Imagining Literacy Equity

Abstract

Theorizing flows of community practices implicates three interrelated themes: (1) theorizing practices rather than practicing theories, (2) theorizing our stories, and (3) research as responsibility to the communities in which we work. One way to claim literacy research as a principled epistemological stance is to confront the real-life effects of literacy theorizing and the practicing of our theories. We must challenge analyses that disadvantage youth from nondominant populations by deconstructing the categories that devalue communities and educational possibilities. To keep our insights, only within the domain of theory and not the practice of theory can allow the reproduction of symbolic violence. Theories like the ''culture of poverty'' and the language gap promise a facile explanatory power for complex multilayered issues. By engaging with multilingualism, transnational literacies, and community communicative flows, we can theorize communicative practices as part of an array of the multiple and multimodal semiotic systems and resources that flow in and through communities. It is argued that we all translanguage across the ecologies of our everyday practices through the full and ample use of our linguistic repertoires. In that sense, we are all translingual. If we think of moving across language and literacy borders as a space for pedagogical potential, we can underscore that learning is about engagement with diverse voices and conceptualizations. Students can develop a translingual awareness that perceives languages as plural and fluid, and this awareness can help students succeed outside of monolingual norms.

Advocacy Stories: Equity Literacy Practices of White Low Income Mothers Navigating School Reform

“…As with other forms of critical and collaborative ethnographic and qualitative work, we recognize that this is one of many stories that might be produced about Hillsdale (Anders & Lester, 2015), informed over time by the broader project, our collaborators, and decisions in the process of data construction, analysis, and write-up (Goodall, 2002;Lather, 1996;Richardson, 2002). It is through long-term, embedded engagement with the community driving our activities and questions, regular public-facing reporting of our research findings to the community, and more traditional qualitative measures of credibility (e.g., member checking and triangulation as described above) that we share a report on our research and identify deeper understandings of white parents who self-identify as low income, and their stories of the reform period at Wrightway.…”