CHAPTER 3
The historical development of Western literacy practices is tied to cultural contact, religious activity, trade, and conquest. The examination of this history demonstrates that literacy practices are social practices; that is, they are linked to human activity and interaction, to something we want to accomplish socially and politically. According to Jared Diamond (1999/1997: 215–216), “writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.” It is not known how many times writing evolved in human history. There is evidence that writing systems developed independently in Sumer (3000 B.C.E.), Mesoamerica (600 B.C.E.), China (1300 B.C.E.), and Egypt (3000 B.C.E.), all socially stratified societies with centralized political institutions. Diamond speculates on whether writing systems were copied as they spread, or whether they inspired other groups to invent their own systems of writing. The Roman alphabet, which we use today, is a product of “a long sequence of blueprint copying” (Diamond (1999/1997: 226). Writing for personal use emerged when writing systems became standardized and easier to decipher, facilitating access.
The history of reading, as developed in Western Europe, emerged with the invention of the alphabet and the development of writing by the ancient Greeks (80 B.C.E.). Orality was part of ancient reading practices, even during private reading, because of the unseparated lines of text. Readers depended on “the enhanced short-term memory that pronunciation afforded to recognize words within undemarcated strings of letters and to combine them to access higher orders of meaning” (Saenger, 1999: 11). Silent reading (no tongue and lip movement) was not common. The wealthy echelons depended on educated slaves to read to them.
It was not until the seventh century that Celtic monks introduced word separation and syntactic punctuation into Latin and Greek texts. These text innovations facilitated silent reading because they “communicate[d] directly with the eyes of readers” (Saenger, 1999: 12). The word-separated text format remained a unique phenomenon of the British Isles until the tenth century. By the twelfth century the word-separated and punctuated texts spread across Western Europe. The introduction of printing with movable type (after the twelfth century) and the use of the vernacular represent the major developments that contributed to the increase of people who could engage in silent reading in countries such as England and France.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the production of print materials increased dramatically. The availability of written materials contributed greatly to mass literacy. The opening of schools in the mid-1800s standardized the processes of reading and writing, as well as contributed to stripping away of people’s cultural and linguistic practices (Bernard, 1999; Spring, 2004).
Historicizing School Literacies
The following historical sketch, constrained by its linear representation of the past, generalizes practices over time and across contexts. These ages of practices speak to the pervasive policies and practices of the time, keeping in mind that many school communities and individual teachers were subversively pushing at these narrow definitions of reading and affirming children’s linguistic experiences. Patrick Shannon’s (1989) and Jan Turbill’s (2002) historical work anchors the following overview of literacy education development in public schools. Kathy Hall’s (2003) analyses of the psycholinguistic, cognitive-psychological, sociocultural, and sociopolitical perspectives of literacy further contribute to this sketch. It is important to note that homeschooling practices and independent schools were in existence, as well as children who were speakers of underrepresented varieties of English. English language learners were not having the same experiences as children who had access to the language of power, standard American English. In addition, it is difficult to untangle how class, gender, and race play a part in these trends. Certainly race and class are tangled up with language diversity issues.
Policies, pedagogies, research, publishing practices, and child development theories have greatly shaped the teaching of school literacies over time. Prior to the mid-1600s, literacy education was the charge of the family in the British colonized sections of northeastern and southeastern sections of the United States. Families were expected to teach children how to read. By the mid-1600s, Massachusetts established the first publiclyfunded schools for large communities. Fifty to 100 years later the rest of New England and other colonies instituted grammar schools to teach children Protestant responsibilities, including the memorization of Bible verses.
Hornbooks and the New England Primer were the main texts used during these first 150 years of public schooling. With John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocketbook, children’s book publishing, as considered in Chapter 1, unfolded with great momentum. However, Shannon maintains that there is little evidence that these texts were used in the teaching of reading. What he notices is that the instructional materials of this period possess a change in tone, a reflection of how children were perceived.
During the 1800s, reading education emphasized word identification over meaning and oral reading over discussion. The spelling method dominated the teaching of reading during the first half of this century. Children learned the names of letters, spelled and pronounced lists of two- and three-letter nonsense syllables, and then spelled and pronounced lists of a variety of words before they began to read sentences orally.
By the latter part of the 1800s, most urban teachers shifted their focus to syllables and pronunciation of words. Rural teachers continued with the spelling method of reading for many more years. William Holmes McGuffey’s Eclectic First Reader for Young Children, one of the most successful textbooks, promoted a phonics approach to reading, increasing children’s recognition of words.
The teaching of writing during this period comprised three activities: children gained mastery of pen use as they formed letters, copied words and text, and reproduced their work. Writing supplies were scarce. Teachers often fashioned supplies out of local materials.
Horace Mann advocated for the word method during the 1840s and 1850s, but it did not take root until the late 1860s and 1870s. This shift in teaching required a change in the role of the teacher from overseer and drillmaster to “interpreters of culture” (Finkelstein, 1970, as cited in Shannon, 1989). The word method began with the children’s experience and their naming those experiences. This exercise brought familiar words into children’s classroom learning. Then teachers and children engaged in discussion about their meaning. Oftentimes, the word method was undermined because some teachers combined word method textbooks with phonics instruction. The word became the focus of instruction and not how the word related to children’s lives. Thus, prior to 1880, reading instruction was reduced to reading aloud, with the teacher selecting bits of passages for children to read aloud and offer support with pronunciation (Finkelstein, 1970, as cited in Shannon, 1989).
As we stated earlier, some teachers were “interpreters of culture” and were committed to literacy teaching that was a “natural consequence of children’s study of their physical and social environment” (Shannon, 1989: 11). Progressive educators like Colonel Francis Parker tried to institute this pedagogy in Quincy, Massachusetts. Parker endorsed the word method because he believed children could learn to read as they learned to talk. He advocated for an integrated approach to language arts teaching. He believed grammar and phonics teaching could wait until children had an understanding of written language and were deemed intellectually ready.
Joseph Mayer Rice’s research (1893, as cited in Shannon, 1989) offers a window into the continuum of literacy across school contexts. Rice surveyed 36 cities in 1892. He found that school literacy teaching could be divided into three categories: first, “mechanical reading instruction” (reduced to “calling off words”); second, programs in transition (the language arts curriculum divided into subjects of reading, penmanship, and grammar); and third, “scientific” and “progressive” approach (literacy learning and thinking are unified by “the laws of psychology”).
According to Shannon, since the late 1920s, the challenge for reading experts has been how to encourage teachers to use the scientific directions incorporated in teachers’ guidebooks. For the past 85 years plus, reading experts and commercial publishers have dictated reading practices because of the prevalence of basal readers in schools. Shannon argues: “It often seems that the materials are using teachers rather than teachers using the materials” (Shannon, 1989: 29).
Jan Turbill’s article, “The Four Ages of Reading Philosophy and Pedagogy,” offers a historical context for understanding how school literacies developed after the 1950s. This historical sketch is useful in recontextualizing teaching practices in order to deconstruct the ideologies implicit in pedagogy.
From the 1950s into the early 1970s, what Turbill calls “The Age of Reading as Decoding,” school literacies practices centered on teaching the following skills: directionality, visual and aural discrimination, letter-sound relationships (phonics), and word recognition. During this period, reading was taught in isolated, decontextualized lessons. It was believed that once children mastered these lessons, comprehension would follow. Spelling, handwriting, and written composition were taught in isolation from each other.
A cognitive-psychological perspective of reading grounds this age of literacy as a series of cognitive skills, processes that just happen in children’s heads. This literacy pedagogy privileges the systematic and sequenced teaching of reading, governed by developmental stages that standardize the reading process for individual children. Commercially produced curriculum (basal readers) is the mainstay in these classrooms, anchored by scope and sequence charts. The focus is on the mechanics of written language, especially phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.
During the mid-1970s, “The Age of Reading as Meaning Making,” reading became understood as a process; that is, children continued to learn how to read long after grade 2, and they learned to read by using reading for learning. Children read more from kindergarten through grade 6. The increase in children’s trade book publishing contributed to these reading practices (as we consider in this chapter). The focus was on reading for meaning, using the cueing systems (i.e., graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic). The reading process was made visible and public through metacognition (thinking about the thinking). Phonics learning became heavily aligned with special education. Research or library skills were introduced in upper elementary grades.
