“I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess - that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name.” (Taken from Gloria Anzaldua’s How to Tame a Wild Tongue, in Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987)
When we think of the terms ‘critical’ and ‘cultural sustainability’, do we think of leaners’ existing knowledge and practices as assets for learning, or as barriers to be undone?
Every year the English specialism in the Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) that I co-lead introduces student teachers to the field of multiliteracies and critical literacies. These fields are interested in how we make meaning from a broad range of texts, across modes of representation and genre, and how these sign systems (from language, to visuals, to oracy) are deeply imbued with issues of power, access, and diversity (see Hilary Janks’ Literacy & Power). Our module for initial teacher education therefore seeks to engage students with the ways in which language and other sign systems contribute to maintaining, resisting, or transforming different relations of power both in and out of the classroom.
"Young people learn best when the cultures and practices of their homes and communities are actively related to the formal curriculum design and practices of schools."
Challenging our assumptions
In order to reveal literacy education (and education in general) as value-laden, we have to ask some uncomfortable questions that put taken-for-granted assumptions into crisis. Let us consider that starter class in the PGDE English module.
We begin with a deceptively simple question: Are you literate? This is followed by a series of guiding questions that student teachers are asked to discuss:
- What makes you literate?
- Who told you that you are a literate person?
- Why do you believe them?
- What evidence has been used to convince you about your literacy?
- What evidence do you use to convince others?
Invariably, the answers to these questions raise interesting issues about what constitutes literacy and how we use these, in Bourdieu’s words, as capital to enforce our social and cultural statuses. Take time to think about these questions and consider how you use language (vocabulary and jargon, accent/pronunciation, syntax, register and tone) as well as the kinds of texts or cultural referents (literature, music, film, disciplinary knowledge) differently in different spaces and with different people to fit in or stand out. For the most part, responses include some of the usual suspects: ‘we have degrees’, ‘we have passed our highers’, ‘we can communicate and understand each other’, and so on. Nothing suspicious here.
"These critical approaches to literacy resonate strongly with anti-racist and decolonial approaches to education."
Enter the disruptive text. Following this discussion, I then present the students with an image of a Coca-Cola logo written in Mandarin (without stating that this is what it is).
The students now have to put their claims to being literate into practice by responding to the following questions:
- What do you see?
- What meaning can you make from this?
- What parts of this can you read, and what parts can you not read?
Disrupting literacy
Many of the student teachers find their initial assumptions about what counts as literacy, and literateness, are disrupted. On one hand, the text seems foreign (which, to an extent, it is) and therefore indecipherable. Students use their English-language-based logic to read the shapes, often stating that the text reads as ‘OJOOJ4’. On the other hand, it reveals that what they already know gives them access to all sorts of meanings despite not necessarily being able to read Mandarin. For instance, the iconic red swish hails memories of coke branding often seen in shops, the layout fits a genre of corporate logos, and so on. Their cultural capital serves them well in this situation.
"We as teachers must also be willing to put our own assumptions into crisis and engage in unlearning and re-learning what counts as ‘good’ education, and the effects this has on young people’s lives."
Drawing on seminal work by Shirley Brice Heath (Ways with Words) and Gloria Ladson-Billings (Culturally Responsive Pedagogies), amongst others, these tasks put our student teachers in a position where they have to face ‘curriculum content’ that doesn’t immediately fit their existing cultural and social capital (i.e. the knowledge that is typically valued by schools and society at large in Scotland). They are put in the same position as so many learners who may not see themselves reflected in the curriculum content of schools or where their own ways of using language, their cultural referents, or their identities and perspectives are undervalued.
As a result, we hope our students will become more conscious of the effects of their seemingly everyday actions and decisions, as teachers, on the broad range of learners with whom they will work. These learners may inhabit different racial, ethnic, (a)gender, (a)sexual, class, and cultural identities, and will therefore each bring a broad range of experiences, perspectives, knowledge, and ways of being that could serve as resources for teaching and learning, if we allow it to. The work by Brice Heath and Ladson-Billings, amongst others, serves as strong evidence that young people learn best when the cultures and practices of their homes and communities are actively related to the formal curriculum design and practices of schools.
Critical literacies
These critical approaches to literacy resonate strongly with anti-racist and decolonial approaches to education which each fundamentally seeking to 1) reveal how education is intrinsically ideological, 2) unpack how power is instantiated through the texts, knowledge, and practices we select to enact education, and 3) reposition education and educational practice as emancipatory and transformative. From Freire to Fanon, the breadth of anti-racist, decolonial, and critical pedagogies argue that education needs to move beyond the current dominance of monoculturalism and monolingualism in order to fully enable young people (and their teachers) to engage with the vast myriad of perspectives that better reflect the diversity of people in the world. But, to do this we as teachers must also be willing to put our own assumptions into crisis and engage in unlearning and re-learning what counts as ‘good’ education, and the effects this has on young people’s lives.
