A Socio Cultural Perspective On School Based Literacy Research Some Emerging Considerations

Language and Education
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A Socio-cultural Perspective on School-based

Literacy Research: Some Emerging Considerations
Anneke van Enk , Diane Dagenais & Kelleen Toohey
To cite this article: Anneke van Enk , Diane Dagenais & Kelleen Toohey (2005) A Socio-cultural
Perspective on School-based Literacy Research: Some Emerging Considerations, Language and
Education, 19:6, 496-512, DOI: 10.1080/09500780508668700
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A Socio-cultural Perspective on
School-based Literacy Research: Some
Emerging Considerations 1
Anneke van Enk, Diane Dagenais and Kelleen Toohey

Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual

cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings
have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social
relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of studies
documenting the ways in which printed texts are taken up in a wide variety of settings
from after-school clubs and community-based adult literacy programmes to work-
places, the Internet, and ‘everyday life’. Increasingly, there have been calls for socio-
cultural literacy researchers to begin directing their attention to mainstream educa-
tional contexts. In this paper, we join in and seek to contribute to such calls by drawing
out some of the complexities and caveats that also need to be kept in mind. After briefly
reviewing what it means to define literacy and learning in relation to socio-cultural
context, we explore some recent arguments for conceptual and methodological refine-
ments. We then turn our attention to schools and to what a socio-cultural definition of
literacy has to offer in terms of addressing diversity and educational inequity, and we
draw out several issues that require closer consideration.
Keywords: school-based literacy, literacy studies, cultural diversity, educational

inequity
Much research on reading and writing in schools has focused and continues to
focus on individual cognitive skills and related interventions. Investigations of
literacy-learning in out-of-school settings (and in less formal educational
settings) have been oriented rather differently, however. Informed by what can
be termed socio-cultural perspectives, such work situates reading and writing in
social relations and cultural institutions. Literacy is always encountered in a
particular context, and here ‘context’ refers not to an inconsequential backdrop,
but to the practices of a group of people in time and place, people who read and
write particular things in particular ways for particular purposes. That a good
deal of socio-cultural literacy research has focused on out-of-school contexts
might, somewhat ironically, be attributed to the widespread but problematic
tendency to associate literacy almost exclusively with one context in particular:
school. Popular notions of reading and writing continue to conflate the type of
reading and writing done at school with a single universal and uniform concep-
tion of literacy. Partly in response to this, proponents of socio-cultural perspec-
tives, and particularly researchers in the New Literacy Studies tradition,2 have
sought over the last 20 years or so to document the varied ways in which printed
text (and, more recently, other media as well) are taken up elsewhere. They have
looked at literacy-learning in everything from after-school clubs and commu-
0950-0782/05/06 496-17 $20.00/0 © 2005 A. Van Enk et al.

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School-based Literacy Research 497
nity-based adult literacy programmes to workplaces, the Internet, and ‘everyday

life’.
In a recent literature review, Hull and Schultz (2001) demonstrate how
generative this work has been, and they argue that it could be usefully linked to
school literacy. Their suggestion has been echoed by Street (2003), in whose
work the discipline of New Literacy Studies often traces its origins and who
predicts that practical application to mainstream education will be the ‘sternest
test’ for the theoretical perspectives of New Literacy Studies. This paper seeks
to examine some of the emerging complexities and caveats we might keep in
mind at the same time as it supports the field’s endeavours in researching liter-
acy and learning in, and with particular attention to, the socio-cultural context
of school. We begin with a brief review of what it means to define literacy in
relation to socio-cultural context. Out of the theory and research conducted on
the basis of such a definition, calls for further conceptual and methodological
refinements have emerged; these we look at in a second section. In the third
section, we turn our attention to schools and to what a contextual definition of
literacy has to offer in terms of addressing diversity and educational inequity;
here, too, we draw out several issues that need further exploration. To
conclude, we review what kinds of challenge the concerns raised within the
field present for the application of socio-cultural perspectives to research in
formal education settings, and we also direct attention to challenges facing
literacy research from without in the form of increasing calls for a return to
so-called apolitical positivistic approaches.
Defining Literacy, Learning, and Literate Identity in Relation to

