Abstract
Writing provided an even more powerful coping/escape mechanism for Raúl. His job within the prison was to sew soccer balls together, and when no one was looking, Raúl wrote poetry and messages inside the balls, all of which came from his own personal inspiration. When the researcher asked Raúl about this writing, he explained that he often thought about his children and other good things:
“When I write I do not feel I am in prison anymore. I think about nicer things regardless of who is next to me, who is looking or who criticizes me, who teases me or who mocks me or talks about me . . .”
This paragraph, excerpted from Kristen Perry and Annie Homan’s article, in some sense epitomizes this current issue of Journal of Literacy Research. The four articles included in 46(4) shed light on literacy research in ways that, like a phantom limb, remind us of what seems to have been absent in the literature, lost in the shuffle of standardization and accountability reforms—the humanizing and liberating potential of literacy.
Perry and Homan’s article, “‘What I Feel in My Heart’: Literacy Practices of and for the Self Among Adults With Limited or No Schooling,” illuminates selected case studies of disenfranchised adults and their use of literacy, and argues for the reconceptualization of adult literacy classes to encompass not only the usual—the practices that lead to economic or community development—but also uses of writing that penetrate to the soul, that literally serve as protective factors in the darkest of human experiences. Similarly, the article by Kofi Quan-Baffour and Norma Romm, “Ubuntu-Inspired Training of Adult Literacy Teachers as a Route to Generating ‘Community’ Enterprises,” claims that literacy education can in practice activate a potential for the “humanization” within social and economic life. They write, “In the context of South Africa, we consider practices for nurturing a variant of humanism called Ubuntu, variously translated as ‘a human being is a human being through the otherness of other human beings.’ ” The article analyzes debriefings from adult literacy classes that aim to keep an Ubuntu spirit alive in the various learning settings with the trainees. Interestingly, in addressing the need to recapture the humanizing potential of literacy, both of these articles make salient the paucity of this focus in the current literacy research, perhaps because in part it may be difficult to measure and, thus, difficult to fund.
Along those lines, Burke Scarborough and Anna Ruth-Allen’s “Writing Workshop Revisited: Confronting Communicative Dilemmas Through Spoken Word Poetry in a High School English Classroom”—on high school writing—offers an ethnography of a writing workshop using poetry slam and emphasizing the importance of building a cohesive discursive community. In this workshop, students are encouraged to let their voices be heard in no-holds-barred, dynamic classroom dialogues where the teacher, a local artist, and student poets preparing for public performances hammer out suggestions for revisions. The two examples of how the students changed their poems in the “warp and woof” of that discursive community’s feedback are powerfully transforming. In time, the poems themselves become more humanizing, more lyrical, and more forceful as rage and shock turn into heart-felt reflection, mediocre craft into artistic writing.
Likewise, the conceptual essay by Robert Petrone, Sophia Sarigianides, and Mark Lewis, “The Youth ‘Lens’: Analyzing Adolescence/ts in Literary Texts,” provides a strong sense that individual literacy performances are socially constructed and played out in the “drama” (cf. Goffman, 1959) of everyday life surrounded by audiences of family, peers, and strangers. Although applicable to a range of literary and cultural texts, this article theorizes and focuses on the uses of a Youth Lens (YL). Implicit in this approach is a reconsideration and alternative to the genre of Young Adult Literature (YAL), claiming that the latter designation participates in shaping and circulating views of adolescence/ts that may be not favorable or inclusive in nature. As such, the author provides an example of how a YL can illuminate new possibilities for understanding Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008), and the implications that a YL has for analysis of young adult and other texts, secondary literacy pedagogy, and literacy teacher education.
All told, the four articles included in this issue theorize various constructs such as “functional literacy,” “Ubuntu,” “Writing workshop,” “queering,” and “youth” and provide both alternative views to traditional definitions as well as place a much greater emphasis on the humanizing and liberating possibilities of literacy itself—no matter where it is found or who possesses it, at whatever level it may exist. Whether in the form of adult literacy instruction, a writing workshop, a classroom analysis of YAL, or within prison walls, what these articles remind us is that all of these actions involving the materials of reading and writing are, foremost, human activities—enacted by human beings at all ages for deeper, but perhaps less visible (even to the person) purposes than just writing a poem for school, starting a business, or taking a test. These articles also challenge us in our research to look for what Bateson (1979/2002) has described as “the pattern that connects,” those patterns that distinguish the very essence of what it means to be human and to know the world.