Literacy as a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967) characterizes this period. This perspective acknowledges all children’s predisposition for language learning, since language is a form of human expression. Process writing and whole language focus on the learner as meaning-maker and on the learner’s interaction with the text. Classroom learning is more collaborative and peer interaction is fostered. The four language modes, that is, reading, writing, listening, and speaking, are integrated. The children are encouraged to use their schemata (prior knowledge), metacognition, and metalanguage (thinking about the language). The focus is on personal development and transformation.
“The Age of Reading-Writing Connections,” a period that began in the early 1980s, introduced computer technology to school contexts. This period of time marks an increase in the production of reading programs and children’s literature. Large print materials (e.g., Big Books) became available. Teachers and children read more together and independently. The writing process became a focus in schools. All children were encouraged to emulate writers, with young children approximating the writing process with drawings and scribbles and invented spelling. Invented spelling became foundational in early childhood classrooms. Children were invited to make connections among reading, writing, and spelling, since the goal was for children to read books and be immersed in the language of books. Emergent literacy was recognized; that is, the literacy practices children acquire during the first decade of their lives. Children were exposed to multiple texts. The shift from reading and writing to literacy reflected the integration of the language modes (e.g., speaking, listening, reading, and writing).
This era recognizes the sociocultural dimensions of literacy learning, while the psycholinguistic and cognitive-psychological perspectives focus on the child as an individual reader engaged in personal and isolated construction of meaning. Both perspectives also privilege the mind over the social or contextual aspects of learning. Cognitive-psychology, in particular, considers culture as one of many variables that influence meaning making. The sociocultural perspective places culture at the center of literacy learning. Literacy is deemed as a set of social practices that children, families, and communities engage in. Literacy learning is regarded as processes that are intellectual, emotional, motivational, and social. Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996), the literacies that children practice in schools and out of school, are acknowledged.
The early 1990s, “The Age of Reading for Social Purpose,” was a period marked by information explosion and a shift to school literacies that offered high levels of literacy to all children so that they could be employable citizens, as well as possess the ability to read and write in a range of contexts. Literacy was used to develop knowledge and understanding, and to achieve personal growth. Multiple literacies were recognized, that is, children’s home and community (everyday) literacies were considered within the classroom context. Literacy was defined as the integration of speaking, listening, and critical thinking (e.g., problematizing texts) with reading and writing, processes that would contribute to the development of knowledge and understanding, as well as personal growth. Literacy was recognized as purposeful, flexible, and dynamic.
Literacy processes are not just cognitive processes or a set of skills stored in people’s heads. Literacies are social practices, connected to and constructed by everyday practices and many contexts (e.g., home, school, work, community, and society). There are many social practices and policies that influence a child’s access to written language.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 is a U.S. federal law proposed to improve education for children who are underserved by schools, through a system of accountability based on standardized tests scores. The Reading First initiative of this legislation has dramatically changed the literacy teaching of children in kindergarten through grade 3. These policies undermine young children’s cultural and linguistic knowledge and teachers’ professional judgment, and get in the way of children learning to read and write. As a matter of fact recent reports indicate that the Reading First initiative has failed to raise children’s reading scores (Dillon, 2008).
Critical literacy researcher Allan Luke (2000) maintains that the distribution of social power, that is, who possesses control over institutions, resources, and dominant discourse within society, largely determines education reform. The NCLB Act punishes rather than supports schools and lower income children, helps further an agenda of privatization of public schools, and further institutionalizes classism and racism. Because the NCLB law requires assessment in the form of standardized testing, it reduces literacies to reading only and sequenced skill-based instruction (Teale, Paciga & Hoffman, 2007), thereby establishing a stronghold, affecting classroom teaching and learning. Cognitive-psychological perspectives of literacy largely inform the NCLB law.
Literacy Defined
The above historical sketch demonstrates that literacy practices are not a fixed set of practices. They are socially constructed and always in flux, depending on many sociopolitical factors. Literacies are not autonomous but ideological; the sociopolitical context shapes the ideologies and power relations in which they take place (Street, 1993). Roz Ivanic (1998: 65) maintains “literacy is not a technology made up of a set of transferable cognitive skills, but a constellation of practices which differ from one social setting to another.” Literacy practices are social practices because we use them to take action in and respond to our everyday participation with our families, communities, society, and the world. We draw on a wide array of literacy practices, shaped by exposure, experience, and access.
According to James Gee (2001), literacy is discourse. Gee suggests that our primary socialization is with our families, peers, and communities where we learn our “primary discourse.” People learn “secondary discourses” within social institutions like schools, workplaces, stores, government offices, churches, and businesses. Secondary discourses develop from primary discourses. Gee (2001: 6) maintains that “literacy is control of secondary uses of language (i.e., uses of language in secondary discourses).”
There are many types of literacy. Gee conceptualizes them as follows:
· Dominant literacy is control of a secondary use of language used in what he calls “dominant discourse.”
· Powerful literacy is control of a secondary use of language used in a secondary discourse that can serve as a meta-discourse to critique the primary discourse or other secondary discourses, including dominant discourses.
(Gee, 2001: 6)
What Gee means by “control” is that the reader has some degree of being able to “use” or “function with” the discourse. “Mastery” is defined as having “full and effortless control” (Gee, 2001: 6). He states: “one cannot critique one discourse with another one (which is the only way to seriously criticize and thus change a discourse) unless one has meta-level knowledge [thinking about the knowledge] in both discourses. And this metaknowledge is best developed through learning, though often learning applied to a discourse one has to a certain extent already acquired.” He concludes that powerful literacy ultimately involves learning, and not just acquisition. Thus, critical reading increases power and flexibility the more it is practiced.
Our theoretical position moves reading and writing away from an exclusively cognitive model which positions literacy as an internal, individual, psychological act, to literacy as a sociocultural, multiple, and political practice. All language modalities and literacy practices inform each other. For example, speaking can inform reading, and writing can inform reading. School literacies tend to privilege reading and writing over the other modalities.
Our contention is that any approach that excludes the social and political dimensions of reading maintains and reproduces dominant power relations. We advocate for a shift away from the psychological definition of literacy to one that includes a social activity that takes place in a particular context, with particular people, involving particular relations and structures of power, values, beliefs, goals, purposes, interests, economic, and political conditions. Texts, oral and written, are discursive sites, sociopolitical products imbued with units of language that move within a discursive grid. A critical multicultural reading, then, involves reconstruction of subjectivities and repositioning the reader as a researcher of language and creator of meaning.
The conceptual framework of the four resources model of literacy practices (Luke & Freebody, 1999) features the practices that support strong and critical readers, writers, and artists. This model does not represent a continuum or a linear process, but rather a dynamic family of practices. The four resources are code breaking, text participating, text using, and text critiquing. They are used depending on the literacy event, type of text, and children’s prior literacy experiences. This resource model is not bound to a developmental or pedagogical schedule; it honors what children know.
Code breaking (cognitive-psychological) is not learned first, in isolation from the other literacy practices. Code breaking is learned as children engage with text participation, text use and text analysis. Code breaking includes alphabetic and letter-sound knowledge. While the teaching of phonics is an important part of literacy learning, it is problematic to begin there. Phonics assigns a fixed sound value to each letter, a difficult matter in the English language. In English, there are more speech sounds than there are letters (i.e., 26 letters to 42 to 44 sounds in spoken English) because we have different letters and letter combinations to represent the same sound. In addition, many languages have contributed to the English language (through cultural contact and conquest); often the spelling patterns reflect the original spelling. Lastly, there are many varieties of spoken English, with different accents producing different pronunciations and speech sounds. We need to ask ourselves “Whose phonics do we teach?” (Wilson, 2002). Maria José will use her name as a text to consider the complexities of these literacy practices (Botelho, 2007).
Her name is illustrative of the possibilities of code breaking practices: Maria José /Ma ree ya/ /Jzu ze/ can teach children about the letter-sound relationships in the Portuguese language, while affording many opportunities to compare to English letter-sound relationships. Exploring names creates spaces to negotiate and practice how to say children’s names.
