Sociocultural Literacy Studies

Предметом исследования являются жанровые стратегии отобранных драматических текстов, их типологические особенности и характер функционирования в театральном процессе обозначенного периода.
Специальность 10. 01. 01-«Русская литература».
Диссертация на соискание ученой степени кандидата филологических наук.
Научный руководитель: кандидат филологических наук, профессор Громова М.И.
Москва-2008

En este trabajo discuto la noción de agencia y su lugar (e importancia) en una perspectiva sociocultural y crítica de la literacidad, específicamente de la de tipo académico. En la primera parte, enmarco la problemática de la literacidad académica en un paradigma crítico que ha venido adoptándose en diversas disciplinas y que ha influido recientemente sobre la lingüística aplicada, y explico la conexión existente entre Los Nuevos Estudios de Literacidad y una teoría del aprendizaje situado como participación en comunidades de práctica. En la segunda parte, presento dos breves estudios de caso sobre estudiantes quechua hablantes de la Universidad de Huamanga (Ayacucho, Perú) para mostrar las estrategias que éstos desarrollan en el proceso de apropiación de la literacidad académica (de la producción escrita específicamente) como parte de un despliegue de agencia. Estos estudios de caso muestran que los sujetos no constituyen meros efectos de sus “características culturales”, sino que son actores en el mundo, que participan en comunidades de práctica y que muchas veces negocian con los posicionamientos institucionales. Finalmente, concluyo el trabajo con una discusión más aplicada sobre la enseñanza de la literacidad académica y con un argumento a favor de un modelo de la negociación que cuestiona una sociolingüística de corte más “neoliberal” todavía imperante en nuestro medio.

Chris Harwood and Clare Brett

Informed by sociocultural theory this study presents insights gained through qualitative study of an undergraduate literacy activity in a North American university that used Facebook Groups to host student online book clubs. Data from student and instructor interviews and online collaborative writing interactions from a 24-week empirical study of the interactions and activities within the online book clubs are used to demonstrate how teaching and learning was perceived and enacted in the online activity. Excerpts from the interviews and online interactions illustrate how learning was mediated between instructors, between instructors and students, and between students on the program. The analysis reveals possible tensions these dialogic interactions can create and informs our understanding of how online educators are also positioned as learners, endeavoring to understand the repercussions of their online interactions and teaching practices. This paper adds to this emerging literature employing the concept of obuchenie by examining how particular affordances and constraints of teaching and learning unfold in an authentic online learning context.

Keywords: Vygotsky, sociocultural theory, obuchenie; online pedagogy, scaffolding, mediation, ZPD

This article discusses the findings of an empirical study that investigated the writing practices in a multilingual, rural, fourth-grade classroom in Kenya. The study was undergirded by Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. Analysis of texts indicated that these emergent multilinguals used multiple semiotic resources to maximize the chances of meeting the communicative goals through translanguaging. However, the translanguaging process in writing was a tension-filled process in terms of language separation and correctness. The emergent multilingual writer went through tensions in the process of finding a balance between authorial intentions and the authoritarian single voicedness required by the school and the national curriculum. The author suggests that translanguaging in writing disrupts unequal voices and language hierarchies by transgressing standard ideologies in academic writing. It is recommended that educators consider multilingual resources as legitimate cognitive tools and resources for communication in school contexts to allow authentic voices and inclusive instruction.

Key words: Emergent multilinguals; heteroglossia; translingual writing

This qualitative study examines a reading comprehension strategy use in English as a second language in upper-secondary schools one year after teachers participated in a professional development course. The data comprises observations, teacher narratives, and student interviews. A key finding is that the teachers used a repertoire of strategies from the course, suggesting an impact of the course. A second finding was a clear difference between how students in general and vocational programmes used the strategies taught: the vocational students used them in ways that indicated their relevance to them as learners, while the students in general programmes did not. The findings also suggest how and why students employ strategies. The article discusses implications for strategy instruction and how to enhance the reading proficiency of adolescent readers.

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Han pasado más de 400 años desde que se publicó la primera parte de Don Quijote de la Mancha, pero su vigencia en las clases de E/LE es eterna. En la obra magna de Cervantes encontramos, además de una aguda crítica a las novelas de caballería de la época, una serie de temas socioculturales que pueden ser explotados en nuestras clases, en especial en lo referente a la gastronomía, las costumbres populares o los horarios. En definitiva, con el Quijote como herramienta, a la vez que trabajamos con un texto literario, con las ventajas que ello conlleva, tenemos la posibilidad de trabajar una serie de rasgos socioculturales presentes en los inventarios del Plan Curricular del Instituto Cervantes y, por lo tanto, susceptibles de llevar al aula.

