Time and Space in Literacy Research

Catherine Compton-Lilly, Erica Halverson, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Erica Halverson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317748694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Literacy researchers interested in how specific sites of learning situate students and the ways they make sense of their worlds are asking new questions and thinking in new ways about how time and space operate as contextual dimensions in the learning lives of students, teachers, and families. These investigations inform questions related to history, identity, methodology, in-school and out-of school spaces, and local/global literacies. An engaging blend of methodological, theoretical, and empirical work featuring well-known researchers on the topic, this book provides a conceptual framework for extending existing conceptions of context and provides unique and ground-breaking examples of empirical research.

Section 1
Timespaces and the Past in Literacy Research

“Flashback”

We open Section 1 by foreshadowing a bit of chapter 1. In chapter 1, Johnny Saldaña engages the reader in a “flashback” into his past. He tells stories of the places he has traveled and the people he has met, including his former high school English teacher, Ann Whitehouse. This concept of flashback aptly captures our everyday experiences as we find ourselves remembering and contemplating the past as we work to make sense of the present. The chapters in section 1 highlight these timespaces of the past, including the lessons we learned at home, in school, and in communities. Experiences across childhood and youth inform the people we become. Interactions in classrooms from yesterday and last month affect the ways we make sense today. The spaces of family and school create contexts that children move across as they also move through time. Both time and space are recursive as our minds move back and forth between the present and the past and as we occupy spaces previously occupied in different ways on different days. These are the timespaces explored in this first section.

1
Thank You, Mrs. Whitehouse: The Memory Work of One Student about his High School English Teacher, Forty Years Later

Johnny Saldaña

Flashback, fall 1960, Austin, Texas: I’m in first grade. The teacher is not in the classroom, but a few of us students are. I see on top of my teacher’s desk—a sacred temple to a six-year-old—a copy of our math textbook. But hers was different from ours. It was almost twice as large and had “Teacher’s Edition” printed in big letters on the front cover. What is this? I thought. I picked up the book and flipped through its pages. It had the same content as our books, but the answers to all the math problems were included—in red ink. This was so cool! One of my art projects was to take a sheet of lined notebook paper, fold it in half, and fold it again as if to make a small book. I drew a copy of the cover of our math book on the front page with pencil and proudly wrote along the side “Teacher’s Edition.” Inside the booklet I included some simple addition problems, but I also included the answers—in red ink. Back in 1960, red ink pens were not so common to children—they were the province of teachers and other professionals. But, because my father did his own business accounting, he had red ink pens at home for me to play with. I proudly showed my creation—not to my teacher but to my first-grade friends. They were so impressed with what I made that they asked me to make them a Teacher’s Edition, too.

Flashsideway: I didn’t know it at the time but, fifty years ago, that was my earliest memory of fascination with being a teacher.

Flashforward, the 1980s, Tempe, Arizona: I can’t remember the specific year, but it was most likely within that decade. I’m a university professor in theatre education at Arizona State University, ordering textbooks for my Methods of Teaching Theatre class. One of the standard titles on my recommended list was a well-known textbook for high school students. I wanted future educators to know what most high school theatre programs adopted as a core textbook for adolescents. But one year, I thought, instead of just the textbook, maybe I should order the Teacher’s Edition of it for my university students. So, that’s what I ordered. The university bookstore contacted me a few months later, stating that the publisher was reluctant to ship those books because the Teacher’s Edition was authorized only for full-time secondary school teachers, not pre-service education majors. Why? I asked them. Security reasons, they said. The Teacher’s Edition of the textbook has the answers to standardized tests they composed for classroom use.

Flashsideway: “Memory work” originated in Europe in the 1980s as a form of feminist participatory action research. One’s personal past is individually and then collectively examined with others to recall moments of oppression that formed gender socialization. The agenda of memory work is therapeutic and emancipatory. One’s memories of actions, motives, and emotions are key experiences that form the construction of one’s present identity. Ultimately the purpose of memory work is the exploration not of “Who am I?” but rather of “How did I get to be this way and, if necessary, how can I change?” (Liamputtong, 2009, pp. 130–131).

