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Literacy (Anthropology)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Prior to representing a concern of academic inquiry and national and international policy, literacy defines the conditions of possibility for any disciplinary or policy enterprise. Playing a central role in social and institutional functioning, while holding significance at the personal level, literacy has become a trope of modernity, a metaphor for our relationship with the world. This bibliography traces literacy’s emergence as a scientific subject and the different theoretical perspectives that developed the field of literacy studies. Literacy studies have always been multidisciplinary, where contributions from historians, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, folklorists, educational researchers, and literary critics have converged and collided. This bibliography begins with General Overviews accounting for this variety of literacy research, followed by a sampling of Journals. The Historical Studies section lists essential, broad histories as well as specific historical case studies of literacy in diverse settings, exhibiting the variety and complexity of reading technologies and practices throughout time. The emergence of literacy as a scientific subject is primarily associated with the works of anthropologists, psychologists, and classicists who conceived of literacy as a “technology of the intellect.” These works, listed in Tracing the Literacy Debate, characterized literacy as a causal, transformative force, deemed to propel advancements of unprecedented import in societal organization and individual cognition. In light of ethnographic and historical work carried out since the late 1970s, our understanding of literacy has shifted toward a situated perspective, a Social Practice approach, that acknowledges the sociocultural and ideological nature of reading and writing. No longer necessarily promoting societal progress and cognitive sophistication, literacy is appraised for its involvement in the reproduction of power relationships and its role in forming identities and subjectivities as well as institutions, as explored in Critical Literacy. A critique of literacy also requires investigating the profound relationship between literacy and Schooling. The literacy debate also advanced claims about orality and literacy, another point of departure, as numerous studies have complicated the relationship between Oral and Written Language. These reflections on communicative modalities intersected with social practice perspectives in efforts to track the enormous changes to literacy wrought by a new media age. In Emerging Texts and Contexts, multilingualism, multimodalities, and multiliteracies provoke reconsiderations of the situated locations of literacy practices in light of the contemporary mobility of agents and texts in an increasingly digitalized and globalized world. Undoubtedly the study of literacy will remain central to our efforts to illuminate meaning making, human sociality, and cultural processes.
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  5. General Overviews
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  7. This section includes several overviews of the field of literacy studies. A useful starting point, Collins 1995 concisely retraces divergent, influential approaches to literacy theory before introducing a synthetic perspective. A more inclusive, article-length review is provided in Bartlett, et al. 2011, which draws on Collins’s categories but also discusses critical literacy and more recent concerns. Street and Hornberger 2008 is a full-length volume that covers a broad range of topics with an emphasis on education-related issues. For an overview that also interrogates the construct of literacy from an epistemological perspective, the readers are invited to consider Brockmeier, et al. 2002.
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  9. Bartlett, Lesley, Dina López, Lalitha Vasudevan, and Doris Warriner. 2011. The anthropology of literacy. In A companion to the anthropology of education. 1st ed. Edited by Bradley A. U. Levinson and Mica Pollock, 154–176. Blackwell Companions to Anthropology 12. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  10. DOI: 10.1002/9781444396713Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  11. A thoughtful review of most influential strands of anthropological research on literacy and their contribution to discerning literacy’s relationship to structures of power, language, identities, and technology.
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  13. Brockmeier, Jens, Min Wang, and David R. Olson, eds. 2002. Literacy, narrative and culture. World of Writing. Richmond, UK: Curzon.
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  15. An important contribution to the multidisciplinary study of literacy, this collection suggests a perspective on texts as cultural artifacts and literacy as a form of cultural organization itself. Such cultural theory of literacy is articulated in this volume through historical and developmental analyses.
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  17. Collins, James. 1995. Literacy and literacies. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:75–93.
  18. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000451Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  19. An influential review that draws on a poststructuralist approach to discuss the contribution of historical and ethnographic research to the articulation of the relationships between literacy and power, epistemology, and social formations.
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  21. Street, Brian, and Nancy H. Hornberger, eds. 2008. Literacy. Encyclopedia of Language and Education 2. New York: Springer.
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  23. This collection covers a broad range of topics through the perspectives of historians, anthropologists, linguists, and educational researchers. In addition to key theoretical frameworks, the volume offers insightful studies of literacy practices in educational institutions as well as other social settings in an impressive variety of geographical areas (including Africa, Australia, Latin America, Nepal, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
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  25. Journals
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  27. Many peer-reviewed journals directly or frequently address literacy. The journals listed here address literacy with concerns and approaches more relevant to anthropology; many journals about literacy from an exclusively educational perspective have been left out. Reading Research Quarterly and Written Communication are reputed, quarterly journals that often publish indispensable articles in literacy studies. The articles in Anthropology and Education Quarterly broadly examine schooling and education, but as contributions to an American Anthropological Association journal, more consistently apply an anthropological approach. Journals also narrow in on more specific areas of literacy research, such as the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices. Too numerous to list are the journals dedicated to reading, composition, and rhetoric, specifically in educational contexts; Literacy is a notable example from the United Kingdom. Journal of Literacy Research has more comprehensive transatlantic coverage. Finally, many journals concerned with literacy are (self-consciously) taking advantage of the wider accessibility to texts offered by electronic publication; Community Literacy Journal is explicitly interested in these diversifying ways of reading in its dissemination as well as its content.
  28.  
  29. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 1970–.
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  31. This American Anthropological Association journal (not limited to the United States) contains studies utilizing ethnographic methods to address educational issues, theoretical and applied, including literacy and related topics.
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  33. Community Literacy Journal. 2006–.
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  35. Exemplifies many trends in many of the newer venues for peer-reviewed publications: a broader spectrum of approaches, an interest in collaborations of practice and research, online publishing and access, and particular interest in both new media and contexts for literacy apart from traditional education and workplace settings.
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  37. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices. 2007–.
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  39. Like Critical Literacy more generally, this journal joins theory and pedagogical practices, invites interdisciplinary perspectives with a common critical orientation connecting literacy and power, and intends to be global in bases.
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  41. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 1995–
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  43. This journal is oriented toward applied educational practice, but this International Reading Association monthly publication contains commentaries and research relevant to adult literacy learning from recognized literacy scholars.
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  45. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. 2001–.
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  47. The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy has more of a developmental, psychological emphasis, but contains indispensable research for those interested in children’s literacy.
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  49. Journal of Literacy Research. 1969–.
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  51. An interdisciplinary journal that publishes research related to literacy, language, and literacy and language education from preschool through adulthood. Article abstracts are made available in seven languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese).
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  53. Literacy. 1967–
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  55. Like many journals excluded from this list, Literacy has a strong emphasis on the practice and policy of literacy education, but its presence serves to highlight the vast array of meaningful research on literacy being done by educators and professional associations (in this case, the United Kingdom Literacy Association).
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  57. Reading Research Quarterly.1965–
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  59. International in scope (published by the International Reading Association), multidisciplinary, and methodologically diverse, Reading Research Quarterly is a leading journal in literacy studies. Full articles available online.
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  61. Written Communication. 1984–.
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  63. The focus of this prestigious quarterly journal is writing, and contributors come from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary orientations. Notably, studies in this journal are not limited to particular populations or institutional contexts.
