Toward Equity and Diversity in Literacy Research,Policy,and Practice: A Critical,Global Approach

Abstract

Can growing inequities between rich and poor and massive manifestations of hatred and intolerance amid rising tides of global populism inspire a focus on equity and diversity in literacy research, policy, and practice? Can such calls for change be collaborative rather than competitive? Can we envision self-love, wellness, and intercultural understanding as compelling ends of a reimagined literacy pedagogy? Toward these ends, this essay offers demographic, moral, and economic imperatives for fundamentally reconsidering literacy policy and practice. It then presents five “big” ideas. We must ask different questions, we must identify and problematize our notions of success, we must advocate for the equitable distribution of material resources, we must fight for bottom-up accountability practices, and we must envision new literacy practices that reflect our new global reality. Finally it advocates a global postcolonial critical literacies framework where teachers are positioned as intellectuals and agents of change, where students have opportunities to collaboratively produce and distribute multimodal compositions, where children have access to a wider array of literary texts that enable them to become powerful, reflexive readers of the word and the world, and where parents and communities are partners in the project of nurturing powerful readers, authors, and speaker.

In September 2016, during a campaign stop at a Cleveland charter school, Donald Trump promised, “As president, I will establish the national goal of providing school choice to every American child living in poverty.” Furthermore, he commented, “If we can put a man on the moon, dig out the Panama Canal and win two world wars, then I have no doubt that we as a nation can provide school choice to every disadvantaged child in America” (Parker & Gabriel, 2016). At a campaign speech in Tulsa in January 2016, Trump commented,

So we’re number one in the world in terms of [education] spending. We’re number 28 in the world in terms of, where do we stand? We have Third World countries that are ahead of us, countries that you wouldn’t believe, some countries that you’ve hardly heard of. (Klein, 2016).

Earlier, former President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union Address, similarly called for massive educational change in what he labeled as our “Sputnik” moment. The impetus for this call was a perceived threat to America’s global economic competitiveness posed by a rising China. President Ronald Reagan made a similar plea through his National Commission on Excellence in Education’s publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. Citing the U.S. educational system’s failure to meet the needs of the competitive workforce, the report opens with the ominous statement, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” It adds, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” (U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The calls of Trump, Obama, and Reagan are not unique. For the past 60 years, American leaders have used the threat of increased global competition as an impetus for political action to advance our domestic educational system.

Although not dismissing the impetus behind these calls for change, this essay seeks to define “our literacy education imperative” in a different manner altogether. Can our growing material inequities between rich and poor, global divisions, and massive manifestations of hatred and intolerance amid rising tides of global populism inspire the same collective outrage as being beat into orbit by the Soviets in 1957? Can such calls for change be collaborative rather than competitive? Can we envision self-love, wellness, intercultural understanding, and human flourishing as compelling ends of a reimagined literacy pedagogy? Suffice it to say that our diminished human capacity is enough of a threat to encourage us to think differently about the imperative for transforming our literacy policy and practice. What I would like to offer are three imperatives for change, with only one being the economic argument posed by our current and past administrations. And even at that I see the economic argument as not one of increased competitiveness but of increased global capacity. Following the three imperatives, I present five “big” ideas. I do not necessarily see these ideas as original, but taken together they could signify a major (and critical) shift in domestic and global literacy policy and practice. Finally, I advocate for a global critical literacies framework as a way forward for the field.

Three Imperatives

Demographic Imperative

Rapidly changing demography should serve as a wake-up call to our new domestic and global realities. Since the 2013-2014 academic year, the U.S. school system has been composed of a majority of students of color (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2013), and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2043, there will be no ethnic majority in the country (Maxwell, 2014). Globally, UNICEF (2014) projects that by 2050, nearly one in three births and one in three children under age 18 will be African. These new realities in our school system and our world make it difficult for us to even use words like “diversity” or “minority” anymore. Who is diverse (Bhabha, 1994)? How can a numerical majority constitute a minority? How do we think about notions of standard language usage in societies with so much difference? Whose languages and literacies are deemed worthy of study? Better for us to think about literacy pedagogies that honor pluralism and difference in our age of global populism. We also need to ask ourselves whether our policies and practices reflect these new global realities.