Flashback, fall 1960: I was taught by and grew up on Dick and Jane readers:

Oh, oh, oh.

See Spot run.

Oh, Puff. Funny, funny Puff.

Flashforward, the 2000s: In my 50s, I am on avid searches for Dick and Jane books in antique stores and online sites. I find a few titles from my childhood that evoke memories of “Yes, this is one I actually read!” Scott Foresman: I even remembered the publisher. The books had a distinctive look; they had style. It was a world of children. They were all the perfect White nuclear family, but race or ethnicity didn’t matter to me back then. The words were big, the pictures were colorful, the workbooks were fun. I was learning how to read. And in my adult searches for these collectable items, about $15 to $125 each depending on the condition, I bought old cover-worn copies of We Look and See and Guess Who? and, yes, the Teacher’s Edition of Fun with Dick and Jane.

Flashsideway: Memory work is the rewriting of memories of past oppression in order to find liberation. As we go through life, we experience “important events and their memories and the reconstructions of these form a critical part of the construction of self” (Grbich, 2007, p. 100). We trace back to find out how our selves became who we are—how we’ve been socialized. We transform ourselves as a result of this. The individual attempts to find significant themes. We look not only for what is present but also for what is missing.

Flashback, fall 1967, eighth-grade English: Our teacher was crazy. We were scared to death of her. I did my best to please her just to keep her from yelling at me as she often did to others. One day I sat down in class before the bell rang and opened my three-ring notebook, getting solidly prepared for class. The teacher walked up to me with a frown on her face, literally yanked my notebook away from my desk, took it up to hers, and slammed it down. I was stunned, and she offered me no explanation for why she had done it. She was crazy. Everyone at school said so.

Flashsideway: Don’t worry. This chapter is not some trauma-filled purging or exorcising of personal demons. On the contrary, it’s an upbeat success story, yet tinted with just enough genre variety and occasional tension, humor, and revelation of juicy stuff to keep you engaged.

Flashforward, fall 1969, high school sophomore English: The teacher was a pleasant enough woman, beautiful penmanship on the chalkboard, but not a very good instructor. She would frequently venture off into tangents with stories about her husband and family. The content was weak, and classes were generally boring. I remember very, very little about them, except for reading Julius Caesar—yawn— and John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Latin American characters—oh yeah, I could relate. Simple, beautiful language, like poetry. And the literary elements: symbolism, irony, foreshadowing. Now this was literature! I would read it over and over again throughout the next decade. I even constructed English tests for myself about the novel to show how well I knew it. And I put the answers in red ink.

Flashsideway: For memory work, once a theme has been chosen for exploration, memories are recalled and written down by the individual. The originators of the method advise writing one’s memories in the third person to provide a sense of detachment and bird’s-eye perspective. But I choose to employ writing in the first person since I’m working on my own rather than with a collective. I write in the first person to take deep ownership of my memories.

Flashforward, spring 1978: I took a graduate-level anthropology course in folklore because the subject sounded really interesting. I had taken a course in children’s literature the semester before and immersed myself in reading folk tales from around the world. But I was way over my head in that seminar with the anthropology majors, and I lasted only about five weeks before I withdrew. But I learned a lot. We were coding African stories’ motifs. And it was there that I learned the concept of what a motif was. I got up to speed by reading Stith Thomson’s books on the subject and found it to be a very intriguing literary element.

Flashsideway: The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is credited with saying, “Every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But not necessarily in that order.”

Flashback, spring 1972, high school senior English: We were studying dramatic literature of late-19th- and early-20th-century Great Britain, and our teacher was trying to discreetly explain the notoriety of Oscar Wilde. After some skirting around the issue, one of the school thugs blurted out, “You mean he was a homo?”