Text participation (psycholinguistic) takes children inside the text. Text participants understand and construct meaningful written, visual, and spoken texts from prior experiences. Children are invited to interact and to ask questions of the text. The role of the teacher is to deepen understanding by posing questions that were not explored, and to seek multiple perspectives. Returning to a name-based investigation, consider that families give their children names which reflect gender, culture, religion, history, family names, and the parents’ hope for their children’s futures. Some questions to explore: What are the origins of your name? What does it mean? What does your name tell others about your cultural heritage? Do you know your name in another language? Do you have a nickname?
Maria José’s name was Maria José de Sousa Botelho. When her family immigrated from São Miguel, Açores to Massachusetts in 1969, her name was reduced to Maria Botelho. She is named after her paternal grandmother. De Sousa was part of her mother’s maiden name and “de” signifies that she is from both families, and not just from the Botelho side. The Portuguese tradition was to name baby girls Maria, symbolizing their devotion to the Virgin Mary. José means God will increase. Botelho is an old Portuguese name, meaning ancient corn measure.
The text user (sociocultural) reads not only to understand and participate but also to make use of the text by considering form, purpose/function, and audience. Names create spaces for text-using practices. Children can complete a two-column list: On the left side, make a list of all the names they can remember being called, including nicknames. On the other side, next to each name, list the people who used it and identify the context. In addition, invite children to sort classmates’ names according to roles (e.g., oldest child in the family, sisters) and activities (e.g., dancers, soccer players).
Maria José is called Maria, Maria José, Mary Jo, MJ, and Maria Josephine. All of these names represent her. Her immediate family and Canadian colleagues call her Maria José. Her American colleagues and friends call her Maria. Her Canadian family calls her Mary Jo. Some friends call her MJ.
The text critic (sociopolitical) understands that texts are not neutral; that is, they represent particular worldviews and silence other perspectives, as well as influence how people perceive themselves in the world. The text critic steps back from the text and analyzes the explicit and implicit messages in the text. Return to the name list: What do the children notice? Any surprises? In what ways have their names been changed? In what ways did their names remain the same? What are the significances of these changes and/or non-changes?
Maria José became another Maria for the sake of bureaucratic expediency. Little did government and school officials know that they severed Maria José from her namesake, her paternal grandmother. But her family complied. In school and in her neighborhood, she tried to encourage teachers, classmates, friends, and neighbors to say her full first name. Many pronounced José as the Spanish /Ho’zā/, a beautiful name, but not her name. As a young adult, she became a U.S. citizen. Maria José decided to change her name to Maria Josephine Botelho, discouraging any further mispronunciations of her name. Maria José’s name change was an instance of her taking action and deciding what she wanted to be called, but it was also an instance of conformity to the sociopolitical practice of Anglicizing and culturally sanitizing first and last names. She reclaimed her full first name during her immigration to Canada. Maria José also is her academic name. Maria Josephine is her legal name, the one you will see on her U.S. passport. Names are texts that can help children see how language works as well as how language and power are bound together.
Analysis of Literacy Narratives
Literacy narratives are books that depict characters engaged in the language modes of speaking, listening, writing, reading, representing, and viewing. A critical multicultural analysis of these texts can uncover the implicit definitions of literacies imbedded in the books, as well as highlight prevailing assumptions about literacy practices. The goal is to locate a variety of texts showing a range of literacies, including literacies as tools for social change. We want to move beyond prevalent middle-class definitions of reading and writing for pleasure, entertainment, and information, to literacy practices that honor children’s out-of-school literacies as well as value the interconnectedness of the four literacy practices as resources for learning and participating in the world.
Children’s literature plays an essential role in the cultures of childhood and school. The following three studies examine the central characters’ interactions with texts and literacy events (i.e., literacy). In the first small study, Wilma Kuhlman and Mary Lickteig (1998) assign three categories that reflect these encounters: “desire for literacy,” “power of literacy,” and “wonder of literacy.” The first category, desire for literacy, relates to the central characters’ motivation to become literate, seeking literacy through their own choice. This category locates the characters’ power of taking action. However, this category can obfuscate some of the factors that have kept characters from literacy learning. Racism and socioeconomic oppression, family illiteracy because of poverty, and lack of access to literacy teaching and printed materials are manifestations of power relations. While it is important to examine the characters’ motivation to learn to read and write, we also must consider the characters’ resistance to reading and writing, naming the underlying factors contributing to the resistance. Lastly, there is a danger in thinking that passionate desire for literacy is enough; it does not mean that the reader will apply that reading in any way.
The power of literacy, the second category, signals the main characters’ transformation because of their involvement with reading and writing. The transformation is at the individual level. Readers also need to learn about examples of the power of literacy to organize and create change, especially noticing the role literacy can play in the exercise of collaborative power.
The last category, wonder of literacy, is about the central characters’ enjoyment of literacy activities. In other words, they find pleasure or important information through reading and writing. What is key here is to see a wide representation of the wonder of literacy. For example, pleasure can come from critical multicultural analysis and not be exclusive to reading without disturbing the status quo. The wonder can lead to using multiliteracies and other modalities (e.g., visual, gestural, linguistic), challenging generic conventions, connecting to other texts, and locating the sociopolitical and historical contexts of the children’s book.
These categories, as the authors maintain, are not mutually exclusive, but work together, with one foregrounded and others evident in the background of the story. While these categories are useful places for preliminary analysis, Kuhlman and Lickteig’s explications fall short of the complexities of these literacy practices. Their interpretations are individualistic, extracting the interaction from a sociopolitical context. Literacy narratives offer opportunities to question the commonsensical associations we attach to literacy practices and invite readers to reflect and deconstruct them.
The second study builds on Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and the sociocultural frameworks of early literacy development. Gardner’s theories call on the diversity of human intelligence, but do not consider issues of access to and training within these modalities of learning. In her dissertation research, Jennifer K. Geringer (2001) locates instances of multiple literacies (e.g., language, cognitive, physical, natural, aesthetic, affective, and social) as represented in 55 award-winning picture books for children that were published between 1993 and 2000, the period that Gardner’s theories gained credibility in universities and school communities. Geringer models her research project on Hoffman’s (1993, as cited in Geringer, 2001) study, a project that analyzed literacy images across children’s texts published between 1971 and 1990. Using a traditional definition of literacy as reading and writing, Hoffman notes that there is an increase of literacy images in books for children. The images reflect literacy strictly as reading and writing practices. Hoffman advocates for research to examine broader definitions of literacy and whether those literacies are portrayed. Geringer addresses this recommendation.
Geringer categorizes the literacy events “as brief, descriptive or developed, depending upon the level of importance placed on the literacy act and its role in the story” (Geringer, 2001: 1). She finds that most of the representations fall within “traditional” definitions of literacy, with reading events outnumbering instances of writing. She also noticed a significant frequency of literacy events as “multiple and multi-layered [the interconnectedness of multiple literacies and their use across intelligences; multimodality]” within the text sample, evidence of the new understandings about literacy in the field of education. Natural, aesthetic, physical, and social were the most prevalent multiple literacies. Geringer’s study documents the social expansion of literacy images.
In Frank Serafini’s (2004) study, “Images of Reading and the Reader,” he argues that the literary representation of reading and readers may influence the literacy learning and teaching of elementary school children. After reading Wolf!, by Becky Bloom, to a group of school-age children, Serafini found a disconnection between the portrayal of reading processes and contemporary literacy theories. The text centers on the wolf’s “ability to pronounce words and read aloud fluently” (Serafini, 2004: 611). This mismatch impelled Serafini to examine how picture books depict reading and readers. This study was guided by two questions: (a) “What images of reading and the reader are portrayed in the text and illustrations of contemporary picture books? (b) Is there a difference between the images of readers and reading portrayed in children’s picture books and those portrayed in transactional, reader-response theories?” (Serafini, 2004: 611). This investigation led Serafini to also consider the implications of these representations of school literacies and teachers’ expectations for child readers.
In Wolf!, written by Becky Bloom and illustrated by Pascal Biet, a hungry wolf learns to read so he can participate in “a farm for educated animals.” The cow, duck and pig constantly read. This pro-reading story perpetuates middle-class norms of reading for pleasure. As the wolf becomes a stronger reader, he assumes particular practices that admit him into this bucolic farmyard. He first practices school reading skills using a contrived text of controlled vocabulary and sentence structure. He then exercises his choice and chooses texts from a local library and bookstore. The message here is that practice will lead to fluency and skills-based reading competence. To tell stories dramatically, the wolf enlists oral language for reading. His attire changes as his reading abilities change over time, signaling that reading is a social practice that vests the reader with particular cultural capital. The wolf discovers the power of literacy because it rewards him with social acceptance and power.
