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Monthly Archives: September 2013

LLED 558 Week 5

Slide 7 of last week’s presentation

Before getting onto the reading, I will write a brief reflection on the multiliteracies and multimodality presentation last week. Despite the 10-minute delay as we discovered we could not reconnect an already-running presentation to the SMARTBoard, we accomplished our goal to demonstrate how the SB is an example of multimodality in the classroom. Well, most classrooms anyway. What surprised me in preparing the presentation, and even some of the in-class feedback during the presentation, was how much teachers and students don’t like using this expensive learning tool. Things could be done a lot more smoothly on a giant LCD television screen connected to a Bamboo electronic drawing pad, but without the hands-on-screen manipulation of objects and text, it just becomes another skill most teachers would tire of introducing to the class, especially as it will get replaced by tablets or the latest technological “fad”. Like it or not, SMARTBoard will be in the classrooms for a while, and with a growing number of children who have been using them since kindergarten (many of the primary students I meet in North Vancouver seem to know more about these devices than the teachers for whom I substitute). While it is a shame that high schools cut off these students from the technology they essentially grew up with, returning them to dusty used books and a mountain of photocopied handouts, there is also a push to make learning more asynchronous, at home on the students’ computers. Nevertheless, our LLED 558 presentation set out to rekindle creative use of classroom technology, and it will remain to be seen who will carry on the torch passed from us to them.

Bamboo drawing pad – SMARTBoard’s next level up?

Now, onto this week’s readings, I would imagine if the grown-up versions of Chelsea and Lucas (from Edwards-Groves’ case study) were to present in our classroom, we would be in for a treat. At their young age, only a couple of years ago, they already have a handle on collaborative work in designing a presentation, as well as the imaginative showpersonship needed to impress net generation students. All three articles acknowledge that the look of learning has changed thanks to online resources, and as Gee would want to add in here, familiarity with gaming practices. It was amusing to read the back-and-forth between James Paul Gee and Julian Sefton-Green, one claiming that online games creates a community of practice, while the other questioning this approach of a gaming literacy that only promotes more gaming (Jewitt, 2008, p. 255). From some of the South Korean students I have tutored on the North Shore, university-aged older siblings could make a better career out of playing Starcraft than continuing with their studies. While JS-G scores a point on the side of caution (for teachers not to get too carried away by every digital bell and whistle), the children from Christine Joy Edwards-Groves’ (hereafter CJE-G) case study demonstrates, they like the wow factor being added to the research and planning they are required to do. It is especially a hit with the kindergarteners, and who knows what technology will be in use when they finish up their studies? A more balanced approach is presented in Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl’s investigation of “sedimented identities” that demonstrates for each device in use in the classroom, students bring knowledge from home that may either support or contradict what needs to be done for school. Rowsell and Pahl place great emphasis on Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus” for defining their studies of the sedimentary layer of home world, school world and other influences on the students.

Although Bourdieu and habitus are two related terms that I have heard in the last couple of weeks, it is still a vague notion of what he means. The field theory video posted to the class makes it a bit more relatable. Reflecting upon Lisa and Meg’s presentation question about the Sri Lankan teacher’s habitus, the answer revealed itself from the discussion with Angela. When teaching a grade four classroom in the United States, there was a district-wide initiative to get students interested in getting into college, each teacher’s classroom was named after the college they had attended, and students took on the identity of that post-secondary (Angela’s college team was the Cougars, and so were her students). While there is not such a focus on the teacher’s university life in Canada, my experience as a Teacher on Call are walking into way too many classroom decked out with hockey posters and other paraphernalia, and the closer the hometeam gets to the play-offs, the more team jersey are spotted around the school. No wonder Vancouver had riots when the team lost the Stanley Cup (twice) when a student’s school world has become so hockey-ified.

Lastly, looking ahead to multimodal text for next week, I would like to draw attention to the latest RSA Animate that came out last week: David Coplin’s Re-imagining Work:

Reference

Edwards-Groves, C. J. (2011). The multimodal writing process: changing practices in contemporary classrooms. Language and Education 25(1). 49-64.

Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacies in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education 32. 241-267.

