Abstract
Many of the literacies students possess go unnoticed or untapped in schools. In some cases, these hidden literacies are not seen or valued because they are not viewed as appropriate or relevant in relation to officially sanctioned, school-based literacies. The literature has shown that these hidden literacies are indeed valuable and relevant and need to be recognized and utilized, yet they continue to hide out in classrooms. Drawing on the body of work on hidden literacies and the metaphor of camouflage, this case study details hidden literacy practices during classroom literacy events in an English language arts classroom. Vignettes are presented featuring three different focal students actively hiding literacies through three different means—covering up, lying low, and blending in. This article suggests that looking for and focusing on instances of hiding in plain sight during literacy events can expose telling juxtapositions between students’ full repertoire of literacy practices, in the foreground, and the “appropriate” or normative literacy practices of schools, or backgrounds, against which they disappear.
Keywords
The birds were everywhere, five and six in a flock, and their camouflage was so perfect that it was possible for Brian to sit and rest, leaning against a tree, with one of them standing right in front of him in a willow clump, two feet away—hidden—only to explode into deafening flight just when Brian least expected it. He just couldn’t see them, couldn’t figure out how to locate them before they flew, because they stood so perfectly still and blended in so perfectly well.
Sociocultural researchers have shown that literacies are everywhere (Gee, 1996; Street, 1995). Yet, at times, literacies can be as difficult to spot as the birds described in the epigraph from the novel Hatchet. Like the birds, students’ literacies may be hidden or hiding out (Dyson, 2008; Finders, 1997; Moje, 2000). In some cases, students’ literacies are hidden because they are enacted beyond the walls of the school in homes and community spaces (Smith & Wilhelm, 2004) or beneath the gaze of teachers in the underlife or off-stage regions of the classroom or school building (Finders, 1997). In other instances, literacies are hiding out in the sense that marginalized or unsanctioned practices of students, not valued or considered appropriate, simply disappear against the backdrop of the sanctioned in the classroom context (Moje, 2000). In other cases children’s unofficial literacy resources are hidden, or sidelined, because of the regularizing pressure of the official school curriculum (Dyson, 2008).
Literacy researchers who have uncovered the existence of students’ hidden literacies in classrooms have detailed the sophisticated natures and functions of those literacies that sometimes go unseen or are overlooked. They have also demonstrated or alluded to the relevance of such literacies to school-based literacies, while at the same time acknowledging the difficulties of integrating unsanctioned or unofficial literacies. These researchers have issued impassioned calls to recognize, value, and utilize a broader range of students’ literacies in classrooms. However, despite a preponderance of research evidence documenting their existence and usefulness, and pleas to open up classrooms to a broader range of students’ literacies, too often these “hidden literacies” continue to go unnoticed, underappreciated, and untapped in classrooms (Dyson, 2008; Finders, 1997; Mahiri, 2004).
As the epigraph suggests, though, spotting something that is hiding out or hidden can be a difficult task. In this article, I draw on sociocultural research on hidden literacies and, using a metaphor of camouflage, explore the difficulties associated with being able to locate that which may be hiding out. I consider whether recognizing hidden literacies in classrooms may present many of the same difficulties that spotting a speckled bird, standing perfectly still in a willow bush, did for Brian. I argue that identifying instances of student literacies hiding in plain sight, and more fully theorizing the act of hiding, will expand literacy researchers’ understanding of why some of the literacies students bring to school remain hidden from view and unused in classrooms as well as suggest possible avenues for rendering them more visible.
Background
Many researchers have sought to understand better the nature of cultural and linguistic resources linked to historically marginalized characteristics or identities. This research has generated important knowledge related to the specific nature of students’ resources beyond school (Faulstich Orellana, Dorner, & Pulido, 2003; González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005), the value of those resources in school spaces (Dyson, 1989, 1997, 2003, 2008), and the means by which teachers and schools might change classroom contexts so as to achieve a more productive and equitable alignment between home and school learning (Moll & Diaz, 1987; Moll & Greenburg, 1990). These studies, influenced by views of literacy as social practice (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000; New London Group, 1996; Street, 1995), have provided insights into the nature of literacy and a wealth of evidence detailing the sophistication, breadth, and adaptive flexibility of all students’ literate practices across contexts.
This research has contributed to the identification of distinctions between different types of literacies, or sets of literacy practices, across domains and communities of practice. New literacy studies researchers have identified, labeled, and studied a flock of heretofore named literacies including popular literacies (Dyson, 2003), African American literacies (Ball & Lardner, 2005; Richardson, 2003), “gansta” literacies (Moje, 2000), and hidden literacies (Finders, 1997). They have suggested that teachers discuss the ideological nature of literacies explicitly with students (Finders, 1997), urged teachers to create permeable curricula in which students are able to utilize unofficial literacies to learn official ones (Dyson, 2003), and advocated and demonstrated using students’ out-of-school and vernacular literacies as teaching resources in the classroom (Mahiri, 2004).
At the same time these studies have documented the multiple and sophisticated literacy practices of students both inside and outside of schools, they have often characterized the relationship between in-school and out-of-school literacies as tension filled. These studies have illustrated the political nature of literacies by demonstrating how students’ literacies are often marginalized, silenced, dismissed, driven underground, and sidelined in schools and classrooms. Students’ literacies in these studies are frequently described as “other.” That is, they are labeled as underground, out-of-school, unofficial, and unsanctioned and are defined in relationship to abstract, vaguely referenced “official” counterparts such as academic or school-based literacies.
Research has revealed many insights into the nature of the relationship between literacies and the contexts in which they are enacted. One important insight is that contextual conditions or circumstances may contribute to students’ literate resources or literacies being overlooked, dismissed, or ignored in the classroom. In fact, many studies that appropriate a multiliteracies perspective have referenced the hidden nature of students’ literacies (Dyson, 2008; Finders, 1997; Moje, 2000). Students’ literacies and literacy practices, when enacted in school contexts or compared with academic literacies, have been characterized as unofficial, unsanctioned, or vernacular and been said to be hidden—lurking in the wings, offstage, and in the margins as part of the underlife of classrooms.
Literacy as “hidden” has taken on multiple meanings in the literature. As I have already suggested it can mean literally “not seeable” as a result of engagement in distant, secretive, covert, or deceptive practices, sometimes though not always intended to obscure or misrepresent literacy; “hidden” has also meant simply not being seen as valuable, appropriate, or relevant in the domain of school. Hidden literacies, then, are also those that are viewed as “other” in relation to the domain of school and school-based literacy practices (Derrida, 1978). They are what is not school based, is not sanctioned in school, and does not belong officially to the domain of school. Dyson (2008) suggested that language arts teachers, educational policy makers, and literacy researchers must embrace policies and practices that foster a mutual interplay between the official and the unofficial in classrooms. This, she argued, would require looking beyond the official spotlight to the symbolic and social activity on the curricular sidelines; for it is there that teachers and literacy researchers have often found evidence of children’s complex literacy practices “hidden in full view” (p. 120).
