Critical Literacy, Schooling, and Social Justice

The Selected Works of Allan Luke

Allan Luke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351587648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/or practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself.

Allan Luke's work on critical literacy, schooling, and equity has influenced the fields of literacy education, teacher education, educational sociology, and policy for over three decades. This volume brings together Allan Luke's key writings on literacy and schooling. Chapters cover a range of topics and theories, including the development and application of a social and cultural analysis of literacy education and schooling; a primer on literacy as a social construction; classroom-based case studies of literacy teaching and learning; major theoretical and philosophic essays; practical programmatic work on school reform and enabling curriculum policies; and classroom approaches to teaching critical literacy and multiliteracies.

1 No Grand Narrative in Sight

On Double Consciousness and Critical Literacy

In ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ (1903/1994), W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the term “double consciousness” to describe the African-American experience of “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others”. My pathway through the politics of literacy education – via those culturally vexed institutions of schooling, the academy and government – was one of unintended but then deliberate displacement. I gradually learned the lesson that double or even triple consciousness was a cultural gift from family and kin, generation, culture and place. Seeing the world (and yourself and the institution) through the eyes of others is hardly deficit or disenabling. It is a key to unique epistemological and cultural power, it enables us to generate new strategies and insights for changing theory and practice, and it remains absolutely central to our political struggle to remake schooling for social justice.

This is an edited transcript of the Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Address, Literacy Research Association, Nashville, USA, December 1, 2016. It is a narrative frame for the development of much of the work included in this volume.

Acknowledgements

We meet today on the traditional lands of the Cherokee Nation. The Trail of Tears passed through these lands around Nashville in the 1830s. I acknowledge the continued struggle of Indigenous peoples and call upon the wisdom of Elders past and present to guide us in our deliberations here today. Beginning a public talk with a recollection of where we stand is a ritual of humility of knowledge and place, a reminder of what we do not know and, in instances, cannot know about where we stand, and an insistence on the context and limits of what we claim to know.

Thank you for the recognition of this work. Returning to the United States from Australia at this difficult historical moment is bittersweet. Yesterday morning I flew from my home in Brisbane across the Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles, where I was born and raised in the 1950s. As I flew over LA, I realised that my heart is broken too, with yours. It is broken for a land where both of my Grandmothers rose up from bound feet. My heart is broken too for a place where my Mother and Father, and Aunties and Uncles waited decades until they could become citizens in the country where they were born. My heart too is broken for a place where we learned to walk arm in arm as children and as young adults for freedom, equality and civil rights. My heart too is broken. And it aches for this place that, seen from afar, many of us believed had come to terms with its diversity of peoples, languages, cultures and ideas as its greatest strength, and a place that we believed was moving towards an emergent understanding that the diversity of all living things was necessary to sustain this planet and to sustain each other – across borders, across continents and between communities.

Over the last few weeks since your recent national election, I’ve come to better understand why I am here today among friends and colleagues, fellow writers, researchers and teachers. It is not to celebrate, and it is certainly not to lay claim to individual invention, grand design or master narrative underlying this work. Rather it is to reflect upon and to story this historical moment and our places in it, to better understand ourselves yet again as products of history and as actors on a cultural and political, academic and scholarly stage that has been dramatically and violently rent apart in the past weeks, months and years. My aim today is to offer recollections and lessons – “petits récits” (Lyotard, 1984) – on race and social class in education, on double consciousness and epistemic stance, on the insights into literacy from working both outside and inside, without and within cultures and institutions.

Many thanks are in order. I thank Pat Edwards, Pat Enciso and the Literacy Research Association committees and colleagues for their encouragement, and I applaud your activist response to current events. My journey here would not have been possible without Carmen Luke, my life-partner, collaborator and co-author for 44 years, the best scholar in our home. Her work on literacy and Protestantism (Luke, 1989), on critical media literacy and feminism has been foundational for the field. I welcome my colleague, mentor and friend, and previous recipient of this award, Courtney Cazden. As we celebrate her 91st birthday, Courtney’s work and life are daily reminders of why we do this work, why we persist in our struggle and with our science (Cazden, 2017). I welcome our editor and friend of many decades, Naomi Silverman, whose editorial work has been far more instrumental in changing the field than most would know. Here today are my Canadian colleague and sister-in-arms, Tara Goldstein, and my true-blue South Australian colleague, co-author and friend, Barbara Comber. I acknowledge Kris Gutiérrez, who also was honoured by the Association today. Kris and I met in 1981 at a seminar run by Richard Anderson at Simon Fraser University, Canada where I completed my teacher training and graduate studies. As we worked our way through graduate school to our first academic positions, Kris and I often found ourselves the only coloured kids in the room. We have drawn strength and steel from each other’s work and friendship since. So to hear the Literacy Research Association’s declaration on anti-racism yesterday was not the closing of a circle for us. It is yet another beginning. This is my message today. This is not a moment for despair, this is a time for action, a new beginning. It is a defining moment of generational challenge.

