This article describes how a group of African-American women read social relations as socially constructed texts. Such reading, I think, is a literacy skill, rehearsed and developed within classrooms and communities that cultural border crossers1 develop through their participation within specific discourses communities, as well as through their movement across different kinds of communities (Majors and Orellana, 2003). I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in an African-American hair salon to both illuminate and challenge notions of texts, literacy, literate contexts, and the permeability of such contexts with regards to skills acquisition and use. The study focuses on the public performances and social discourse of the women as well as their readings of these performances. Researchers of language and learning have argued that success and failure in school is contingent upon one's ability to successfully navigate processes of meaning-making through discourses (Cazden, 2001; Cole, 1996; Delpit, 1995; Gee, 1992; Lee and Majors, 2003). I want to ask what role, then, do the processes and skills of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues play in facilitating this navigation? In what ways does an acknowledgment of these as reading skills illuminate the complexities involved in the social and arguably academic work participants do in constructing identities? And in what ways can such an acknowledgement help us to identify ways to develop school-based literacy skills?
Au, K. (1980) ` Participation Structures in a Reading Lesson with Hawaiian Children: Analysis of a Culturally Appropriate Instructional Event ', Anthropology and Education Quarterly11: 91—115 .
2.
Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays ( M. Holquist , ed., C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press .
3.
Banks, I. (2000) Hair Matters: Beauty, Power and Black Women's Consciousness . New York: New York University Press .
4.
Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (1998) Local Literacies: A Study of Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge .
5.
Booth, W. (1974) A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
6.
Bourdieu, P. (1979) ` Symbolic Power ', Critique of Anthropology4: 77—85 .
7.
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
8.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development: Experiment by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
9.
Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
10.
Cazden, C. (2001) Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann .
11.
Cole, M. (1996) Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press .
12.
Craig, M. (1997) Hair: Sex, Society, and Symbolism. New York: Stein and Day .
13.
Crenshaw, K. , Gotanda, N. , Peller, G. and Thomas, K. (eds) (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press .
14.
Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (eds) (2000) Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 2nd edn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press .
15.
Delpit, L. (1995) Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press .
16.
Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. New York: Longman .
17.
Foster, M. (1987) `“It's Cookin' Now”: An Ethnographic Study of a Successful Black Teacher in an Urban Community College'. Dissertation , Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
18.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge. Brighton, UK: Harvester .
19.
Freire, P. (1997) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum .
20.
Gee, J.P. (1992) Sociolinguistics and Literacies. New York: Falmer Press .
21.
Gee, J.P. (1993) `Postmodernism and Literacies', in C. Lankshear and P.L. McLaren (eds) Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis and the Postmodern , pp. 271—95. New York: State University of New York .
22.
Gee, J.P. (1997) The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice. New York: Bergin and Garvey .
23.
Gee, J.P. , Hull, G. and Lankshear, C. (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press .
24.
Gilbert, P. (1993) ` Narrative as Gendered Social Practice: In Search of Different Story Lines for Language Research ', Linguistics and Education5: 211—18 .
25.
Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis. New York: Harper Collins .
26.
Gramski, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks ( Q. Hoare , ed. and G. Nowell-Smith, trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart .
27.
Graves, B. and Frederiksen, C.H. (1996) `A Cognitive Study of Literary Expertise', in R.J. Kruez and M.S. Macnealy (eds) Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics, pp. 397—418. Norwood, NJ: Ablex .
28.
Grimes, R.L. (1990) Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press .
29.
Gumperz, J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .
30.
Gumperz, J. (1999) `Sociocultural Knowledge in Conversational Inference ', in J. Jaworski and N. Coupland (eds) The Discourse Reader, pp. 98—106. New York: Routledge .
31.
Harding, S. (1987) `Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?', in S. Harding (ed.) Feminism and Methodology, pp. 1—14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .
32.
Hull, G. and Schultz, K. (eds) (2002) School's Out!: Bridging Out-of-School Literacies with Classroom Practice. New York: Teachers College Press .
33.
Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press .
34.
Jacobs-Huey, L. (1997) ` Is There an Authentic African American Speech Community: Carla Revisited ', University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics4: 331—70 .
35.
Jacobs-Huey, L. (2006) From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women's Hair Care. New York: Oxford University Press .
36.
Kelley, R. (1997) ` Straight From the Underground ', The Nation254: 22.150 .
37.
Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press .
38.
Lacewell-Harris, M. (2004) Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
39.
Langer, J.A. (1987) `A Sociocognitive Perspective on Literacy Learning ', in J. Langer (ed.) Language, Literacy and Culture: Issues of Society and Schooling. Norwood, NJ: Ablex .
40.
Lankshear, C. (1997) Changing Literacies. Buckingham : Open University Press .
41.
Lee, C.D. (1992) ` Literacy, Cultural Diversity, and Instruction ', Education and Urban Society24: 279—91 .
42.