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  65. Historical Studies
  66.  
  67. Much of the significant work on literacy has been historical in nature, unearthing the trajectories that brought reading and writing to take such a prominent place in modern societies, including how specific technologies, practices, and beliefs shaped literacy’s development and how different peoples generated distinct uses and meanings for literacy. Broad Historical Overviews includes volumes with more sweeping views of the historical landscape, offering certain angles or vantage points to the development of literacy across time. Historical Case Studies of Literacy, Technology, and Contexts features works closely examining particular historical moments linked to technological transformations as well as the interaction of literacy and specific cultural milieus. These studies, taken together, provide a detailed picture of the advent of literacy in the West. This account is augmented by Historical Case Studies in Diverse Communities, which highlights studies representing the widespread and variegated uses of literacy among different peoples.
  68.  
  69. Broad Historical Overviews
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  71. This section aims to offer a selection of historical studies that approach literacy as social practice. In other words, the selected references consider the historicity of ways of engaging with texts, manners of reading and writing, and the situated meanings of those literacies. Thus, exemplary work on the history of the book, the development of various genres of texts, and contributions associated to bibliography and paleography proper are not included in this bibliography. While never claiming or aiming to offer a comprehensive historical account of reading and writing from inception to contemporary time, the contributions included in this section span several centuries and geographical areas. Cavallo and Chartier 1999 and Graff 1987 overview literacy in the West from antiquity to the late 20th century, the former volume emphasizing the differing contexts of writing and reading, the latter arguing against an oversimplified “literacy myth.” Mignolo 2003 offers a thought-provoking perspective on how literacy is implicated in the Western colonial project. Resnick 1983 provides an important balance by also considering non-Western cultural traditions in this collection of studies. Kaestle 1985 focuses on the history of literacy in the United States, proposing an approach that accounts for everyday readers and everyday reading.
  72.  
  73. Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier, eds. 1999. A history of reading in the West. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
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  75. A collection of studies reconstructing the various ways of reading that have been characteristic of Western societies from classical antiquity to the present.
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  77. Graff, Harvey J. 1987. The legacies of literacy: Continuities and contradictions in Western culture and society. Midland Books 598. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
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  79. An ambitious historical overview that spans from the origins of Western literacy to the “today and tomorrow” of literacy, aiming to demonstrate that definitions and functions of literacy cannot prescind from an analysis of the social and historical contexts in which they are situated.
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  81. Kaestle, Carl F. 1985. The history of literacy and the history of readers. Review of Research in Education 12:11–53.
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  83. A provocative essay that urges historians to study the uses of literacy in everyday life, to construct a history of readers and a history of literacy as social practice.
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  85. Mignolo, Walter D. 2003. The darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, territoriality, and colonization. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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  87. An influential reflection on the connections among writing, social organization, and power. Drawing from literature, semiotics, history, and cultural theory, Mignolo reveals how European forms of literacy were implicated in the colonization of the New World. An important historical foundation for Critical Literacy. Originally published in 1995.
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  89. Resnick, Daniel P., ed. 1983. Literacy in historical perspective. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.
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  91. A collection of studies spanning different centuries and cultural traditions, including 19th-century China, 17th-century England and New England, and imperial Russia. A thought-provoking essay on literacy and schooling in subordinate cultures by anthropologist John U. Ogbu is included in the volume.
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  93. Historical Case Studies of Literacy, Technology, and Context
  94.  
  95. These historical case studies, largely focused on Western development of literacy, illuminate the complex relationship among literacy, the technologies that shaped textual forms and practices, and the sociocultural contexts in which reading and writing were embedded. Among studies of Middle Ages literacy, Innes 1998 describes an individual monk’s biography and literacy to examine the relationship between memory and written records, a relationship Clanchy 2013 examines in proposing the birth of a literate mentality. This notion of the incipient literacy of the Middle Ages restructuring how people thought is also central to Stock 1983, and as later sections of this bibliography describe, important to the concerns of literacy scholars interested in history and the present. Chartier 1994 and Eisenstein 1979 are helpful for understanding the development of literacy, textual production and practices, and social and political impacts in the period leading up to modernity. Saenger 1997 offers a historical account for the main manner of modern reading—solitarily and silently with a text.
  96.  
  97. Chartier, Roger. 1994. The order of books: Readers, authors, and libraries in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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  99. Examines the mechanisms and practices devised in Western Europe between the Middle Ages and the 18th century to regulate increasing production and distribution of texts. Contains three essays: the rules for the formation of communities of readers, the figure of the author, and the meaning of the library, respectively.
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  101. Clanchy, Michael T. 2013. From memory to written record: England, 1066–1307. Malden, MA: Wiley.
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  103. Influential account of the written world of Middle Ages England. The first part details the making of records: the technology, record types, and preservation and use of documents. The second examines the shift from oral tradition to “literate mentality,” with examples of the infiltration of oral tradition into written records. Originally published in 1979.
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  105. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1979. The printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  107. Influential examination of the shift from manuscript culture to printed communication. After a detailed overview of main characteristics of the introduction of printing, the second section relates the script-to-print shift to three historical developments: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of modern scientific thought.
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  109. Graff, Harvey. 1979. The literacy myth: Literacy and social structure in the nineteenth-century city. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press.
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  111. Noted book analyzing the place of literacy in 19th-century society and culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources and employing qualitative and quantitative techniques, The Literacy Myth reevaluates the role typically assigned to literacy in historical scholarship, cultural understanding, economic development schemes, and social doctrines and ideologies.
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  113. Innes, Matthew. 1998. Memory, orality and literacy in an early medieval society. Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 158:3–36.
  114. DOI: 10.1093/past/158.1.3Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  115. Through analysis of the life and literary work of Notker, a 9th-century monk who endeavored to write down the deeds of Charlemagne from materials that had been orally transmitted over at least one generation, this study sheds light on the fascinating interrelationship between social memories and their means of transmission.
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  117. Saenger, Paul. 1997. Space between words: The origins of silent reading. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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  119. The author traces the emergence of the predominant modern habit of reading, that is, solitary and silent involvement with text, and connects it to changes in writing techniques as well as social ideologies.
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  121. Stock, Brian. 1983. The implications of literacy: Written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  123. Drawing from anthropology, literary theory, and history, this book explores the influence of literacy on 11th- and 12th-century life and mentality. The author argues that medieval and early modern literacy did not simply supplant oral tradition but created a new type of interdependence between the oral and the written.
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  125. Historical Case Studies in Diverse Communities
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  127. Case studies of literacy also offer evidence for the significant presence and function of textual practices in communities overlooked or misrepresented as illiterate, as in the author’s account in Greene 1994 of Spanish literacy in the Americas and (in McHenry and Heath 1994) the authors’ recovering of the literate presence in early African American communities. The study in Barletta 2008 of 16th-century Spanish Muslims, the analysis in Boyarin 1992 of the reading of Hebrew Scriptures, the exploration in Jaffee 2001 of Torah among ancient Palestinian Jews, and the study in Sterponi 2008 of medieval devotional practices all focus on vital literacy contexts involving reading of sacred texts and the interface between the religious and the social in various historical locations.