Research efforts in identifying adult literacy rates have for the most part focused on national and international contexts. Conversely, there has been little to no research conducted on neighborhood literacy rates in medium size cities. The purpose of this study was to identify the adult literacy rate in the West Hope Zone, a neighborhood in Grand Rapids Michigan. The major findings reveal that the English illiteracy rates are higher than the most recent estimations by the National Adult Literacy Survey. Adults who attended college, regardless of the language, had more literacy skills and knowledge than those who had a high school diploma or did not graduate from high school. Native speakers of English developed more English literacy skills and knowledge than non-native speakers of English. Based on these findings the author recommended that literacy development efforts be focused on concurrent bilingual programs. Similarly, the author suggested that systematic studies are needed to identify literacy rate and implement literacy programs in neighborhoods within medium and large cities.

This paper highlights the challenges and experiences of the researchers in an academic institution where the research project which initially began as part of an academic research initiative expanded to helping a marginalized community in need. As social science researchers in a technological university which emphasizes natural science research, opportunities and motivation to carry out social research is a challenge. Furthermore, as minorities among academicians from the Engineering and Technology disciplines, obtaining funding and carrying out community based research is also difficult. In this paper, we share the conception of Living Literacies, a literacy programme for the Orang Asli, an indigenous community in Malaysia, and share the challenges we faced in executing this project.

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According to the popular discourse, America is facing a tremendous literacy crisis. Poor children and children of color trail their affluent and White counterparts on traditional literacy assessments. Employers complain that workers do not possess requisite literacy skills at a time when changing communications technologies are making old and new literacy skills mandatory for participation in the global economy or even civic life. As all of this happens, urban schools continue to fail to provide access to literacies of power for their students as they also fail to account for the local and popular cultural literacies that their students bring with them into the classroom. The true literacy crisis is that educators and researchers have not figured out how to decrease the literacy achievement gap; a gap that carries with it severe social, economic, and political consequences.

Of course, nothing is inevitable, and there have been historic moments when populations have gained access to literacies of power as they also intervened in their conditions of oppression. Even now, literacy educators and scholars possess the potential to create positive, conceptually grounded and empirically tested strategies for transformative literacy education that can not only change classroom practices, but the world itself.

This course examines historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literacy theory and research in hopes to produce scholars and educators who are able to theorize, create, and/or investigate these transformational practices. It begins with an examination of the historical legacy of literacy as a vehicle to freedom and empowerment for marginalized populations. Students will read literature covering the Cuba literacy campaign and the struggles of African-Americans in the United States as they consider (and reconsider) the role of literacy education in social transformation. The class will also investigate the major paradigms of literacy theory and research during the past half century examining myths about great divides between oral and literate societies and the transformation from “culturally neutral” theories of literacy to cross cultural and sociocultural theories. The course will also consider the impacts of the revolution in communications technologies on the nature of literacy and on contemporary new media literacy practices. Finally, the course will examine theories of critical literacy education and examples of literacy praxis in classroom and out of school settings.

According to the popular discourse, America is facing a tremendous literacy crisis. Poor children and children of color trail their affluent and White counterparts on traditional literacy assessments. Employers complain that workers do not possess requisite literacy skills at a time when changing communications technologies are making old and new literacy skills mandatory for participation in the global economy or even civic life. As all of this happens, urban schools continue to fail to provide access to literacies of power for their students as they also fail to account for the local and popular cultural literacies that their students bring with them into the classroom. The true literacy crisis is that educators and researchers have not figured out how to decrease the literacy achievement gap; a gap that carries with it severe social, economic, and political consequences.

Of course, nothing is inevitable, and there have been historic moments when populations have gained access to literacies of power as they also intervened in their conditions of oppression. Even now, literacy educators and scholars possess the potential to create positive, conceptually grounded and empirically tested strategies for transformative literacy education that can not only change classroom practices, but the world itself.

This course examines historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literacy theory and research in hopes to produce scholars and educators who are able to theorize, create, and/or investigate these transformational practices. It begins with an examination of the historical legacy of literacy as a vehicle to freedom and empowerment for marginalized populations. Students will read literature covering the Cuba literacy campaign and the struggles of African-Americans in the United States as they consider (and reconsider) the role of literacy education in social transformation. The class will also investigate the major paradigms of literacy theory and research during the past half century examining myths about great divides between oral and literate societies and the transformation from “culturally neutral” theories of literacy to cross cultural and sociocultural theories. The course will also consider the impacts of the revolution in communications technologies on the nature of literacy and on contemporary new media literacy practices. Finally, the course will examine theories of critical literacy education and examples of literacy praxis in classroom and out of school settings.