Context: A Brief Review
Much of the early work that defined the field of literacy studies framed liter-
acy as a technology with important consequences for its users. On the basis of
comparisons between oral and literate societies and spoken and written
language, the so-called ‘Great Divide’ scholars argued that the development of
the alphabet made possible a range of cognitive, cultural and historical transfor-
mations. Their lines of enquiry support common associations made between
literacy and moral, intellectual, political, social and economic progress. Such
associations endure even though it has been pointed out that there is no empiri-
cal evidence for straightforward causal connections. In The Literacy Myth
(1979), for instance, historian Harvey Graff’s analysis of 19th century Canadian
census data demonstrates that literacy had little, if any, effect on people’s
socio-economic prospects. Several other classic studies, too, have challenged
traditional claims about the consequences of literacy, showing that what literacy
does varies according to the socio-cultural contexts in which people do things
with it. Scribner and Cole’s experimental research on reading and writing among
the Vai in Liberia, documented in The Psychology of Literacy (1981), sought to
distinguish the mental effects of schooling from those of literacy and concluded
that literacy-in-general cannot account for shifts in cognitive functioning. Shirley
Brice Heath’s Ways with Words (1984), an ethnography of literacy in three neigh-
bouring communities in the Carolinas, documents the very different ways in
which each community uses language. Her work illustrates how children from
498 Language and Education
different communities are differently prepared for a school system that values
middle-class ‘ways with words’. Both studies highlight how the reading and
writing done at school is, in fact, of a particular type; it varies in form and
purpose and outcome from reading and writing done in other contexts.
In Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984), Brian Street describes two broad
models – autonomous and ideological – for conceptualising literacy. Theorists
and researchers subscribing to the autonomous model frame literacy as a set of
technical skills. Street argues that their approach is suspect because they general-
ise from ethnocentrically privileged ‘essayist’ forms of literacy dominant among
Western academics to pronounce on the consequences of all of literacy. In
contrast to the autonomous model, the ideological model focuses on the signifi-
cance literacy takes on within particular socio-cultural contexts. It leads us, Street
writes, to ‘concentrate on the specific social practices of reading and writing . . .
[and to] recognise the ideological and therefore culturally embedded nature of
such practices’. The assertion that literacy is a social practice (a term first invoked
by Scribner & Cole, 1981) has become a central tenet of socio-cultural theories of
literacy. Literacy practices are essentially socially regulated and recurrent ways
in which people use written language. Practices are inferred from literacy events,
defined by Heath (1988: 351) as ‘any occasion in which a piece of writing is inte-
gral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes’.
The exact nature of an event and its relationship to practice have become matters
of debate, however, leading Street (2003) to state that ‘a key issue, at both a meth-
odological and an empirical level is how we can characterise the shift from
observing literacy events to conceptualising literacy practices’. We shall look
below at the ways this analytically useful distinction also presents quandaries
and potential limits, and, indeed, at how too exclusive an emphasis on literacy as
ideological practice may itself be problematic.
A socio-cultural definition of literacy has an attendant theory of liter-
acy-learning and of literate identity. In Western cultures, reading and writing
instruction takes place predominantly at school,3 and literacy curricula there
remain significantly influenced by traditional cognitivist models of discrete,
sequential skill development. For cognitivists, reading and writing are
specifiable sets of skills and knowledge that are acquired more or less quickly
and accurately by individual learners with more or less ‘aptitude’ for learning. In
a socio-cultural view, however, an intentionally ‘instructional’ context such as
school is only one of the places people learn literacy. Moreover, skills that can be
explicitly taught and systematically tested for are far from all that people acquire
at school (or elsewhere) with respect to printed text. Social practices of literacy
also involve processes for socialising people to the uses of reading and writing
within a given setting. Most of these processes are relatively informal and tend to
take place in tacit ways. Becoming proficient at literacy viewed as a set of social
practices is largely a matter of participating in them. Hence, Lev Vygotsky’s
(1986) work on socio-cognition, as well as subsequent research and theory on the
sociality of learning (for example, Lave & Wenger’s [1991] writing on ‘communi-
ties of practice’), links well with socio-cultural enquiry into literacy. Finally, what
are learnt in terms of literacy are not so much cognitive skills but ways of social
belonging. Being literate is similarly understood in terms of membership, but it’s
important to note that there are various forms or levels of membership. Having a
literate identity is not simply a matter of being ‘in’, but, as Toohey (2000: 8) has
suggested, of where one is placed within a socio-cultural context: ‘Seeing identity
not as an essence, but as a positioning, helps us to focus on the social construction
of that positioning, on the politics of position’. From a socio-cultural perspective,
a literate identity is contextually constructed and political. And here it becomes
evident why literacy-learning, too, is highly politicised. Opportunities for partic-
ipating – for rehearsing, both in the sense of developing and demonstrating,
contextually appropriate ways of engaging with text – are essential for successful
integration (see, for example, Rex [2001]), but, as we will explore further on with
respect to school contexts, such opportunities are not equally available to all.
(And this iniquitous situation, in turn, has to do at least partly with how we
approach literacy.)
A socio-cultural theory of literacy might be helpfully encapsulated in the
pithy point made by Gee (2001: 16–17) that we never just read but always read
something. He elaborates:
This something is always a text of a certain type (in a certain genre) and is
read (interpreted) in a certain way . . . Learning to read a text of a given type
in a given way . . . requires scaffolded socialisation into the groups and
social practices that make a text of this type to be read in this way. Being
able to read a text of a given type a given way requires that one is a member
of such social groups and is able to engage in their practices . . . [those prac-
tices] involve ways of talking and listening, acting and interacting, thinking
and believing, and feeling and valuing, as well. All this – types of text, ways
of reading them, social groups and their practices that go beyond writing –
is what falls under the notion of ‘something’ when we talk about reading
something . . . To leave the something off . . . is, in the end, ironically, to leave
out reading.
Failure to anchor literacy in context makes it difficult to specify what literacy and
literacy-learning and being literate consist of. Indeed, from a socio-cultural
perspective, it seems to make it impossible to discuss literacy at all. Without the
dense whirl of contextually derived philosophies, histories, actions, purposes
and relationships that accompany and inhere in the particular things we read or
write, there is nothing to study. Or is there? In the following section we take up a
recent challenge to this strong position on the centrality of context.
Literacy’s Cross-contextual Travels: Some Conceptual and