According to Serafini’s findings, the texts in his study reduced the reading process to oral fluency and expression, sounding out words without mistakes, letters and sounds, and sight words—reading as only a part-to-whole, cognitive process. The children’s books analyzed also represented environmental print contributing to early literacy learning; recognized emergent literacy; acknowledged the escapism from reality that reading offers; taught new things and met new people; and honored the emotional qualities of reading (e.g., symbol of love, comfort, and affection)—all sociocultural processes. Finally, reading was depicted as a requirement for democratic participation as well as a transformative event that could heal and change people in significant ways. The ability to read was equated with power and cultural capital processes (i.e., reading providing social mobility). According to Serafini, the role of prior knowledge in the reading process was missing from the text collection.
As Serafini maintains, critically analyzing representations of literacy in children’s literature can create spaces to expand our definitions of reading. For example, it is not reduced to “closeted bookworms” or that pleasure can only be derived from fiction reading. What we noticed from this text collection is that there were no informational texts included as reading for pleasure. Informational texts can bring the reader lots of joy. The bookworm representation needs further consideration: Bookworms are privileged with time and book resources. Literacies should not dominate a child’s life; they are social practices. For example, the protagonist in The Gardener, by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by David Small, uses writing to communicate and to stay connected to her family in the countryside while she lives with her uncle in the city.
In the next section, we analyze literacy narratives, a text collection that we assembled from the Comprehensive Children’s Literature Database and in consultation with local librarians. Selected themes emerged from multiple readings of the text collection (primary sources) alongside literacy histories and secondary sources as we analyzed the literacy events. Literacy is central to or plays a part in each text. We have chosen representative texts to explore each cultural theme and examine the implicit definitions of reading and other literacy practices across the text collection.
This is not an exhaustive analysis. There are many books that represent children engaged in multiliteracies (i.e., speaking, listening, writing, reading, representing, and viewing). For example, there are many biographies of famous writers and poets, and diary- and letter-type texts that warrant analysis. We decided to focus on the language modes of reading, writing, and speaking. We conducted critical multicultural analyses of the text collection representing the emerging cultural themes: African Americans and the struggle for literacy; adult/family literacy; English language learners; “reluctant”/ “struggling” readers and writers; emergent literacy; access to books and school literacies; orality; writing; and critical literacy. These themes are cultural because they come from particular historical and sociopolitical circumstances (Carspecken, 1996). These cultural themes speak to literacies as social practices associated with literacy events. For example, literacy practices such as accessing online catalogues and compiling lists of titles are associated with the social practice of borrowing books from the public library (literacy event). The text collection reflects the historical and sociopolitical implications of literacy practices.
African Americans and the Struggle for Literacy
Every form of oppression imposes silence. The great divide between orality and written literacy was socially constructed (Willis, 1995). The institution of slavery left its mark on the access for African Americans to acquire print literacy, silencing the community and contributing to its oppression. Several children’s books that document the lack of and struggle for access to the language of power. (It is important to keep in mind that Native peoples were also stripped of their many languages.) The following texts, historically organized, create spaces to examine how race and class work with language, with African American history as a backdrop. The texts show how code-breaking and text-using literacy practices are crucial to full participation in a society whose language of power is centralized and maintained through print modalities. In a number of books, members from the African American community organize and teach other members, as a way to escape inhumane conditions.
Underlying Nightjohn, by Gary Paulsen, narrated by twelve-year-old Sarny, is the social power of the written word; so socially important that the White oppressors go to great lengths to withhold literacy from the slaves, making the teaching of reading and writing forbidden by law. Reading is so socially important that the slaves are willing to risk their lives to acquire it. This text brings the reader up close to the brutality of slavery.
In Gary Paulsen’s Sarny, the young slave girl continues her story. As a ninety-four-year-old woman living in a nursing home in Texas, Sarny writes down her personal history. In the final days of slavery, reading spreads through the whole plantation. The story is a portrait of a strong woman who appreciates the social power of literacy and who gives back to society what her mentors have given to her. This text invites questions about how power is exercised and gained.
The next two texts show how members of the White community were allies to slaves and shared their literacy practices (cultural capital). In Up the Learning Tree, by Marcia Vaughan, Henry Bell, a slave child, risks his fingers getting cut off when he secretly learns how to read and write, first by eavesdropping on White children in a schoolhouse, and second, with the help of a young White teacher from the North. Even when the teacher is found out, the protagonist, Henry, continues his struggle for literacy as a way to escape slavery.
In Alec’s Primer, by Mildred Pitts Walter, based on true events, a plantation owner’s granddaughter teachers Alec Turner how to read letters, words, and sentences—illegal practices for slaves. When the plantation owner’s wife discovers Alec’s secret, she slashes his face with her whip. Alec is determined not to give up his primer and escapes from slavery by joining the Union Army during the Civil War. As a free man, he becomes a landowner in Vermont.
After Reconstruction, in More Than Anything Else, by Marie Bradby, nine-year-old Booker T. Washington wants to read the “secret in … books.” He works from dawn until dusk in salt works with his brother and father. In his community of Malden, West Virginia, only a few people know how to read, but Booker maintains that “If I had a chance, I could do it.” Race and class are implicated here. He has no access to schooling and literacy materials. The book jacket claims that this story is a “tribute to dreaming.” He shows a desire for literacy, a motivation to become literate, but we must ask why he and other community members are labelled illiterate in the first place. How do U.S. race and class relations figure in this story?
Based on a passage from Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, in Richard Wright and the Library Card, by William Miller and illustrated by Gregory Christie, seventeen-year-old Richard borrows a White man’s library card so he can access books from the local library. At the time in the 1920s, African Americans were banned from using libraries, which at that time were for Whites only. Richard reads prodigiously. He connects the lives that he has read about to his own and notes the same forms of suffering and longing for freedom as he experiences. Books offer him new possibilities for being in the world, learning about what it means to be free and summoning the strength to persevere.
In Leon’s Story, Leon’s father was left at the mercy of Mr. Johnson, partly because he could not read. Leon comments that even if his father had an education, he could only work on the farm because of the color of his skin. The Black community was relegated to farm work. Lack of access to literacy and formal education was one way racist practices were institutionalized.
Adult Literacy
Socioeconomic oppression contributes to the theme of adult literacy. Poverty bars access to and experience with dominant discursive practices. While these texts dispel the myth that all adults can read, especially all White adults, they focus on the individual, as if illiteracy were innate to these characters. The social factors that created these situations are avoided in these stories; it is as if the poverty the characters live was individually created. In what ways is illiteracy the lack of access to functional written literacy practices? Why are the other literacies adults practice in everyday life not recognized? Illiteracy is not a matter of intelligence but a symptom of sociopolitical factors. We must understand a person’s literacy experiences against a broader context and ask: In what ways do school policies and teaching practices get in the way of people learning to read and write? In what ways does poverty, recognizing that race and gender are implicated, shape people’s access to literacy? Code-breaker and text-user practices offer parents opportunities to support their children’s learning of school literacies. In addition, these literacy practices broaden adults’ employment possibilities. But are these literacy practices enough to actively enable participation in a democratic society? The goal is not just to skill unskilled groups. That is not enough. The four literacy practices model offers possibilities for adults and children to use literacies as social tools, for social transformation. Code-breaking and text-using practices lead to adults “functioning” in a society and not restructuring the power base.
Multiliteracies pedagogies (New London Group, 1996) recognize the everyday literacies of children and families. Is illiteracy possible within a multiliteracies framework? What is the equation of literacy: is it print literacies associated with the language of power? What about other modalities? Everyday literacies tend to be less recognizable and valued than the literacies associated with “doing” school. We cannot assume that people are not engaging in literacies. We should consider people’s linguistic knowledge and the literacies associated with their families, communities, and work, as well as the social conditions that diminished their access to school literacies. The following texts perpetuate the myth that literacy is reading and that reading is code breaking, with meaning locked in the text. The language modes of speaking and writing, for example, are not enlisted for the learning of reading.