Literacy Discourses in Two Socio-economically Differentiated Neighbourhoods in Brazil is an ethnographic study concerned with people’s use and representations of literacy in two residential quarters in Distrito Federal, the federation district within which is the capital city of Brazil. It is a detailed description of situated literacies in particular domains such as home and community, and it involves knowing literacy
practices at both individual and social level. Besides, it is an explanation of how these literacies relate to other domains such as work and school. Informal ways of learning literacy are also given attention as part of the everyday use. In doing so, I explore the categories of vernacular and dominant literacies within the New Literacy Studies.
Use of literacy is combined in this work with the notion of language in use – discourse – in a theoretical framework of discourse as both activity and representation, cf. Critical Discourse Analysis, following a particular strand of research into literacy in Lancaster University. This integration between the New Literacy Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis allows for the study of literacy as discourse in the link between local settings
and global practices.
As a main proposition, these situated literacies are classified as lifeworld and systemic literacies, derived from Habermas’s social theory of lifeworld and system. This classification is meant to show the advantage of providing ways to understand relationships between vernacular and dominant literacies, which do not figure as discrete elements but exist in hybrid practices.
Finally, a critique of dominant discourses of literacy is made through the explanatory framework of CDA, as in Chouliaraki & Fairclough (1999), in order to show how dominant uses and representations of literacy function in the broader social context.
These dominant discourses of literacy are contrasted with critical uses and knowledge of literacy, pointing to new possibilities of using and conceiving literacy in everyday life, which could be applied in educational settings.

Research on disrupting inequality in education can benefit from situating it within the debates on varying and often conflicting meanings of equality and its perils and promises. Especially in the wake of achievement testing and resurgent biological determinism, researchers continue to equivocate between commitment to the idea that all humans are equal in their core capacities versus the tendency to attribute developmental outcomes to differences in " natural " inborn talents and endowments. This chapter examines contemporary research and theorizing to address the tenet of fundamental equality to counter biological determinism laden with mythic racial, gender, and other types of unproven assumptions and biases. Drawing on a wide range of emerging positions and evidence across neurosciences, epigenetics, developmental systems perspective, and cultural-historical framework, the core argument is that all persons have infinite potential—incalculable in advance, unlimited, and not predefined in terms of any putatively inborn " endowments. " This potential is realized in the course of activity-dependent generation of open-ended, dynamic, and situated developmental processes that are critically reliant upon sociocultural supports, tools, mediations, and access to requisite resources, especially through education. An educational policy along these lines would be centrally premised on the imperative to remedy the effects of discrimination and marginalization.

In their 1985 report, Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading, Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson defined reading and proposed five principles that guide its successful enactment: (1) reading is a constructive process, (2) reading must be fluent, (3) reading must be strategic, (4) reading requires motivation, and (5) reading is a continuously developing skill. In this article we revise the definition from reading to literacy and rethink the principles in response to theoretical and empirical developments in the intervening years with regard to the processes of, and contexts for, reading. Our updated principles include: (1) literacy is a constructive, integrative, and critical process situated in social practices; (2) fluent reading is shaped by language processes and contexts; (3) literacy is strategic and disciplinary; (4) literacy entails motivation and engagement; and (5) literacy is a continuously developing set of practices. We redefine each p...

Despite growing support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the United States, the Southeastern region continues to pass legislation that discriminates against those who do not fit normative notions of sexuality and gender. This opposition affects LGBT students and the teachers who identify as LGBT activists. This study of two years of data is an analysis of one novice teacher’s efforts to advocate on behalf of LGBT students despite the resistance that she faced from sociocultural factors influencing her students, classroom, and her teaching practices. An examination of the social, cultural, and political limitations she faced suggest that research advocating curricular changes and findings suggesting that teachers resist sexuality- and gender-based topics ignore the many sociocultural factors acting on educators in the Southeastern US as they strive to be LGBT activists.

This article, part of a four-year research partnership with a multilingual faith community and its school, explores what happened when we invited young children in an aftercare program to inquire into the university from their perspectives. Through a sociocultural literacy framework and realist theories of identity and experience, we examine the children's organic forms of sense making through what we describe as critical play. The children took up our invitation to represent their inquiries into college by using humour and imagination to demystify the university and make it their own. We conclude with some specific recommendations for colleges and universities interested in supporting access to higher education, especially for those young children who may not have the economic means or the entitlement of institutional legacy as part of their social habitus.