LLED 601 Week 5

Constructivism at an international Shakespeare conference

As a theme I would like to explore in relation to this week’s readings on constructivism, I will mention an international conference I attended this summer. In the sunny Mediterranean town of Montpellier, I was at the European Shakespeare Research Association conference to discuss some findings that involve the digitization of First Folio text happening in Japan. It was an eye-opening experience for me, but in terms of constructive learning, far from the ideals of Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky. It felt more along the theme of oppression written so evocatively by Freire. Little evidence did I find in France for the Shakespearean sense of freedom (Greenblatt, 2010) and even less for a democracy where everyone can read and have an opinion about the plays (based on the tradition that everyone could understand a commonly spoken language while watching a play). Instead, there was an educated hierarchy represented at the conference, where only certain skill-levels could fully understand the deeper meaning of Shakespeare’s words. The professors at the top of this food chain had reputations to uphold, insisted upon their (usually) singular way of reading the text, and while others convened to listen to lectures, those on top did not seem to be too willing to construct ideas about the plays (unless of course they had a book on the same topic as someone else). The closing plenary speaker articulated my growing suspicion that I had come to the wrong place to learn about the latest ideas in Shakespeare scholarship, by showing a slide of a related text (Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit) and declaring that “anyone who doesn’t know what this is doesn’t deserve to be in this room.” As the French would say, incroyable!

Pre-show at the Berliner Ensemble’s Richard II
Domain d’Or, Montpellier

Romanticism often gets looked down upon, even though for Dewey it was a major influence. At ERSA, the Germans seemed to get blamed for perpetuating myths about Shakespeare, yet the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Richard II was inspired theatre, one of the highlights of the conference. There is a connection here to be sought with John Dewey and his fondness for the Romantic poets, such as Coleridge (Garrison, 1999, para. 21) in forming his philosophy of education. One person’s delights can lead to higher levels of thinking about other topics in their lives. Contrasting to these enlightening moments glanced at in Jim Garrison’s entry on John Dewey is his growing mistrust of Social Darwinism, which he saw as control via an undefined notion of being fit to survive. Happily for most readers, Dewey was not a racist, and perhaps for the American readers that he also had reservations about Soviet Communism. Those who try to impose order on a society are no better than the oppressive “bankers” that Freire writes about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It will be important to remember that English burnt down the Globe Theatre the second time it was built, part of the Reformation, and if it wasn’t for other countries noticing how enjoyable Shakespeare’s plays are, there would be little evidence of his plays past the late 17th century.

Scene from Peines d’amour perdues (Love’s Labour’s Lost)

Another connection I will make between the constructivist ideal and this eye-opening conference centers upon the participants themselves. While their devotion to Shakespeare scholarship cannot be questioned, many of them traveling great distances to attend this annual conference, there seemed to be little joy in watching versions of the plays. The opening night production of Richard II was well attended, but many left at the intermission (which came a few minutes shy of midnight, so understandable for most long-distance travelers). Before the show, during the welcoming dinner, local university students had prepared scenes from Shakespeare plays, a program called “purple passages” in both French and English. It was a brave sight, many of these young theatre students presenting before a renown collection of scholars, but as for the aural pleasures, it was hard to make out any of the actors’ words over the din of table conversation. Similarly, the same group of actors performed the first three acts of Love’s Labour’s Lost for this dwindling crowd on the closing night. I loved seeing (and hearing) the French construction of this play, and by this time not at all surprised to see the people who should be most interested in how students make meaning from the play (they are all professors, after all) grouping together for more chat in cafés and bistros around town. A banker’s holiday, it seems.

Dining alone at French bistro

Not so much to write about Piaget this week, and I am finding it a struggle to write positively about the Canadian Journal of Education article I selected which refers to both Dewey and Piaget, but confuses sociocultural and cognitive constructivism. While searching for James Paul Gee’s video “Books and Games”, I came across this intriguing item: Howard Gardner, Noam Chomsky and Bruno della Chiesa discuss the influence of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At one point, around the 30 minute mark, they even put in a word or two about Dewey’s school.

Reference

Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey. In M. Peters, P. Ghiraldelli, B. Žarnić, A. Gibbons, R. Heraud (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education. Retrieved on September 26, 2013 from http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.php?id=dewey_john

Greenblatt, S. (2010). Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LLED 536 Week 4

Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to StageEthnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage by Johnny Saldana

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Here is the first draft of an autoethnodrama based upon recent teaching experiences.
Et Tu…

LLED 558 Week 4

See our SMARTBoard presentation first! – Uploading soon.