Jeremiah Learns to Read, written by Jo Ellen Bogart, is an idealized story of illiteracy. Elderly White farmer, Jeremiah, knows how to construct fences and prepare pancakes, but does not know how to read. The story, cast perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century, promotes the idea that illiteracy is a problem of the past. While Jeremiah gains support from a local teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, the reader never learns about the process and the hard work involved in learning to read.
Young Harry, in Mr. George Baker, by Amy Hest and illustrated by Jon J. Muth, narrates the story about his one-hundred-year-old African American neighbor, George, who takes an adult literacy class at Harry’s school. George is a former jazz musician. The text portrays the friendship between a child and older person and their similar experiences of going to school: they carry the same book bags and use the same books, and both are learning to read. George’s illiteracy needs consideration beyond the text. While it is endearing that both George and his young neighbor attend class at the same school, they are at opposite ends of formal schooling. It is never too late to learn to read, but we must consider the social factors that got in the way of George accessing school literacies in the first place as well as take stock of the literacies that George knows.
In the next several stories, the young protagonists support their parents in learning to read. Literacy learning is categorized as code breaking and text using practices. In Papa’s Stories, written and illustrated by Dolores Johnson, young Kari enjoys her Papa’s stories varying each time he “reads” a book. She grapples with the notion of literacy as an expression of intelligence, especially when she discovers that her father cannot read. Finally, Kari offers to help her father read but he has already made a good start with Kari’s mother serving as his tutor. When her father is able to read the book word for word, Kari finds that she prefers his earlier renditions of the text (e.g., from Little Red Riding Hood to “Little Miss Too-Big-for-Her-Red-Britches”). Perhaps the intent here is to have young readers appreciate creativity as well as word for word reading.
In Read for Me Mama, by Vashanti Rahaman, Joseph, a young African American boy, loves to read. The librarian selects an easy book and a hard book for Joseph to enjoy at home. Because his mother is often tired from her work as a maid, a neighbor friend reads to Joseph. When the friend moves away, his mother admits she is unable to read and learns from a church member that she can take adult literacy classes at the local library. Mama becomes a capable reader, largely because she wants to be able to read to her son.
In Just Juice, by Karen Hesse, nine-year-old Juice is the middle child of five sisters of a poor family. They live in a small mountain town. The family experiences difficult times: Pa is unemployed, food is scarce, and Ma, who is diabetic, is expecting her sixth child. Juice feels challenged at school because, unlike her sisters, she still has difficulty reading. She stays home often where she is happy helping Pa in his machine shop in the yard: Juice is talented with her hands. Fairly early in the story, it becomes evident that Pa cannot read. Because he is unable to read official documents the family almost lose their home. In one of the final scenes, Ma gives birth and Juice is the only one at home to read the sugar monitor. The family survives these hardships because of their family interdependence and community support. Along with her father, Juice comes to learn about the social purpose and power of literacy.
The 11-year-old protagonist of All Joseph Wanted, by Ruth Yaffe Radin, details the daily challenges of an adult who is not functionally literate. Joseph convinces his mother that she needs support that an adult literacy course can provide. The reader comes to understand the frustrations, barriers and burdens adults face who cannot read. What about writing? What about the other language modes that can inform the learning of reading as well as the ones central to participating in a democratic society?
English Language Learners
The most powerful cognitive tool that children have is their first language. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that an estimated 40 percent of the school-age children by the year 2030 will need the teaching of English as an additional language. Children who speak nonstandard varieties of English will continue to need support with standard English development (Delpit & Dowdy, 2002). While cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contact is at its high in human history, language diversity has always been a reality in the United States (Spring, 2004); it is that we now recognize its presence.
Access to one’s primary discourse or language is a human right (Botelho et al., in press). Keeping children away from their first language is another form of dehumanization. As Gee suggests above, secondary discourses develop from primary discourses. A child’s primary discourse can inform English language learning as well as function as a meta-discourse to critique the first language and additional language learning. The difficulties that English language learners experience in schools are socially constructed because, often times, schools do not respect and draw on the linguistic and cultural resources children bring to school. Linguistic diversity is obscured by language and literacy policies and practices that attempt to undermine what children already know about language and the world. In Chapter 6, we further consider this theme because many of the protagonists in the text collection about Mexican American migrant farmworkers are English language learners.
Speaking, visually representing and writing are key language modalities reflected across these texts about English language learners. Some of the sub-themes that exist include friendships across cultures; child as translator (placing the child in adult role) and the role of the teacher in additional language education. We focus on the texts that represent teacher and student interactions with teachers who listen, interpret children’s art and approximations of English, and scaffold children’s speaking. (See also Chapter 6.) Some of the texts make visible the complex cognitive work that English language learners are engaged in on a daily basis.
In Aliki’s Marianthe’s Story One: Painted Words, written and illustrated by Aliki, Marianthe initially communicates with other children through her drawings. In the second story, Marianthe’s Story Two: Spoken Memories, accessed by flipping the book over, Marianthe tells her teacher and classmates through speaking and writing about her family’s lived experiences with war, famine, and immigration. Her teachers validate what she knows linguistically and culturally through inviting her to draw and speak what she knows, modalities that lead her to writing. She learns to speak, read, and write in English.
Hassan, a young Somali refugee, tells his story to his classmates through impressionistic watercolor paintings. In The Color of Home by Mary Hoffman, Hassan represents his home with warm colors before the soldiers invaded his village during a violent civil war. Through these watercolor representations the young protagonist conveys the message that his family “left all the colors behind in Somalia” but that the meaning of home eventually extends to his new surroundings.
Inspired by her own experiences in a New York City immigrant community, Josephine Nobisso portrays a young girl’s initial days in a multicultural classroom as she tries to communicate her experience in Naples, Italy. Josephine augments her English with vocal expressions, body language, and occasional prompts from the teacher to help her convey her story. The teacher builds on Josephine’s multimodal meaning making. After sharing her story verbally, she is invited to capture it in writing. In In English, Of Course the young protagonist dispels some misconceptions about Italy, but some cultural stereotypes are rendered in the images of children from other cultural backgrounds.
I Hate English, by Ellen Levine, affirms attachment to one’s language of origin. Mei Mei feels silenced and out of place in New York. She hates the sounds and appearance of English where “The letters stand alone and … bang against each other … Not like Chinese.” She loves to write and speak in Chinese. Although there are many people in Chinatown who look and speak like her, she feels alienated and alone. She gets solace from helping out in a community center where some children speak Chinese, and others speak both English and Chinese. She discovers that she likes arithmetic because it is neither Chinese nor English.
One day a woman comes to the center to help Mei Mei learn English. She introduces Mei Mei to some children’s books which challenge Mei Mei to start to learn English. However, she is afraid that she will be unfaithful to her origins and her language if she learns English. The loss of language is equated with the loss of culture and identity. Eventually, Mei Mei is willing to be convinced that English is a pathway to a parallel and satisfying second culture while she retains what she loves in her first culture, and that she will always have choices to make that are in her control. The teacher models respect and patience as she introduces the new language and culture to Mei Mei.
“Struggling” Readers and Writers
Randy Bomer and Katherine Bomer (2001) argue that the “struggling” label implies that all “struggling readers” are challenged by the same aspects of the reading process. They maintain that struggling is not failing, but demonstrates the child’s intention and effort. The struggle is typically not named by the child reader, but is determined by grade-specific expectations that attempt to standardize and sequence literacy learning. Bomer and Bomer assert that anyone can struggle. What is prevalent across these experiences is that the loss of meaning is always implicated in the struggle (Bomer & Bomer, 2001: 89). In what ways do school literacies policies and practices create/contribute to these difficulties?
Cognitive-psychological perspectives of literacy attribute success and failure to individual difference and discount the influence of accessible social and cultural resources and institutional practices (Luke & Freebody, 1997). The struggle is left with the individual child, a struggle that could well be institutionally and pedagogically constructed. Psychological approaches to literacy learning standardize and sequence learning, conceptualizing learning as stages that are universally experienced by all children. This perspective decontextualizes the difficulties and inexperience a child might have, as well as dismisses the child’s experience and does not build on what the child already knows. It is easier to blame the child than the system, isolating the child from sociopolitical factors that created the circumstances. There is a focus on synthetic phonics and decontextualized skills teaching, with no purpose and context for learning, reducing literacy learning to reading with code breaking as the prevalent practice. When children are permitted to use language modes with which they have experience, they offer a foundation for learning. The following texts enlist text participant and text user practices alongside code breaking practices.