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  129. Barletta, Vincent. 2008. Deixis, taqiyya, and textual mediation in crypto-Muslim Aragon. Text and Talk 28.5: 561–579.
  130. DOI: 10.1515/TEXT.2008.029Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  131. Careful analysis of key texts translated, copied, and circulated within reading communities of crypto-Muslim minorities during 16th-century Aragon (Spain). Presents fundamental practices of text performance and mediation that these scribal and lectorate traditions engaged as a mode of resistance and survival throughout a period of persecution and forced conversion.
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  133. Boyarin, Daniel. 1992. Placing reading: Ancient Israel and medieval Europe. In The ethnography of reading. Edited by Jonathan Boyarin, 10–37. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  135. On the basis of sophisticated textual analysis, this essay engages ancient and modern claims and ideas surrounding the practice of reading as those claims apply or question mainstream ideas about engagement and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.
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  137. Greene, Jamie C. 1994. Misperspectives on literacy: A critique of an Anglocentric bias in histories of American literacy. Written Communication 11.2: 251–269.
  138. DOI: 10.1177/0741088394011002004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  139. The author provides evidence of the wide spread of literacy in Spanish during the 15th and 16th centuries in Mexico, Central America, and the United States South. Ethnic and social groups traditionally excluded from literacy accounts are given due literate recognition.
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  141. Jaffee, Martin S. 2001. Torah in the mouth: Writing and oral tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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  143. Studies the complex relationships of oral tradition to texts among Palestinian Jews from the Second Temple period into Late Antiquity. While only books were regarded as authoritative, oral tradition was necessary for their interpretation. Argues that ideology of oral transmission—“Torah in the Mouth”—served to legitimize the institution of rabbinic discipleship.
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  145. McHenry, Elizabeth, and Shirley Brice Heath. 1994. The literate and the literary: African Americans as writers and readers—1830–1940. Written Communication 11.4: 419–444.
  146. DOI: 10.1177/0741088394011004001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  147. This article provides a corrective to the emphasis on oral roots of African American language and literary practices by documenting the activity and influence of African American literary societies and journals over the course of a century.
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  149. Sterponi, Laura. 2008. Reading and meditation in the Middle Ages: Lectio divina and books of hours. Text and Talk 28.5: 667–689.
  150. DOI: 10.1515/TEXT.2008.034Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  151. Through examining pedagogical treatises that provided instruction on the medieval practice of reading the book of hours—interwoven with semiotic analysis of textual and illustrational features of those texts—this essay reconstructs a prominent practice of reading in medieval Christian tradition, fostering involvement with text as a meditative and prayerful activity.
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  153. Tracing the Literacy Debate
  154.  
  155. Beginning in the 1960s, various anthropologists, media theorists, cultural historians, and other scholars produced a set of landmark works positing literacy as more than merely a significant tool of communication, but as a causal, transformative, and epoch-marking force on society, cognition, language, and consciousness. Taken together, many of these early works can be said to have introduced a “literacy thesis,” a set of staggering claims of literacy’s significance that would have to be taken seriously (incorporated or refuted) by any studies of modern culture and society (see General Overviews). These works initiated and elevated consideration of literacy in contemporary scholarship.
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  157. The Literacy Thesis
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  159. The “literacy thesis” had its seeds in studies of classical Greek oratory and literacy by Havelock 1963 and in new recognitions of the expansive effects of media technologies by McLuhan 1962, but found its most concentrated and bold statement in Goody and Watt 1963, in which (particularly alphabetic) literacy was shown to have encompassing cognitive, organizational, and epistemological consequences the world over. This strong thesis, though later qualified and mitigated by many of its proponents, nevertheless provided the basis for Goody 1977 and Goody 1986, which provide an anthropological examination of literacy’s rise and role in civilization, Olson 1977 and Olson 1994, which discuss the far-reaching cognitive impacts of literacy, and Ong 1982, which studies the oral-literate divide, serving as a major point of departure for later perspectives of literacy.
  160.  
  161. Goody, Jack. 1977. The domestication of the savage mind. Themes in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  163. Goody further extends the argument from Goody and Watt 1963, focusing more directly on differing modes of communication as a mechanism against advanced/primitive or savage/civilized dichotomies of societies.
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  165. Goody, Jack. 1986. The logic of writing and the organization of society. Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture, and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  167. Utilizing archaeological evidence from the Ancient Near East and ethnographic data from West Africa, develops the argument of Goody and Watt 1963 to examine different aspects of society, like economics and law, changing with the advent of writing. Cautiously avoids presenting literacy as entirely causative, but makes substantially similar arguments.
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  169. Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. 1963. The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3: 304–345.
  170. DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500001730Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  171. Often credited—or attacked—as the seminal articulation of the literacy thesis. Contrasts oral and written culture and narrates literacy’s ascent (particularly Greek alphabetic) and its impacts on communication, cognition, categorization, critique, culture, and civilization, and argues that the oral-literate divide is the epochal distinction most important to human sciences.
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  173. Havelock, Eric. 1963. Preface to Plato. History of the Greek Mind 1. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
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  175. Havelock enters the conversation about orality and literacy by explaining Plato’s objections to poetry representing “oral thought.” He links Platonic self-reflection and organization of object knowledge to the advent of 5th-century Greek literacy. The first of several works where Havelock develops theories of Greek and Western literacy’s consequences.
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  177. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
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  179. In his typically entrancing and eclectic fashion, McLuhan pioneers the idea of modes of communication as entirely new environments—or here, galaxies—for human society, with far-ranging consequences. This early statement of the influence of literacy on society presents print technologies as transformative for “typographic man.”
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  181. Olson, David. 1977. From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review 47.3: 257–281.
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  183. Marks the historical trajectory from oral to literate, tracing shifts of meaning from extrinsic, contextual, and referential (associated with speech/“utterance”) to intrinsic, explicit, and autonomous (associated with writing/“text”), culminating in the British essayist tradition, with implications for language, comprehension, and learning. First of Olson’s many contributions to literacy scholarship.
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  185. Olson, David. 1994. The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  187. This multidisciplinary synthesis is representative of Olson’s progression, reasserting the claims of the literacy thesis mitigated by its counterarguments (see also Seminal Critiques), attributing the difference that literacy makes to the development of a literacy culture based on representing authorial intentions in text and practices of interpretation developed by readers.
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  189. Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New Accents. London: Methuen.
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  191. Gives nuance to the division of orality and literacy; attributes complexity to oral cultures. Ong’s reflections on “oral literature,” print, and sound vs. sight proved to be unique, persuasive, and generative, showing his debt to his teacher Marshall McLuhan’s fascination with the power of technologies and media to alter people and society.
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  193. Seminal Critiques
  194.  
  195. Though the provocative assertions of the literacy thesis would be moderated by many of their authors, most notably Jack Goody and David Olson, the critiques of grand claims about literacy’s effects not only tempered those claims but also provided the bases of alternative approaches to the study of literacy. Some critiques addressed the empirical grounds of literacy thesis arguments, such as the author’s account in Gough 1975 of literacy in Asian contexts and the discussion in Harris 1989 of Greek writing and thought. Others challenged the conceptual generalizations, such as the author’s work in Finnegan 1973 on the orality-literacy divide and the experimental study in Scribner and Cole 1978 that attempts to distinguish literacy’s effects from schooling. Scribner and Cole 1978, Heath 1980, and Street 1984 would not only criticize the literacy thesis’s ambitions, but also develop a contrasting point of view with a different set of methods for investigating literacy in society (see Social Practice).