Methodological Issues
In their article ‘Limits of the local’, Brandt and Clinton (2002) argue that an
overly strong (though substantially justified) critique of autonomous theories of
literacy has led to a detrimental overemphasis on context. They largely address
New Literacy Studies scholarship; however, the issues their piece raises are
worth considering with respect to neighbouring socio-cultural traditions of liter-
acy research, as well. Brandt and Clinton’s basic argument is that overstating the
power of context to define literacy and, concomitantly, understating the techno-
logical aspects of literacy, has led to ‘methodological bias and conceptual
impasses’. Methodologically, the problem appears to rest with the predominant
use of ethnographic approaches and their narrow ‘here and now’ standpoint.
The ‘conceptual impasses’ have to do with the difficulty a social practice perspec-
tive has in theorising the ‘transcontextualised and transcontextualising poten-
tials of literacy . . . its ability to travel, integrate, and endure’. Recall that literacy
practices are inferred by observing a series of literacy events; the ethnographer
looks for patterns of interactions with text in a given socio-cultural context and in
this way develops a description of its practices. But, as Brandt and Clinton point
out, literate practices are not generally ex nihilo inventions maintained solely by
their practitioners; they may be inherited, imported, or imposed, in part or in
whole, and are adapted to varying extents in the process. Moreover, they are
often addressed to and/or taken up in other contexts. How, then, do we account
for the fact that literate practices involve historical trajectories beyond the ‘local’
contexts in which we encounter evidence of them? This would seem an essential
point to address in relation to Street’s (2003) contention that the ‘shift from
observing literacy events to conceptualizing literacy practice’ needs to be more
closely examined.
It is important to note that social practice models in no way explicitly suggest
that contexts for literacy practices are isolated and sealed off. Barton and Hamil-
ton (1998), for example, state clearly that literacy practices are embedded in
broader social goals and cultural practices and that literacy is historically situ-
ated. And they comment that the ‘domains of life’ associated with different
literacies are not clear-cut: ‘there are questions of the permeability of boundaries,
of leakages and movement between boundaries, and of overlap between
domains’ (Barton & Hamilton, 2000: 11). However, it might be preferable to inte-
grate such understandings into our conceptualisations, rather than adding them
on, so that our analytic tools better incorporate this history of intercontextual
travel and inherently acknowledge that contexts are interconnected. Brandt and
Clinton advocate a return to the notion of literacy-as-thing (or, at least, to a focus
on the material as an important facet of literacy. It must be noted that their
concept of literacy is somewhat unclear, for they are obviously sympathetic to –
and, we assume, are not advocating a wholesale replacement of – the liter-
acy-as-practice view). This would, they argue, allow us to endow literacy with ‘a
capacity to travel, a capacity to stay intact, and a capacity to be visible and
animate outside the interactions of immediate literacy events’ (p. 344). A concep-
tualisation of literacy that doesn’t eclipse its material aspect and thereby wouldn’t
allow us to push it theoretically into non-existence in the absence of observable
socio-cultural uptake, is, we agree, compelling, and not only because it addresses
the problem of cross-contextual trajectories and transformations.
If current constructions of literacy as socio-cultural often seem to dissolve
reading and writing rather quickly when they stray outside the periphery of the
locally focused gaze, socio-cultural theories of learning, in contrast, are very
much focused on the material aspects of literate activity. Consideration of
mediational means is central to analyses that strive to understand how mental
functioning is related to socio-cultural context, and materiality is considered a
property of all mediational means, including written language. As Wertsch
(1998: 31) points out, ‘The development of [skills in using particular mediational
means] requires acting with, and reacting to, the material properties of cultural
tools. Without such materiality, there would be nothing to act with or react to,
and the emergence of socio-culturally situated skills could not occur’. Clearly,
then, research on literacy-learning both in and outside formal educational
contexts will need to take the ‘thingness’ of literacy into account. Attention to the
materiality of literacy, moreover, refines our understanding of readers’ and writ-
ers’ agency. To quote Wertsch (1991: 12) again, ‘the relationship between action
and mediational means is so fundamental that it is more appropriate, when refer-
ring to the agent involved, to speak of “individual(s)-acting-with-mediational-
means” than to speak simply of “individuals”’. The social practice model risks
exaggerating the amount of agency local practitioners have in using and shaping
literacy, as though reading and writing were independent (or even collective)
exercises of the will; literacy, Brandt and Clinton contend, has a presence of its
own that ‘pushes back’. Its materiality needs to be factored into accounts of what
readers and writers can (and cannot) do.
But here we come to an important issue: how might the quality of literacy’s
materiality be described? What is it exactly that pushes back (and travels and
endures) – written language or actual texts? We noted earlier the ambiguity in
Brandt and Clinton’s conceptualisation of literacy, and this is tied to the fact that
their notion of literate ‘thingness’ is not altogether apparent either. While their
arguments are undeniably compelling on a number of counts, focusing on the
way they conceive of the materiality they want to (re)introduce is useful in think-
ing further about the consequences their arguments have for the concept of liter-
acy. Brandt and Clinton use the word ‘technology’ repeatedly and they want to
reinstate ‘certain “autonomous” aspects of literacy’ (p. 339), yet they insist that
‘literacy as a something does not make it an ideologically neutral technology’
(p. 355) and state that they do not wish to appeal to the ‘autonomous model’ of
literacy (p. 339). They seem to have a historically situated, dynamic object in
mind – a text,4 in other words – and yet also something unencumbered by
context, stable and stand-alone – written language as it was studied by theorists
espousing so-called ‘autonomous models’. Among these theorists, Ong (1982)
very directly invokes literacy, by which he means written language, as a technol-
ogy. But is this what Brandt and Clinton, who write that they lean strongly
towards a socio-cultural perspective, have in mind?
Brandt and Clinton propose that the technology of literacy ‘will transform [a]
local literacy event into somebody else’s meaning and send it into somebody
else’s setting where the meanings of the original context will not matter’ (p. 345).
To us, ‘technology’ intimates a kind of smooth unyieldingness – nothing sticks to
the literate object or changes its shape – and it’s difficult to see how such a quality
would allow for any communicative transcontextuality. From a socio-cultural
perspective, it would seem that it is the accumulation of human investments
inseparable from ‘objective’ form that accounts for a given text’s ability to be
transformed into someone else’s meaning. In Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) dialogic
linguistic theory, the concrete form language takes in socio-cultural contexts is
profoundly marked by a history of human workmanship, shaped by past
encounters (still ‘warm’, as he puts it, from use in other times and places) and
anticipated projections. Language’s sociality is inextricable from its ‘thingness’,
and we would suggest that what travels, what remains even when we’re not
looking, what pushes back might therefore be more aptly described as a protean
artefact than a fixed technology.
Bakhtin proposes that we may repeat words and sentences in other contexts
but that these linguistic ‘things’ are in no way guarantors of meaning. What
makes them communicative in that context are the socially shared elements that
recognisably inhere in them; when we speak we must somehow imagine and
trust we have such elements in common. Of course, Bakhtin is dealing with
spoken exchanges and perhaps what we need to explore further is the extent to
which we can apply all this to written instances. Brandt and Clinton’s central
point – that a focus on practice alone means literacy remains local and disappears
when no one is observably engaging in literate practice – suggests that the nature
of literacy is not completely resolved by New Literacy Studies and other
socio-cultural positions. Nevertheless, we would want to ensure that the concep-
tion literacy’s material aspect still acknowledges practice, that we talk of a mate-
riality marked by practice. This materiality may have a ‘technical’ aspect to it – it
seems reasonable to suggest that written language introduces certain constant,
‘inherent’ enablements and constraints. Thus, the acute social responsiveness of
speech – what is in Bakhtinian terms invoked as its accentuated quality and its
capacity for reaccentuation – may indeed be lessened in writing, as Plato argues
in the Phaedrus, sacrificed in a materiality that travels further and endures
longer and is less yielding to our will than breath. But we cannot finally talk of
literacy as some sort of immutable technology with uniform consequences
always and everywhere and, at the same time, talk of it as purely a context-based
practice. Hence, the term ‘artefact’ as a compromise and reminder that it is finally
in the form of particular texts that we encounter and generate literacy’s material-
ity.
If the materiality of texts is needed conceptually to explain how literacy prac-
tices travel across contexts, it is important methodologically in focusing
researchers’ attention. Brandt and Clinton do not take up ethnography as a meth-
odology in any systematic way; they object only to the ‘here and now of the
ethnographic gaze’. But they do critique the concept of event, which has come
under discussion elsewhere in the field, too, as being potentially problematic.
Hamilton (2000), for example, reports on a study of media representations of
literacy in which she and her colleagues used newspaper photographs as data.
Heath’s definition of literacy events served as a selection guide, but this meant
focusing strictly on photos that depicted interactions centred on texts and
excluding photos in which texts were present but appeared incidental. Hamilton
noted the numerous photographs featuring signs and labels that signalled
taken-for-granted but pervasive and significant literacy practices: ‘People are in
some way incorporated into these practices without having to engage actively in
reading or writing as such’ (p. 29). The photo study suggests that observing only
visible and direct uptakes of texts can be limiting; literate materials can have an
impact on a socio-cultural context even when, from the ethnographer’s observa-
tional standpoint, they are being ignored. Brandt and Clinton thus want to see
the literacy event replaced by ‘literacy in action’, a phrase they suggest ‘would
awaken analytical curiosity in any objective trace of literacy in a setting whether
they are being taken up by local actors or not’ (p. 349). Particularly useful in connec-
tion with this is their notion of ‘sponsorship’, which clearly draws attention to the
literate object’s history of use. Asking who provided or imposed literacy materi-
als in a context, how they are controlled or shared, and what costs or obligations
they entail for users ‘illuminates how things in a setting serve as surrogates for
the interests of absent others’ (p. 350).
Into the Schools

