CEPSE/TE 915* (Literacy in Sociocultural Context)
Professor Mary Juzwik
Mondays, 12:40-3:30, 175 Communication Arts Bldg
In this reading course, we will study writing and reading conceptualized as pluralistic cultural practices whose forms, functions, and influences take shape as part of, and contributors to, larger contexts–social, political, ethnohistorical, material and ideological. This contextualized approach to literacy scholarship arose in reaction to earlier theories – which we will review — that treated literacy as an autonomous technology delivering certain predictable consequences, social and cognitive, to its users. We will read ethnographic, linguistic, and historical studies, with a particular eye to the difficulties of studying literacy in — and across — context(s) and to the theoretical and methodological choices that authors make.
We will explore questions like these: What follows from conceptualizing “literacy” in the plural as “literacies”? What can we learn from looking at literacy/ies from historical perspectives? What can be learned by examining the role of literacies in colonization, nation building, and relationships between individuals and seats of power? What roles do literacies play in relationships between nations and citizens? How are literacies implicated in issues of societal inequities, and to what extent – and how — can literacies contribute to redistributions of power? How do literacies interact with technologies? How do literacies interact with racist ideologies and histories? How do literacies relate to, interact with, and define so-called “oral,” “digital,” and other cultures? How do shifts in the means of creating, distributing and preserving information shape ways of knowing? How do literacies interact with other aesthetic, artistic, and expressive practices? We will also assess the implications of this body of research for literacy teaching and learning in school contexts, trying to identify the next frontiers: What should be studied now and how?
Because this is a reading course, and our primary mode of learning will be engagement with and interaction with others about texts (including quite a few book-length studies), it also affords an opportunity to build our capacities as scholarly readers and note-takers. A strand of the course will therefore involve learning about different approaches and technologies for scholarly note-taking, with a particular focus on reading books for “the scholarly conversation(s)” a book is entering into, the claims authors make in response to those conversations, and how those claims are grounded in theory and methodology.
*Please note: This course is an elective in the literacy PhD specialization and is offered every 3 years.
Possible course texts include:
Baker Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. New York: Routledge and Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Welch, B. J. (2016). Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
Collins, J. & Blot, R. K. (2003). Literacy and literacies: Texts, power, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gee, J. (2012). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, Fourth edition. New York: Taylor and Francis.
Goody, J. & Watt, I. (1968). The consequences of literacy. In J. Goody (Ed)., Literacy in traditional societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kirkland, D. (2013). A search past silence: The literacy of young black men. New York: Teachers College Press.
Olson, D. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47(3), 257-281.
Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artifactual Literacies: Every object tells a story. New York: Teachers College Press.
Mignolo, W. (1996). “Signs & their Transmission.” In Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Winn, M. T. (2011). Girl time: Literacy, justice, and the school-to-prison pipeline. New York: Teachers College Press.