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  197. Finnegan, Ruth. 1973. Literacy vs. non-literacy: The great divide? Some comments on the significance of “literature” in non-literate cultures. In Modes of thought: Essays on thinking in Western and non-Western societies. Edited by Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan, 112–144. London: Faber.
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  199. Many have not only adopted Finnegan’s characterization of the literacy thesis as a “Great Divide,” but also her critiques of its dichotomous simplifications.
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  201. Gough, Kathleen. 1975. Implications of literacy in traditional China and India. In Literacy in traditional societies. Edited by Jack Goody, 69–84. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  203. Gough’s testing of Good and Watt’s consequences of literacy against the script, history, and thought of China and India mitigates their claims, challenging the causal role of alphabetic systems; the impact of literacy on myth, linearity, and science; Western categorizations of knowledge; and democratizing effects of literacy on political structures (see Goody and Watt 1963, cited under Literacy Thesis). Originally published in 1968.
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  205. Harris, Roy. 1989. How does writing restructure thought? Language and Communication 9.2–3: 99–106.
  206. DOI: 10.1016/0271-5309(89)90012-8Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  207. A critique of the overreach of “romantic” notions of literacy’s consequences, this essay specifically attacks the leap from Greek alphabetic literacy to exceptional mental faculties. Instead, Harris argues that writing provides an “autoglottic space” that allows for language to be surveyed “unsponsored” by speakers, with political and social implications.
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  209. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1980. The function and uses of literacy. Journal of Communication 30.1: 123–133.
  210. DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1980.tb01778.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. Heath challenges the universal claims of the literacy thesis and the simplistic assumptions of school-based literacy endeavors by describing the unique and specific uses of literacy captured by the ethnographic study of communication in an African American, working-class community. A precursor to her 1983 work, Ways with Words (see also Monographs).
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  213. Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. 1978. Literacy without schooling: Testing for intellectual effects. Harvard Educational Review 48.4: 448–461.
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  215. To isolate the consequences of literacy from the consequences of schooling, this study of Liberia’s Vai people, whose writing system is learned without schooling institutions, finds that instead of automatic cognitive effects proposed by Olson 1977 (see also Literacy Thesis), literacy’s influence is linked to the social practices in which literacy is embedded.
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  217. Street, Brian. 1984. Literacy in theory. In Literacy in theory and practice. By Brian Street, 19–128. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 9. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  219. The first half of this book presents Street’s salvo against what he terms the “autonomous model” of literacy, combing through the generalizing claims advanced by Goody, Olson, and earlier linguists to show that they belong, in fact, to particular ideological contexts. He poses his alternative, an “ideological model” (see also Social Practice).
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  221. Social Practice
  222.  
  223. In reaction to the literacy thesis and the embedded conceptualization of reading and writing as technologies—independent of social context and endowed with inherent cognitive potential—an ethnographically informed perspective on literacy has emerged which characterizes it as a practice that is ideologically shaped, socioculturally organized, and historically contingent.
  224.  
  225. Theoretical Formulations
  226.  
  227. The references included in this section articulate the theoretical underpinnings of the late-20th- and early-21st-century trend of studies that look at literacy as a social practice. Barton 2007 and Street 1993 highlight the ideological nature of literacy in the authors’ presentations of the approach known as “New Literacy Studies.” Szwed 1981 and de Certeau 1984 emphasize the importance of exploring the ordinary, the former outlining an ethnographic method and the latter providing rich theoretical material. Barton and Papen 2010 is an edited volume containing dialogues and syntheses of the New Literacy Studies and the Anthropology of Writing.
  228.  
  229. Barton, David. 2007. Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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  231. An introduction to literacy studies that examines theories of language and learning underpinning sociocultural views of literacy as well as methods for researching literacy practices. Originally published in 1994.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Barton, David, and Uta Papen, eds. 2010. The anthropology of writing: Understanding textually-mediated worlds. London and New York: Continuum.
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  235. This book brings together two distinct research traditions on writing, the Anthropology of Writing developed prevalently in France and the New Literacy Studies developed in the United Kingdom, North America, and other English-speaking countries. Its eleven chapters offer illustrations of most prominent themes and theoretical frameworks of the two traditions and attempt to open a dialogue and a cross-fertilization between them.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  239. In this very influential book, the eclectic and erudite social scientist Michel de Certeau discerns devices, actions, and procedures that ordinary people use in their ordinary practices in order to subvert the hegemonic systems of meaning making. Among the practices examined by the author are reading and writing.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Street, Brian. 1993. Introduction: The New Literacy Studies. In Cross-cultural approaches to literacy. Edited by Brian Street, 1–21. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 23. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  243. In this introductory essay to his book, Street overviews different conceptualizations of literacy throughout the discipline’s history and puts forth a model that frames literacy not as an autonomous nor neutral technology, but instead as a practice shaped by structures of power and ideology.
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  245. Szwed, John F. 1981. The ethnography of literacy. In Writing: The nature, development, and teaching of written communication. Vol. 1, Variation in writing: Functional and linguistic-cultural differences. Edited by Marcia Farr Whiteman, 13–23. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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  247. The author argues for the study of literacy as a social practice and invites the extension of focus beyond text to function and context. The essay also discusses a set of methodological tools for studying literacy in its everyday settings.
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  249. Monographs
  250.  
  251. Exemplary studies of literacy practices are featured in this section. Influential anthropological works include a study in Ahearn 2001 of love letter writing in Nepal, ethnography in Besnier 1995 of literacy introduced by missionaries in a Polynesian society, ethnography in Heath 1983 of communication among Southern (United States) towns separated ethnically and economically, and an examination in Messick 1993 of literacy and authority in Islamic Yemen. These anthropological studies are presented along with contributions of cultural psychologists Scribner and Cole 1981, testing for the influence of literacy on schooled and nonschooled Vai peoples in Liberia; literacy scholars Barton and Hamilton 2012, detailing often-overlooked vernacular literacies in Lancaster, England; a folklore scholar, Shuman 2006, documenting oral and written discourses of adolescent girls in an urban American city; and cultural studies scholar Radway 1991, tracking the reading practices of romance novel fans in a small town. These monographs exhibit the fruits of a situated, social practice approach to literacy study.
  252.  
  253. Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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  255. Linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist documents an incipient literacy practice in Junigau, Nepal: love letter correspondence. Through an engaging ethnographic account, the author examines how literacy is closely linked to processes of social transformation (marriage practices in Ahearn’s study) both as result of and catalyst for those shifts in social practices.
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  257. Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. 2012. Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. New York: Routledge.