The exploration of the ‘limits of the local’ is invaluable; however, we would
like at the same time to reassert the value of a ‘local’ socio-cultural perspective on
literacy specifically in school-based research. School, we want to suggest, could
use a bit of ‘local’ treatment, even while we keep in mind the problematics that
accompany such an approach. Researchers guided by a social-practice perspec-
tive on literacy, and especially those in the New Literacy Studies tradition, have
tended to focus on the practices of particular (and often ‘marginalised’) commu-
nities to the virtual exclusion of more dominant institutional (read especially
school) ones. In consequence, their work has drawn the charge from some that it
romanticises the local as pitted against prevailing social structures. Moss (2001)
sketches the political agenda behind the attempts of researchers to draw atten-
tion to the hitherto marginalised practices of diverse, informal, everyday
community contexts. For New Literacy Studies in particular, ‘describing the
alternatives [to school literacy] is . . . a strategic objective in which the weakening
of the power of school literacy to rule other varieties in or out is at least a partial
aim’ (p. 147). Such a project, she argues, has merit for being democratically inten-
tioned, but it is finally misguided. This is because school literacies, while they are
not inherently superior, are more socially powerful and therefore operate differ-
ently. This needs to be acknowledged . . . and studied. New Literacy Studies’
politics seem to have drawn attention away from a much needed focus of
ethnographic research: the dynamics of literacy in the classroom (and also, we
would add, of school literacy beyond school contexts).
Accounting for educational inequity: Misrecognition, social

