Literacy, Schooling and Social Justice – October 27th 2012

Literacy involves being able to read and write in a socially appropriate context (Blackledge).  Cultural literacy acknowledges how the context of culture is crucial in the development of a person’s literacy.   As Comber and Cormack articulate, children come to school with different literacy skills.  In Canada, those students who come to school literate with a western cultural approach, aka upper middle class schools, have a distinct advantage.  Student’s who come from an oral storytelling culture, tend to struggle in school.  Wenger identifies us as social beings.  Western culture values students to ask “explicit questions” and to “synthesize the knowledge with the world around them”.   When students are able to develop knowledge and connect it to the world around them, they are proving their literacy.  Learning does not only take place in the classroom from textbooks—it takes place all the time—it’s human nature to understand things and to want to learn.

 Students from lower socio-economic groups who challenge authority and try to “save face” and maintain their culture, are significantly less likely to achieve success in school.   Many of the students from these lower socio-economic groups do not see the point in education and many are blamed for “not trying”.  They believe that by becoming educated, they are adopting the culture of the middle-class and betraying their own cultural community.  Freire believes that these students need to see how literacy and education can make their own lives better—to figure out how literacy will help them.  Students from many  voluntary “immigrant” families frequently see literacy and schooling as the key to mobility. 

 Luke identifies how different literacy approaches have serious political and economic consequences.   Government wants educators to be more accountable.  It’s not surprising then that a technocratic data driven approach is what is preferred by governments today.  This is particularly true in our “data” driven board.  It is not surprising that many “inner-city” multi-cultural neighbourhood  schools struggle to achieve acceptable standardized results compared to their upper middleclass suburban schools.   A technocratic approach assumes that literacy can be accurately measured through this “neutral” and “efficient” approach.  This approach ignores the unique personalities and challenges in multi-culturally diverse schools.  For example, I remember one EQAO assessment story where students were to relate and reflect on their camping experiences.  This assumption that all students would be familiar with camping proved particularly challenging for students who lived in downtown Toronto.  This socio-cultural experience is similar to Gregory’s article about the Chinese immigrant child in Britain.   The article extrapolated how not all cultures place the written text on as high a pedestal as the Western culture had.  The article identified how a British advertisement equated the cultural practice of the bedtime story ritual to that of washing with Persil soap.  It related how the Western culture valued both cleanliness and the bedtime stories with your child; how both were a given.  The article implied that there must be something wrong with a family that did not read to their child.

 Although I read bedtime stories with my sons when they were small, I did so with the belief that it would develop their love of reading.  I also believed that this experience would strengthen the relationship we had with each other.   I never thought how this might not be the experience for children of different cultures. 

Western governments and educators tend to prioritize their culture above others.   Even when I taught grade 6 History, rarely did the text book relate to the Native Canadians.  The vocabulary used was from the European perspective—“the European explorers discovered North America”.  The vocabulary in the text comes across as rather insulting to the Native Peoples.   Thankfully, teachers are able to use critical literacy to debunk insufficient text and open the student’s eyes to different perspectives.   However literacy is taught--it is never taught through a neutral lens.  Many of society’s educators and successful individuals believe that everyone has had an equal chance to achieve success in life.  That if you study and work hard, a solid education will give you an equal opportunity to rise up into a higher social class than one into which you were born. The reality is quite different.  It is much easier to maintain the social class into which you are born than to “jump” up to another one.  A socio-cultural approach to literacy helps to explain how the student’s own culture plays a pivotal role (both positive and negative) in their acquisition to the dominate culture’s literacy.