Program requirements

Prerequisites (if any):

Catalog Description:

Provides opportunities for building shared understanding among teachers working with students across grade levels. Involves critical examination of social and linguistic perspectives on language and literacy. Addresses the relationships among schooling, literacy, social, and cultural life. Encompasses family literacy, media studies, and the nature and significance of sociocultural and linguistic diversity.

Extended Description:

This course looks critically at anthropological and sociolinguistic studies of literacy. It examines historical and contemporary aspects of those ways with language that we call literacy, focusing particularly on sources of sociocultural and linguistic diversity, the relation of such diversity to the origins and development of schooling, and the relation between schooling, literacy, and forms of social and cultural life. Topics to be discussed include: (1) perspectives on literacy; (2) the role of literacy in shaping selves and societies; (3) dimensions of social and linguistic diversity, and the implications of such diversity among students for literacy learning; (4) relationships among classrooms, schools, and other social and institutional sites. 

Program goals:

** major goal

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

** individual and cultural differences: knowledge of economic, academic, social, and cultural diversity; use of this knowledge to inform instructional decisions

** literacy in society: societal changes in literacy usage, and implications for teaching and learning both inside and outside the classroom

task difficulty: relation to student learning, independence, and development

assessment of literacy: the value and properties of assessment methods and instruments

prevention and solution of literacy difficulties: management of the classroom context to prevent difficulties in the acquisition of literacy as well as to solve learning difficulties when they occur

** technology: understand the nature and functions of information technologies in contemporary literacy practices; use relevant information technologies for teaching and assessment

self-extended learning: how to engage critically with professional text and research to extend learning, including success with their own professional reading and writing

Readings

(Note: these are suggested texts--actual readings in this course will be listed in the course outline)

Perspectives on Literacy

Addresses the ways in which literacy has been imagined or theorized and the implications this has for enacting pedagogy (topics covered may be approached historically or thematically).  Perspectives to be discussed will include but are not limited to:

• Psychological
• Socio-cultural
• Critical
• Functional
• Cultural
• Sociological

The role of literacy in shaping selves and societies

Explores the ways in which participation in specific literate practices produces new identities that allow people to function within and across a range of social contexts.  Areas of study will include:

• Literacy practices and identity development.
• Literacy practices across multiple social contexts (e.g. family, workplace, school).
• The role of literacy in the development and maintenance of social groups (e.g. speech communities, discourse communities, virtual communities).
• Possibilities and problems related to multiple and competing discourse practices within particular social contexts (e.g. classroom, school board meeting, board room).

Dimensions of social and linguistic diversity Addresses how various social categories (e.g. class, gender, race, age, religion) as well as linguistic variation inhabit literacy practices in ways that affect different groups of people in different ways in different social contexts e.g. enfranchise some, disenfranchise others).  Topics to be discussed include:

• Understanding and working with English Language Learners
• Relationship between language and literacy practices and issues of equity
• Dialect variation and it’s relationship to teaching and learning.
• Teacher as researcher (observing and documenting classroom interactions, attending to discourse, analysis of textual artifacts, informal and nontechnical assessment of children).

Relations among classrooms, schools, and other social and institutional sites

Explores the ways in which the nature and functions of literacy are mediated by the norms, routines and social practices of distinct contexts  (e.g. families, community centers, churches and other places of worship, workplaces, the media, web based forums; information technologies, popular culture, religious institutions, peer culture). Topics to be addressed include:

• Relationship between children’s home discourse and the discourses of school.
• Literacy and learning and instruction in community contexts (e.g. after school clubs, chat rooms, work places, poetry slams).
• Re-imagining assessment practices based upon current knowledge of social and linguistic diversity.
• Cultural conflict in the classroom.
• Literacy and new informational technologies.

Required Assignments

• Practicum:  The central project for this course is an empirical investigation within and across social contexts.  This practicum includes (a) a minimum of five hours of fieldwork (observation and interviews); (b) analysis of these data, using tools learning course, and; (c) the production of some kind of traditional (e.g. research report) or non-traditional (e.g. video, multi-media text, website) representation of the research.  Among the projects students have developed in the past include:  case studies of individual students across contexts; development of a workshop to teach parents about the literacy curriculum in place in the classroom and ways to support literacy development at home; investigation of the nature and function of literacy in specific community institutions (e.g. church, work place, governmental office); inquiry into the range of beliefs and practices surrounding the literacy development of second language students; examining the ways in which specific institutions (e.g. an urban charter school) respond to the multi-literacies of students. 

• Analysis of a classroom interaction where differences in race, class, gender, etc. are at play.

• Critical examination of the circulation of power through language and literacy practices within and across social institutions

• Critical exploration of new information technologies

Alvermann. Donna E. (Ed.) (2002)    Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World.   New York: Peter Lang Publishers.

Carger, Chris Liska.   (1996).   Of Borders and Dreams:   A Mexican-American Experience of Urban Education.    New York: Teachers College Press.

Delpit, Lisa D. (1996)   Other People's Children:   Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.

Egan-Robertson, Ann & Bloome, David (Eds.).   (1998)   Students as Researchers of Culture and Language in their own communities (Language and Social Processes).   Hampton Press.  

Franklin, Barry. From Backwardness to At-Risk .   Albany:   SUNY Press.  

Freedom Writers & Gruwell, Erin. (1999).   The Freedom Writers Diary.   New York: Doubleday.

Gates, Victoria Purcell (1997)   Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy.   Harvard University Press.

Howard, Gary R. (1999).   We can't teach what we don't know:   White teachers, multiracial schools.   New York: Teachers College Press.

Rodriquez, Richard.   (1983) Hunger of Memory.   Bantam Books.