reproduction, and a closer look at the context of the classroom
New Literacy Studies in particular, and much other socio-culturally informed
work on literacy as well, is motivated at least in part by concerns about the
inequalities implied in and created by school literacy’s dominance. In Moss’s
(2001) interpretation, New Literacy Studies focuses on the unequal outcomes of a
‘divide’ between those whose literacy is recognised in school and those whose
literacy is not. Documenting different literate practices outside the school
becomes a means of helping school acknowledge and appreciate competencies
beyond those of the white middle class it is theorised to reflect and reproduce.
The thinking goes that recognition of greater literate diversity in ‘official’ curric-
ula will, in turn, benefit those students whose home-based linguistic practices
have not generally fitted in with literacy as it is at school. Misrecognition is
without doubt an important part of the explanation of differential levels of
‘success’ at school, as not only Heath’s seminal work but also smaller scale
studies such as Micheals’ (1986) oft-cited analysis of a story-time session at
school have shown. But the issues are also more subtle and bear closer analysis –
educational disparities cannot be rendered as simply the result of mis-
understanding. A document we came across posted on a teacher-support
website entitled ‘Addressing literacy needs in culturally and linguistically
diverse classrooms’ (Ingram-Willis, 2000) is illustrative. The report centres on

various ‘knowledge bases’ that teachers need to meet the implied challenges of
diversity (‘implied’ since the text avoids framing diversity as an issue that might
generate tension or conflict). Teachers must reflect on their ‘self-knowledge’,
learn to respect their students’ varied backgrounds, and grasp culturally
‘informed’ and ‘sensitive’ pedagogy and curriculum. The ‘knowledge bases’ are
unquestionably valuable, but the report pays little attention to the institutional
contexts within which teachers are to deploy this knowledge. There is no account
of the education system’s complicity in past and present inequities, and no analy-
sis of the exclusions resulting from the practices and structurings of school and
classroom. Such accounts and analyses would offer the teachers the report
addresses a more complete picture by acknowledging both that injustice cannot
usually be attributed solely to individual misrecognition and that greater recog-
nition on the part of individual teachers may not be enough to meet obstacles to
change.
By the same token, it isn’t wise to view the negative effects of school literacy’s
power broking simply in terms of monolithic stories about the role of institution-
alised education in reproducing the status quo (e.g. Apple, 1979; Bourdieu &
Passeron, 1990; Giroux, 1981). Again, these are compelling (if problematic)
accounts, but accounts of relationships in classrooms also elucidate much about
the processes that produce inequity (Armand et al., in press; Gutierrez et al., 1995;
Toohey & Day, 1999). Indeed, that is where the large-scale theories of social
reproduction, as well as the complexities and conflict around what is termed
misrecognition, get played out – in the local. Getting closer to the practices in
schools can play a role in bringing important theories about educational equity
closer to educational practitioners. While socio-cultural research rightly rejects
the imposition of linguistic and socio-cultural homogeneity as a ‘solution’ to
diversity and inequity it has not offered much to teachers and administrators per
se beyond broad and abstract systemic critiques (challenging to transform into
positive practical interventions) or encouragement to ‘recognise’ local practices
(of which there are an impossibly wide range) (Carrington & Luke, 1997;
Dagenais, 2001). Offering nuanced ethnographic observation and analysis that
show what kind of socio-cultural context school itself is, might prove to be of
greater use to educational practitioners looking to address diversity through an
understanding of what productive heterogeneity looks like, and of what enables
and obstructs it. Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) concept of sponsorship can draw
attention to what comes into and out of a given classroom and/or school in terms
of and via literacy. (Brandt [1998] demonstrates in an analysis of personal narra-
tives about literacy-learning how sponsors organise differential access to
resources in out-of-school contexts, which in turn accounts for differential
outcomes in education.) We also argue for the value of focusing on the finely cali-
brated subtleties that play out within these contexts.
Expanding what counts as literacy in school contexts

Narrow definitions of literacy, the argument runs, contribute to inequity by
excluding or devaluing non-dominant ways of engaging with language. This
represents a loss in itself, but failing to capitalise on the competencies of children
from ‘marginalised’ backgrounds and seeing only deficits with respect to privi-
leged practices also effectively limits these students’ opportunities for learning
school literacy. As Au and Raphael (2000: 173) point out,
there is much to be gained in better understanding the literacies students
bring to the classroom, both for working within what social constructivist
theorists (e.g. Vygotsky) have described as students’ zones of proximal
development,5 as well as for making literacy-learning in school pertinent to
students’ everyday lives and therefore more compelling and motivating.
They note, too, that higher numbers of ‘students of diverse backgrounds’, as
they term them, tend be slated for remediation on the assumption that their liter-
acy skills are lacking; steered towards phonics and other ‘basic’ skills, they conse-
quently have limited opportunities to develop the higher-level critical-thinking
skills also taught at school. There are thus plenty of reasons to expand what
counts as literacy in the school – not just simply on principles of fairness (i.e. that
a democratic education system cannot privilege one culture by claiming a
supposedly natural and necessary homogeneous set of skills and knowledge)
but also on the basis of the demonstrable value such a move would have for
successful learning. Nevertheless, there are also cautions in the literature that we
need to heed. We need to consider this approach of diversifying literacies with a
greater nuance – what happens when we import local literacies into a context like
school? What needs to be in place for school to become a heteroglossic, or
multi-voiced, context? To what extent can we make classrooms ‘safe’ for
non-mainstream students?
These, too, are questions that can be approached partly through a more ‘local’
focus on the classroom and school. For example, Moss (2001: 149) argues that we
need to pay attention to ‘the very different social regulation of school literacy,
which is specific to its institutional base’. Applying Bernstein’s work to data
documenting children’s uptake of media texts, she demonstrates the ‘hierarchi-
cal and vertical sequencing of instruction in school, where knowledge is care-
fully ordered and access to it constrained according to the level of competence
children are deemed to display, and the relative free-for-all in relation to media
texts at home’ (2001: 151). In an earlier paper drawing on the same data, Moss
(2000) suggests that out-of-school literacies cannot remain intact in school
contexts. Popular and everyday texts that are part of a present-oriented literate
competence (a competence whose function, as Bernstein puts it, is ‘consumed in
its realization’) tend to fall flat when introduced into formal curricula; in a peda-
gogic setting, attempts are made to transform the in/of-the-moment literacies
that make these texts live (and that seem to relegate these texts in fairly short
order to a trash heap of the passé) into more enduring ‘conceptual understand-
ings’. Such attempts are not generally successful, according to Moss. Nor are
out-of-school literacies likely to act as ‘levelling repertoires’ in school; on the
basis of interviews with middle- and working-class students, she concludes that
the differences in the ways the two groups characterise in- and out-of-school
texts has to do, not with differences in cultural capital, but with their respective
senses of what the future holds for them. Thus, the working-class students do
not, in their talk about texts, take up ‘schooling’s sequential and hierarchical
knowledge structures because such structures are quite literally taking them
nowhere’ (2000: 62).
Another (more optimistic) example of a ‘local’ focus on learning contexts is