Moral Imperative

We have an ethical and moral imperative to ensure that every student receives a humanizing, impactful literacy education. We also have a moral imperative that every student’s literacy education increases his or her capacity for intercultural understanding. This approach is not intended for “historically marginalized” populations only. We need to think differently (and more boldly) about the literacy education that every child receives. How does a reimagined literacy education help every child to understand the world and his or her place within it? How do we encourage multiliteracies, multilingualism, and translanguaging practices in our classrooms and schools? (García & Wei, 2014). And how do we hold ourselves accountable for developing literacy curricula and literacy policies that produce more engaged and empathic global citizens?

Economic Imperative

As I mentioned earlier, I do not mean to dismiss the economic imperatives offered by U.S. presidents and countless others, though I do want to contextualize them and modify them a bit in this essay. We cannot and should never think of groups of people as problems that need to be solved, and we should not sacrifice humanizing values for economic competitiveness. That being said, people are concerned about their material well-being in the world, and one of the reasons that so many parents and families make sacrifices for their children’s literacy education is because they want better economic opportunities for them and they understand that literacy is a pathway toward that end. To ensure economic progress and that we have the human capital to move society ahead, more people will need a higher quality literacy education, which means paying more attention to issues of equity and diversity.

Five “Big” Ideas

To answer this question, I offer five big ideas: We must ask different questions as a field, we must identify and problematize our notions of success, we must advocate for the equitable distribution of the necessary material resources, we must fight for bottom-up accountability practices, and we must envision new literacy practices that reflect our new global reality. Ultimately, I argue, we are limited only by our (individual and test-centric) paradigms and our (fragmented, nation-focused) scale.

Literacy Researchers Must Ask Different Questions

My first suggestion is that the research community challenge itself to ask different questions. I argue that much of our scholarly literature is stuck in a 1960’s sociology of the urban problem paradigm that we need to move beyond. Sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois predicted in 1903 that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line, and more than a century later, we are proving him correct. In literacy research, as in many other areas of educational scholarship, the culture of deprivation, largely inspired by the work of Daniel Moynihan (1965) and Oscar Lewis (1969), remains our contemporary paradigm a half century later, informing how we view certain kids, teachers, families, and communities. Our language in journals, articles, and monographs reflects this paradigm: Who is “of color”? Who is “not diverse”? In his groundbreaking work Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) argued that the Orient is a Western construction of academicians, artists, and government officials and its persistence over many centuries says far more about the gaze of the so-called West (and its uses) than it ever could about the heterogeneous assemblages of peoples it “Others.” Taking up a postcolonialist critique, we could ask ourselves about our scholarly gaze and the impact it has on the myriad communities that it, too, “Others.”

The literacy research community needs to move beyond only seeing high-quality research as being defined by methodological rigor. Research can be rigorously conducted but flawed in its conceptions of people and communities. I argue that we move toward a philosophy of funds of knowledge and engagement with communities (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). In addition to thinking about literacy research as rigorous, we also need to imagine work that is engaged, humanizing, and conducted in solidarity with communities. We need to take seriously the work of scholars like Django Paris and Maisha Winn (2013), who advocate for decolonizing methodologies in literacy research. We need to look at the work of postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak (1990) and Homi Bhabha (1994), who would push us to reconsider our essentializing narratives of schools, of students, and of geographies. We must have the courage to relish complexity and difference, and we have to explore the myriad ways that literacies are practiced in neighborhoods and communities (Brandt, 2015) and, with respect to classroom practice, we need to ask about what is working and assume that successes are possible and present.

Identify, Replicate, and Problematize “Success”

The identification of the “successful” literacy classroom has to become an even more comparative and collaborative enterprise. The United States contains less than 5% of the world’s total student population. If we are only using research from the United States to inform our vision of the ideal literacy classroom, we are missing out on 95% of the world’s classrooms to inform our research on the subject. Particularly, what do we know about innovative pedagogical practices in classrooms in Latin, Asian, and African nations, and how is that informing our knowledge base in the United States? What are these nations doing effectively to promote equity and access? How are they exposing students to difference? How are they connecting literacy education to the development of sociopolitical consciousness? How are they working together with teachers to produce curricula that are responsive locally while also providing access to global discourses of power?