Camouflage as Metaphor
The birds, foolbirds as Paulsen (1987) refers to them in the novel—grouse, he explains in an author’s note—that eluded Brian in the epigraph beginning this article, evaded detection through camouflage. For foolbirds, hiding in plain sight was contingent on a durable set of physical characteristics including colorations and patterning so that when they positioned themselves, against surroundings with specific characteristics, and behaved in particular ways, they became difficult to differentiate from the background against which they were situated. For instance, when a mottled grouse stood perfectly still in the center of a bush with colors and patterns similar to its own, it seemed simply to disappear into and become visually subsumed by the bush.
Metaphor is often used as a way to explain new understandings and experiences by comparing them to the familiar or to “shift our understandings about something that we know by reframing how we see it” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 99). By means of metaphor people move meanings from one context into another to explain the unknown (Chandler, as cited in MacNaughton, 2005). For this reason I draw on metaphor as a tactic (Derrida, 1978). The metaphor of camouflage becomes a lens through which to examine the relationship between literacies and contexts as they relate to hiding. It focuses attention on the interplay between context, in this case the classroom, and student literacies that are there but hiding in plain sight.
Understanding hiding in plain sight in terms of camouflage relies on one knowing that in the animal kingdom camouflage is a process that can function to disguise or distort an animal’s appearance to evade detection. Animals who are camouflaged are often in plain sight, and yet through juxtaposition an animal in the foreground can be challenging to see because it seemingly disappears against a particular background. Scientists who study camouflage in the animal kingdom have learned a great deal about how it is accomplished (Hanlon, 2008). They have found that achieving effective camouflage requires a suite of appropriate actions by an animal. The animal must sense the local environment, filter that sensory input, use selected sensory input to make a behavioral decision, direct the appropriate effectors to achieve some form of camouflage, and implement the appropriate behavior to render the camouflage effective.
Here, I borrow the construct of camouflage to help reveal ways in which students’ literacy practices hid or were hiding in plain sight. However, utilizing a biological construct taken from the natural world and applying it, even metaphorically, to children in classrooms has its limitations. I am not intending in any way to evoke comparisons between the behavior of children and the behavior of animals. Nor is my intent to construct students’ hiding as a physical accomplishment. Instead, I am relying on common understandings of camouflage to illustrate and articulate the situated particularities and social complexities of episodes of literacy hiding in plain sight in this classroom.
In what follows, then, literacies that are hiding in plain sight are theorized as camouflaged to consider more fully literacies hidden in classrooms. Viewing literacies through the lens of camouflage helps literacy researchers look at how students, in the context of schooling, might be actively and strategically hiding so that their full range of literate resources disappear against the backdrop of the classroom. Furthermore, it leads researchers to theorize ways in which the context of school might provoke children to hide. Using three vignettes drawn from a case study of one English language arts classroom, I address three questions: What literacies are hiding out in this classroom? How are these literacies hidden? When hidden literacies are spotted, what is revealed about the relationships between those literacies and the context of schooling?
Method
Qualitative case study methodology (Yin, 2008) was used to study hiding in plain sight during an integrated novel study unit in a sixth grade urban English language arts classroom. This methodology was chosen because of its usefulness in describing and unraveling the particularities and complexities in situ of abstract social phenomena.
Setting and Participants
This case study was conducted at Hoyt Middle School (pseudonym). Hoyt is one of four middle schools in an urban school district located in a midsized Midwestern city. The student body at Hoyt Middle is composed almost entirely of African American students from poor and working-class homes. During the year of this study, Hoyt was in its fifth consecutive year of failure to meet adequate yearly progress as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Not surprisingly, concern about preparing students to take and pass the state assessments, called LEAP tests, was an ever-present and highly visible pressure in the lives of Hoyt teachers and administrators.
Ms. Wagner (pseudonym) is a teacher at Hoyt and the focal teacher in this study. She is a European American woman, who at the time of the study had taught at Hoyt her entire 12-year teaching career and now manages many roles and responsibilities there. Ms. Wagner, an English language arts teacher, said she “tried to always use best practices” in her teaching and worked hard to stay abreast of and align her instruction with current federal, state, and district curricular expectations for sixth grade language arts.
The students featured in the case study were the members of an accelerated sixth grade English language arts class at Hoyt. According to their teacher, Ms. Wagner, students for this accelerated class had been hand selected by the sixth grade teaching team because of their relatively high test scores, good attitudes, and supportive home environments. Of the 24 students in the class, 16 were females and 8 were males. Of the students, 22 were African American. The other 2 students, both girls, were of European American descent.
Data Collection
Data collection in Ms. Wagner’s classroom began in January 2006 and ended in June 2006. The focal integrated novel unit revolved around the reading of the young adult adventure novel, Hatchet. Primary data sources included field notes from classroom observations, instructional artifacts, interviews, and students’ literacy products. In all, 25 class sessions were observed and recorded by video. All video data were transcribed in their entirety. I adopted the researcher stance of participant observer throughout my time in the classroom, most often operating recording equipment and taking field notes, but also occasionally answering questions and assisting students with assignments and having informal conversations about all manner of topics with Ms. Wagner.
Analysis Through Metaphor
Data analysis for this project began in the field during data collection as I made and refined decisions about the nature and purpose of the study. In some cases, the impact of those decisions and the evolution of new insights were captured in the observer comment sections of the field notes. In one case especially relevant to data analysis, a new object of study was identified. I did not enter this site knowing that I would eventually be detailing and theorizing the phenomenon of hiding in plain sight. My original intent was to study how a teacher was utilizing students’ cultural and linguistic resources in her teaching. However, as the data were collected, I became increasingly puzzled by what I was not seeing as I observed in this classroom. One afternoon, as I observed and took field notes in a corner, students took turns reading aloud from Hatchet. As they read, my focus began to shift back and forth among three scenes. The first scene was the one being created by the author, Gary Paulsen, in the chapter being read. The second was the one being enacted at the moment in this particular language arts classroom. The third scene—the one that seemed to run a constant, endless, nagging loop in my brain—depicted the need and the struggle to learn to recognize, value, and utilize all students’ cultural and linguistic resources in schools.
In the chapter the author was describing Brian’s desperate quest to capture the foolbirds for food. He knew they were there, and yet they continued to elude him because they were so well camouflaged. In the classroom scene 21 students, 12 or 13 years of age, sat at their desks exhibiting varying degrees of either compliance with the norms or interest in the activity of the moment—reading aloud from the novel, Hatchet. As I looked out at them I thought of students’ cultural and linguistic resources and the relationship between those resources and the literacy activity in which they were participating right then. And I thought, where are they? Where are these unique resources? How do they figure into what is going on right now in this classroom? Why are these resources so hard to spot?
