Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times

243 Pages·2017·22.27 MB·English

by  Rahat Zaidi, Jennifer Rowsell (eds.)

LITERACY LIVES IN TRANSCULTURAL
TIMES
Combining language research with digital, multimodal, and critical literacy, this
book uniquely positions issues of transcultural spaces and cosmopolitan identities
across an array of contexts. Studies of everyday diasporic practices across places,
spaces, and people’s stories provide authentic pictures of people living in and with
diversity. Its distinctive contribution is a framework to relate observation and
analysis of these flows to language development, communication, and meaning
making. Each chapter invites readers to reflect on the dynamism and complexity
of spaces and contexts in an age of increasing mobility, political upheaval, eco-
nomic instabilities, and online/offline landscapes.
Rahat Zaidi is an Associate Professor and Chair in Language and Literacy at the
Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.
Jennifer Rowsell is Professor and Canada Research Chair and directs the Centre
for Multiliteracies in the Faculty of Education, Brock University, Canada.
EXPANDING LITERACIES IN EDUCATION
Jennifer Rowsell and Cynthia Lewis, Series Editors
Zaidi & Rowsell, Eds. • Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times
Nordquist • Literacy and Mobility: Complexity, Uncertainty and Agency at the Nexus of
High School and College
Comber • Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility
Orellana • Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love
Enriquez/Johnson/Kontovourki/Mallozzi, Eds. • Literacies, Learning, and the
Body: Putting Theory and Research into Pedagogical Practice
Compton-Lilly • Reading Students’ Lives: Literacy Learning Across Time
Visit www.routledge.com/education for additional information on titles in
Expanding Literacies in Education
LITERACY LIVES IN
TRANSCULTURAL TIMES
Edited by Rahat Zaidi and Jennifer Rowsell
LONDONLONDON
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LONDON AND NEW YORK
YOYROKRK
First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Rahat Zaidi and Jennifer Rowsell to be identified as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Zaidi, Rahat, 1969- editor. | Rowsell, Jennifer, 1969- editor.
Title: Literacy lives in transcultural times / edited by Rahat Zaidi and
Jennifer Rowsell Routledge.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Exploring literacies in
education ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053827 | ISBN 9781138225152 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138225169 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315400860 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Literacy--Social aspects. | Language arts--Social aspects |
Critical pedagogy. | Education and globalization.
Classification: LCC LC149 .L49987 2017 | DDC 302.2/244--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053827
ISBN: 978-1-138-22515-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-22516-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-40086-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword viii
1 Introduction: Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times 1
Rahat Zaidi and Jennifer Rowsell
Ethnoscapes 15
2 Complicating Literacies: Settler Ways of Being with Story(ies)
on Wabanaki Lands 17
Pam Whitty
3 International Struggles over ‘Low Literacy’ versus the
Alternative ‘Social Practices’ Approach 32
Brian Street
4 Multiliteracies Reconsidered: A “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”
in the Context of Inquiry-Based Approaches 43
Margaret Early and Maureen Kendrick
5 Examining the Relational Space of the Self and Other in the
Language-Drama Classroom: Transcultural Multiliteracies,
Situated Practice and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 58
Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou
vi Contents
Technoscapes 73
6 Monster High: Converging Imaginaries of Girlhood in Tweens’
Digital Doll Play 75
Karen E. Wohlwend and Carmen L. Medina
7 Investing in New Literacies for a Cosmopolitan Future 89
Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton
8 Public Engagement and Digital Authoring: Korean
Adolescents Write for/as Action 102
Amy Stornaiuolo and Jin Kyeong Jung
9 Artifacts as Catalysts for Reimagining Transcultural Literacy
Pedagogies 117
Michelle A. Honeyford with Judy Amy-Penner, Timothy S. Beyak,
David Beyer, Amanda Borton Capina, Kelly Fewer,
Chasity Findlay and Damian Purdy
10 Rescripting Classed Lives and Imagining Audiences as Online
Cosmopolitan Practice 136
Diane R. Collier
Ideoscapes 155
11 Poststructural and Posthuman Theories as Literacy Research
Methodologies: Tensions and Possibilities 157
Candace R. Kuby
12 Proper Distance and the Hope of Cosmopolitanism in a
Classroom Discussion about Race 175
Anne Crampton, Cynthia Lewis and Jessica Dockter Tierney
13 Towards Transculturalism in Tackling Diversity for Literacy
Teacher Education 191
Patriann Smith, S. Joel Warrican and Gwendolyn Williams
About the Editors and Contributors 216
Index 223
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Rahat and Jennifer would like to acknowledge funding from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Connections grant
program and the Werklund School of Education and Brock University for their
funding support. We acknowledge the support that Gina Ko at the University of
Calgary offered as a lead-up to the collection. We are most grateful to Dr.
Cynthia Lewis and Naomi Silverman for their editorial guidance. We appreciate