Gutierrez et al.’s 1999 paper. It shows how diverse language practices can be
‘hybridised’ to create a productive non-hierarchical and collaborative context for
learning in an after-school programme. However, it’s not clear that a similar situ-
ation could be reconstructed in a formal school setting. Hull and Schultz (2001)
point out that the relationship between after-school programmes and schools
themselves needs to be addressed lest the former become school-like and we lose
‘creative space for doing academics differently’. We would suggest further that
even the playful after-school setting has power relations, and that thus the
hybridity Gutierrez et al. describe will have to be as much a (hard-won and
continually tended-to) product of collaboration as a resource for it. In an earlier
study of classroom discourse (1995), she and her co-authors look at the ways in
which a teacher’s monologic ‘script’ exists symbiotically with a parallel but never
intersecting student ‘counterscript’ that refuses to comply with the teacher’s
view of appropriate participation. This study, while it argues for a ‘third space’
where these scripts intersect and create potential for ‘authentic’ interaction, does
more to suggest that a good deal of skill is required to create a productively
heteroglossic classroom. Here, too, we might add that, while spaces that open up
opportunities for participating and learning are clearly what we need to work
towards, we also need to be careful in suggesting that there are spaces for ‘real’
participation and learning that are somehow free of inequities. We need to main-
tain an awareness that no educational space can be completely ‘safe’. Hull and
Schultz remind us of the need to tend to those students ‘whose critical conscious-
ness as members of oppressed groups is finely honed and who may not be
predisposed to display the competences they possess’ (p. 603) – these are
students, we suggest, who are savvy about what’s ‘safe’.
Addressing the power of school literacy in out-of-school contexts

Mindful of Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) cautions, we also need to look at the
classroom’s connections to broader contexts – to the institution of school more
generally and to out-of-school contexts, as well. School is held up as a powerful
institution and its practices are accepted as powerful, but we need to find out
more about the nature of its/their influence. Incorporating diverse ‘local’
literacies into school settings may not always meet with the approval of parents
and students themselves: they, as Au and Raphael (2000: 174) note, ‘recognize
that academic, economic, and social advancement in the mainstream requires
mastery of the codes of the culture of power’. One pedagogical response to this
line of thinking about linguistic power is the genre approach drawn from
systemic functional linguistics and implemented in Australia in the 1980s. In this
approach, educational inequity is seen as the result of a lack of access for ‘margin-
alised’ groups, and that lack of access is, in turn, due to the hiddenness of criteria
and practices that lead to success at school (and beyond). To promote the social
mobility of these groups, instruction therefore focuses on the explicit teaching of
forms associated with dominant social, political and economic spheres. Luke
(1996) suggests, however, that many practical instantiations of the genre
approach tend to neutralize literacy by emphasizing genres’ functionality (i.e.
‘how texts work’) over their ideologically contested and contestable history.
Genre-based pedagogy often avoids conflict and difference, he argues, and it
operates with an overly simplified notion of power as something that can be