Lots of readings to cover this week, but Natalie and I got off to a good start in preparing for our presentation. New London Group seemed to be the most daunting, even after reading it again since my Master of Educational Technology course (and it is on the reading list for LLED 601 later this term). It tells an enticingly simple story of where literacy education was at the end of the 20th century, and how it must be designed for the 21st, making the fullest use of multiliteracies. In predicting changes to lifeworlds, even without the paranoia caused by September 11th, the Group seem to have envisioned Twitter and Facebook. People are reading information in a decidedly more public way, and able to comment on what others are up to, that would have shocked other in the late 1990’s. One issue that comes up is harm that happens, and cases like Amanda Todd get more attention than most people are able to deal with in a respectful way. Amongst the obscenities and wry comments in Lewis CK’s latest stint on Conan O’Brien’s talkshow, he raises an interesting point about the lack of empathy children have for other when most of their interaction happens through a smartphone screen.

James Paul Gee, one of the New Londoners, as well as Knobel and Lankshear, see the young students’ ability to process the vast amount of information coming at them from all corners as a sign of multitasking, and it was a good point raised in this week’s discussion that how well these students are able to blog, listen to music and study at the same time is not made clear. On the one hand, if students are productive with so many resources at their fingertips, it will encourage others to make use of any device within reach, never mind the digital divide that supposedly limited how many can access these tools. Yet on the other hand, society seems to have taken just as many steps forward as they have regressed into a mob mentality due to anyone being able to say anything in a vaguely anonymous manner. Another recent example is the fall-out from Guido Barilla’s anti-LGBT comments. It is unfortunate that the chairman of an otherwise successful pasta company needed to air his views on the “family values” issue, and equally sad that he is not as unbiased and enlightened as others appear to be. Somehow hectoring him to conform to a 21st century standard makes social justice all the more oppressive, when tolerance is only granted to those with the same level of tolerance.

Barilla backpedals

Finally, two other article that captured my attention were Kress and Bhattacharya. Another New Londoner, Gunther Kress writes about mutlimodality in the year 2000, and takes a less digital, more “at hand” or manual approach to the different forms literacy takes. The shape and feel of a bottle of water, the images on the label, the taste of local spring are all working together to make one brand more appealing than another – good thing he stayed away from the pasta aisle when generating his thoughts on this topic! For him, there are multiple ways of experiencing the same thing, yet a more critical stance is taken by the more modern Usree Bhattacharya, who problematizes the western alphabet and the Eurocentric culture of education. When it comes to histories disrupted by the colonial takeover of the world, learning to type or text using only the 26 letters provided (less and less accents, tildes and umlauts seem to be required) by the English alphabet makes for easier computer processing, but a less dialectally interesting world. Two developments occurring with digital literacy could be the game-changers for New Londoners and their new literacies-backed opposition alike: video lectures and online gaming communities (what Gee calls an affinity group). The former is evident with popular websites such as TEDtalks and RSA, which produce digital video of lectures and can communicate radical ideas across the world, no doubt in as many languages as subtitle-writers permits; it moves the information age into the visual and aural corners of the New London Group’s multimodality circle. The latter allows for people to work past political and socia-economic boundaries in the form of avatars (or more simply players – the spatial and gestural modalities) to tackle important issues like zombie invasions or minecrafting.

Minecraft Earth

Move over Google, here is Minecraft Earth!

LLED 601 Week 4

Some inspired and dramatic choices for this week’s reading list, starting with the image suggested in the first paragraph of Rosenblatt’s (1978) The Reader, the Text, the Poem: a darkened stage, two chair and a book. Much of this discussion recalls one of the novels I had just finished rereading, from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Whether it was Lost in a Good Book (2002) or The Well of Lost Plots (2003), I cannot recall, but the scene played out could have just as easily been restaged in Rosenblatt’s discussion. Miss Havisham, I believe, was telling her rookie Jurisfiction agent Thursday about the role the reader plays in the creation of a narrative. The author seems to get all the creative credit, her point echoing Rosenblatt, while the people who choose to read the book (and at what point in their lives the reading happens) become so generalized as barely to be mentioned in any discourse on literacy.

Maggy Roberts, created for Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book

© Maggy Roberts, click this link for her webpage.