all of the contributors’ thinking and writing as the collection came to fruition.
We appreciate Dr. Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s thoughtful foreword to the
edited collection. Finally, this collection would not have been possible without
the coordination, shepherding, and editorial precision of Jennifer Turner.
FOREWORD
Marjorie Faulstich Orellana
I begin with a cautionary note about transculturalism in order to underscore the
importance of the promise that this book on literacy lives in transcultural times
holds out.
We are living in a time of unprecedented movement of people, things, and
ideas around the globe. Geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and literate borders are
being crossed in new, varied, changing, and speeded-up ways. People from around
the globe are meeting up in spaces of what Steve Vertovec (2009) refers to as
“superdiversity” or what Mary Pratt (1991) calls “cultural contact zones.” It is in
these spaces—both real and virtual—that the promise of transculturality appears.
But transculturality can emerge only if people actually communicate with each
other within those spaces. People have long moved around the globe, but they
have not necessarily learned to listen, and really hear or understand, what others
say or write or do. This is especially true when operating across lines of differ-
ence, power, privilege, and inequality. To realize the possibilities that this “super-
diverse” era offers, we must address those inequities and ensure that some voices are
not silenced while others are amplified. We must suspend the human tendency to
judge, dismiss, ignore, silence, oppress, or attack people that we consider different
from ourselves. Only by connecting empathically and nondefensively with others
can we transcend the divisions of the past and allow for the emergence of
something truly new.
This is why literacy matters. The power of literacy is not just that it allows
words and ideas to travel across time and space and to move across borders that
sometimes keep people out. It is that words can travel between minds and hearts.
They can open our hearts and minds, taking us into the experiences of people
whose lives are very different from our own. They can help us to see new
possibilities and to imagine the world as we want it to be, not just as it is now.
Foreword ix
Transculturality is actually not a new term, and we are not the first generation
to see exciting possibilities of what can be birthed when people from diverse
backgrounds communicate and create together. But the concept, as first used by
the Afro-Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, raises new questions as we
apply it to the world in 2016. Ortiz defined transculturality as the “reinventing of
a new common culture”—something that he saw forming in his small island at
the time, as people from African, Spanish, indigenous, and Latin American
descent comingled. Building on the ideas of the poet and philosopher José Martí,
he emphasized the importance of relinquishing ties to traditional identities (those
grounded in political and religious affiliations) in order to forge a new humanism
through which we could see ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves.
We might ask what it would mean to reinvent a new common world culture,
one that extends beyond the boundaries of a single nation-state. Could we
imagine such a world into being? What kinds of literacy practices could facilitate
its emergence—helping people to find their loyalties and forge their identities not in
a kinship group, village, nation-state, religious or political affiliation, race, or
ethnicity but as citizens of the world, taking collective responsibility for that
world and everything in it?
The authors of this book point to possibilities. They show what can happen
when people move across borders, mix and meet and mingle, and engage with
words and the world in new ways. They suggest ways of rectifying erasures—
reinscribing the past rather than throwing it off, and bringing it with us into the
light of a different future. They argue for the importance of unlearning many of
the things we have learned in schools, not simply “celebrating” diversity but
actively analyzing the inequalities that can happen in its name. They reimagine
schools as sites for cosmopolitanizing—transforming a thing into a set of actions
and creating a new vision of citizenship education.
Collectively, the chapters in this book illustrate a range of transcultural, multi-
modal, critical, and transformative literacies, and they show us the educational
practices that can support the emergence of a transcultural cosmopolitanism.
Drawing from rich and innovative studies of literacy and educational practices in
their own diverse local spaces, as well as connections between those spaces
around the globe, the authors’ voices come together in this text to help us to
imagine a world that is not shaped by the deeply engrained categories of a
Cartesian worldview with all its efforts to categorize and hierarchize and keep
things apart. The world they envision eschews the binaries that bind us. They
offer instead a series of scapes—ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes—as new
cultural imaginaries.
The authors of these chapters do not romanticize cosmopolitanism. They are
alert to how power operates to privilege certain ways of knowing, doing,
thinking, being, talking, and writing over other ways. They recognize that the
movement of people across geopolitical, cultural, or linguistic borders is var-
iegated: some people cross freely to places of their choosing and bring resources