In Just Juice, the main character is deemed a reluctant reader. It is only when her ability to read saves her mother’s life and helps her family keep their house that she learns the purpose for reading and that it can afford the reader with social power.
In Marvin One Too Many, written by Katherine Paterson, first grader, Marvin, cannot read. He comes to reading at a slower rate than his classmates. The family rallies around. He gets support from his father by reading with him. He gets support from his sister when they play school and she constructs flash cards for him to sound out. Marvin begins to read when he encounters words that represent his own life. For example, he lives on a farm, so the word “cow” is relevant to his experience. School literacies gradually become accessible for Marvin when they are no longer disconnected from his lived experience.
The text, Once Upon a Time, by Niki Daly, reinforces the effectiveness of having someone (Auntie Anna) who appreciates the young child (Sarie) and to whom she can confide. Sarie moves from stammering and feeling sick when she is called upon in school to read aloud, to reading the Cinderella story clearly and easily. Her week-long practice with Auntie Anna with a book that she is interested in, the Cinderella story, does the trick. The story is set in South Africa but it could be any place where a child is jeered at for her school performance in reading aloud.
In Thank You, Mr. Falker, written and illustrated by Patricia Polacco, Trisha loves school, but like Sari, her difficulty with learning to read makes her feel inadequate. It is not until fifth grade that a new teacher helps her with her reading disability. In what ways did institutional practices contributed to this disability? Mr. Falker uses individualized teaching and invites Trisha to manipulate written language with different materials. Assumptions about knowledge are imbedded in the story: “Knowledge is like the bee that made that sweet honey, you have to chase it through the pages of a book!” Young Trisha comes to love school again and her experience as an artist is affirmed. She overcomes her reading disability and accesses school discourse through visual arts, a language mode that she knows well.
Emergent Literacy
The emergent literacy theme recognizes the range of literacy practices children engage with, reflecting their dynamic participation in language activities over time. Literacy learning occurs through participation in sociocultural activities that are based in culturally significant circumstances. Emergent literacy is connected to communities of practice, with community defined as a shared set of social practices that vary among members. The differences are historically, sociopolitically, and discursively shaped through access, exposure, experience, and apprenticing. Books about emergent literacy demonstrate that text participant and text user practices lead to code breaking, with multiple language modes valued.
In Book!, by Kristine O’Connell, a small child joyfully romps with his new book, finally getting his mother to read to him before he falls asleep, snuggled against the book in his bed. This is a lovely introduction to the joys of owning a book. The illustrations are purposefully of a family of color to aid in the dispelling of stereotypes.
A young child is asked by her teacher to go home and write a story in Steven Kroll’s Patches Lost and Found. Even though writing does not come easily to the child, the teacher does not give her a prompt or invite her to tell the story to get her started on this project. When she loses her guinea pig, Patches, Jenny has her lived experience to draw from. She uses drawing and writing to locate her pet. The process of searching for Patches leads Jenny into writing the story of how he was lost and found. She uses images and words, one after another, in her search, which demonstrates how a text can be constructed. This story has implications for pedagogy: everyday life is used for literacy learning because stories live among us. The child is transformed by these literacy practices.
In When Will I Read?, written by Miriam Cohen and illustrated by Lillian Hoban, first grader Jim wonders when he will finally learn to read. Through actively noticing the print in his environment he comes to realize that he can read. The teacher in this story is encouraging and creates many invitations to literacy learning (e.g., labels throughout the classroom and the writing down of children’s stories). This story speaks to reading as a process, supplying many wonderful examples of young children using reading and inquiry in their play throughout the classroom.
The “26 Fairmount Avenue” books, an autobiographical early chapter book series by Tomie DePaola, offer glimpses of a young boy’s desire to learn how to read and write. If we use the category of desire, we assume that Tomie is naturally wanting to read and write. He grows up in a middle-class family, is school literate and has access to reading, writing, and art tools. There is a danger in assuming that when children have exposure to print and positive self-image, they will automatically succeed at reading and writing, and if that is not the case, the child tends to be blamed.
In 26 Fairmount Avenue, the first book in the series, Tomie looks forward to his first day of kindergarten and to learning to read. Eagerly, he asks his kindergarten teacher, “When do we learn how to read?” She responds: “Oh, we don’t learn how to read in kindergarten. We learn to read next year, in first grade.” Tomie says, “Fine … I’ll be back next year.” He leaves the school and heads home. He returns home and waits for his parents, “holding one of [his] mother’s big books, staring at it, hoping that I could learn to read by myself” (DePaola, 1999: 35).
Tomie DePaola indicates his opposition to what really are senseless rules. He is willing to compromise and abide by them. Because of the loving support of his extended family, he feels enabled and supported. The school scenarios depicted are rule-bound. For example, Tomie’s name is spelled T-O-M-I-E. The schoolteachers insist that he must spell his name T-O-M-M-Y, and he obediently does so for seven years. The school tries to shape his literacy practices. Taken for granted in the stories is that Tomie can remain a child for a while. At home, there is no pressure for him to be independent; but he is encouraged to grow at his own pace.
In Here We All Are, the second book in the series, Tomie pronounces: “I know what I want to be…. I want to be an artist when I grow up. I want to draw pictures and write stories for books and sing and tap dance on the stage” (DePaola, 2001: 13). His entire extended family supports his interests by giving him drawing and writing supplies for his birthday and Christmas.
In On My Way, he challenges the reading practices of his first grade teacher. He “borrows” the reading text reader and masters it by asking family members and friends to assist in his practice. He returns the book to his teacher and surprises her with his newly acquired competence. She is so impressed with his ability that she signs off on a permission slip so he can have access to more books from the local public library.
Access to Books
The Library by Sarah Stewart, illustrated by David Small, tells the story of Mary Elizabeth Brown, a woman for whom books are an obsession and who has the economic means to maintain this passion. According to the text, she was born “skinny, nearsighted, and shy.” Her only recreation is reading and she retains this single interest for her entire life. There is no reason a child reader would want to emulate Elizabeth’s behavior. If the book’s intention is to invite children into the world of reading, then it fails. Nowhere is there any indication of the titles of the books. Elizabeth’s decisions are impulsive and not made with thoughtful care. She has the privilege of time and leisure. Who is the audience for this book? It may be very gratifying to elderly, upper-class, financially-secure readers. The implication here is that reading is a passive act and an isolating activity. It does not matter what books you read or how you read them.
Reading is depicted as if it were an insatiable appetite. This story might turn children off to reading: Who wants this kind of life? Who is taking care of this child? Where is her money coming from? The reader never meets her family. Where did her elderly friend come from at the end?
The Library is well intentioned but depicts, as the norm, a woman of means who seems to be anti-social and isolated. Reading should not be portrayed as uncontrollable consumption of books. What about other forms of reading?
While books only surround Elizabeth, in contrast, in The Old Woman Who Loved to Read, by John Winch, animals, tools, fruit, flowers, and the accoutrements of everyday farm life surround the older protagonist. Although the old woman loves to read, she is too busy managing her daily existence to spend much time with her books. When the dead of winter finally comes, the old woman does take the opportunity to catch up on her reading. The old woman reads practical books on weaving and craft making. The pile of books next to her and the list of books in the end papers demonstrate a variety of reading materials for different purposes. Some of the books are nonfiction and some are fiction. There is evidence that she uses the reading to improve her skills as a farmer.
Access to School Literacies
The role of the teacher is central to literacy learning. In the texts about English language learners (see Chapter 6), and emergent readers and writers, the interactions between children and teachers provide insights into the roles constructed by particular literacy pedagogies. Chapter 10 offers some guiding questions for the teaching of reading as a text, analyzing teacher and child roles in lessons, the source of knowledge, and what children are learning about their place in the world (Wooldridge, 2001).
It is telling that The Year of Miss Agnes, by Kirkpatrick Hill, is dedicated to Sylvia Ashton-Warner and other subversive teachers. Most of the teachers, who have come to this one-room school in an Alaskan fishing community, leave quickly thereafter. Miss Agnes is different in many ways. She is particularly different in the practices she uses to teach all of her students. She is respectful of the culture of the community. She manages to reach not only every child, but every adult in the community.