In that moment I felt like Brian did when he was hunting foolbirds. He knew those birds were everywhere, and he was desperate to spot them, but he simply could not figure out how. As I sat in that room and watched those students, I thought about the things they probably knew and could do and about how many of those things, though closer and more useful than one might ever imagine, often went unnoticed. But like Brian I was coming to realize that despite knowing they were there and wanting and trying to see them, actually doing so was not necessarily such an easy task. And so, I began to search for new ways to see what I knew must be there.
I studied and coded the data to understand the phenomenon of hiding in plain sight. Literacy events were identified and coded: sustained silent reading, whole-class read-alouds, journal writing, literature circles, and composing. Student participation in those events was also characterized. I paid particular attention to patterns of student participation—how they were participating and for what purposes. Considering camouflage to investigate the theme of hiding in plain sight, I coded the data for appearance of nonparticipation that was participation and appearance of participation that was nonparticipation. These preliminary codes led to the identification of the phenomenon of hiding in plain sight and the means for accomplishing that hiding, namely, the categories of covering up, lying low, and blending in.
Description of Focal Students
In the “Findings” section that follows, the phenomenon of hiding in plain sight is illuminated through three vignettes based on my analysis of the data. The vignettes featured three focal students: Keairra, Tatianna, and Jamal.
Keairra, an African American girl who usually wore her shoulder-length hair straight, was relatively short and slight in comparison to many of her classmates. In class she routinely sat and worked with the same two or three girls with whom she seemed to talk and laugh with ease. She participated regularly and voluntarily in whole-class read-alouds, literature circles, and other class activities, but not excessively or overenthusiastically. Keairra completed and turned in work consistently. She also tended to comply with the teacher’s instructions, especially when the teacher was looking, but Keairra also liked to play and talk with friends particularly beneath the notice of the teacher.
Tatiana was a tall, thin African American girl who always appeared carefully dressed and coifed. She had an air of maturity and responsibility and seemed eager to please adults. She reported to me in an interview that she liked to draw and write. She said she especially enjoyed writing poetry and that she once won first prize, $500, in a poetry contest. Tatiana wrote prolifically in class and shared her writing frequently—in fact, at almost every opportunity. She was recognized by her peers as a compelling storyteller and seemed explicitly to attend to her audience when sharing stories.
Jamal, an African American boy, was a big kid, the tallest of all of the kids in the class and mature looking. He typically wore his long afro braided tightly against his head and dressed in the baggy style popular among youth today. He wore white, leather Nike tennis shoes—laces untied and tucked in—and a blue plastic band on his right wrist that read LeBron, referring to LeBron James, a basketball player for Cleveland. Jamal liked sports and used his silent sustained reading time flipping through issues of Sports Illustrated. Jamal was also frequently absent, and on the rare occasions when he was in class he seemed tired or bored or both. I never saw Jamal participate in class voluntarily, but he most certainly did engage with his peers on the sidelines.
Each of the three following vignettes illustrates an instance of a student actively and strategically hiding in plain sight. Analysis of vignettes reveals the means by which students achieved hiding and the nature of the literacies, that is, literacy practices, knowledge, or competencies being hidden though their actions. The vignettes also show how students actively hide literacies as a strategic response to their reading of the classroom context. In the first vignette Keairra is exposed as a pleasure reader. Next, Jamal is caught playing with figurative language during class time. And finally, Tatiana’s attempts to be a good student and writer are uncloaked.
Findings: Literacies Hiding in Plain Sight
Vignette 1—Pleasure Reader: Covering Up
The first 10 minutes of each class session in Ms. Wagner’s classroom was sustained silent reading (SSR) time. With no prompting from their teacher, students were supposed to enter the classroom, find something to read, and begin reading silently. They could bring something of their own, or they could select something to read from one of the two or three baskets of books and magazines at the front of the classroom or from the small metal bookshelf located in the back corner of the room. Students could find a variety of reading materials to choose from in the classroom including young adult novels, popular sports magazines, and Disney-inspired picture books. SSR was a routine literacy event in which hidden literacies sometimes lurked.
Patterns of participation during SSR in this class were somewhat difficult to characterize because there was quite a bit of variability both across students and from session to session. Students were generally quiet and relatively still during the 10-minute period, yet the amount of sustained reading that was actually accomplished across the class each day seemed somewhat minimal. Despite what seemed like generally low engagement, overall, some students tended to be more likely to read for a greater proportion of the time each day than others. Those students typically brought in their own reading materials, read longer, more sophisticated books, and spent less of the SSR time transitioning in and out of reading. For example, Paris, one of the students who appeared on a daily basis to be the most consistently on-task, once read from the first minute to the last of every session for several days from a 100-page nonfiction book she had checked out from the public library titled, Behind the Eyes of Juvenile Delinquents. The same day Paris had spent more than 9 minutes of the period reading that book, though, one of her peers, Keairra, had spent only approximately 2 of the 10 minutes reading a Junie B. Jones book, an early reader chapter book series featuring a kindergarten to first grade protagonist.
This was not unusual for Keairra. On most days she was slow to find something to read. She would spend a lot of time settling in. She might organize and reorganize her things, touch base with her friends at the table, and lotion up her hands before she would rise and wander back to the shelf where she took an equally long time selecting something to take back to her seat. In fact Keairra often exhausted the entire 10 minutes without ever reading a word. On the occasions she did actually make it to her seat with something to read it was frequently after her teacher urged her to “find something quickly.” Her reading choices tended to be picture books based on Disney movies such as Little Mermaid and Pocahontas or beginning chapter books such as Junie B. Jones. Once she had a book either she would open it on her desk, slide way down in her seat, and with her elbow on the edge of the desk and her chin in her hand, flip though each page with a uninterested look on her face or she would prop the book up so it was standing up on its bottom edge and duck her head behind it so she could whisper back and forth to the girls next to and across from her.
One day during SSR at the beginning of third hour, I noticed that Keairra seemed more focused and intent than was typical for her. She had come directly into the classroom, moved right to her desk, and immediately began reading. What she was reading was not visible because it was sandwiched between a folder and a notebook. Whatever it was, though, she was definitely engrossed. She was sitting up in her chair, with her upper body and left arm draped across the desk, head resting on her upper arm. She talked to no one. She turned page after page and scanned across the pages with her eyes. She stopped reading only to readjust the folder and to look around, seemingly to keep tabs on the teacher’s location in the room. When SSR was over and students were asked to put their books away, Keairra just kept on reading. When papers were passed out, Keairra ignored them and read on. She read the entire period, pausing only to deal minimally with what was being asked of her by the teacher. Then the lunch bell rang. She arranged her notebook and folder on top of the book she had left open and face down on her desk. She exited the classroom with the other students, glancing back at her desk once as she passed through the door.
