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Literacy Research for Political Action and Social Change. Mollie V. Blackburn and Caroline T. Clark, eds. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 291 pp.
Reviewed by: Lynn M. Nybell Literacy Research for Political Action and Social Change collects theoretical essays and ethnographic accounts of the literacy practices of young people in the United States. The authors of these works are scholars of education who aim to illuminate the challenges of approaching English-language literacy education and research with the explicit intent to promote social justice. Editors Mollie Blackburn and Caroline Clarksituate this collection of work within New Literacy Studies (NLS), a paradigm of research that challenges the dominant approach to literacy as the acquisition of individual skills by examining social practices of literacy in local settings instead. NLS has generated a rich vein of ethnography on local literacies. This book aims to address a central tension that has emerged within the field, as critics have claimed that NLS has exaggerated the power of local contexts on literacy, neglecting the impact of the forces of globalization on these settings. The editors seek to promote work that shows how research on literacy in local contexts must be connected to global issues to produce social change. Contributions to this book are divided into three parts. The first section includes four essays that explore theory and method in literacy studies, often drawing extensively on empirical data to develop and illustrate the arguments. Contributions like those by Dixson and Bloom push their theoretical frameworks beyond the deconstruction of oppressive structures and the documentation of local agency in order to analyze ways in which particular teachers in particular classrooms work to construct more equitable and socially just relations of power. Allen's final essay in this section also accounts the trials and errors of particular teachers and researchers working to connect literacy research and social action. The section ends with her contribution, aptly titled "So…" The second section of this book "Listening to and Learning with Participants in the Local" offers a series of diverse ethnographic accounts of young people engaging in innovative literacy practices mostly outside of school. Compton-Lilley offers a thoughtful account of 5-year-old Angel, who reads joyously with his grandmother but fails to display the particular ways of "being a reader" that are valued by the school and larger society. Authors de Castell, Jenson, and Halverson focus their work on the meanings and practices created by LGBTQ youth outside of traditional educational environments. Leander and Mills describe the transnational digital literacy project initiated by the latter author as youth in three different countries collaborated in efforts to produce a video game. The final section of the book offers several illustrations of educators and educational researchers who attempt efforts to transform English-literacy education within schools, often drawing on Frierian-inspired strategies of critical pedagogy. These experiments include Morell's efforts at teaching popular culture in the classroom, Campano and Damico's efforts at involving pre-service teachers in process drama, and Weltsek and Medina's accounts of drawing on the subjective experiences of students from lower-income, working-class backgrounds as intellectual resources in the classroom. O'Garro and Joseph offer a particularly moving and insightful analysis of the ways in which classroom practices produce indifference toward black urban schoolchildren, pointing to the links between literacy, power, and love. The editors of this book deserve appreciation for their efforts to engage directly with the failed global/local binary that confronts contemporary ethnographers. However, I find the aim to bridge "the global/local divide" in the NLS research only partially realized in this book. To some extent, this difficulty stems from the daunting challenge of theorizing "the global." The editors offer us a conception of "globalization in general" characterized by new arrangements of people, nations and ideas linked by flows, connections and disjuncture. However, I believe that what most of the authors are addressing, either implicitly or explicitly, is not "globalization in general" but globalization in its specific, historical, neo-liberal form a specific set of ideologies and political strategies disseminated by specific actors and promoted by specific agencies. Neoliberal ideologies and strategies have, among many other things, shaped educational reform and stifled challenges to dramatically inequitable school conditions. In this book, decidedly non-local frameworks for literacy such as those embedded in "No Child Left Behind" exist mainly as subtext for the inspiring efforts that are described. Nevertheless, the collection succeeds admirably in offering scholars and activists important insights and tools gained from programs of literacy research that are theoretically and practically engaged in social change. This review is cited and indexed in issue 39.4 of Anthropology & Education Quarterly. |
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