The ways in which macro factors of global socioeconomic power shape micro language/literacy interactions in education have increasingly gained attention in applied linguistics research. This volume, which emerged from an American Anthropological Association symposium in 1999, sets out to examine this dialectic through the lens of critical ethnographic research. In her introduction, McCarty draws on the new literacy studies paradigm to challenge dichotomizing discourses—oral versus literate, literate versus illiterate, monolingual versus bilingual—as well as current calls for standardization, homogeneity, and universalist approaches to language and literacy education. Instead, the editor situates the volume within a social practices framework, which emphasizes the multiplicity and variability of literacy practices shaped by context, power, culture, and purpose.
The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is followed by the commentary of a renowned scholar (McDermott, Moll, and Cummins, respectively). The first section focuses on ways in which oppressed or colonized (minoritized, as McCarty calls them) communities have appropriated dominant practices or structures for local ends: how, for example, writing was used to impose colonial political and religious power in the Chiapas highlands but was appropriated for local purposes; how dominant educational institutions that were historically used to wipe out Hopi language and culture have become tools for cultural reclamation; how a teacher education initiative within the context of imposed accountability mandates was collaboratively transformed by Navajo teachers into a space for curriculum renewal and teacher empowerment; and how deficit constructions of Alaskan Native and Australian Aboriginal graduate students' performance within mainstream academia triggered counternarratives that asserted the legitimacy of indigenous knowledge and terms of reference. Taken together, the chapters in this section demonstrate that imposed literacy practices can breed resistance, which, in turn, can become a tool of cultural power. An interesting implication of this section is that the reductionist notion of illiteracy (failure to achieve imposed dominant literacy) can be reframed as a complex response to literacide (my term): In the face of colonial and postcolonial (globalizing) efforts to eliminate indigenous cultures, languages, and literacies, not embracing the literacy = progress myth becomes a weapon of cultural preservation.
The second section of the volume looks closely at how power plays itself out in micro interactions in multiethnic and multilingual classrooms. Chapters in this section critique many of the discourses that frame classroom practices: teacher discourses about African American children (examined through the lens of critical race theory); bilingual education discourses, which reductively categorize students by dominant language; and discourses that dichotomize home and school practices. Recurring themes focus on hybridity, fluidity, and contextual variability in language and literacy use as well as negotiation and shifting balances of power in teacher-student relations. Several of the chapters implicitly challenge the cultural mismatch theory (which argues that underachievement by minoritized students results from a mismatch between the cultures and practices of home and school), arguing, on the one hand, that cultural congruency is an ideal that is difficult to achieve and, on the other, that students can negotiate power and space for learning even in classrooms where dominant practices (like initiation, response, evaluation) prevail. A key argument in this section is that learning takes place through this negotiation of power, identities, classroom roles, and language use in shifting local contexts. As such, this section both reinforces and problematizes the first section of the volume. It reinforces the notion that imposed institutional power is not fixed and impermeable. However, it raises questions about the relationships between culture and power: Whereas the first section emphasizes the importance of reclaiming indigenous languages and cultures in shifting power relations, the second section of the volume suggests that cultural reclamation, in itself, is not the issue.
Section 3 zooms back out to a macro lens, looking at how schooling interfaces with the demands of the global economy. Chapters in this section juxtapose pedagogical models that feed into the production of workers required by the new capitalism and those that challenge the ways they have been affected by it. The first chapter, despite arguing that there is a mismatch between the kinds of worker required in the new capitalism and the kinds of people being produced by schools, provides data suggesting that schools actually ensure that there will be an abundance of service workers, who make up the largest growing sector of the workforce. In other words, the historical trend of producing a stratified workforce continues (even though the types of job are different). The next chapter examines the impact of globalization on the workforce in El Paso, TX and the implications of changes brought on by NAFTA for English language learners. It describes two programs: One, through its teaching practices, produces menial workers, many of whom blame themselves for their circumstances; the other takes on the challenges of the socioeconomic context through a power-building model.
The volume offers a rich palette of studies that, as McCarty argues in the conclusion, call for “multiple literacies and the pedagogies that nurture them” (p. 297) as a response to the monolithic one-size-fits-all policies of the dominant political agenda. The strengths of the volume are in its diversity—it enacts the diversity that it calls for—and in its critique of current policies. Additionally, these strengths are, at the same time, exactly its weaknesses (as is so often the case): In embracing such a range of critiques, the underlying differences among the authors' theoretical orientations are obscured. The editor seems to conflate a multiple literacies/social practices perspective with a critical literacy perspective; although they might be rooted in related ideologies, their emphases and pedagogical orientations differ. Either explicitly acknowledging these differences or attempting to reconcile them would have yielded analytical cohesion in the volume. The strength of the critique that permeates the volume, likewise, left me with a somewhat unrequited thirst for more examples of classrooms in which teachers forge hope within constraints. Overall, though, the volume is a valuable contribution to research on the roles of language and literacy in negotiating power within the dialectic of local and global forces.