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  259. In this book the authors document the uses of reading and writing in Lancaster, England in the 1990s. Particular attention is devoted to the analysis of vernacular literacies, which the authors argue are often devalued and disregarded, especially within public discourse and education policy. Originally published in 1998.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Besnier, Niko. 1995. Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 16. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  263. A fascinating case study of the shift from a nonliterate into literate society of Nukulaelae (of Tuvalu in the Polynesian Central Pacific). Combining comparative and event-centered ethnographic methods, illuminates the relationship between newly acquired literacy introduced by missionaries and transformations in social relationships, conception, and experiencing of gender and personhood.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  267. This classic study provides a rich and nuanced ethnographic documentation of the ways young children are apprenticed to make meaning with words, oral and written, in three communities in the Piedmont Carolinas. A landmark study about relationships between oral and written language uses, language and schooling, and language and literacy socialization.
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  269. Messick, Brian. 1993. The calligraphic state: Textual domination and history in a Muslim society. Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies 16. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
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  271. In this book, Messick seeks to reconstruct two interrelated discursive practices in highland Yemen, both at the local level and in the larger cultural-historical frame of Islam (and Islamic jurisprudence in particular): the constitution of authority in texts and the social and political processes involved in articulating the authority of texts.
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  273. Radway, Janice. 1991. Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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  275. This seminal contribution to the study of popular genres of literature, readership, and audiences combines interviews, informal discussions, and questionnaires, illuminating the act of reading and its relationship to ideological and cultural orders as well as economic forces that shape the composition, dissemination, and fruition of texts. Originally published in 1984.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. 1981. The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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  279. A highly influential study combining ethnography with experimental procedures. Documents Vai (Liberia) literacy activities that engage multiple writing systems, languages, and learning contexts. The results suggest limited and specific, rather than significant and extensive, effects of literacy on cognition; the authors propose conceptualizing literacy as social practice.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Shuman, Amy. 2006. Storytelling rights: The uses of oral and written texts by urban adolescents. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 11. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  283. A sophisticated study within the ethnography of communication tradition, with rich discourse and narrative analyses of different forms of textual practices, notably personal diaries, collaborative writings, and oral narratives, and the role they play in constructing the social world of adolescent girls at an inner city Philadelphia junior high school.
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  285. Collections
  286.  
  287. Numerous collections of New Literacy Studies have been published since the mid-1980s. Those included in this section present a variety of foci: developmental (Schieffelin and Gilmore 1986), cross-cultural (Street 1993 and Street 2001), and institutional (Barton, et al. 2000 and Cook-Gumperz 2006). Cook-Gumperz 2006 features studies that take a view of literacy as socially constructed to examine the problems that arise mostly in school-based literacy. Schieffelin and Gilmore 1986 illuminates literacy acquisition through ethnographic studies across multiple contexts. Street 1993 articulates the contours of the New Literacy Studies and assembles exemplary practice-based, ethnographic accounts from diverse locations, while Barton, et al. 2000 investigates a diversity of institutional contexts rather than geographical ones. Street 2001 also collects a wide representation of studies, this time narrowing in on the ideological aspects of literacy policies and programs in different parts of the world.
  288.  
  289. Barton, David, Mary Hamilton, and Roz Ivanič, eds. 2000. Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. Literacies. New York: Routledge.
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  291. Within the New Literacy Studies, this collection offers ethnographic studies of literacy practices in wide-ranging institutional contexts (the classroom, prison, and livestock auction). Contributors engage thought-provoking issues, like visual/material aspects of literacy, concepts of time and space, and the role of literacy practices in identity formation within communities of practice.
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  293. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny, ed. 2006. The social construction of literacy. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 3. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  295. Contributors to this volume apply anthropological and linguistic perspectives on language use to address enduring educational problems, notably unequal access to instructional opportunities and school achievement. As a whole, this collection advances a perspective on literacy as a socially constructed phenomenon, with normative and moral valences. Originally published in 1986.
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  297. Schieffelin, Bambi, and Perry Gilmore, eds. 1986. The acquisition of literacy: Ethnographic perspectives. Advances in Discourse Processes 21. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
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  299. An outstanding collection of studies that focuses on the social and cultural contexts and processes involved in the acquisition of literacy. The contributors to this volume share an ethnographic approach to the study of reading and writing and advance our understanding of literacy acquisition as socialization.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Street, Brian, ed. 1993. Cross-cultural approaches to literacy. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 23. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  303. A collection of ethnographic accounts of literacy practices from a wide range of geographical locations, including Africa, Great Britain, Madagascar, Polynesia, and the United States. It contains an introductory essay by Brian Street, in which the author traces the emergence of the New Literacy Studies and its theoretical underpinnings.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Street, Brian, ed. 2001. Literacy and development: Ethnographic perspectives. Literacies. London and New York: Routledge.
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  307. A collection of case studies of literacy projects from around the world that not only document everyday uses of literacy but also illuminate culturally situated and ideologically shaped meanings of literacy as they inform and resist literacy programs and policies.
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  309. Critiques and Reformulations
  310.  
  311. Articulations of the social practice approach in general and the New Literacy Studies in particular have been critiqued for overemphasizing or misrecognizing the contexts of literacy. Brandt and Clinton 2002 represents one influential attempt to reformulate some of the linchpin concepts of New Literacy Studies. Reder and Davila 2005 and Barton and Hamilton 2005 render similar critiques based on rethinkings of context, agency, and actors and artifacts. The extensions in Lewis, et al. 2007 to the social practice perspective engage critical theory-based arguments (see also Critical Literacy).
  312.  
  313. Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. 2005. Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. In Beyond communities of practice: Language, power and social context. Edited by David Barton and Karin Tusting, 14–35. Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  314. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511610554.003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. The authors engage actor network theory and Wenger’s notion of reification to complicate notions of agency and context in New Literacy Studies. Their theorization offers insights into the relationships between different localities and timescales, as well as the material and symbolic nature of literacy artifacts.
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  317. Brandt, Deborah, and Katie Clinton. 2002. Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice. Journal of Literacy Research 34.3: 337–356.
  318. DOI: 10.1207/s15548430jlr3403_4Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. This essay offers a critical appraisal of the social practice model of literacy, arguing that the influential impact given to the local contexts in defining meaning and forms of literacy practices within that model underestimates the transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy.
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  321. Lewis, Cynthia, Patricia Enciso, and Elizabeth Birr Moje, eds. 2007. Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency, and power. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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  323. A collection of theoretical essays and empirical papers that augments the sociocultural perspective on literacy by engaging critical theory to develop a framework that is no longer narrowly defined by social context. Also relevant to Critical Literacy.
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  325. Reder, Stephen, and Erica Davila. 2005. Context and literacy practices. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 25:170–187.
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  327. This essay considers and further articulates early-21st-century critiques of New Literacy Studies as limited in their conceptualization of contextual dimensions relevant to literacy as a cultural practice. The authors invite to discern the polycontextuality and heterochronicity of literacy practices, where agency is distributed across individuals and nonhuman artifacts.
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  329. Oral and Written Language
  330.  
