The Ideologies of Literacy Schooling

Street identifies a cluster of scholars who subscribe -- explicitly or not -- to the view that literacy, while a technology, is also an ideological cultural form. Literacy, or more appropriately, literacies, are never neutral and must be studied within the social and political context in which they are practiced. People use literacies for specific purposes within these contexts. While I will not discuss every research working with an ideological view of literacy, I will provide here a brief discussion of certain researchers as a way to illustrate the value and function of research based on an ideological view.

One of the most influential ethnographic literacy studies to date is Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words in which she studies three communities in the Carolinas. Two of these communities comprise working class populations, one predominantely African-American and the others predominantely White. Heath conducted her decade-long study to ask "What were the effect of preschool/home and community environment on the learning of those language structures and uses which were needed in classroom and job settings?" (2). What she discovered was that the children in each community -- Roadville and Trackton -- acquired language differently. For example, in Roadville, children were encouraged to include a level of didacticism and verisimilitude in their storytelling: "into their play, Roadville children carry their parents' requirement for using language: report exactly how something is said, maintain a single consistent lable for items and events, and render stories in absolute chronological order with direct discourse" (165). Trackton children grew up with different discourse conventions, in which good storytelling is embellished, exaggerated, and entertaining: "anyone who can talk junk [in Trackton] is a good storyteller" (166). Moreover, Heath observered a marked lack of "moral summaries or admonitions about behavior" in Trackton storytelling, which tended to focus instead on "conflict and resolution or attempts at resolution" (167). The significance of such observations is that they outline the cultural and ideological nature of language use in actual contexts. Heath discusses instances in which the storytelling conventions valued in Trackton were interpretted by teachers in classroom contexts as misbehavior. Heath's work points out the fact that particular language practices are valued in schooling just as in any other context, and that certain preschool language conventions, which happen to align with those valued in the classroom (such as the storytelling conventions in Roadville), provide certain students with an advantage. Their ways of using language (and thus of knowing the world) are sanctioned by the educational institution, while those with different ways of using language have a greater chance of being alienated. In short, her work helps show that schooling is not neutral meritocracy.

Stuckey criticizes Heath for her implication that children outside of the mainstream must learn mainstream habits (40). What is evident here, according to Stuckey, is not a call for changes in the exclusive mainstream culture, but a call to the marginalized to adapt to mainstream culture: "Why...," asks Stuckey, "do studies of language always result in solution that are linguistic rather than social or economic?" (41). While Stuckey's critique is that Heath's study deemphasizes social class in favor of language, Prendergast suggests that Heath does the same with race and desegregation (59-60). Prendergast points out, though, that what the study also reveals is a shared understanding of the "institutions of segregation" as a hegemonic force affecting both the White and African-American people in Heath's study (62).

Lisa Delpit's work, however, emphasizes the importance of helping students acquiring discourses of power. She thus takes issue with the pedagogical implications of suggestions made by James Gee's that dominant discourses cannot be "'overtly' taught, particularly in a classroom, but can only be acquired by enculturation in the home or by 'apprenticeship' into social practices" (Delpit 546) and that those who "seek to acquire status discourses...may be faced with adopting values that deny their primary identities" (Delpit 547). Delpit's point is that this reading of discourse acquisition denies the agency of people exckuded from dominant discourse to enter those discourses and shape them from within while still "maintaining one's home identity and values" (552). Delpit calls upon teachers to "acknowledge and validate students' home language without using it to limit students' potential)"; they must also "recognize the conflict Gee details between students' home discourses and the discourse of school" (553) and create an environment in which students need not choose between acquiring dominant discourses and their home identities.

In his study of literacy in nineteenth-century Canadian cities, Harvey Graff points out that literacy was often the result of economic success, not the cause, despite the ideology of literacy which suggested the inverse; much of what Graff discovered in his study is still evident today in public discourse surrounding literacy. Graff coined the term the "literacy myth" by which he describes the ideological assumption that literacy alone can lead one to economic and social success. Graff's work is important because he helped begin a conversation about the ideological nature of literacy, and the fact that the ideological discourse about the value of literacy which arose due to the advent of mass public education did not match the reality of the role of literacy in peoples' actual lives. Graff traces the roots of the literacy myth to the 18th Century Englightenment (xiv), but also notes that literacy must be studied in the actual context in which it is practiced because "without the specification of a context in which literacy is to serve either the individual or society, attempts to establish a valid concept of functional literacy cannot succeed” (4). Indeed, as mass literacy schooling gained momentum in the nineteeth century, the function of literacy became multifaceted: “the goals of public education where of course many; they included the implication of habits and values, social discipline, work preparation, cultural homogenization, literacy, and the establishment of hegemony among the population” (155).

-- BrianHoule - 05 May 2006