I was intrigued by the profound difference in the way Keairra was participating in SSR on this day as compared to her typical engagement in the activity. I had to know what was motivating this impassioned display of literacy. I had tried to get a look at the title of the book she was reading during class, but was not able to because it was covered up. Now that students were at lunch, though, I walked over to her desk to see what I could see. Lying on Keairra’s desk was a novel well over an inch thick. The cover had a drawing of two glistening, half-naked, Black lovers wrapped around each other and the title read, Chocolate Flava: Erotica noir. As I noted the title of the book, I thought, “So, Keairra is a pleasure reader after all.”
Covering up exposed
For most of one class period, Keairra surreptitiously read erotica during SSR by employing the mechanism of covering up. Secretly reading a book with sexually explicit content is an example of hiding “unsanctioned” (Finders, 1997) or inappropriate literacies in the classroom (Moje, 2000). It also demonstrates the ideological nature of students’ literacies and the challenge integrating those literacies in school spaces can present (Finders, 1997). Discovering a sixth grader reading sexually explicit material is disquieting. It immediately raised a number of difficult questions for me, as I’m sure it would for most adults. Where did she get the book? Should I confront her about it? Should I tell her teacher? Indeed, I wondered what was best for Keairra as well as what my ethical obligations were as a researcher under the circumstances.
I also wondered what might be possible or advisable for Keairra’s teacher to do had she been the one to see what I did. I imagined myself as Keairra’s teacher and saw myself mentioning casually to Keairra that I had noticed her latest reading interest (so she would get the idea she probably shouldn’t bring the book back to class) and at the same time passing along several works of romantic fiction (ideally featuring African American characters) written for middle school readers for her to read during SSR. Such secretive enactments were not entirely unique to Keairra. Over the course of the novel study unit, I caught several glimpses of this kind of hiding during various literacy events. For example, I witnessed notes being passed on the sly while students were supposed to be reading independently. I saw fashion comic strips being created in the margins of worksheets. I watched as rap lyrics were composed on the down-low during journaling sessions. I never again saw Keairra with that particular book, though, or any other book like it.
Keairra and other students engaged in secretive literacy practices were sometimes able to accomplish hiding by literally covering up or distorting the appearance of aspects of unsanctioned practices to pass them off as, or conceal them within the midst of, sanctioned events. Keairra, was able to hide the type of text she had self-selected for the day—a type she surely suspected would be considered unsanctioned, or inappropriate, for her to have and to read at school—by carefully and strategically keeping the front, back, and spine of the book covered by folders. However, this instance of hiding revealed more than a student concealing an erotic text. It also exposed Keairra as a pleasure reader—a characteristic of her literate self that was regularly hiding in plain sight against the backdrop of the classroom.
Foregrounding the background: Keairra reads the context
Upon turning my attention to Keairra’s routine participation in SSR, I would discover an even more telling instance of hiding that I had previously overlooked. Keairra had actually been hiding in plain sight during SSR on most days. On one day Keairra actively covered up erotica noir, a genre she likely knew would be considered inappropriate for a sixth grader and, therefore, unsanctioned at school. Each class session, though, Keairra consistently read in full view of everyone, without making any attempt to cover up, texts like Junie B. Jones. These texts, targeting early beginning readers, were also inappropriate choices for Keairra, a sixth grader reading at grade level, because they were written well below her independent reading level. What’s more, Keairra engaged in SSR in a manner that drew no attention, yet included refraining on a daily basis from participating in SSR in the fully engaged way she exhibited when reading Chocolate Flava. In fact, when compared to the stated goals and benefits of the practice of SSR, namely, developing personal reading tastes and preferences, a daily reading habit, enjoyment of reading, and the ability to read for uninterrupted periods of time (Pilgreen, 2000; Tompkins, 2006), Chocolate Flava, the inappropriate and unsanctioned text, seemed a better choice, at least for meeting the goals of SSR, than the inappropriate but sanctioned texts Keairra typically read.
Keairra’s ability to read and interpret the nuances of the classroom context and the literacy event enabled her, and even seemed to entice her, to hide herself as a reader in the classroom. She knew what was sanctioned and unsanctioned during SSR. She had learned through participation and attention who could and could not do what to escape notice or reprimand. For instance, she showed, during her typical participation, that she knew she could whisper a little, but not talk too much or too loudly. She knew she could delay or pretend to be reading but not refrain from appearing to read altogether. But she also knew somehow that it was acceptable for her to unenthusiastically flip through a book written for first graders in full view of her teacher and peers. Her atypical participation demonstrated that she also understood that during SSR one could read something brought in from outside the classroom, read in a silent, sustained, engaged, way, and even continue to sneak in some reading once the whole-group instruction started, but not openly read a sexually explicit text, no matter the reading level. Understanding these factors, through reading and interpreting the classroom context, was an essential part of the process of hiding in plain sight.
Ironically, what led to the uncloaking of Keairra’s hidden literacies was not something unexpected in a general sense. She was actually reading in a sustained, engaged way. For Keairra, though, participating in this way was uncharacteristic, and for that reason her completely typical-looking participation was noticed. That is, noticed by me, an outsider. It went unnoticed by her teacher. However, being suspicious of students’ appropriate participation is rarely at the top of a busy teacher’s list of priorities. So it would have been difficult, even for a skillful student of the classroom environment like Keairra, to anticipate how an outsider like me, an extraneous adult with a dubious role, might affect the mix. Certainly, she didn’t imagine someone might actually spot her reading this once during reading time, think it odd, and expose her as a pleasure reader.
Vignette 2—Artful Orator: Lying Low
One activity that was commonplace in this language arts classroom was whole-class read-alouds. Although, this routine varied occasionally, this usually meant that the teacher would select a student to read, and that student would read aloud until the teacher chose another student to continue. One afternoon while a student was reading aloud Ms. Wagner stepped in to call students’ attention to a sentence in the novel.
“Okay, wait a minute. Look up where it says, in the middle of that paragraph, ‘the tops were all down rotted and gone, leaving the trees pointing into the wind like broken teeth.’” A student offered, “That is a simile.”
Following the student’s comment, Ms. Wagner delivered a mini lesson to the class about figurative language—especially three types of figurative language, similes, metaphors, and idioms—that included students copying definitions into their journals. Following the mini lesson Ms. Wagner told the class that she often played a game with students related to similes and metaphors during read-alouds of Hatchet. She explained,
If you see a simile or metaphor you have to wait until it gets to the end of the sentence. The person has to get to the end of the sentence. And the first person to raise their hand and they guess it correctly and they have to say simile or metaphor and then they have to tell me what it is. They either get extra credit or a prize whatever we do for that day. Is that something you want to look at for now?