Throughout the chapters, Rosenblatt invokes poets, playwrights and other authors but they merely seem incidental. Perhaps what she really wants to draw attention to is the fact that she has read this poem, seen that play etc. On a similar note, Bakhtin slyly slips in a quotation from Gogol’s Dead Souls which made me smile… oh, those Russians! Back to Rosenblatt, the Robert Frost experiment she describes is a wonderful examination of what goes on inside the reader’s head, minus any background knowledge they bring to the text – what might have happened if one of the student recognized the stanza? New word of the day comes a chapter or two later, where she contrasts “efferent” (p. 24 et passim) with the aesthetic sense of reading. Here I may need to reflect upon the classroom discussion for her idea to sink in, so stay tuned to the comment section below. Of course, the chapter I am figuratively dying to read is not included in this excerpt, but someday soon I will catch up on her discussion of timelessness texts for Hamlet and The Waste Land.

Something Rotten illustration sketch by Maggy Roberts

Now for Bakhtin’s article, I must admit that I was efferently carried away from the meaning that he was making, by a very simple mistake. What seems like a lifetime ago, I was an actor in small productions around town, and I got really excited about a production of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; I was advised by one of the director I was working with to read as much of Stoppard’s plays as I could, and set about collecting and enjoying those. A few weeks before I shipped myself off to Japan, for what was to become the next phase of my life as a teacher, I found in the library a new collection of plays called the Coast of Utopia. It was a trilogy that followed the ups and downs of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Here’s where the mistake comes in, as any reader might start to sense in this lenghtening digression: when I saw on the class reading list an article by Bakhtin, my mind immediately leapt to the conclusion that we were going to reading about that guy from the Stoppard play I never got to finish reading. Wonder what Ferdinand de Saussure would think about me unconsciously substituting a “un” for the “ht” (not withstanding the Russian characters Бахт’н and Бакунин that signify their surnames as originally given to them)? Ah well, plenty more to write about the actual Mikhail Bakhtin in the comment section below 😛

Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure by Jonathan Culler

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Finally, one author who can’t escape so easily is the one who barely wrote anything during his game-changing career as a philologist and professor of linguistics. Kind of silly to dwell on these biographical details, when so much of what is written about his theory of language is worth discussing here, as opposed to the comment section below. yet out of respect for this proto-linguist, i want to bring any thought I have about Culler’s text into the classroom to discuss. One of the greatest shifts from my Master of Educational Technology and the current Literacy Education PhD programs is the amount of face-to-face time instructors and students. If there is not a rousing discussion on the sounds and utterances de Saussure observed coming from round the tables, I don’t think there will be much more I can add to this online discussion that will set the record straight.

LLED 536 Week 3

Started work on the tentatively titled ethnodrama Et tu… and will find out soon what stage it has to be in for each of the classes. Also discovered another interesting play that will happen at the East Van Cultural Centre (the playhouse of my youth) called Inside the Seed, looks like a modern-day spin on Oedipus Rex, but more to do with argi-business than wireless communication. Hope that the class can decide on this one (although I still want to see the concurrent play Penelope. Perhaps a double bill?

LLED 558 Week 3

The plot seems to thicken with the New Literacy Studies, especially as the binary relationship between orality and literacy is called in to question. Gee (1996) leads the way with his review of the development of the two-sided debate, including some familiar names like Havelock, Vygotsky, Ong and Heath. The old world view of educated civilization and illiterate savages was demonstrated not to be so appealing after Havelock proved Homer’s epics were most likely composed ages before anyone could read or write (at least anyone Greek had these valuable skills). Ong’s further praise of oral culture’s strengths, along the same argumentative lines as Plato, prove that more the word’s proper place was in the mouths of people, not on surfaces or even screens. Ong’s Orality and Literacy presents an intriguing case for secondary orality, which follows along the same lines as TEDtalks, RSA.org and even YouTube itself. Here is a link to animator Andrew Park discussion with RSA on link between the visual images and memory: The RSA Animate Revolution.

Andrew Park’s scribing for RSA Animate

Perry (2012) covers the same ground, but with more questions about the difference between New Literacy studies and New Literacies. Kind of difficult to follow along without a map or flowchart, and she even includes diagrams in her paper. Many of her questions are answered, some with more questions to follow, all zeroing in on the big question, what is literacy? Much of the class seems to be pondering this very question, which is not so bad for literate minds like ourselves, but I really have to wonder if students in other graduate degree programs spend as much mental energy asking questions like “what is physics?”, “how do we define law?” or “what does ‘ocean’ mean?”. A paradigm must have something in view, however nebulous the abstract idea might be, and Perry puts her two-cents in with a subtle complaint that “something is lost when the field defines literacy so broadly” (p. 65). For other answers that Perry provides, they are directed towards multiple meaning and differing opinions, and I find her paper at a balancing point between Gee and Street.

