Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

Land-based literacies scholars have worked to expand understandings of literacies to include often marginalized cultures who understand literacy as resulting from human and more-than-human relations. In this article, we contribute to this broadening of literacies with an analysis of how nature influences the meaning-making practices of rural, subaltern communities in the Global South. Our inspiration stems from indigenous scholars who have advanced indigenous and relational epistemologies, seeking to bridge the nature/culture divide that remains prevalent in Western thinking. The central question that guides this article is: How are Land-based literacies produced through the felt and sensed relationships with nature, history and culture in the Callemar community? Drawing on micro-analysis of participant-generated video data from two walks with Colombian youth and adults from the Callemar community, we illustrate ways naturecultures, specifically the assemblages of Land, collective memory and cultural practices, produce Land-based literacies. We describe Land- walking, including forest- and creek-crossing practices, as literacies that require reading and meaning-making with the Land, and that which allow individuals to relate to other beings and thrive in the changing landscape of their rural community. Our description and discussion of Land-based literacies in this rural community poses important implications for informing pluriversal literacies pedagogies that draw on local knowledges and contexts to make literacy learning more relevant and equitable. Furthermore, we describe the relevance of Land-based literacies for sustainable stewardship of the Land during times of drastic environmental change.

This article highlights how mentors in spoken word poetry workshops drew on culturally sustaining pedagogy, modeled their own creativity and vulnerability through their poetry, and amplified the voices of youth poets by encouraging them to explore their identities and grapple with inequities in their own lives. Situated in western Sydney, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse communities within Australia, the article focuses on the Real Talk program, a 6-week school-based spoken word poetry workshop organized by the Bankstown Poetry Slam, the largest slam in the southern hemisphere. It examines the critical role that mentor poets play in supporting young people's storytelling through spoken word poetry.

Global literacy partnerships between the Global North and Global South inevitably reside in the expansive waters of neoliberal reforms and coloniality. Global North and Global South literacy educators within global literacy partnerships must decolonize life through a liberatory praxis whereby they are convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce and to announce. Nonviolent Communication, with its focus on speaking honestly and listening empathetically, provides a framework for cultivating the criticality, awareness, and connection needed to disrupt neoliberal reforms and coloniality within partnerships. Through NVC, the everyday dialogic experiences of Global North and Global South educators can generate a “power with” relationship instead of a “power over” relationship of oppression and coloniality.

This paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero-cisgender norms are perpetuated through overrepresentation in endorsed texts. Representations of queer subjectivities or themes in the most highly promoted texts, those appearing on the examination list, are infrequent and minor. Reflexive justice thinking acknowledges the critique of merely identifying “who is missing” in the literature and extends the discussion to consider the complexities of the social, cultural, and political contexts that influence who gets to decide.

In this Narrative Inquiry, we share the stories of three Chinese rural students who grew up in a southeastern county in China before moving to the county seat for high school. By inviting our participants to read their own life, we aimed to understand how Chinese rural students make sense of their experience in an exam-centered school system that seemed to offer them opportunities of upward social mobility but at the same time perpetuated the mindset of rural deficiency. Data analysis shows that the visceral feelings of shame and love played an important role in our participants' critical consciousness about school, allowing them to work within and against school norms to transform a strictly stratified school space. We argue that marginalized youth's storytelling can become a practice of critical literacy, enabling them to construct critical meaning makings in embodied ways.