Fred (short for Frederika), a ten-year-old girl, is the narrator. Even though a child tells this story, there is an invitation for the reader to read between the lines. She describes the language experience approach Miss Agnes uses: The books the children write become their texts. Miss Agnes also reads aloud regularly from classic books such as Robin Hood. What Miss Agnes does is affirm the linguistic resources the children bring. She respects the children’s life experiences and they become part of the invitations for learning. She teaches the children American Sign Language because one child is deaf. The children learn it with ease. Miss Agnes professes that schools are not just for children: “we have to keep learning all of your life” (Hill, 2000: 64). She integrates the curriculum and teaches the children about the rest of the world, while validating their own experience: “With Miss Agnes the world got bigger and then it got smaller” (Hill, 2000: 75). She understands the children’s language and insists that there are many ways of speaking. The community worries that they are going to lose Miss Agnes after her one-year contract, but she comes back. She affirms children’s multiliteracies by identifying children’s experiences with different language modalities (e.g., drawing, American Sign Language, music, writing, and dancing).
In Don’t Say Ain’t, by Irene Smalls, Dana learns that she can maintain her two varieties of English and use them appropriately, depending on the situation. She learns that language is context dependent. She has some good models to draw on, since her teacher has successfully demonstrated her ability to speak both in Ebonics and standard English, depending on the social context. The teacher affirms the child’s home literacies while helping the child to succeed within the school context to master school literacies and the language of power.
Orality
Everyone has access to oral language, but it depends on the language and language variety that determines the level of social power afforded the speaker. Orality is central to writing and reading but often is isolated from these language modes. Storytelling helps disseminate a culture’s stories, values, and histories.
In Keepers, by Jeri Hanel Watts, young Kenyon loves listening to his ninety-year-old grandmother’s stories. He also loves playing baseball. Little Dolly informs him that the family needs a keeper of stories and legends: “The Keeper holds onto the past until she can pass it on to the next.” Kenyon volunteers for this important role but Little Dolly reminds him that keepers are typically girls.
For his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, Kenyon wanders from shop to shop in his town in search of a special present. A new leather baseball glove catches his eye and he buys it, thereby spending the money he saved for his grandmother’s gift. He comes to realize that the perfect gift for his grandmother is writing down the stories she has told him over the years, capturing storytelling in print and carrying it on by a younger generation. Storytelling offers intergenerational learning and respect for elders, affirming a sense of community.
Storytelling brings a group of people together at an open-air market in The Storytellers, by Ted Lewin. The book shows a panoramic view of the marketplace. We meet many of the vendors who remind the reader of one of the benefits of their work: “We are lucky to work where we can see the sky.” They also remark on how easy their work is in comparison to their neighboring vendors. The storytelling commands respect; the community values the storytelling as they lean into the stories. The story communicates the power of apprenticing between elders and the younger generation, in this case, between a grandfather and grandson. The discourse is not everyday language; it is an art form, a theatrical performance, passing on historical information.
William Miller wrote Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree, a short biography of Zora Neale Hurston, an African American anthropologist, folklorist, and author. We learn about her gender-segregated community in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black, incorporated town in the United States. Her parents have different ideas about what she can do and who she can be in this small town. It is Zora’s mother who invites her to dream and look beyond where she lives as she climbs the chinaberry tree, “one branch at a time.” Zora crosses gender lines and observes and asks questions about what she sees and hears, (the groundwork practices of anthropological fieldwork). On her death bed, Zora’s mother encourages her “to always remember what she had learned … [because] stories … kept their people alive.” This text speaks to the power of oral stories for remembering history and maintaining culture, especially underrepresented cultures. Orality and listening are significant language modes.
Writing
Many children’s books portray the writing process as a subtext. The metafictive or self-conscious devices call attention to different genres of writing (e.g., poetry, letters, diaries, journals). Writing can help characters name their realities and gain control of their lives through naming, synthesizing, connecting, and questioning their lived experiences (Goode, 1999), as well as allowing children to explore how language works.
Max’s Words, by Kate Banks, depicts a young boy’s decision to collect words from magazines, newspapers, and the dictionary, as a way to rival his brothers’ stamp and coin collections. Smaller words lead to larger words. The word collection is used to label his daily activity and surroundings, and inspire storytelling, especially when the words take the shape of what they represent. His brothers organize their collections into stacks, resulting in piles of money and stamps, but when Max puts his words together he creates thoughts and stories and even his cynical brothers are impressed.
The Boy Who Loved Words, by Roni Schotter, reflects the same sentiment. The young protagonist, Selig, loves words and jots them down on pieces of paper. The children in his class make fun of Selig and call him “Wordsworth” and “Oddball.” The latter name disturbs him and leads him to seek his life’s purpose, at the advice from a magical genie, which leads him to new adventures with words. He collects words that sound melodious and contribute to good thoughts. He discovers the purpose for his passion for words by sharing and distributing words for community members to utilize in their everyday practices. This storyline challenges the literacy practice of “controlled” and “limited” vocabularies because it impedes literacy development and creative speaking, writing, and thinking.
The next two novels in verse portray the role of writing in helping children gain control of their lives, as well as the role that teachers can play in this process. In Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech, Jack, an elementary school student, unlearns assumptions about literacy learning and tells his story through journal entries of his growing acceptance of poetry writing: “I don’t want to because boys don’t write poetry. Girls do.” His teacher, Miss Stretchberry, introduces several poems by well-known poets that transform Jack’s views of poetry. These poems inspire Jack; he incorporates some of the poems’ words and structures into his own work. Miss Stretchberry displays Jack’s poems alongside other children’s in the classroom. Jack’s poems become an intertext, a blend of lived experience and voices from the other poems.
This story demonstrates the writing process and capitalizes on poetic sources of inspiration. Jack is exposed to different models and draws as well from his personal life. His journal is a catchall for these experiences, both literary and lived, and a space for Jack to tease out his questions about poetry writing. Miss Stretchberry creates multiple invitations for Jack to experiment and encourages him through her feedback and posting of his work.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Locomotion is a series of poems written by eleven-year-old Lonnie. His parents are deceased, and he is separated from his sister Lili. He lives in a foster home and exercises his poetic spirit, with the guidance of his teacher, Ms. Marcus, through his writing at school. Lonnie writes poetry about all the issues that he thinks about in formats from rap to haiku to sonnet and many other poetic structures in between.
He writes about his undirected energy, mixed-up emotions, daily observations and experiences, as well as his bittersweet memories of his family before a fire took his parents’ lives because, as Ms. Marcus says, “write it down before it leaves your brain.” The poems develop subtly from beginning to end, reflecting both specific school writing assignments and his emerging competence and comfort with poetic expression. Lonnie writes about racism, grief, loss, and growing up. Class and gender are implicated among these poems. He writes to survive his life. The protagonists in these novels in verse practice code breaking, text participating, text using, and text critiquing, speaking to the power of critical writing.
In América is Her Name, by Luis J. Rodríguez, América and her family are undocumented immigrants, living and working in Chicago. She aspires to be a poet and to belong in this place that deems her “illegal.” Mr. Aponte, a Puerto Rican poet, visits her class and encourages the students to write poetry by using process writing and their home language as a resource: “There’s poetry in everyone … Don’t worry about spelling or grammar—that will come later. Write in Spanish or English, whichever feels comfortable.”
América’s father, who is unemployed, tries to discourage her from writing because it “won’t pay the bills.” Class, gender, and race are implicated here. If this story were used alone it would be problematic just as any single book would be, because there is a danger of perpetuating stereotypes about the Mexican American community. América’s situation is one representation. There are many stories to be told about Mexican Americans: They are not all undocumented immigrants, poor, unemployed, or abusers of alcohol. Nor are Mexican American communities replete with criminals.
The Gardener, by Sarah Stewart, illustrated by David Small, contains memorable characters and a deep sense of the hard times of the Depression. The father loses his job, and the family reluctantly decides to send Lydia Grace to the city to stay with her Uncle Jim, who owns a bakery, and who never smiles. The book contains evidence of several genres: letter-writing, realistic fiction, and picture book, making it a genuine hybrid and acknowledging how unproductive it is to label this text as a single genre.