In 1979, my doctoral supervisor Suzanne de Castell and I began discussing a philosophical, cultural and political reinvention of literacy at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Our initial forays into the field were judged by peer referees to be too theoretical and political for mainstream literacy journals. After finding a home in the field of curriculum studies, the work began to cross over into literacy studies thanks to the editorial support of interdisciplinary scholars like Donna Alvermann, Rob Tierney, Judith Green, Jay Lemke and David Bloome. These US-based researchers deliberately reached out across paradigms, institutional boundaries and geography to invite many of us – Australians, Kiwis, feminists, scholars of colour, LGBTQ academics and ­others – into this scholarly community. Collectively, their editorial work opened the field for the critical theory and neomarxism, feminism, postcolonialism, applied linguistics, semiotics, poststructuralist and interpretive studies that feature prominently in today’s meetings.

I acknowledge the senior scholars present from the Reading Hall of Fame. Many of us dislike the notions of a “Hall of Fame” and of an academic ‘star-system’ (indeed, we meet today in the building that houses the Country Music Hall of Fame). But there is a simple lesson for societies like our own caught up in a perpetual tradition of the new: that Elders are not solely the prepossession of Indigenous and Confucian-based cultures. My initial studies of the “Dick and Jane” readers and the history of reading (Luke, 1988) led me to the continuing legacies of William James, E. B. Huey, E. L. Thorndike, May Hill Arbuthnot, William Gray and others.

I have come to understand that education is always an inter-generational and inter-cultural exchange and gifting (Chapter 14, this volume). In this way, my stories today are a further turn in a larger, inter-generational and inter-cultural conversation about language, literacy and education – a conversation that goes back to the establishment of the moral and, later, scientific foundations of Western literacy by Martin Luther and Wilhelm Wundt respectively, a conversation that extends through the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Paulo Freire to echo across this room today. For as much as it might entail scientific and phenomenal description, the formation of the field of literacy has always been and continues to be a debate over moral and scientific foundations and, as importantly, about cultural and political practices. This premise is at the core of my work: that literacies and languages are normative human technologies, culturally shaped and socially consequential. As such, they have been and remain the principal media of ideological control and political power, institutional means for shaping human capacity in equitable and inequitable ways – as well as means for human invention and creativity, art and science.

A Journey through Double Consciousness

It is still difficult to grasp how this Chinese-American kid from LA came to be part of this conversation. My father, Edwin S. Luke, was born in Seattle in 1911 – part of that first generation of Chinese born in America. His life inspired my work on “genres of power” (Chapter 6, this volume), a philosophical critique of the widespread notion that literacy has causal links to ‘power’. In the midst of a debate with colleagues in the systemic-functional linguistics community and with advocates of critical pedagogy, I was struggling to come up with an analogy for explaining how literacy per se did not necessarily translate to power if you were a person of colour in a White-ruled society, or if you were someone at the economic margins in an unequal society. My contention was that you could be visibly and audibly literate but if you were poor, from a minority culture, without social networks, connections and institutional access, you were still likely to be treated as such in a dominant society that recognised its own inherited cultural capital, but failed to acknowledge the cultures, languages and resources of Others.

