potions thus constitute an ideal point of entry for analyzing different types of literacy ideologies being followed in religious traditions.

Valuing the Lives and Experiences of English Learners: Widening the Landscape of Children's Literature

This article explores the current landscape of children's picture books in terms of the diversity represented, how having a range of diverse populations authentically depicted in picture books impacts culturally and linguistically diverse students, the importance for teachers to seek out culturally relevant literature, and ways that ideologies of literacy transmitted through picture books impact English learners' (ELs') academic success. The authors suggest that books must offerELs authentic views of all cultures represented in schools and discuss culturally relevant literature and its uses in the classroom. The article presents three pedagogical lenses teachers can explore and incorporate into their curricula to build on theirELs' cultural capital in the classroom: multicultural, multilingual, and strategic. Specific curricular ideas, including pre‐, during‐, and postreading strategies, are included as are lists of suggested titles for classroom use.

Mobilities of Language and Literacy Ideologies: Dual Language Graduates’ Bilingualism and Biliteracy

Using qualitative methodology, this research examines how graduates of a K-5 dual language immersion program have experienced multiple and competing social, cultural, institutional, and political forces at play in complex processes that ultimately affect one’s mobilities of language, literacy, and learning. These students have now grown into adulthood, and the extent to which their past experiences as dual language students have affected their current language and literacy ideologies and practices is examined. As graduates experienced and internalized notions of Spanish as social, cultural, economic, and literacy capital, this likely contributed to current ideologies that greatly esteem bilingualism and biliteracy. The findings highlight that ideologies of language and literacy are neither static nor fixed, but over time, they have been molded and reshaped in a very fluid and lively process.

Unfinished Science in Museums: a push for critical science literacy

Communication of scientific knowledge has been caught up in a pedagogical struggle between science literacy ideologies. The backseat role taken by the teaching of the philosophical and sociological aspects of science has come under fire by those calling for a broader view of science to be made public under the umbrella term “critical science literacy”. In this paper, we argue that the lack of unfinished science in museums — science still in the making or still being debated — is a paradigm case where the richer, fuller view of science is being denied air by the presentation of science as a finished, objective set of facts. We argue that unfinished science offers us the opportunity to present the full complexity of science, including its social and philosophical aspects, and thus enabling the “critical” of critical science literacy.

Kreol at school: a case study of Mauritian Muslims' language and literacy ideologies

Negotiating their double identity as Mauritians and Muslims in multilingual and in multiethnic Mauritius, Mauritian Muslims have been socialised into reading and writing in Kreol in madrassahs, while they have never been exposed to Kreol literacy in mainstream education. At the point where Kreol is being introduced as an optional school subject, and given that the Mauritian Muslim community has made particular use of written Kreol in the madrassah, this community becomes an interesting test case to explore its language and literacy ideologies with respect to Kreol. A case study approach was used to investigate madrassah informants' language and literacy ideologies, their attitudes to and perceptions of Kreol at the madrassah and at school. The findings reveal that they tolerate written Kreol at the madrassah, but that they use a French-Kreol literacy variety and aspire to shift to French in the near future. Furthermore, they have ambivalent attitudes towards the introduction of Kreol as an optional school subject and potential medium of instruction. These findings are discussed in relation to the micro-practices occurring in the madrassah and the macro-context, both of which reinforce dominant historically situated popular ideologies about Kreol literacy.

Ideologies of Literacy, “Academic Literacies,” and Composition Studies

In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the call of this journal in its mission statement for “new interactions between Literacy and Composition Studies.” From the framework of competing ideologies of literacy, I explore points of intersection as well as divergence between strands of what’s known as “composition studies” and what has come to be identified as the “academic literacies” approach to academic literacy. My focus on “academic literacies” rather than the broader area of literacy studies signals at least three of my biases: first, I wish to counter the tendency to allow the cultural norm for academic literacy to go unchallenged, a tendency that a focus on those literacy practices deemed nonacademic risks maintaining; second, and relatedly, insofar as work in composition studies remains tied by its location in the academy to programs charged with the study and teaching of academic writing, those of us identified with composition cannot allow cultural norms for academic literacy to go unchallenged; and third, some of the most promising work challenging such norms can be found in work taking an academic literacies approach.