Religious Literacies in a Secular Literacy Classroom

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis article examines how a literacy teacher and her students engaged students' Christian religious literacies in a secular classroom and the outcomes of those transactions. Case study methods; scholarship offering historical, cultural, and social perspectives on Christian religious literacies; and the New London Group ' s theory of a pedagogy of multiliteracies assisted this investigation. Three findings are discussed: First, the teacher ' s pedagogy of multiliteracies, in recruiting students' entire cultural, linguistic, and multiliterate repertoires for academic learning, also drew on students' religious literacies for teaching and learning in school. Second, students, with their teacher ' s support, recruited their religious literacies for analyzing and understanding secular literature and for producing academic writing. Third, religious literacies in the classroom produced tensions, which the students and teacher navigated by emphasizing a shared value of human empathy and their shared commitment to classroom community, pursuing understanding of one another ' s perspectives, and seeking underlying commonalities of different, or differently articulated, religious beliefs. This research contributes more robust understandings of the role of religious literacies in the lives of an increasing demographic of culturally and linguistically diverse youths.

The Interactional Production of Race and Religious Identity in an Urban Catholic School

“…As Catholics, to make an option for the poor means that we are called to pay special attention to the needs of those who are poor by defending and promoting their dignity and by meeting their immediate needs" (Christ Our Life, 2009, p. 133). discourses of anti-black racism and other forms of racial identification intersecting with more locally-developed narratives about Catholic identity in and through schooling. In doing so, I demonstrate the way religious discourse is not simply an additive category in the students' understanding of school and the space of the classroom, nor simply a resource for productively engaging with the literacy dictates of school ( Juzwick, 2014;Skerrett, 2014), but rather undergirds a whole series of categorizations used for the social positioning. At stake in this categorization is the capacity to invoke representations of the social world, at times antagonistic and hierarchical.…”

Adolescent Multilinguals’ Engagement With Religion in a Book Club

“…The few existing studies are ethnographic examinations of the identities of youths who were subject to stereotyping in North America because of their religion, Islam (Sarroub, ; Zine, ). Other scholarship includes classroom‐based research that has importantly illuminated the ways in which high school students with mostly Christian faiths tapped into their religious practices and beliefs when interpreting secular texts and writing and experienced conflict and uneasiness when contrasting religious beliefs were presented by other peers at the literacy sites (Juzwik & McKenzie, ; Reyes, ; Skerrett, ). We subsequently review the three most pertinent studies to the current study in more detail.…”

“…In another related study, Skerrett () documented more multilingual high school students’ engagement with religious knowledge and religious identities in a ninth‐grade reading class taught by Mrs. Campbell, who often invited students’ religious literacies into their transactions with secular texts and refrained from identifying her own religious orientation. The findings showed how the seven focal students, consisting of individuals with Mexican and Colombian origins and of African American descent, brought up their Christian religious literacies in reading texts in class and how they dealt with tensions raised from engagement with different religious identities (i.e., Catholicism vs. Protestantism) by trying to find commonalities between different religious orientations for a healthier classroom community.…”

Performance and Apprehension of the Mass in an Urban Catholic School

“…For example, Vieira (2011) describes how Brazilian immigrants draw on church-related writing practices to renarrate themselves within a pan-nationalist frame, and in doing so "document" themselves when undocumented by the U.S. government. Recently, literacy scholars have begun to examine the place of religion in educational contexts, with a particular interest in the means by which language and literacy practices help students at the margins position themselves in relation to educational and institutional discourses (Juzwik & McKenzie, 2015;Skerrett, 2014). Recently, literacy scholars have begun to examine the place of religion in educational contexts, with a particular interest in the means by which language and literacy practices help students at the margins position themselves in relation to educational and institutional discourses (Juzwik & McKenzie, 2015;Skerrett, 2014).…”