I reconsidered my father’s battle. As a child, he had lost his father early on in a fight in Seattle, Chinatown; his mother had bound feet and was unable to work. Although there was neither social science nor cultural vernacular for it at the time, poverty, alienation and affiliated mental health issues took a grinding toll amongst immigrant and refugee communities, as they do today. In the 1930s, he became the first Chinese-American to graduate with a degree in journalism from the University of Washington. But he was never able to find employment as a writer, reporter in an era where the Hearst newspapers were inventing what came to be known as “yellow journalism”. Edwin Luke was born in the USA, as the song goes, he was literate, he spoke unaccented English, he had a degree. But his cultural capital, embodied and credentialed, was never acknowledged as such by White institutions. He went to work as a linotyper instead, becoming the first Chinese-American member of the International Typographical Union. My mother, Ahlin Wong Luke, grew up on a north shore farm in Oahu. She was bilingual and bidialectal, speaking English, Cantonese and Hawaiian Pidgin. She finished high school, worked as a clerk and secretary, raised three kids who all became school teachers. But even after we had moved out of Chinatown, owned a house and car and made our way through the American dream of the 1950s – certain doors remained locked.

Then, as now, at this crucial historical moment, the message was simple. Literacy matters, but how it matters, for whom, when and where depends upon the rules of exchange in a social field. These rules of exchange typically require linguistic and literate capacity in combination with other forms of capital: social, embodied, cultural/racial and economic. In democratic societies, the central challenges for the field, then, are not solely about scientific accounts of cognitive processes or behavioural skill acquisition – they are about the study and development of socially just and equitable systems and institutions for acquiring, practicing and developing literacy, in all of its diverse modalities and genres. In sociocultural terms, we cannot talk about cognitive capacity and individual psychology without talking about cultural forms and social structures. In sociological terms, then, we cannot talk about race and culture without talking about social class, without talking about gender and sexuality, without talking about geography and place, without talking about the ­multiple and complex ways that communities and classes, cultures, genders and peoples are marginalised while, indeed, others are privileged without question. We cannot talk about changing the world by expanding or altering pedagogy without also attending to and altering the rules and relationships of the social, institutional and economic systems where we and our students live and work.

In 2013, I ceased writing, teaching and taking on any new academic work, other than mentoring Indigenous and minority scholars at the University of Calgary. I have been spending much of the last three years playing and writing music in Brisbane. This has been a much needed respite. For our craft and work as academics is privileged but difficult. We are paid well, we possess and influence what counts as symbolic capital, we nominally have a public and professional voice. As much as we might complain about teaching hours, endless meetings and marking loads – we are employed to talk and think, write and teach with what remains a great degree of freedom in comparison to our academic colleagues in autocratic and theocratic systems. But because this is performative and public work, it is also extremely fragile, stress-filled, potentially narcissistic and self-centred. It is easy to lose one’s cultural and moral bearings in what increasingly has become a star-system of academic distinction. This situation has been complicated by the corporatisation of university governance and work, with an audit culture where all aspects of academic work are measured, made to count and, ultimately, monitored and surveilled. There are even impact indicators and metrics covering awards like this one. No aspect of scholarly life is beyond countability.

In 2002, I had the honour of sharing the podium at this conference with Louise Rosenblatt, the second recipient of this award. This was yet another inter-generational and inter-cultural exchange. She recalled discussions with her college roommate, Margaret Mead, about anthropology and literature; she mentioned her and her husband Joseph Ratner’s weekend discussions of philosophy with their colleague John Dewey. When I received word of this award a few months ago, my instinctive reaction was one which feminists, scholars of colour and postcolonial writers have explored at length: I felt fraudulent, alienated, and out of my depth, unworthy of standing with the likes of Rosenblatt, Cazden and others. Knowing these people made it even more implausible. After four decades as a teacher and academic, I am well accustomed to the territory of working as a cultural and generational outsider to what historically have been White-defined and dominated institutions. This experience of liminality, of embodied Otherness, of being an outsider remains. I find myself among my own best sceptics.

When you are a cultural outsider, a classical intellectual project and trajectory isn’t really possible. That was the masculinist, Eurocentric fiction of the last century, that sovereign individuals, unifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements and Permissions
• 1 No Grand Narrative in Sight
• 2 The Social Construction of Literacy in the Primary School
• 3 The Secular Word
• 4 The Body Literate
• 5 Stories of Social Regulation
• 6
• 7 Critical Literacy in Australia
• 8 Adolescence Lost/Childhood Regained
• 9 Two Takes on the Critical
• 10 Literacy and the Other
• 11 Evidence-based State Literacy Policy
• 12 The Trouble with English
• 13 Pedagogy as Gift
• 14 Looking at the Next Twenty Years of Multiliteracies
• Index