The general consensus seemed to be yes, and the game was afoot. After the final sentence of the fourth paragraph, one or two hands sprung into the air. Ms. Wagner called on Diamond, and she identified “with bark like clean, slightly-speckled paper” as a simile. Next Devon pointed out the phrase “a cloud of sparks rained down,” and Ms. Wagner helped him out by providing him with the label, idiom. Students were really getting into the game of identifying similes and metaphors in the text during the read-aloud. A flock of hands was constantly waving in the air.
Up until that point in the game, Ms. Wagner had called on only people who were raising their hands to identify the figurative language. Now, however, Ms. Wagner turned her attention to students on the margins of both the physical classroom space and participation in the metaphor game. She called on Jamal, a student who had not been an active participant (or giving the activity his undivided attention) and had not volunteered to identify the figurative language.
Jamal’s example was relatively complicated. The text read, “The red glow moved from the sparks themselves into the bark, moved and grew and became worms, glowing red worms that crawled up the bark hairs and caught other threads of bark.”
Ms. W: Glowing red? Glowing red worms that crawled up, what is that? Jamal, what do you think it is? Jamal?
Jamal: What?
Ms. W: Look at the first line. He’s making tendrils, he’s saying they moved and grew and became worms, glowing red worms that crawled up the bark hairs and caught other threads of bark and grew. So it’s saying something turned into worms. Is that a simile, a metaphor, or an idiom?
Jamal: I don’t know.
Ms. W: What is worms? What is he saying is worms?
Jamal: The sparks.
Ms. W: So sparks are like worms, but it doesn’t have the words like, as, or than. So, what is it?
Jamal: An idiom?
Ms. W: No what’s the other one? Similes and metaphors are the opposite. So simile uses like, as, or than and if it doesn’t have it, it’s a what? It’s a what?
Jamal: Metaphor.
Jamal had answered correctly, but someone else at his table had fed him the answer. Ms. Wagner seemed to be becoming increasingly frustrated that she was having trouble getting and keeping Jamal’s attention even though she was focused entirely on doing so.
Ms. W: You’re not listening. You’re not listening. Now, who can explain to Jamal what the difference is. Why is an idiom different? You need to listen. Paris, what do you think?
Paris: An idiom is a sentence that don’t make sense.
Ms. W: But it’s popular. We all hear it. It’s raining cats and dogs. Is this statement popular that sparks turn into worms? Do we all say that?
Student: No.
Ms. W: Jamal, are you listening?
Tyrone: [answering for Jamal] No, he’s talkin’ about my momma.
Throughout this individualized, but far from private, tutoring session Ms. Wagner insisted Jamal needed to listen. Her insistence that Jamal listen, needed to listen, wasn’t listening seemed to suggest the reason he did not understand the concepts of figurative language she was teaching was due to inattention. In fact, though, Jamal’s issues had more to do with managing the demands and priorities of attending.
Jamal had been listening. But he’d been listening to, attending to, and adjusting his participation in two games at one time—the whole-class game led by the teacher and the game of snaps being played by the students, including Tyrone, seated at his table. Snaps, or snappin’, is a verbal game of ritual insult played in African American discourse communities. It has been part of the Black oral tradition in America for generations. Snappin’, as the kids in this class referred to it, included barbs related to mothers or other relatives (also called playing the dozens) as well as those aimed directly at their opponent (sometimes called signifying). Like the novel-related game snappin’ is also a competitive, rule-governed activity. “One-upmanship is the goal of this oral contest,” (Smitherman, 2000, p. 224), and to be good in the game your snaps must be exaggerated, employ metaphorical language, and be delivered immediately and spontaneously. The game is played in front of appreciative audiences who are secondary participants in that they laugh and encourage snappers to increasingly up the ante. Joining in the laughter of the audience provides the loser of the game a face-saving way to end and cede the competition to the winner.
Throughout nearly the entire episode during which many of his peers were identifying and naming the similes and metaphors of the author, Jamal and the other boys at his table had been hurling an array of ingenious linguistic creations of their own at one another. Their game had been on the down-low, though. And until Jamal’s interchange with Ms. Wagner, and Tyrone’s revelation that Jamal was “talkin’ about his momma,” they had kept it that way. However, what was also hidden, even when the game had been exposed, was Jamal’s expertise at metaphorical expression. Instead he was judged a nonlistener, while his knowledge and use of figurative language remained undetected.
Lying low exposed
As Jamal demonstrated through playing the dozens, another mechanism for escaping detection that students employed in this classroom was lying low. Lying low was often characterized by behaviors such as sitting on the periphery of the group, keeping voice levels low, avoiding eye contact with the teacher, participating minimally in whole-group activities, and communicating with peers through subtle gestures. Sometimes students employed these methods to hide a particular activity as in the case of the game of snappin’ played during whole-group instruction. But in other cases, lying low was more of a typical way of being in class that was not designed to cover anything specific, rather was an attempt to keep from being noticed generally. This type of lying low, though, also ultimately had the effect of hiding students’ literacies by withholding what they did know and were able to do.
Lying low was a tricky and uncertain business. Students in the act of lying low sometimes appeared, and were perceived by the teacher, to be off task, unengaged, or uninterested in literacy learning. Although sometimes this was true, it sometimes was not true, or at least not the whole truth. This instance of hiding the game of snappin’ revealed more than a student secretly goofing off with friends, however. It also exposed characteristics of Jamal’s literate self that were hiding in plain sight against the backdrop of the classroom.
Foregrounding the background: Jamal reads the context
Lying low required constant vigilance and a capacity to read and interpret the signs in the context that might signal the need to adjust the way lying low was being enacted or the possibility that exposure was imminent. However, even determined students, skilled at lying low, were sometimes thrust into the spotlight. Students lying low were noticed when their behavior wandered from or violated norms for participation in novel-related activities. As the above examples show, that divergence from norms of participation occasionally camouflaged student literacy practices that actually converged with the classroom literacy goals in important, though not always immediately obvious, ways. Frequently, what was perceived as unrelated to academic literacies or as having nothing to do with literacy at all were in fact literacies that shared many elements with classroom literacy. The simultaneous enactment of the Hatchet-related metaphor game and the game of snappin’ is an example of such related literacies hiding in plain sight.
Though these two activities diverged in a variety of ways, they also had many things in common. Both were goal-directed activities that took the form of a contest or game. Each was governed by culturally constructed rules and norms. Each related to one’s knowledge of or competence with figurative language. In the snappin’ game students were engaged in a shared cultural practice among many African Americans. The game was a social contest that was serving the purpose of creating solidarity and bringing pleasure. These students learned to play this game through observation and participation in a community of practice. The competent snapper must be fast, responsive, and clever. Above all, the winner of a game of snaps must know how to use figurative language in a way that impresses and entertains an audience of onlookers. The admiration of others and the satisfaction of out-talking another are the spoils of the game.