The story is told through a series of letters that Lydia Grace, a child who is unflappable, creative, and resourceful, writes home to her grandmother and the rest of her family. Subtle messages appear through the illustrations, such as the fact that Uncle Jim’s two valued workers, who are also his close friends, are African American. Lydia Grace makes an important contribution to her uncle and his friends, and they reciprocate. Left unsaid are the causes and impact of the Depression, but discussion can lead to questions, conversations, and research about this period in U.S. history.
Critical Literacies
Critical literacies acknowledge the role that language plays in social processes; they connect language use to the power relations of the sociopolitical context. Critical literacies pedagogies make visible how children are offered multiple subject positions through the discourses imbedded in the texts and images to which they have access. If children are taught from early childhood onward that language and texts are sites for ideological struggle, they learn to resist dominant messages that dictate who they are, who they should be, and what they can do and not do. Few texts reflect text critic practices among the characters. We located three titles, with two that have anthropomorphic farm animals. Typically, animal characters distance the reader from the issues grappled with in the text.
The cows on Farmer Brown’s farm protest the work conditions and issue their complaint via typewritten letters in Click, Clack, Moo, by Doreen Cronin. The cows go on strike and the chickens join the effort. Farmer Brown enlists the help of a neutral party, Duck. The hilarious text exemplifies the process of negotiation and the role that writing can play in such work.
In the sequel, Giggle, Giggle, Quack, Cronin continues the story of the farmyard animals whose literate activities create problems for Farmer Brown. He goes on vacation and leaves his brother Bob in charge of the farm, but with an admonition: “keep an eye on Duck. He’s trouble.” Unfortunately, Bob is no match for the wily duck and his animal friends.
Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude, written by Kevin O’Malley, showcases the negotiation processes of collaborative writing and the possibilities for critical writing. A young girl and boy create a fairy tale together but challenge and “rewrite” each other’s gendered renderings. They both try to overcome storylines that portray girls in pretty and passive roles and boys full of brawn.
Unless they are able to read and write for social change and justice, readers and writers will find themselves confirming and perpetuating existing meanings determined by dominant ideologies. While we must consider what children read, we concur with Peter Hunt (1992), that we should also consider “how they think about what they read.” A critical multicultural analysis brings ideologies into a sharper relief and fosters critical multicultural consciousness and social change. Critical multicultural analysis is powerful literacy because it utilizes literacy for “reading” the discourses that have created us, as well as aligning ourselves with subjectivities (ways of being in the world) and discourses that will mobilize us toward democratic participation in society.
Classroom Applications
· Ask children to investigate home literacy practices and create a class book based on their findings. (See Compton-Lilly, 2004 for guidelines.) Compare these practices with what they do at school. What are the similarities and differences? Invite the children to represent their findings through multimodalities (e.g., visual arts, photography, poetry, speaking, digital technologies, dance). Use these assignments as windows into children’s lived experiences outside of school.
· After children do a critical reading of a passage or children’s book, invite them to create a visual representation of their process as critical multicultural analysts.
· Examine language use in Doreen Cronin’s children’s books that are diaries of different animals such as a worm, spider, and fly (e.g., The Diary of a Worm). These texts depict the possibilities of journaling as ways to document and name everyday occurrences. The entries are told from the perspective of a worm, for example, which invites the reader to consider how language use is specific to the animal’s experience.
· Analyze texts about libraries. Consider issues of access and social function. Here are some titles to begin with:
· The House of Wisdom by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland.
· A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Inés by Pat Mora.
· The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq by Jeanette Winter.
· My Librarian is a Camel: How Books are Brought to Children Around the World by Margriet Ruurs.
Recommendations for Classroom Research
· Take stock of your literacies history. Create two columns on one sheet of paper. Make a list of your home literacies on the left side of the paper and school literacies on the right side. Which modalities were recognized within each context? Compare and contrast both lists. What are the similarities and differences? What do the similarities and differences signify? How can this reflection inform your teaching of literacies and children’s literature? What questions emerged from this analysis?
· Analyze in what ways are multimodalities are represented in children’s books. What are the explicit and implicit ideologies about these multiple forms of expression as reflected in these texts? Share your findings with your students.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Barton, David. (2007). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Booth, David. (2007). Reading doesn’t matter anymore: A new way to look at reading. Toronto: Pembroke/Stenhouse Publishers.
Cervetti, Gina, Pardales, Michael J. & Damico, James S. A tale of differences: Comparing the traditions, perspectives, and educational goals of critical reading and critical literacy. Retrieved on November 7, 2006, from www.readingonline.org.
Gee, James. (2008). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology and discourses. (3rd ed). New York: Routledge.
Larson, Joanne. (2005). Making literacy real: Theories and practices for learning and teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Larson, Joanne. (Ed.). (2007). Literacy as snake oil: Beyond the quick fix (New literacies and digital epistemologies). New York: Peter Lang.
Meacham, Shuaib J. & Buendia, Edward. (1999). Modernism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism and their impact on literacy. Language Arts, 76(6), 510–516.
Pahl, Kate & Rowsell, Jennifer. (2005). Literacy education: Understanding the New Literacy Studies in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman.
Shannon, Patrick. (2007). Reading against democracy: The broken promises of reading instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
References
Children’s Books
· Aliki. (1998). Marianthe’s Story One: Painted Words; Marianthe’s Story Two: Spoken Memories. New York: Greenwillow.
· Banks, Kate. (2006). Max’s Words. Illustrated by Boris Kulikov. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
· Bloom, Becky. (1999). Wolf! Illustrated by Pascal Biet. New York: Orchard Books.
· Bogart, Jo Ellen. (1997). Jeremiah learns to read. Illustrated by Laura Fernandez & Rick Jacobson.
· Bradby, Marie. (1995). More than anything else. Illustrated by Chris K. Soenpiet. New York: Orchard Books.
· Cohen, Miriam. (1996). When will I read? Illustrated by Lillian Hoban. New York: Yearling.
· Creech, Sharon. (2001). Love that dog. New York: HarperCollins.
· Cronin, Doreen. (2000). Click, clack, moo: Cows that type. Illustrated by Betsy Lewin. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
· Cronin, Doreen. (2002). Giggle, giggle, quack. Illustrated by Betsy Lewin. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
· Daly, Niki. (2003). Once upon a time. Illustrated by author. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
· DePaola, Tomie. (1999). 26 Fairmont Avenue. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
· DePaola, Tomie. (2001a). Here we all are. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
· DePaola, Tomie. (2001b). On my way. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
· Hesse, Karen. (1998). Just Juice. New York: Scholastic.
· Hest, Amy. (2004). Mr. George Baker. Illustrated by Jon J. Muth. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.
· Hill, Kirkpatrick. (2000). The year of Miss Agnes. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books.
· Hoffman, Mary. (2002). The color of home. Illustrated by Karin Littlewood. New York: Phyllis Foselman Books.
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· Levine, Ellen. (1989). I hate English. Illustrated by Steve Bjõrkman. New York: Scholastic.
· Lewin, Ted. (1998). The storytellers. Illustrated by author. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.
· Miller, William. (1994). Zora Hurston and the chinaberry tree. Illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu. New York: Lee & Low.
· Miller, William. (1998). Richard Wright and the library card. Illustrated by Gregory Christie. New York: Lee & Low.
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· O’Malley, Kevin. (2005). Once upon a cool motorcycle dude. Illustrated by Carol Heyer & Scott Goto. New York: Walker & Co.
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· Rahaman, Vashanti. (1997). Read for me, Mama. Illustrated by Lori McElrath-Eslick. Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press.
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· Stewart, Sarah. (1995). The library. Illustrated by David Small. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
· Stewart, Sarah. (2001). The gardener. Illustrated by David Small. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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· Vaughan, Marcia. (2003). Up the learning tree. Illustrated by Derek Blanks. New York: Lee & Low Books.
· Walter, Mildred Pitts. (2004). Alec’s primer. Illustrated by Larry Johnson. Middlebury, VT: Vermont Folklife Center.
· Watts, Jeri Hanel. (1997). Keepers. Illustrated Felicia Marshall. New York: Lee & Low.
· Winch, John. (1997). The old woman who loved to read. New York: Holiday House.
· Woodson, Jacqueline. (2003). Locomotion. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Secondary Sources
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