Finally there is Street (2003) again, jazzing up the questions Perry would ask less than a decade later, but focusing on the newness of New Literacy Studies. If he himself and Gee take so much credit ushering in the new studies in the early 1990s, how new could they be by the start of the 21st century? I felt the same sense of unease as when I studied post-modern art for my undergraduate, wondering if there will be a point in art history where people look back at our period and say “ah, that po-mo movement, so dated. Thank goodness society moved on to…” While literacy seems to keep morphing its researchable shape, picking up new terms and dropping out-of-date concepts, one of my classmates last week raised an interesting point about the continual search of the new. Taking digital literacy as the newest of the new literacies, there will eventually be a point where society, led by dissatisfied academics, go into post-digital literacy. No doubt Google has its top thinkers working on a way to get their corporate logo put in front of whatever words are used to describe gliteracy.

Reference

Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and social literacy: Ideology in discourse. London: Taylor Francis. 46-65.

Perry, K. H. (2012). What is literacy? – A critical overview of sociocultural perspectives. Journal of Language & Literacy Education 8(1). 50-71.

Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to theory and practices. Current Issues in Comparative Education 5(2). 77-91.

LLED 601 Week 3

“Standing a head taller” is an empowering theme that Soviet cognitive psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky mentions from time to time, and he notices this quality most with the children he observed throughout his career. In these cases, imaginative play allows a child to internalize the activities of older individuals, learning and developing in the “zone” which continues to motivate the mind throughout one’s life. Most people seem to believe this development stops at a certain age, adulthood (anywhere between 13 and 24, according to different cultural beliefs), but I would argue that we continue to see ourselves a head taller, especially those who embrace the idea of life-long learning. For the majority who became adults and stopped the imaginative play, a good reminder will come when a person visits a place from their recent past: an old school, first job site or even the home to which, we are told, we can never go back. Recalling the feelings of that time when we hoped and dreamed to be grown up might make one feel a head taller than they were, but children get to live this experience everyday, a head taller than they are. Perhaps this is why someone like Vygotsky wanted to surround himself with these young active learners, as he could share in their enthusiasm to try new things for the rest of his tragically shortened life he knew, at the age of 26, he was going to live.

In the pages of Mind in Society, Vygotsky vents some of his frustration at adults who accept that things are the way they are, contemporary psychologists like Ted Thorndike and Jean Piaget, and their view of adulthood as the end of the developmental line. Equally frustrating is their search for the lower limits of ability, the beginning of a developmental stage where children or certain animals could do some things or not do some things. Given the proper amount of observation, children will never cease to impress open-minded adults that there are not many things they can’t do: anything that can be imagined could be played out. Vygotsky and his team had the right amount of patience for such viewings of children, infants and people with cognitive exceptionalities as able learners who go through a process of interpersonal (the mind in a society) and intrapersonal (internalizing society) adaptation. Attempts to get candy from a shelf or using coloured cards to recall instructions for a game of questions, both experiments described in this book, meet the participants at their level of cognitive ability. While he share opinions and gives respect to other constructivists and behaviorists in their respective fields, it seems a challenge for Vygotsky to accept their limiting theories; both “Problems of Method” and “Interaction between Learning and Development” are places where Vygotsky hashes out how quickly these theories fall apart. Setting limits is akin to censorship, something Vygotsky struggled with professionally in Soviet Russia.

Borrowing a quote from another Soviet author who faced censorship and limitations, Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s “manuscripts don’t burn” is very applicable. It is impressive how so much of Vygotsky’s thoughts survive on paper, and how many decades later his ideas are finally catching hold of minds in a far wider society than most people would have imagined. Somehow I know Vygotsky would have imagined it like this.