  331. The landmark works espousing the literacy thesis not only provoked the methodological questions that prompted the rise of the social practice approach, but also invigorated the discussion of differences, interdependences, and developments of oral and written modes. This section presents a selection of works on the similarities and differences between speech and writing and the relationship between the oral and the written. The scholarship represented is multidisciplinary, ranging from anthropology (Akinnaso 1982, Akinnaso 1985, and Philips 1975), psychology (Olson 1996), linguistics (Biber 1988 and Chafe and Tannen 1987), folklore (Finnegan 1988), and classics (Havelock 1986). Although employing different methods and articulating different arguments, all authors included in this section adopt a multidimensional and situated perspective on speech, reading, and writing, which eschews technological determinism and categorical distinctions between oral and written language. In more recent decades, the proliferation of communication technologies has prompted significant reconsiderations of modes that extend this discussion. See A New Media Age.
  332.  
  333. Akinnaso, F. Niyi. 1982. On the differences between spoken and written language. Language and Speech 25.2: 97–125.
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  335. Drawing on sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, synthesizes findings about lexical and syntactic differences between spoken and written language. Argues that spoken language and written language derives from the same semantic base and vary mainly in choice and distribution of vocabulary and syntactic patterns in response to modality-specific pragmatic constraints.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Akinnaso, F. Niyi. 1985. On the similarities between spoken and written language. Language and Speech 28.4: 323–359.
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  339. Based on research on oral ritual communication in nonliterate societies, this paper challenges both the theoretical assumptions and the quantitative method underlying comparative studies of spoken and written language. Proposes a sociolinguistic model that relates linguistic forms to macrosociological contexts, communicative goals, and functions.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  342. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511621024Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343. The author employs corpus linguistics analyses to elucidate similarities and differences across a wide range of spoken and written registers in English. The dimensional model articulated by Biber debunks the polarization of speech and writing and offers a more nuanced understanding of variation within and across communicative modalities.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Chafe, Wallace, and Deborah Tannen. 1987. The relation between written and spoken language. Annual Review of Anthropology 16:383–407.
  346. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.16.100187.002123Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. This review essay examines the structural properties of written and spoken language and the contextual influences that shape and give meaning to the use of these two linguistic modes. The authors eschew a dichotomous approach and emphasize the intersection of multiple social dimensions in spoken and written language use.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Finnegan, Ruth H. 1988. Literacy and orality: Studies in the technology of communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
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  351. The author examines communicative practices and their implications for human thought and action in a comparative and historical framework. Eschewing technological determining, Finnegan shows how information technology depends upon the social uses to which it is put.
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  353. Havelock, Eric A. 1986. The muse learns to write: Reflections on orality and literacy from antiquity to the present. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
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  355. The classicist scholar extends his reflection on the shift from orality to literacy, from ancient Greece to contemporary time. While Havelock’s central focus is Greek literature and philosophy, he also offers his insights on modern technologies of communication and on the theories of Lévi-Strauss, Parry, McLuhan, Derrida, Ong, and others.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Olson, David. 1996. Towards a psychology of literacy: On the relations between speech and writing. Cognition 60.1: 83–104.
  358. DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(96)00705-6Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. In this article, Olson challenges the traditional view of phonemic writing as transcription of speech by claiming that writing provides a conceptual model for that speech. Writing is thus seen as metalinguistics.
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  361. Philips, Susan U. 1975. Literacy as a mode of communication on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. In Foundations of language development: A multidisciplinary approach. 2 vols. Edited by Eric H. Lenneberg and Elizabeth Lenneberg, 367–382. New York: Academic Press.
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  363. Considers reading and writing as a mode of communication and then situates the literate mode among additional modes that may be part of a speech community’s communicative repertoire. Such an approach, illuminated by fieldwork on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, unearths the cultural variation in patterns of use of literacy.
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  365. Emerging Texts and Contexts
  366.  
  367. In mundane and profound ways, the emergence of information and communication technologies and an increasingly globalized world induces not only new contexts for literacy research, but original definitions and theoretical orientations as well. As the technologies and media through which people communicate change, the boundaries of what counts as “literacy” are pressed, and much scholarship on literacy rests on the increasingly fuzzy borders between reading texts and other kinds of communication and expression in this age of new media. Simultaneously, the intensifying movement of people and texts heightens the relevance of multilingualism and the multiplicity of forms of literacy individuals encounter and must master.
  368.  
  369. A New Media Age
  370.  
  371. The growth of information and communication technologies has produced immediately apparent changes in writing and reading, and studies such as Dobson and Willinsky 2009 have attempted to capture the influence of such technologies. But further reflection on how profoundly reading and writing practices have marked modernity has yielded new insights into how their evolution forces us to rethink literacy and society. Kress 2003 and Jewitt and Kress 2003 exemplify this dual recognition of the watershed technological, societal moment and the expanding conceptions of reading and writing necessary to account for the contemporary proliferation of texts—their flows, their multimodality, and their production. Many proponents of the “New Literacy Studies” described in Social Practice have turned their attention to these changing practices, as Mills 2010 reviews. Hull and Nelson 2005 demonstrates that examining these new literacies has called for researchers, including ethnographers, to develop novel means to account for the texts themselves and the participants and spaces that researchers study; Leander 2008 reconsiders ethnography in the online and offline spaces and offers important methodological and theoretical insights in contemporary literacy. Meanwhile, the chapters of Baynham and Prinsloo 2009 show that all this novelty does not simply outmode formerly dominant institutions and media of reading and writing, but interacts dynamically with them, ensuring that the field of literacy studies will remain vibrant and continuous amid these unremitting changes.
  372.  
  373. Baynham, Mike, and Mastin Prinsloo, eds. 2009. The future of literacy studies. Palgrave Advances in Linguistics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  374. DOI: 10.1057/9780230245693Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. This collection of chapters by scholars engaged in research on the rapidly changing modes, contexts, uses, and meanings of literacy provides a sampling of the range of concerns emergent in the beginning of the 21st century.
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  377. Dobson, Teresa, and John Willinsky. 2009. Digital literacy. In The Cambridge handbook of literacy. Edited by David Olson and Nancy Torrance, 286–312. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  378. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511609664Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. Chronologically reviewing the changes to literacy brought on by word processing, hypermedia, information and digital archives, and collaborative knowledge (such as Wikipedia), this article assembles scholarship which tracks changes in fairly traditional notions of literacy without significantly retheorizing literacy as other works represented in A New Media Age.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Hull, Glynda, and Mark Nelson. 2005. Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written Communication 22.2: 224–261.
  382. DOI: 10.1177/0741088304274170Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Hull and Nelson demonstrate multimodal analysis in this study of a multimedia work of digital storytelling called “Lyfe-N-Rhyme” by an Oakland, California artist. An exemplar of conveying the “semiotic power of multimodality” through the textual medium of a journal article.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Jewitt, Carey, and Gunther Kress. 2003. Multimodal literacy. New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies 4. New York: Peter Lang.
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  387. Jewitt and Kress have pioneered methods of using analytical tools of social semiotics to interpret the different forms of multimodal texts becoming more prominent in the digital age. In this book, the authors demonstrate these methods as they describe various forms of literacy involving images, gesture, movement, and other signs.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Kress, Gunther. 2003. Literacy in the new media age. Literacies. London: Routledge.
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  391. Kress traces how moving from print to screen and from text centered to image centered not only alters reading, but also ramifies throughout textuality, communication, and semiosis in society. In addition, Kress builds out the concept of “multimodality,” the way that the increased prominence of a variety of “modes” produces new “affordances.”