Increasing access to the global knowledge base on literacy education would enable nations like the United States to have a much-needed vigorous policy (and scholarly) debate on what constitutes success in literacy education. What are bold new possibilities for literacy assessment? How might we use different measures of success to open the doorway to more innovative, student-centered literacy instruction? How might broader definitions of success help us to connect powerful literacy education with global awareness and engagement? Can, for instance, we measure hope? Radical self-love? Agency? Joy? Kindness? Intercultural understanding? Sociopolitical consciousness?

Advocate for Literacy Education Policies That Promote Equitable and Humane Distribution of Resources

Ironically, the simplest solution seems to be the most elusive. At the time of this writing, the Trump administration and Congress are contemplating massive cuts to the U.S. Department of Education at a moment when access to a powerful literacy education is more important than ever. In 2016, the U.S. gross domestic product approached 18 trillion dollars and the federal budget topped three trillion dollars, yet our underinvestment in children’s literacy futures remain palpable and alarming. The literacy research community is poised to leverage its robust scholarship to advocate for literacy education policies that promote a more equitable distribution of resources. I have identified four major areas in need of funding, teacher learning, digital tools, classroom libraries, and out-of-school programs. Each of these funding items is central to a critical literacy framework that privileges teacher agency (Freire, 1997), critical media production, self-love (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008), love of others, and engagement with communities and the world.

A critical literacy framework requires that teachers be positioned as intellectuals and agents of change. Toward these ends, the literacy education community needs to increase its funding for teaching and teacher learning. Given the complexity of the profession and the ever-growing knowledge base, teachers need continual access to learning communities that allow them to reflect upon and reshape their practice. The best professional learning opportunities for teachers are ongoing, are teacher-led, and connect directly to classroom practice (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). This form of teacher learning is expensive, but well worth the investment when we consider the real threats of teacher attrition and burnout (Darling-Hammond, 1997). In addition, domestic threats by the Trump administration to cut federal Title II funding (preparing, training, and recruiting high-quality teachers and principals) should be a major concern to us all. We need to move aggressively in the opposite direction. Teachers need funding to innovate, to travel to conferences, to create “pop-up” research teams with colleagues, to expand their professional libraries, and to share their big ideas with others in the profession.

A critical literacy framework also requires that young people have opportunities in their classrooms to become producers and distributors of their own multimodal compositions. To promote this critical media literacy, we need to confront the persistent digital divide that results in inequitable access to digital tools and technologies. We need to continue to advocate for funding for meaningful and consistent access to current digital tools and technologies. Although we continue to promote the acquisition of digital literacies, we have to remain vigilant in bringing attention to the persistent digital divides domestically and internationally (Rowsell, Morrell, & Alvermann, 2017).

A critical literacy framework also demands that young people have access to a wider array of literary texts that enable them to become powerful readers and writers of the word and the world. We need to press for funding for culturally heterogeneous classroom, school, and public libraries. There is no excuse for children not to have classrooms and school libraries filled with books that they can touch, hold, and explore. Children need time to read books of their choosing in class and at home if they are going to become strong readers, but first they must have equitable access to books that will interest and engage them. All children also need to be able to see themselves in the books that they read, and they need access to the stories and experiences of others, past and present, so these books also need to reflect the wonderful diversity of the human experience. These libraries are essential for not only developing reading stamina, fluency, and academic vocabulary but also to promote a love of self and of others (Allyn & Morrell, 2016).