The metaphor game was also a contest and a shared cultural practice related to competence with figurative language. Students may have had experience playing games like this in the context of school; in this sense it was a shared cultural practice. Ms. Wagner also explicitly explained several rules related to the game. The goal of this game was to pick figurative language out of a text and to practice distinguishing and labeling that figurative language as one of three types. The stated purpose for practicing with these three types of figurative language was for students to improve their writing by being able to create more vivid images for readers. In this game, the teacher identified a winner for each instance of figurative language encountered in the chapter. Winners in this game also had to be fast. They had to know the three labels of figurative language—metaphor, simile, and idiom. They had to get identified as first by the teacher so they could give an answer. The rewards that motivated participation in game-play may have included accruing status through academic prowess, enjoying competition, creating solidarity—with the teacher and other participating peers—and accumulating extra credit points.
Neither Jamal nor Ms. Wagner, however, seemed to discern any relationship between the game of snappin’ and the text-related identification activity. If they had, perhaps Jamal might have showcased his prowess by signifying on Gary Paulsen or his metaphors and been able to save face by making Ms. Wagner and the others laugh. Or maybe Ms. Wagner might have invited Tyrone to share with the class what Jamal had said about his momma and then asked the class to notice the figurative language in his snap. This would have foregrounded what Jamal could do and exposed ways in which the two “games” were related. Then she could have guided him to label his own snap as a metaphor, simile, or idiom.
Students in the classroom often worked hard to keep their practices to themselves or on the sidelines. Many are well practiced and very skilled at doing so. Most important, however, is that hiding the game also cloaked Jamal’s knowledge of and competence with oral forms of figurative language and his ability and willingness to engage enthusiastically in linguistic play. In the classroom context, where his lying low was usually interpreted as being off task, the relevance of literacies associated with Jamal’s identities as an African American youth and an artful orator remained hiding in plain sight.
Vignette 3—Survival Writer: Blending In
As part of the novel study unit, students routinely wrote in journals, spiral notebooks provided to them by the teacher at the beginning of the unit. Below Ms. Wagner is asking students to compose a journal entry.
Ms. W: Right now in a nice, neat, well-written paragraph I want you to tell me what would be something that you would need in your life right now to survive. That you would feel that you could not survive without. You in your life. Brian has no choice, but you right now, what would you take with you? What would you definitely need to survive in a situation or in your life? Whatever way you want to put it. Something to survive.
After this prompt was given, the students set to writing. Once several people seemed to be finished with their entries, Ms. Wagner asked for volunteers to share their writing. Tatiana was the second student, after Terrence, to share her journal entry.
Tatiana: [reading from her journal] I could not survive without paper, pencils, and a pencil sharpener. I said drawing materials because it keeps me calm and entertained. I know other people would say food or CD players or other things like that but this is what keeps me calm. Drawing material is a definite thing I would have to take.
As was routine during journal sharing events in this classroom, Tatiana’s presentation of her paragraph was followed by teacher feedback about her writing.
Ms. W: Okay, was that six sentences though?
Tatiana: That sounded more like three.
Ms. W: Count your periods.
To Ms. Wagner’s comments regarding the length of her entry, Tatiana replied, “I didn’t know I was supposed to read the whole thing.” Ms. Wagner then invited Tatiana to finish by saying, “That’s fine. Let me hear the rest of what you have.”
Tatiana: [reading] I couldn’t survive with out paper, pencil, and pencil sharpener. I also couldn’t survive without food too. I said drawing material because it keeps me calm. I said food because food is what I live off of. Food and drawing material is very important to me. It might sound weird to other people, but it is definitely not weird to me.
Tatiana’s second journal sharing, this time of the “whole thing,” or the original written text, revealed that Tatiana’s first performance had been an oral adaptation, rather than a literal reading, of her journal entry. In the oral iteration she had omitted the sentence, “I said food because food is what I live off of” as well as the word “food” at the beginning of the next line. She also inserted material, “I know other people would say food or CD player,” that was not included in the original text. Tatiana’s decision to adjust what she shared was motivated and made possible by the previous performance of her classmate, Terrence.
Terrence had raised his hand when Ms. Wagner first asked for volunteers to share their writing. He had been the first student to read his entry aloud. Terrence read the following:
I will need liquid to knock off the thirstiness and food to keep my belly from hurting. I will need all type of weapons for protection and warm clothes so I won’t be cold. I will need my dog to keep me company. I will need tools so I could make a house. Then I will need a t.v. for entertainment. I will need a radio to listen to music and dance, too.
Terrence had read off, in a clear, audible voice, the text he had composed in his journal—a conventionally accurate and correctly punctuated, if not indented, paragraph of exactly six sentences. Terrence had read exactly what he had written down.
Immediately before students began to write Ms. Wagner had reminded them, “Don’t forget to use the rules—indenting, six or more sentences, capitalization, punctuation, higher vocabulary.” Terrence’s performance met most of the salient requirements explicitly included in the prompt. He had listed several reasonable things a 12-year-old would deem critical to his survival, and he had thrown in some “higher vocabulary” such as liquid, protection, and entertainment. As it would turn out, though, there were some implicit requirements that it did not quite satisfy.
Frequently, Ms. Wagner would involve students in the feedback process by structuring her critique as a series of questions addressed to the writer as well as the rest of the class.
Ms. W: Okay, so he gave us a lot of examples didn’t he? If that’s the way you interpreted that’s fine. How many did I ask for though?
Student: One.
Ms. W: So, that’s fine that you did that, but try to zero in on that one, especially for the LEAP tests. When they ask for one, they mean one. They do mean one. So make sure you zero in on one. If I say make a list that’s fine, but if they say one you better stick to one.
Tatiana’s original written journal entry demonstrated that Tatiana, like Terrence, had written about more than one thing needed to survive, drawing material and food. After observing during Terrence’s feedback session, though, Tatiana had new information with which to revise her initial interpretation of the prompt. Now it seemed what mattered most was “zeroing in on one” thing. So she volunteered to share, modifying her text in a way that she assumed would meet the newly clarified expectation. She strategically embellished the written text with oral insertions as she went. She read the first line as written, but then added a line that was not written down: “I know other people would say food or CD player.” She also omitted several sentences related to needing food. Tatiana’s oral addition of this one sentence and omission of written text related to food reflected both her awareness of the content of Terrence’s piece—“other people would say food or CD players”—and her deliberate and careful attention to Ms. Wagner, particularly in terms of newly clarified information about the prompt revealed by the teacher’s critique of Terrence’s paragraph.