Lee, C.D. (1995) ` A Culturally Based Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching African American High School Students Skills in Literary Interpretation ', Reading Research Quarterly30: 608—31 .
43.
Lee, C.D. (2004) `Double Voiced Discourse: African American Vernacular English as a Resource in Cultural Modeling Classrooms', in A.F. Ball and S.W. Freedman (eds) Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy and Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press .
44.
Lee, C.D. and Majors, Y. (2000) Cultural Modeling's Response to Rogoff's Challenge: Understanding Apprenticeship, Guided Participation and Participatory Appropriation in a Culturally Responsive, Subject Matter Specific Context . Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. New Orleans: Louisiana (April 2000).
45.
Lee, C.D. and Majors, Y. (2003) ` “Heading Up the Street”: Localized Opportunities for Shared Constructions of Knowledge ', Pedagogy, Culture and Society11: 49—67 .
46.
Luke, A. (2003) Literacy Education for a New Ethics of Global Community . Urbana, IL: Language Arts, National Council of Teachers of English .
47.
Majors, Y. (1998) ` Finding the Multi-voiced Self: A Narrative ', Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy42(2): 76—83 .
48.
Majors, Y. (2001) ` Passing Mirrors: Subjectivity in a Midwestern Hair Salon ', Anthropology and Education Quarterly32(1): 116—30 .
49.
Majors, Y. (2003) ` Shoptalk: Teaching and Learning in an African American Hair Salon ', Mind, Culture and Activity10(4): 289—310 .
50.
Majors, Y. (2004) ` “I Wasn't Scared of Them, They Were Scared of Me”: Constructions of Self/Other in a Midwestern Hair Salon ', Anthropology and Education Quarterly35(2): 167—88 .
51.
Majors, Y. (2006) ` Shoptalk in the Classroom: The Community Socialization of African American Youth in a Language Arts Class ', Paper presented at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, Nashville, TN, November 2006.
52.
Majors, Y. and Orellana, M. (2003) ` Envisioning Texts or Reading the Other ', Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 2003.
53.
Mercer, K. (1990) `Black Hair/Style Politics', in R. Ferguson (ed.) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
54.
Miller, P.J. , Potts, R. , Fung, H. , Hoogstra, L. and Mintz, J. (1990) ` Narrative Practices and the Social Construction of Self in Childhood ', American Ethnologist17: 292—311 .
55.
Moll, L.C. (1992) ` Bilingual Classroom Studies and Community Analysis: Some Recent Trends ', Educational Researcher21(2): 20—4 .
56.
Morgan, M. (1998) `More Than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and Verbal Genres in African American Culture', in S.S. Mufwene , J.R. Rickford and G. Bailey (eds) African-American English: Structure, History, and Use, pp. 251—81. New York : Routledge .
57.
Ochs, E. (1990) `Indexing Gender', in A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, pp. 336—58. Cambride: Cambridge University Press .
58.
Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
59.
Phelan, P. , Davidson, A. and Cao Yu, H. (1998) Adolescents' Worlds: Negotiating Family, Peers, and School. New York: Teachers College Press .
60.
Philips, S. (1972) `Participant Structures and Communicative Competence: Warm Springs Children in Community and Classrooms', in C.B. Cazden , V.P. John and D. Hymes (eds) Functions of Language in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press .
61.
Rabinowitz, P. (1987) Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press .
62.
Rogoff, B. (1995) `Observing Sociocultural Activity on Three Planes: Participatory Appropriation, Guided Participation, and Apprenticeship', in J.V. Wertsch , P. del Rio and A. Alvarez (eds) Sociocultural Studies of Mind, pp. 139—64. New York: Cambridge University Press .
63.
Rooks, N. (1996) Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press .
64.
Schank, R.C. and Abelson, R. (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .
65.
Smitherman, G. (2000) Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America. London: Routledge .
66.
Street, B. (2000) ` New Literacies in Theory and Practice: What are the Implications for Language in Education? ', Linguistics in Education10: 1—24 .
67.
Swidler, A. (2001) Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
68.
Tharp, R. and Gallimore, R. (1988) Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning and Schooling in Social Context. New York: Cambridge University Press .
69.
Thompson, J. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
70.
Tucker-Raymond, E. (2006) Mediated: A Collaborative Action Research Group on Critical Media Literacy. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, Chicago .
71.
Tyler, B. (1990) ` Black Hairstyles: Cultural and Socio-Political Implications ', Western Journal of Black Studies14: 4 .
72.
Van Den Broek, P.W. (1994) `Comprehension of Narrative Texts: Inference Processes and the Construction of Coherence', in M.A. Gersbacher (ed.) Handbook of Psycholinguistics, pp. 539—88. San Diego: Academic Press .
73.
Van Dijk, T. (1977) Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman .
74.
Van Dijk, T. (1993) ` Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis ', Discourse & Society4: 249—83 .
75.
Wertsch, J. (1985) Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
76.
Wodak, R. (1996) Disorders of Discourse. London : Longman .
77.
Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds) (2001) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage .