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Leander, Kevin M. 2008. Toward a connective ethnography of online/offline literacy networks. In Handbook of research on new literacies. Edited by Julie Coiro, Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, and Donald J. Leu, 33–65. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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  395. The entire volume features several relevant studies, but Leander’s chapter informatively reviews research of online networks in order to raise questions of how ethnographic study can examine texts and contexts moving across digital and nondigital spaces. Indicative of the ongoing efforts of literacy researchers examining changing landscapes of literacy.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Mills, Kathy A. 2010. A review of the “Digital Turn” in the New Literacy Studies. Review of Educational Research 80.2: 246–271.
  398. DOI: 10.3102/0034654310364401Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. A helpful literature review of the increasing focus on the changes brought on by digital technologies within the interdisciplinary New Literacy Studies (see Social Practice section).
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  401. Multilingual Literacies
  402.  
  403. Multilingualism is not a new phenomenon but is being theorized in fresh and fecund ways in view of the increasingly mobilized nature of contemporary populations and lifeworlds. Emerging textual practices that traverse and connect different cultural and linguistic contexts compel researchers to analyze and elucidate multilingual literacies. The New London Group 1996 represents the seminal reflection and theorization on multiliteracies, then further developed by Cope and Kalantzis 2000. Martin-Jones and Jones 2000 links literacy and multilingualism research to illuminate practices of reading and writing among multilingual and multiethnic groups. Hornberger 2003 offers a multidimensional theoretical framework that nuances our understanding of multiliteracy phenomena by connecting them to micro as well as macro processes. Collins and Slembrouck 2007 and Blommaert 2008 articulate illuminating and thought-provoking analyses of texts in their contexts of production and dissemination, with seminal insights on the dynamics of global connectedness and division.
  404.  
  405. Blommaert, Jan. 2008. Grassroots literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. Literacies. London: Routledge.
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  407. Through a detailed textual analysis, Blommaert illuminates the links between globalization and literacy regimes, showing how “grassroots” texts, produced within local semiotic and social systems, lose their meaning, voice, and scope when they are transposed to the global context.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Collins, James, and Stef Slembrouck. 2007. Reading shop windows in globalized neighborhoods: Multilingual literacy practices and indexicality. Journal of Literacy Research 39.3: 335–356.
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  411. In this article, Collins and Slembrouck engage the concepts of indexicality, indexical orders, and orders of discourse to articulate an analysis of multilingual literacy practices that highlights emerging dynamics of globalized localities.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2000. Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. Literacies. London: Routledge.
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  415. Encapsulated in the word “multiliteracies” are two emerging phenomena that Cole and Kalantzis explore in this volume: the increasing multiplicity and integration of modes of meaning making; and the increasing global connectedness, which makes local diversity more salient and lively than ever before.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Hornberger, Nancy H., ed. 2003. Continua of biliteracy: An ecological framework for educational policy, research, and practice in multilingual settings. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 41. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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  419. This collection includes and builds on Hornberger’s theorization that challenges simplistic perspectives of literacy in relation to bilingualism by articulating a multidimensional model that elucidates key variables shaping multiliteracy phenomena.
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  421. Martin‐Jones, Marilyn, and Kathryn Jones, eds. 2000. Multilingual literacies: Reading and writing different worlds. Studies in Written Language and Literacy 10. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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  423. Building on theoretical and methodological insights from literacy and multilingualism research (outlined in the first two introductory chapters by Martin-Jones and Jones [Introduction] and Brian Street [chapter 1]), this collection provides detailed accounts of everyday practices of reading and writing in different multilingual settings. The focus is primarily on the language and literacy experiences of children and adults in linguistic minority groups and multiethnic contexts in the United Kingdom.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. New London Group. 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies. Harvard Educational Review 66.1: 60–93.
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  427. A group of literacy scholars convening in New London, Connecticut address the globalizing contexts and expanding expertise related to the production and proliferation of multimodal, multimedia, and multicultural text varieties, encapsulated in the term “multiliteracies.”
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Critical Literacy
  430.  
  431. Critical literacy scholarship attends to the political dimensions of literacy in contemporary societies, often along the lines of forms of critical theory or ideological critique. Literacy’s historical association with social development and modern institutions means that reading and writing practices are laden with ideological significance. Although critical literacy proponents question simplistic correlations between particularly dominant and institutionalized forms of literacy and notions of empowerment, freedom, or enlightenment, they also tend to maintain positions of concern or advocacy for literacies that advance critique, justice, or humanization.
  432.  
  433. Theory
  434.  
  435. Despite Paulo Freire’s attention to literacy in his path-breaking 1970 work (Freire 2000), Pedagogy of the Oppressed is better known for initiating the school of educational thought known as critical pedagogy, which was more conversant with social theory and political activism than with the contemporaneous advances and debates in literacy studies (as represented in the other sections of this bibliography). Where scholars did follow Freire’s articulation of literacy as instrumental to revolutionary change, such as in Lankshear and McLaren 1993 or Freebody and Luke 2003, they often did so with social theory or educational practice in mind. Nevertheless, those developments—as well as the syntheses of social practice perspectives with critical attention to politics and social change in Gee 2008 and Collins and Blot 2003—lead literacy scholars with a critical orientation to nuanced analyses of literacy’s role and power.
  436.  
  437. Collins, James, and Richard Blot. 2003. Literacy and literacies: Text, power, and identity. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 22. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  439. Charts a critical and anthropological alternative path through the literacy thesis (see also Literacy Thesis) and situated social practice (see also Social Practice) perspectives, attending to the historical development of state institutions like schooling, and influences on race, gender, and class. A crucial synthesis of contrasting perspectives of literacy under rubrics of power and identity.
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  441. Freebody, Peter, and Allan Luke. 2003. Literacy as engaging with new forms of life: The “four roles” model. In The literacy lexicon. 2d ed. Edited by Geoff Bull and Michèle Anstey, 51–66. Frenchs Forest, Australia: Pearson Education Australia.
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  443. The “four resources” or “four roles” model developed here provides an example of the application of critical literacy in education. The model presents four social practices (coding practices, text-meaning practices, pragmatic practices, and critical practices) that are at least necessary, if not sufficient, in a critical literacy education.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Translated by Myra Ramos. New York: Continuum.
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  447. Cornerstone text of critical literacy. Freire’s description of dehumanizing, “banking” methods of education of oppressed peoples, his articulation of a “problem-posing” consciousness and praxis through reading the word and the world, and the example of his adult literacy work in Brazil paved the way for critical literacy’s liberatory vision. Originally published in 1970.
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  449. Gee, James. 2008. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. 3d ed. London: Routledge.
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  451. Gee’s first edition of this book, published in 1990, presented a social practice view of literacy in the context of discourse (languages that constitute particular social groups or communities), theories, and analysis. Further editions clarified and developed an already influential and readable introduction to the ideological dimensions of literacy.
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  453. Lankshear, Colin, and Peter McLaren, eds. 1993. Critical literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern. Teacher Empowerment and School Reform. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.
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  455. By gathering a collection of essays including glimpses of critical literacy in practice throughout the world and from various theoretical and methodological perspectives, this volume advances the border-crossing edges of critical literacy.