identified and owned: ‘a model of power as technical control over “valued” text
types, with no regulative moral or political framing (valued by whom?), fits well
with instrumental approaches to schooling and training’ (p. 322). While ‘de-
naturalising’ and demystifying literate practices may help address educational
exclusion, Luke argues that we need at the same time to ‘situate, critique, interro-
gate and transform [privileged] texts, their discourses and their institutions’
(p. 334); otherwise we will simply be engaging in a form of pedagogy that repro-
duces the status quo, not one that works for equitable change.
While Luke’s critique of the genres-of-power pedagogy is instructive, casting
doubt on the notion that particular literate practices can directly inculcate
power,6 we do still need to acknowledge the connections that are made between
school literacy and socio-political and economic advantage. Again, we need a
more nuanced understanding of the purported power of school literacy in
contexts beyond school. Carrington and Luke (1997) address this question in
theoretical terms, suggesting that Bourdieu’s framework can help us think about
what forms of literate practice will be of value in students’ life trajectories.
Bourdieu theorises human activity as exchange in an economy of practice, where
all practice is directed at maximising social advantage through the accumulation
of various forms of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital. School-based
literacy is popularly thought of as a form of cultural capital with universal uses,
valuable in any field of social relationships, but the authors argue that, in fact,
‘there can be no product guarantees for the social consequences of school liter-
acy’ (p. 104). School constitutes only one socio-cultural context and we cannot
acritically assume that its practices can be always and straightforwardly ‘cashed
out’ in other contexts. In the end, the authors again advocate critical literacy as
‘pedagogy that pays attention to textual forms and features but in relation to
social fields’ (p. 109).
However, there is also a need to look beyond Bourdieu’s economistic meta-
phors. Carrington and Luke argue that his theory makes a better tool than the
if/then reasonings of popular ‘folk theories’ for evaluating the consequences of
school literacy in learners’ life trajectories. Yet we would point out, that such
folk theories are part of the very social fields Bourdieu writes about in which
the value of school literacy manifests itself; hence, these folk theories can’t
exactly be shelved. School literacy may not be inherently more valuable than
other forms and it may not even be of practical necessity in a given context (for
example, ‘proper’ spelling may rarely come into play in certain employment
sectors), but if the people in that context deem it important, that has to be taken
into account (employers may still insist that applicants demonstrate ‘proper’
spelling skills to be considered for a job). Moss (2001) and Street and Street
(1991) observe that many forms of literacy practice not just in but also out of
school are already deeply pedagogised, associated with instruction, the
primary activity of educational institutions. Popular beliefs about the impor-
tance of school literacy to possibilities for and paths to ‘success’ in life are a key
part of this pervasive pedagogisation, and the impact of such beliefs needs to be
better understood. Secondly, we note that Bourdieu’s theory itself is a form of
if/then reasoning and, while hugely compelling, it’s possible that something
more or different can be said about the fundamental motivation it posits for all
this pursuit of capital. Is social mobility (or ‘the maximisation of social advan-
tage’ as Carrington and Luke put it) a good enough description of the motive that
drives our lives? Why do we want this mobility or advantage so badly? What
fears do we seek to allay through it? What needs or desires does it meet? Perhaps
there is more to literacy-learning than is explained by an economistic metaphor.
Conclusion
In this paper we have sought to advocate socio-cultural perspectives on liter-
acy and learning in school-based research. We conclude by highlighting two
challenges for such research. First, while focusing on context-based practices has
generated rich insight, we suggest that the emerging subtler problematics we
have reviewed in relation to this approach need to be addressed in applying it to
formal literacy-learning. In particular, Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) piece consti-
tutes an important reminder to attend to literacy’s cross-contextual travels and
transformations. In turning its ‘local’ focus on formal education settings,
socio-cultural research can create deeper, more nuanced understandings of the
kind of context school is for learning to read and write. In ensuring that its
conceptual and methodological tools allow it to work cross-contextually,
however, socio-cultural research can also investigate hybridity and heterogene-
ity in schools and trace the influence of schooling beyond school. It will further
enable us to understand what happens, for example, when out-of school texts are
introduced in schools, thereby allowing for better-informed approaches to diver-
sifying reading and writing there. Conversely, it can also help to develop a
clearer picture of what happens when practices linked to school literacy are taken
into out-of-school contexts, thereby supporting the development of curricula
that will be more relevant to students’ lives beyond the classroom.
The call for a renewed focus on the materiality of literacy also leads us to urge
those investigating school-based reading and writing to begin drawing more
connections between socio-cultural approaches to literacy and socio-cultural
approaches to learning. The latter emphasise the ways that linguistic acquisition
and development are materially mediated and make clear that ‘it is meaningless to
assert that individuals “have” a sign, or have mastered it, without addressing the
ways in which they do or do not use it’ (Wertsch, 1991: 29). This resonates, again,
with the point that Gee (2001) makes about the ‘something’ of literacy students. To
talk as if in the abstract about whether or not students have a command of reading
and writing, as much traditional research on school-based literacy has done,
reveals little. Studies of literacy-learning must focus on mediated action, on
action-with-tools, as Wertsch puts it. For too long, the emphasis in research on
literacy in formal educational settings has been on some neutral tool with univer-
sal applications, when, in fact, any consideration of literacy as a tool must account
for its use. The question research needs to ask is, what can and do students do with
school texts and the practices they are taught in relation to these texts? The caution
those working from a socio-cultural perspective – and thus already oriented to
action (or practice or use or doing) – should draw from arguments about the mate-
riality of literacy, of course, is that the focus cannot be purely on action.
The second challenge to which we wish to draw attention is linked to increas-
ing and disquieting calls for positivistic and thus supposedly apolitical educa-
tional research. The work of researchers such as Moss (2000, 2001) makes it clear
that socio-cultural research on literacy does well to be critically aware of the
biases to which its own particular political agendas may lead, but, obviously, this
does not suggest that politics can be bracketed. The assumption in research that
context matters is one that cannot be dispensed with if we want to develop sound
understandings about literacy and literacy-learning. Those working within
education – be it as teachers, administrators, policy-makers or researchers – need
to stop treating school as a mere backdrop for learning an ostensibly singular and
universal literacy. Our education system does not offer the same conditions and
opportunities for learning to all students, and this has been shown to have an
impact on students’ abilities to do well in school-based literacy tasks. As Gee
points out, to ignore power imbalances in the classroom is to ignore an empirical
fact; it is not to separate out good science from ‘just politics’. Unfortunately,
research that takes socio-cultural context into account is increasingly overlooked
by higher-level policy-makers. In the United States and Britain, government
funders are demanding ‘rigorous’ studies that will support ‘evidence-based’
policies, despite the fact that notions such as rigour and the positivist assump-
tions that underlie the euphemism ‘evidence-based’ have been extensively and
repeatedly problematised. In Canada, federal funding programmes for research
on literacy and learning have also, in recent years, reflected a bias towards
studies along experimental lines with a focus on cognitive aspects of reading and
writing development. Programme descriptions generally conceive of literacy in
the singular, referring, for example, to ‘good language and literacy skills’
without indicating where or by whom or for what purposes the skills in question
are considered ‘good’. Moreover, mandates call for ‘bias-free’ and ‘scientific’
research, signalling an epistemological framework that is antithetical to many
qualitative methodologies. Consequently, it is difficult for researchers who
adopt socio-cultural perspectives on literacy-learning to situate their work
within these funding programmes.
Clearly, there is a need to challenge the privileging of such approaches in
social science research generally and in research on literacy and learning in
particular. In closing, we also want to draw attention to another avenue for
promoting socio-cultural research in educational settings, and that is to draw a
wider group of people working in education into the project of knowl-
edge-making. Movements to encourage broader involvement in practice-based
research already exist in the field of adult literacy education; they might be
expanded to the more formal settings of ‘official’ schooling, too.7 In Britain, for
example, a group called Research and Practice in Adult Literacy (RaPAL) has, for
more than 15 years now, been publishing research and critique by instructors,
administrators and others working in adult literacy in an effort to draw research
and practice closer. In Canada, too, practitioner-based research has been build-
ing strong momentum as people investigate questions that concern them in their
work and draw on, share and develop the knowledge their particular positions
in the field have yielded. Often such enquiry is supported by or done in collabo-
ration with university-based researchers. It is a politically charged movement, to
be sure – what constitutes ‘research’ is much discussed, and the practices and
forms that are slowly emerging don’t necessarily resemble what is traditionally
accepted (within the academy, anyway) as research. But the exercise of negotiat-
ing the practices and forms ‘legitimate’ knowledge takes can be highly instruc-
tive; the tensions do illuminate for those who participate the ways in which
knowledge is politically constructed and contestable and contextual . . . much
like literacy itself.
Notes
1. We gratefully acknowledge support for this project from a grant to Toohey and
Dagenais from the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (CLLRNET)
through the Government of Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence. We also
wish to acknowledge the reviewers, who made very helpful suggestions for clarifica-
tion.
2. New Literacy Studies is a line of research that draws on socio-linguistic and anthropo-
logical theories of language and employs largely ethnographic methodology. It is
particularly concerned with the ways in which literacy practices are imbued with
power. There are, of course, other overlapping traditions of research that draw on
socio-cultural perspectives of literacy and learning as well.
3. Increasingly, in the discourse of family literacy, that responsibility has been extended
as parents, and mothers in particular, are enlisted to ensure young children are
‘school-ready’ (see, for example, Mace’s [1998] Playing with Time: Mothers and the
Meaning of Literacy). Much overt prescription is aimed at low-income and linguistic or
ethinic minority groups in the name of improving chances of educational success for
their children; however, even the white, English-speaking middle-class, whose liter-
ate habits already closely match those of the school, is addressed.
4. In the main, ‘text’ refers here to a particular written message, be it in the (concrete)
form of a traffic sign or of a novel. However, the postmodern extension of the term to
include any event, idea, or discourse that can be analysed critically certainly seems
relevant to this discussion as it draws attention to the ways in which written messages
are intertextual and difficult to separate from human action, thought and speech.
5. The phrase ‘zone of proximal development’ was coined by Vygotsky, who defined it
as ‘the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independ-
ent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through
problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’
(1978: 86).
6. New rhetorical approaches to genre theory and research (see, for example, Freedman &
Medway [1994] and Coe et al. [2001]) have argued that the workings of genre are much
more complicated than the genres-of-power pedagogy assumes, questioning, for exam-
ple, the extent to which generic knowledge is amenable to fixed explication and noting
that not everyone who ‘masters’ a genre can always use it to the same effect.
7. We would also like to make note here of the recent and increasingly well-known
‘design-based’ research methodology, which has been used in school-based research
to understand ‘the relationships among educational theory, designed artifact, and
practice’ (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003: 5). Although it appears less
focused than practitioner-based research is on relationships among those working in
the field, it does, like practitioner-based research, seek to develop ‘useable’ knowl-
edge by studying learning in context.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to A. van Enk (aavanenk@sfu.ca), or
to Dr D. Dagenais or Dr K. Toohey, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser Univer-
sity, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada, V5A 1S6.
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A Socio Cultural Perspective On School Based Literacy Research Some Emerging Considerations