Unfortunately, if what Tatiana had hoped to gain by her vigilance to Ms. Wagner’s wishes and skillful adaptations was praise for her writing, she was to be disappointed. Instead, her attempts to respond to the newly clarified expectations would be complicated by her momentary inattention to other explicit requirements. After being tripped up in her attempts to pass off the oral text as the written text by the six-sentence rule, Tatiana had to resort to reading her paragraph in its original form—what Tatiana referred to as the “whole thing.” Interestingly, though, what remained hidden, as Tatiana worked to meet various shifts in focus on the part of the teacher, was her ability to flexibly adapt to the demands of audience in writing.
Blending in exposed
In this episode Tatiana was deliberately attempting to conceal from view the fact that the journal entry she shared with the class was a revised rather than an original response by blending in. She was trying to appear to have written a journal entry that met certain criteria her original entry had in fact not met. Her efforts were guided by attention to teacher feedback given to another student, Terrence. Blending in is similar to covering up in that the goal is to hide something beneath the guise of appropriate participation. The difference between covering up and blending in is that students who are covering up are hiding something that is somehow taboo—like the sexually explicit nature of reading material. With blending in, students are trying to participate appropriately. What they are hiding is something that might jeopardize the appearance of appropriate participation—such as having misunderstood a writing prompt. For Tatiana, blending in required hiding what she came to think of as flaws in her original entry, as well as her efforts to correct them, to project the appearance of appropriate participation. This instance of hiding, however, revealed more than Tatiana’s ability to edit on the fly. It showed how her flexibility and responsiveness to audience in writing remained hidden in plain sight against the backdrop of the classroom.
Foregrounding the background: Tatiana reads the context
Tatiana was actively trying to be a good student and a good writer even as the feedback session was in progress. Tatiana had shared in an interview that she truly enjoyed school and saw herself as a good writer. She said she liked doing the writings Ms. Wagner assigned in this class. She also wrote poems and kept a journal at home. She even expressed an interest in being a writer, as well as an actress and a fashion designer, when she was grown. To perform the roles of good writer and student successfully in the context of the journal sharing event, Tatiana paid attention to Ms. Wagner’s critique of Terrence’s writing. She carefully attended to what the teacher wanted in the moment and tried to anticipate what the teacher would want next. What Tatiana wanted was to perform her identity as a good writer and student well in front of her teacher and her peers. She then raised her hand to perform rather than read her text, which had been adjusted in an attempt to reflect the most current information available about the expectations. Tatiana, though, had misunderstood something important about how her teacher viewed this activity. This is where Tatiana’s plan began to unravel and how her hiding was spotted.
Since Tatiana’s goal was to perform the identity of writer well, she may have hoped Ms. Wagner’s response to her writing would be something like, “Okay, now notice what Tatiana did. She zeroed in on one didn’t she?” Though, Ms. Wagner certainly did not want to discourage Tatiana from wanting to perform good writer and student, she tended to see this event as an opportunity to provide mini instruction through feedback. Toward this end, she regularly pointed out to students that they needed to add more details, that they could have used higher vocabulary, and that they should have included their feelings. Ms. Wagner did occasionally praise students’ writing or use the writing to illustrate what others ought to do during writing sharing events like this one, but she was much more likely to find something for students to improve. This did not mean that Ms. Wagner did not want her students to be good writers, or feel like they were good writers, but in these instructional events she seemed to see her role as needing to push even good writers to be better through critique. Ultimately, Tatiana, with her goal of appearing to be a good writer and student during a journal sharing session by escaping critique, and Ms. Wagner, with the aim of using these opportunities to critique even relatively good writing, were at cross-purposes.
Tatiana aimed to hide in plain sight by blending in. She altered an oral performance to the class of a written journal entry. In doing so, Tatiana hoped to hide “ mistakes ” she had made in her original written entry. Tatiana’s efforts at hiding in plain sight cloaked her initial, completely defensible, interpretation of and response to the writing prompt. Her subterfuge camouflaged her strategic and active engagement in the writing event as well as her awareness of and ability to negotiate tensions associated with addressing audience expectations. Attempting to blend in left Tatiana’s literate actions, informed by a careful reading of context and motivated by a desire to perform identities such as good student, hiding in plain sight.
Discussion and Conclusion
In this article three instances of hiding in plain sight in an English language arts were identified and closely examined. Utilizing the metaphor of camouflage as a lens and lexicon, hiding in plain sight was exposed as a highly literate achievement, revealed to be a purposeful, strategic response to students’ reading of the classroom environment and shown to be dependent on the juxtaposition of foreground and background. In the section that follows, I further discuss each of these findings, including how each contributes to expanding current theoretical understandings and practical implications of hidden literacies research.
A Literate Achievement
When viewed through the lens of camouflage, each instance of hiding in plain sight could be viewed as a literate achievement. That is, to conceal or disguise some aspect, or aspects, of their literacy practices successfully, each student had to carefully and accurately read and interpret the cues in the classroom context. This demanded a high level of attention to and engagement with what was happening in the classroom at any given moment. It also required the student to process and filter multiple pieces of information from various sources quickly, flexibly, and knowledgeably. For example, to both conceal her reading of erotica and escape calling too much attention to her daily habit of low-level reading during SSR, Keairra had to read and interpret and act on very nuanced norms related to what elements of literacy practices were and were not sanctioned in the classroom. Knowing to hide, knowing when to hide, knowing what to hide, knowing whom to hide from, in essence, knowing how to hide, meant first knowing how to read—to read the context.
A Strategic Response
Each instance of hiding in plain sight was a deliberate, strategic, and purposeful response to students’ reading of the classroom environment. Though students had different reasons for hiding and employed varied means—such as covering up or lying low—to do so, the objective was the same—to trick an observer’s eye. Tatiana’s goal, for instance, was to give her teacher and peers the impression that she had initially responded in her journal to the prompt the way it had become clear to her that the teacher wanted—by zeroing in on one item necessary for survival. Tatiana’s decision to hide seemed to be a response to new information about the teacher expectations revealed when Terrence received feedback about his journal entry. Hiding in plain sight, by blending in, was strategically and responsively employed by Tatiana in an attempt to appear to have done in the first place what it was now clear to her the teacher wanted.
A Juxtaposition of Foreground and Background
Each instance of hiding in plain sight also illuminated the importance of the juxtaposition of, or relationship between, foreground and background in the achievement of hiding in plain sight. Students depended on, or took into account, the characteristics and contingencies of the contextual moment to hide intentionally against the background of the classroom. For instance, Keairra was able to hide reading erotica fairly easily against the backdrop of SSR because the unsanctioned practice resembled the sanctioned practice she was hiding in the midst of in so many ways. It likely would have been more difficult for her to hide that practice against the background of the routine practices in her math class or even another kind of practice in her language arts classroom. The juxtaposition of students’ literacy practices against the backdrop of the classroom obscured or distorted their literacies in unintended ways, too. Jamal meant to hide his play with friends from the view of his teacher, but doing so had the unintended effect of hiding his skill at verbal expression and figurative language. The juxtaposition of the foreground and background played a role both in helping students hide their literacy practices and in rendering their practice invisible unintentionally.