In this editorial, the author reflects on the state of research on academic literacies in Latin American higher education. To this end, the author presents a description of the context of higher education in Latin America and an analysis of literature on academic literacies in the region through the lenses of three models: the study skills model, the academic socialization model, and the critical sociocul- tural model. Based on this analysis, the author argues that a critical sociocultural perspective is emerging in Latin America, which considers academic literacies as social practices embedded in systems of power. This transition to a critical socio- cultural perspective is important and timely because it challenges deficit views of students, and it addresses issues of power, identity, representation, and authority. The author invites Latin American scholars to consider the implications of a criti- cal sociocultural perspective on academic literacies and the possibilities it offers for understanding how youth interact with literacy in a region where education often reinforces deep inequalities.

Half of humanity lives in towns and cities and that proportion is expected to increase in the coming decades as society, both Western and non-Western, is fast becoming urban and mega-urban. Given the disciplinary commitment to an empirically-based analysis Anthropology has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of our evolving urban world. It is in such a belief that we have established the Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology series.
For more information on the series and submitting a proposal for it, please contact me: [email protected]

Despite growing support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)
rights in the United States, the Southeastern region continues to pass legislation
that discriminates against those who do not fit normative notions of sexuality
and gender. This opposition affects LGBT students and the teachers who identify
as LGBT activists. This study of two years of data is an analysis of one novice
teacher’s efforts to advocate on behalf of LGBT students despite the resistance
that she faced from sociocultural factors influencing her students, classroom, and
her teaching practices. An examination of the social, cultural, and political limitations
she faced suggest that research advocating curricular changes and findings
suggesting that teachers resist sexuality- and gender-based topics ignore the
many sociocultural factors acting on educators in the Southeastern US as they
strive to be LGBT activists.

Half of humanity lives in towns and cities and that proportion is expected to increase in the coming decades as society, both Western and non-Western, is fast becoming urban and mega-urban. Given the disciplinary commitment to an empirically-based analysis Anthropology has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of our evolving urban world. It is in such a belief that we have established the Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology series. For more information on the series and submitting a proposal for it, please contact me: [email protected]

In this communication, we examine the concept of information culture - used preferably to information literacy - and its dynamics in the context of digital convergence. We argue that the phenomenon of digital convergence, a cultural phenomenon, brings to the foreground the social and human dimensions, it gives a central role to the actors, considered in their interactions with other people and with artifacts in their information environment. So, in a world in permanent change, information culture is much more than information literacy, in its functional and individual meaning. It is not only a matter of seeking and using information; it is a matter of creating meaning out of cultural objects which are much more than neutral objects transmitting messages and information. It includes a general reflection on the process of knowledge creation and communication.

This article presents two studies of students and teachers negotiating writing practices in two high school English classrooms in the United States. Both studies draw on a sociocultural framework of understanding writing as a social practice involving distributed, mediated, and dia-logic processes of invention. Each study presents a different approach to investigating how writing practices are negotiated and how writing is produced related to that negotiation. Across the two studies, findings illustrate how the written texts students produce are a result of negotiations among historical writing practices students bring along, the sanctioned writing practices the teacher is attempting to bring about, and a myriad of other possible related issues. Considered together, the findings of the two studies have implications for understanding student writing as a negotiated relationship among multiple writing practices, social interactions with peers and teachers, and objects and artifacts at work within the writing events.

This paper contributes towards revealing the ‘gap’ that exists between what Peruvian literacy campaigns seek for ‘illiterates’ and what these ‘illiterates’ actually need. Although the discourse of recent governmental literacy programmes stresses the need to take into account the illiterates agency during the whole process, the neoliberal view of development and the idea of an autonomous model of literacy end up building an identity of the ‘literate’ based on hegemonic interests. The paper will compare this contradictory discourse with a case study of a bilingual Quechua and Spanish-speaking woman who only attended one year of schooling – and is probably conceived of as a ‘functional illiterate’ by the State – but has managed to position Spanish literacy practices within the core of her identity as a mother and a grandmother. The analysis of a literacy event within a context of migration will reveal how literacy appropriation may be related to cultural transmission and to affection.

In this editorial, the author reflects on the state of research on academic literacies in Latin American higher education. To this end, the author presents a description of the context of higher education in Latin America, and the analysis of literature on academic literacies in the region through the lenses of three models: the study skills model, the academic socialization model, and the critical sociocultural model. From this analysis, the author argues that a critical sociocultural perspective is emerging in Latin America, which considers academic literacies as social practices embedded in systems of power. This turn into a critical sociocultural perspective is important and timely because it challenges deficit views of students, and it includes issues of power, identity, representation, and authority. The author invites Latin American scholars to consider the implications of a critical sociocultural perspective to academic literacies and the possibilities it offers to understan...