LLED 558 Week 2

It was a happy coincidence that I have been working through a reading of Vygotsky’s Mind in Society (1978) for another class, and noticing the synchronicity between the long-deceased Soviet cognitive psychologist and the literacy specialists read this week. So much of what Kress and Street have to say about pre-reading or pre-literate people can be found in Vygotsky’s writing. The one line that led me into this connection was “written sign frequently are simply gestures that have been fixed” (p. 107) onto a page in squiggly shapes otherwise known as letters. Kress makes a similar meaning similar images as well, when recalling a day at the beach upon seeing a print of seagulls snacking on fish and chips. His daughter makes her own meaning, and Kress dotingly examines the complex process that his daughter must have went through to understand that the gulls are reading the newspapers rather than eating the left-behind food. It probably did occur to this three-year old girl that the birds might actually be eating, as she has been to a beach before and probably seen what seagulls actually do in their natural habitat. But being able to see more meaning than the picture, or the visual text, suggests is the playfulness that comes with pre-literacy, where the signs are not as fixed as the sign-makers intended them to be.

The title of the print, interesting enough, is Fish and Chips   Seagulls and the extra spaces between the hendiadys and compound word (my fancy etymological way of pointing out these italicized squiggly lines have names) suggest other words could fit between them. The most telling would be …on Newspaper, Picked at by… but this three-year old girl isn’t interested in making sense of the first signifier. Instead, she wants to claim this portrait as Newspaper, Read by… as it is more amusing than the maudlin reality depicted, that some creature thrive off of the waste human being leave behind. Her father raises a similar point, noticing the headline on the print’s newspaper and commenting on the irony of newspapers decrying overforesting while the entire newsprint industry requires trees to be cut down (even with recycling). His musing on this topic may be more sophisticated, but if asked by his daughter, “why is there so much garbage left behind on beaches?” or “How many trees were cut down to have their processed remains scattered about?” – big questions for a three-year old, but something along those lines – what answers would he have for her?

Make meaning of this sign, Kress!

Speaking of seagulls, I was fascinated to learn that early in Vygotsky’s career he taught theatre at an adult education centre in his hometown of Gomel, Belarussia. One theory I have about young Lev was his fascination with playhouses and theatre, and it is entirely possible (though not confirmed) that he would have caught productions of innovative theatre by the great playwright Anton Chekhov, possibly while the artist himself was still alive (his initially disastrous debut play was successfully restaged in 1898, the same year Vygotsky was born). The Moscow Arts Theatre still uses the image of the seagull out of respect for Chekhov’s first play. Being an undergraduate in Moscow, or perhaps seeing a touring production of any one of Chekhov’s plays, possibly even directing his students in Uncle Vanya or Three Sisters might have inspired Vygotsky to examine the people’s roles within a family, closely attuned to how play helps children develop psychologically. There might not be anything to this theory at all, just my strong sense that Chekhov and Vygotsky would have shared a connection, other than the grim fact that they both died of tuberculosis; two promising careers ended! And yet the cultural impact of both of their collections of handwritten pages would have on generations that followed is impressive.

Chekhov’s Seagull

Not many birds were mentioned in Street’s article, but there is still a sense of human migration and roles within pre-literate cultures in the chapter. Particularly where religion is involved, whether it is sermons pounded into people’s heads on Nukulaelae, or competing Christian and Islamic rules for reading and writing in the Philippines, Malaya and Sumatra. Even the Hmong people in Philadelphia, I believe, have some ideological issues that chased them out of Vietnam and Laos. Like many other cultures involved with dominant cultures invading, there is a certain amount of adaptation involved that combines ways of representing culture from the non-dominant as well as concessions made towards understanding of “them” and “their” ways. New Literacy Studies, as Street suggests, is an acknowledgement of the many variations literacy can take, and it is refreshing to see academics opening up to these ideas. The same cannot be said, however, for Heath’s close examination of three types of communities: the educated swells in Maintown, the trashy workers in Roadville and the former slaves in Trackton. I now see how her way with words was influential for language and literacy scholars, but I could barely get past the first paragraph of her abstract. She set up the dichotomy of rich vs. poor, white vs. black that I couldn’t really take her seriously. Yes, it was a different world back in the early eighties, where direct quotation in Ebonics may have provided a researcher with ethnographic street cred, but when the Tracktonian vernacular is used to demonstrate how hopelessly undereducated these people are, it gets embarrassing to read. Similarly, poor lil’ Wendy and her disinterest in listening to bedtime stories was disturbing from a social constructivist point of view. All that Aunt Sue and other adults seem to do is reinforce the dread of reading, and cuts off imaginative play with squiggly shapes on a page. After this article, Heath will have a hard time winning me over, but I am willing to find out more.

Reference

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: Development of higher psychological processes. Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner (Eds.). Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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