Addressing the Challenge of Spotting Foolbirds
In the research literature, hidden literacies have been described as literacy practices that ultimately go unnoticed, untapped, or unappreciated in formal classroom spaces because they are not considered relevant, appropriate, or valuable in relation to school-based literacy learning even though they evidence “children’s agency, symbolic astuteness, and social responsiveness” (Dyson, 2008, p. 155). University-based literacy researchers concerned with valuing and utilizing a broader range of students’ literacy resources and practices have revealed and described “hidden literacies” (Dyson, 2008; Finders, 1997; Moje, 2000). Through their accounts they have shown students to be skillful, adaptive, and agentive users of literacy and provided details of the ways in which hidden literacies are indeed sophisticated, valuable, and relevant; however, they have not explicitly examined or discussed the challenges associated with the task of seeing what’s hidden or hiding. Beginning with an acknowledgment that spotting that which by definition is hidden in classrooms may be challenging, I used the metaphor of camouflage to theorize the ways in which students hide and their literacies are hidden to extend research understandings of why students’ literate practices continue to be underutilized in classrooms.
Researchers who have documented hidden literacies have often uncovered these hidden practices by attending to child and youth literacy practices in out-of-school spaces, such as after-school programs or in unofficial spaces in classrooms—what have variously been referred to as the underlife (Finders, 1997), the underground (Moje, 2000), or off-stage regions (Dyson, 2008) of the classroom. In addition, Dyson (2008) has argued that students’ literacies are frequently hiding in full view. That is, they are perfectly visible yet sidelined, or made invisible, as a result of where the “official school spotlight” shines. Finders (1997) described the active hiding of unsanctioned practices in the underlife of the classroom. Findings of this study, however, highlight the active role students play in instances of hiding in plain sight in official spaces of the classroom. Consequently, I argue that hiding is itself a literate achievement rather than a passive condition. That is, students make decisions about and accomplish hiding by reading and responding to the classroom context. They do more than hide unsanctioned literacy practices in unofficial spaces of the classroom; they employ hiding, or visual camouflage, as a strategic response to their reading of the classroom environment. This choice, to hide or distort the appearance of certain literate practices, not only makes it difficult to see what the students are trying to hide but also can have the unintended effect of rendering other literacies invisible.
Moje (2000) has argued that high school students resist through their literacy practices or opt out of school-based literacy practices altogether. However, based on the findings of this study, I would argue that student practices that might be labeled resistant or disengaged, when viewed through the lens of camouflage, appear to be highly responsive to and engaged with the classroom environment. Hiding in plain sight requires significant knowledge about classroom norms, a nuanced understanding of the literacy context, attention, and vigilance. As Dyson (2008) has suggested, through the context of schooling, young children learn to regularize their literacy practices. The sixth graders in this study responded to the context of schooling through strategically hiding elements of their literate practices. In fact, because students seem to be so responsive and flexibly adaptive to classroom contexts, examining what and how students hide, with an understanding that hiding relies on the juxtaposition of fore- and backgrounds, could reveal a great deal about the characteristics of classrooms that evoke hiding.
This article has drawn on the metaphor of camouflage to describe the dimensions and dynamics of three instances of hiding in plain sight in an English language arts classroom. In each of these instances students were actively strategically hiding in response to a reading of the classroom environment. They hid for different purposes using different means, but in each case their attempts to hide obscured other useful and relevant information about their literate resources and repertoires in part because of the juxtaposition of their literacy practice in the foreground and the official classroom practices against which they were set. Here, I also emphasized the challenges associated with spotting hidden literacies in classrooms. One challenge is recognizing that students may be actively hiding their literacy practices from view. Another is acknowledging that instructional pressures shaping classroom contexts can make seeing the relevance or managing the ideological tensions associated with some literacy practices, like erotica for example, very difficult.
New Questions and Directions for Future Research
These findings raise important questions about language arts students in classrooms. For example, what does it mean that students have learned to view hiding as a useful strategy in classrooms? What about the context of schooling evokes hiding? Why are researchers more able to see the complex nature of children’s literacies, especially children from marginalized groups, in a skateboard park (Petrone, 2010), on a social networking site (Alvermann, 2002), or in a gang neighborhood (Moje, 2000) than in a classroom? Can the metaphor of camouflage help researchers and teachers learn more easily to spot a broader range of students’ literacy practices in classroom contexts? If so, how? If the goal is to draw on students’ cultural and linguistic resources to help them learn school-based literacy, perhaps literacy researchers will need to attend explicitly to what it requires to spot students’ hidden literacy practices against the background of classrooms in which they tend to disappear.
To do this, researchers might more fully consider the range of challenges associated with identifying hidden literacies from the vantage point of the classroom teacher, beginning with recognizing the role that students themselves sometimes play in hiding their literacy practices. University researchers, like me, have conducted much of the research on hidden literacies. University-based researchers, though, have very different roles, responsibilities, and priorities in classrooms than teachers or teacher–researchers do. In addition, the research process itself, including data collection and analysis, provides such researchers with a unique vantage point from which to observe what students do. To understand the challenges that teachers face in spotting hidden literacies in classrooms, university researchers might consider conducting research in association with teachers, designing studies that focus specifically on teachers’ processes of identifying instances of hiding in plain sight or uncovering hidden literacies, or that showcase teachers who are particularly adept at or are presently wrestling with the challenges of spotting hidden literacies. In addition, the research literature could benefit from the contribution of studies conducted by individual teacher–researchers or teacher inquiry groups such as those associated with the National Writing Project.
Powerful and promising pedagogical possibilities for teaching literacy may be hiding at the intersection of students’ personal literate practices and the literacy practices most often noticed and valued in school contexts. Behaviors that at first appear off-key, off-task, or off-base may in fact be cloaking surprisingly literate behaviors. For Keairra, Jamal, and Tatiana, some aspects of their literate selves were difficult to spot against the backdrop of the classroom. Their literacies disappeared against carefully outlined procedural and conduct norms, teacher attention to on-task behavior, and student response to teacher expectations. Like the willow clumps for the foolbirds, the sanctioned spaces of the classroom seemed to allow, and even entice, students to hide. Perhaps with explicit attention to literacies hiding in plain sight and the lens of camouflage, literacy researchers will be able to not only discover literacies that hide out but also articulate for classroom teachers and others how to spot for themselves when students’ literate achievements might be hiding against the background of classroom spaces.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
This research was made possible with two grants: a Grant-in-Aid award from the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation and a small grant from the Michigan State University Intramural Research Grant Program, both awarded to Mary Juzwik.
References
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