Flashforward, the late 1970s: I’ve moved away from home, and I’m coming to terms with my own sexual identity. I bought a paperback copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Read it cover to cover, looking for “those” passages. Found them, savored them—and underlined them in red ink.

Flashsideway: We study the personal to get to the historical, social, political, and cultural. I present a hybrid form of time study in this address—a qualitative mixed-methods genre of memory work, autoethnography, and longitudinal qualitative research (Saldaña, 2003). As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1983) mused, “Life is just a bowl of strategies” (p. 25). Life is adaptation, and I am a notorious adaptor. I take what is necessary for me and reshape and blend it to suit my own purposes.

Flashback, summer 1971: I took the first semester of high school senior English during summer school, just to get ahead of my program of study. We had an import teacher from another high school that term—admittedly and frankly an old, bitter queen of a man. We read Hamlet, as most seniors will in that course. A hard play, especially for a high schooler, to digest. But this teacher asked us to read the entire play on our own rather than guiding us through it one act at a time for whole-class discussion. On the first day we discussed the Shakespearean work the teacher asked me, “Johnny, what’s the theme of Hamlet?” I remember being taken aback and feeling the need to say something—anything—lest it appear that I hadn’t read the play. I cannot remember what I said to him in front of the class, but I know I said something—a desperate fledgling answer. But the teacher’s sarcastic reply, almost forty years later, will never be forgotten. He said, “Well, that’s very interesting, Johnny. What a shame it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the play.”

Flashforward, the 1980s through 2000s, Methods of Teaching Theatre class: When we study the teaching of dramatic literature, I tell my students that story, and I encourage them to never ask someone what’s the theme of a play. Instead, I encourage them to ask their students to look for those lines in the play that strike them as the most interesting, and why.

Flashsideway: Holstein and Gubrium (2000), in Constructing the Life Course, conceptualize that

The life course and its constituent parts or stages are not the objective features of experience that they are conventionally taken to be. Instead, the constructionist approach helps us view the life course as a social form that is constructed and used to make sense of experience.… The life course doesn’t simply unfold before and around us; rather, we actively organize the flow, pattern, and direction of experience in developmental terms as we navigate the social terrain of our everyday lives. (p. 182)

Flashback, fall 1970: As a beginning high school teacher and presumably on a low or modest salary, Mrs. Ann Whitehouse, my junior-year English teacher, would wear the same outfits frequently throughout the year. There were two in particular that I remember: a bright orange and cream-white polyester pants suit (well, that was the fashion at the time) and a dark-blue knee-length dress flecked with gold motifs. The dark-blue dress in particular was remembered because it was a bit low cut at the top—somewhat scandalous for a female high school teacher in 1970. But Mrs. Whitehouse looked stunning in those outfits. Add her long brunette hair, sparkling eyes, pleasant smile, and bright red lipstick, and she was pretty.

Flashforward, the 1980s: I go through my beiges, tans, and browns phase.

Flashforward, the 1990s: In midlife crisis I go through my tight jeans, Harley T’s, and leather phase.

Flashforward, the 2000s: I go through my blacks and whites and grays phase. A graduate student once asked me, “Johnny, why do you always dress in blacks and whites and grays?” I sincerely replied, “I guess it’s like a uniform, a sense of professionalism.” But I learned later, on my own, that that was not the real reason.

Flashsideway: There are five categories of memories for memory work. The first is accretion—how memories accumulate meaning over time; the second is condensation—how meanings intensify and become simpler over time; the third is secon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Conceptualizing Past, Present, and Future Timespaces
• SECTION 1 Timespaces and the Past in Literacy Research
• SECTION 2 Timespaces and the Present in Literacy Research
• SECTION 3 Timespaces and the Future in Literacy Research
• Afterword: The Time-Space Double Helix of Research
• Author Biographies
• Index