Those Who Know and Are Known: Students Using Ethnography to Interrogate Language and Literacy Ideologies

Abstract

Framing ethnography as a form of democratic inquiry, this study examines how the author worked with a group of Mexican and Vietnamese American adolescents to learn and apply ethnographic tools to interrogate language and literacy ideologies in their school and community. Examination of the students’ findings reveals circulating ideologies and narratives of English monolingualism in schools, as well as their own complex literacy repertoires that worked against Standard English deficit models. This study demonstrates the democratic potential of welcoming diverse students into their own ethnographic research for literacy learning. The study equally provides insights for teachers and researchers into the mundane ways that literacy and language ideologies are produced schools and how students work to resist these through their own practices.

'Not Reading Just Seems Crazy to Me'

“…Although ideologies have been described "as a kind of social glue, binding us all together" (McCormick & Waller, 1987, p. 196), they can also be a source of inequity. The cohesion ideologies create can be racialized and tenuous and the social systems they support can be unequally distributed (LeBlanc, 2018;Rosa & Flores, 2017). Ideology, like literacy, is never neutral; it has a strong social process dimension and tends to serve the interests of certain groups over others (Kroskrity, 2000).…”

Breaking spiritual silences as literacy education scholars: a conversation

“…Research in literacy has long included a strong thread tracing literacy in religious spaces and traditions, from literacy in religious schools to religion in language learning to religious identities in secular literacy spaces. Significant studies across English education, composition and writing research demonstrate the depth and historicity of some of those influences (Boyerin, 1993; Brandt, 2001; Brass, 2011a, 2011b; Ek, 2008; Elster, 2003; Han, 2018; Han and Varghese, 2019; Juzwik et al , 2020; Juzwik and Weyand, 2019; LeBlanc, 2017, 2018; Moss, 2003; Norton, 2008; Papen, 2018; Peshkin, 1986; Sarroub, 2002, 2005; Wong et al , 2013). This special issue focusing on English education extends that tradition.…”