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  457. Studies
  458.  
  459. Because of critical literacy’s emphasis on praxis, many of the empirical grounds for its scholarship are found in projects of political and social action. Freire and Macedo 1987 has no dearth of theory, but its bases are in the authors’ literacy work in South America and throughout the world. This kind of work was sometimes contiguous with, sometimes at odds with national and international efforts at promoting literacy for “development” or democracy (Lankshear and Lawler 1989) and the relationships between some version of transformative literacy and institutional education (Luke 2000). Global market forces (Gee, et al. 1996) have remained the object of critical literacy’s scrutiny. Anthropological studies have often offered necessary complexity to the picture of how literacy functions in power relations, as in Dyer and Choksi 1998.
  460.  
  461. Dyer, Caroline, and Archana Choksi. 1998. Education is like wearing glasses: Nomads’ views of literacy and empowerment. International Journal of Educational Development 18.5: 405–413.
  462. DOI: 10.1016/S0738-0593(98)00033-9Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. One example of ethnographic studies (in this article, the Indian Rabari Nomads) that provides an empirical critique of the sometimes over-simplified association of literacy and empowerment that can be said to be critical literacy’s legacy, while exploring complexities of power in adult literacy in ways that contribute to critical literacy’s understanding.
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  465. Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. 1987. Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Critical Studies in Education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
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  467. Presented as essays and dialogues cowritten with Donaldo Macedo, Freire extends and elaborates on literacy as a theoretical discourse and the political praxis of emancipatory literacy, including observations from literacy campaigns where the authors have studied and worked.
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  469. Gee, James, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. 1996. The new work order: Behind the language of the new capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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  471. Analyzes the language and literacy suffusing a United States corporation’s management literature and other texts for training and education, to critique new capitalism. Both an example of the critical reading of texts produced by critical literacy, and an exploration of implications of changes in the political economy for education and literacy.
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  473. Lankshear, Colin, and Moira Lawler. 1989. Literacy, schooling and revolution. Education Policy Perspectives. New York: Falmer.
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  475. Confronting misappropriations of the urge for mass literacy by proclaimers of a “literacy crisis,” the authors instead formulate a framework for an optimal, functional literacy, an alternative to the stultifying and falsely neutral literacy of most schooling. Draws on examples from the Nicaraguan revolution, constructing a literacy for political transformation.
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  477. Luke, Allan. 2000. Critical literacy in Australia: A matter of context and standpoint. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 43.5: 448–461.
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  479. Alongside the lineage of Paulo Freire, critical literacy has also been informed by the work of Australian linguists and educators such as Luke, who provides an overview of theories of critical literacy and gives an account of its practice as an educational project in Australian public schools.
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  481. Schooling
  482.  
  483. Traditionally, schooling has been inherently associated with literacy instruction and development. Thus, though books and articles throughout this bibliography have addressed the link between literacy and schooling, this body of research is significant enough to warrant its own list of representative works. These references critically examine this relationship, on the one hand by questioning the assumption that literacy instruction necessitates schooling, on the other hand by denouncing the biases of schooled literacy instruction. Historical (Cook-Gumperz 2006 and Resnick 1990), ethnographic (Akinnaso 1992, Fisher 2006, and Schieffelin 2000), sociolinguistic (Collins 1996), and discourse analytic (Michaels 1981 and Sterponi 2007) studies are featured in this section. Michaels 1981 is an example of ethnographic and discourse analytic studies that pointed out the cultural mismatches between students’ styles of narration and the dominant forms of schooled literacy acquisition activities. Critiques like these supported the argument of Cook-Gumperz 2006 that literacy, rather than a presumed, unequivocal good, is a socially constructed product of schooling. Resnick 1990 deepens this historical critique of schooled literacy, and Collins 1996 presents an empirical study of a class of children in an urban school that unveils the ideological and institutional dimensions of schooled literacy. Meanwhile, Akinnaso 1992 and Schieffelin 2000 provide important and often overlooked perspectives on literacy and schooling from non-Western societies. Finally, Fisher 2006 and Sterponi 2007 are representative of discoveries of literacy occurring in interactional ways and spaces orthogonal to the dominant organization of schools, the former in black bookstores and the latter in the peripheries of classroom life.
  484.  
  485. Akinnaso, F. Niyi. 1992. Schooling, language, and knowledge in literate and nonliterate societies. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.1: 68–109.
  486. DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500017448Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. This essay illuminates the relationships among institutionalized learning, language, and knowledge by considering comparatively literate and nonliterate societies. Akinnaso’s analysis debunks the dual assumption that schools specialize in literacy instruction and that literacy education is coterminous with formal education.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Collins, James. 1996. Socialization to text: Structure and contradiction in schooled literacy. In Natural histories of discourse. Edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 203–228. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  491. Through a case study of reading instruction in a third-grade classroom serving predominantly working-class African American students, Collins unearths the relations between participation and sequential unfolding of text-oriented interactions on the one hand and large-scale ideological formations and institutional practices on the other.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Cook-Gumperz, Jenny. 2006. Literacy and schooling: An unchanging equation? In The social construction of literacy. Edited by Jenny Cook-Gumperz, 16–44. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 3. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  494. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511617454Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. In this chapter, Cook-Gumperz examines literacy as both the purpose and product of schooling and interrogates the assumption that the acquisition of literacy skill improves the quality of life for individuals, social groups, and society as a whole. Originally published in 1986.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Fisher, Maisha. 2006. Earning “dual degrees”: Black bookstores as alternative knowledge spaces. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 37.1: 83–99.
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  499. This article examines the role of two African American–owned-and-operated bookstores in the literacy practices and education of their participants. Fisher documents the active pursuit by African American individuals and families of alternative and supplementary knowledge spaces for literacy learning.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Michaels, Sarah. 1981. “Sharing time”: Children’s narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in Society 10.3: 423–442.
  502. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404500008861Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. Ethnographic and discourse analytic study of “sharing time,” a preparatory activity for children’s entry into literacy in an ethnically mixed first-grade classroom. Mismatches between black children’s narrative style and the teacher’s expectation for sharing time performances point to invisible cultural biases that threaten black children’s acquisition of schooled literacy.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Resnick, Daniel P. 1990. Historical perspectives on literacy and schooling. Daedalus 119.2: 15–32.
  506. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. A critical historical analysis of how school-based literacy instruction has limited critical engagement with texts and pluralism of language practices, and disregarded the specific needs of the adolescent and the workspace.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Schieffelin, Bambi. 2000. Introducing Kaluli literacy: A chronology of influences. In Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited Paul Kroskrity, 293–327. Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.
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  511. In this chapter, the author examines the friction between local language ideology and worldview in a small village in Papua New Guinea and those encoded in the literacy program brought to the village by Christian missionaries.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Sterponi, Laura. 2007. Clandestine interactional reading: Intertextuality and double-voicing under the desk. Linguistics and Education 18.1: 1–23.
  514. DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2007.04.001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. Reports insights from an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of children’s clandestine practices of interactional reading in an educational context where individual, silent involvement with text is the teachers’ prescribed way of reading. Discusses the interface between the reproduction of literacy habitus and the tactical operations that produce its transformations.
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