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Language and Education

ISSN: 0950-0782 (Print) 1747-7581 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlae20

A Socio-cultural Perspective on School-based

Anneke van Enk , Diane Dagenais & Kelleen Toohey

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668700

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Anneke van Enk, Diane Dagenais and Kelleen Toohey

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual

Keywords: school-based literacy, literacy studies, cultural diversity, educational

0950-0782/05/06 496-17 $20.00/0 © 2005 A. Van Enk et al.

School-based Literacy Research

School-based Literacy Research 497

nity-based adult literacy programmes to workplaces, the Internet, and ‘everyday

Defining Literacy, Learning, and Literate Identity in Relation to

498 Language and Education

School-based Literacy Research 499

Literacy’s Cross-contextual Travels: Some Conceptual and

500 Language and Education

School-based Literacy Research 501

502 Language and Education

School-based Literacy Research 503

Into the Schools

Accounting for educational inequity: Misrecognition, social

504 Language and Education

diverse classrooms’ (Ingram-Willis, 2000) is illustrative. The report centres on

Expanding what counts as literacy in school contexts

School-based Literacy Research 505

506 Language and Education

Another (more optimistic) example of a ‘local’ focus on learning contexts is

Addressing the power of school literacy in out-of-school contexts

School-based Literacy Research 507

operates with an overly simplified notion of power as something that can be

508 Language and Education

School-based Literacy Research 509

510 Language and Education

School-based Literacy Research 511

512 Language and Education

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