Finally, a critical literacy frameworks needs to reimagine education as a 24/7/365 enterprise where parents and community members are coequal partners in the project of nurturing powerful readers, writers, and speakers. In this spirit, we need to increase funding for out-of-school-time programs. The average child spends about 1,000 hr a year in school (Silver, 2014), but kids spend almost 3,000 hr a year in outside-of-school activities, and this is where much of the inequity happens (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2013). Whether we are talking about youth participatory action research projects in community-based organizations, summer reading programs, after-school literacy clubs, evening programs at public libraries, or opportunities for parents to have access to free books in their homes, we need to pay much more attention at a policy level to the out-of-school literacy lives of our students.

Fight for Bottom-Up Accountability Measures

In their book on community organizing for educational justice, Oakes and Rogers (2006) point to the flaws of a top-down accountability structure where those with less power are held accountable for education outcomes. Rather, they advocate for a bottom-up accountability structure where those who are most impacted by educational outcomes hold those in power accountable for producing and maintaining equitable access. In this spirit, the literacy education community needs to come together to flip the political spectrum and have parents, students, teachers, and communities define the measures to hold policy makers and school systems accountable for educational excellence.

Promote New Literacy Practices for a New Global Reality

Finally, we need to highlight domestic and international literacy pedagogical practices that celebrate difference and multiliteracies. There are so many innovative classroom practices, such as the move from European to global literature (Said, 2001); the inclusion of media and popular culture in literacy classrooms (Emdin, 2016; Hill, 2010; Morrell, Dueñas, Garcia, & Lopez, 2013); having students become researchers and writers of their own neighborhoods and communities (Kinloch, 2010); apprenticing students as poets, playwrights, and artists (Fisher, 2007); and creating spaces for students to become students of languages and translanguaging (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017; Gutiérrez, 2008; Lee, 1995). These practices have proven engaging to students and teachers, yet they remain the exception rather than the norm in most literacy classes.

Literacy researchers, classroom teachers, and education leaders will have to work collaboratively to advocate for substantive changes to literacy frameworks, standards, and assessments if we are going to move the needle on classroom pedagogy for all students. And I do mean all students. These innovative practices are not only useful for those we have labeled as underperforming but all students will truly benefit from reading a more diverse array of literature, learning from media and popular culture, and having the opportunities to expand their linguistic repertoires. They all can gain confidence in their ability to change the world as adults when they are given permission to do so as children and young adults in their literacy classrooms.

Toward a Global Critical Literacies Framework

A critical postcolonial framework has to push literacy education beyond decoding and composing traditional print texts in an ahistorical, apolitical context. As a discipline, we must ask ourselves whose texts we privilege. What do these texts say implicitly or explicitly about who is valued? How are readers allowed to engage these texts? What types of questions do we ask of these texts? Are students exploring the politics of text selection? Are they encountering a diverse array of voices? Do they have the power to speak back to texts? Are they composing and distributing multimodal texts of their choosing to authentic audiences?

Brian Street (1984) and many others have argued that we cannot create policy and curricula based on the idea of a single (and ideologically laden) autonomous literacy given the social situatedness of language and literacy practices. Nor can high-status, gatekeeping language and literacy practices be reserved only for those who come from homes and communities with means. In addition, what counts as high-status knowledge has to be historicized and continually problematized in our ever-changing world. Drawing from New Literacy Studies scholars like Street and the New London Group (1996), we should consider multiliteracies and multilingualism as desired ends of a critical literacy education—really, a literacies education. We cannot shy away from conversations about the politics of language in the literacy field, nor can we hold onto language and literacy ideologies that do harm to the growing majority of our students.

Noticeable differences in inputs or outcomes have to be collectively challenged from the global literacy community. We cannot turn a blind eye to the inequitable material distribution of teachers, texts, and digital tools and technologies. Withholding the necessary tools for a critical literacies education, one that privileges students, their local languages and literacies, and that creates opportunities for them to use their literacy skills to develop a love of self and a sustained engagement with the world (Morrell, 2008), needs to be viewed in the same way as intentionally withholding food or water. The inaccessibility to critical literacies education anywhere impoverishes us everywhere. Access to critical literacies is not just a civil right; we must reimagine critical literacies as a human entitlement, and teachers, researchers, policy makers, and advocates across the globe must come together as a community if we are going to make this happen.