Alternative media for public pedagogy: "Chief" concerns and human agency

To demonstrate how the growing influence of alternative media in civil society correlates with the rise of social movements and their influence on contemporary manifestations of resistance, this research uses critical ethnographic methodologies to document the narratives of alternative media producers in the pro-Indigenous and anti-“Chief” campaigns at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 2006-2007 school year. These narratives demonstrate not only the ways alternative media help transmit dissent by distributing information to diverse populations, but also the manner they facilitate contexts that influence identity formations and strengthen counter-cultural communal practices. Particular lineages of critical social theory are used to situate knowledge construction and social relationships within specific socio-historic contexts to approach issues of subjectivity, human agency, and resistance. These include the Frankfurt School for Social Research, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and the Brazilian education philosopher Paulo Freire, who emphasize criticality based on the engagement of ideological analysis, as well as developing capacities to critique and resist oppressive social and political relationships. Thus, this study argues for expanding traditional notions of literacy to include the ability to decode and produce media as a critical element of meaningful democratic participation.

Education at last! Taiwanese grandmothers "go to school"

Language socialization is a life-long process in which individuals are continuously socialized into new roles, statuses, and practices. This process becomes more complex in multilingual contexts. However, we know little of the language socialization of older adults and we know even less of minority-speaking elders' experiences of linguistic marginalization in contemporary communicative milieus. In this ethnographic and discourse-analytic study, I examine the language socialization of non-Mandarin-speaking elderly Taiwanese women in senior adult education programs in a rural township in Taiwan. Through examining autobiographical narratives, master narratives about elders, and classroom discourses, this study explores the historical construction of their sociolinguistic marginalization and their negotiation and resistance of such marginalization. The majority of the elderly women were denied education when they were young. Some received Japanese education during the Japanese colonization period. While the uneducated and illiterate elders have a strong aspiration for learning, they are dismissed as "unable to learn" by their teachers, peer students, and community leaders. By contrast, the Japanese literate exhibit a strong learning identity associated with colonial modernity. These two groups, however, have to contend with the social stereotype associated with their non-Mandarin speaking status. Under a Mandarin-only ideology that links Mandarin with modernity, discourses that have actively mobilized the category of “illiterate” to reference the older population are part and parcel of Taiwan’s modern identity. By demonstrating how these women are treated, in official discourses and in classroom interactions, as children for their lack of Mandarin abilities, I argue that the literacy education that set out to “compensate” these women for their earlier lack of educational opportunity has paradoxically reinforced their marginalization. Further, in recent years, they have become even more marginalized as the government has prioritized the education of recent young female marriage immigrants from Southeast Asia, who are considered in charge of educating the “future sons and daughters of Taiwan.” This research demonstrates how language socialization is a contested and life-long process and calls attention to the effects of language ideologies on literacy and language education. The findings have policy implications for improving literacy and language education both within Taiwan and elsewhere in the world.

Seeing Turkish state formation processes: Mapping language and education census data

Language provides an interesting lens to look at state-building processes because of its cross-cutting nature. For example, in addition to its symbolic value and appeal, a national language has other roles in the process, including: (a) becoming the primary medium of communication which permits the nation to function efficiently in its political and economic life, (b) promoting social cohesion, allowing the nation to develop a common culture, and (c) forming a primordial basis for self-determination. Moreover, because of its cross-cutting nature, language interventions are rarely isolated activities. Languages are adopted by speakers, taking root in and spreading between communities because they are legitimated by legislation, and then reproduced through institutions like the education and military systems. Pádraig Ó’ Riagáin (1997) makes a case for this observing that “Language policy is formulated, implemented, and accomplishes its results within a complex interrelated set of economic, social, and political processes which include, inter alia, the operation of other non-language state policies” (p. 45). In the Turkish case, its foundational role in the formation of the Turkish nation-state but its linkages to human rights issues raises interesting issues about how socio-cultural practices become reproduced through institutional infrastructure formation. This dissertation is a country-level case study looking at Turkey’s nation-state building process through the lens of its language and education policy development processes with a focus on the early years of the Republic between 1927 and 1970. This project examines how different groups self-identified or were self-identified (as the case may be) in official Turkish statistical publications (e.g., the Turkish annual statistical yearbooks and the population censuses) during that time period when language and ethnicity data was made publicly available. The overarching questions this dissertation explores include: 1.What were the geo-political conditions surrounding the development and influencing the Turkish government’s language and education policies? 2.Are there any observable patterns in the geo-spatial distribution of language, literacy, and education participation rates over time? In what ways, are these traditionally linked variables (language, literacy, education participation) problematic? 3.What do changes in population identifiers, e.g., language and ethnicity, suggest about the government’s approach towards nation-state building through the construction of a civic Turkish identity and institution building? Archival secondary source data was digitized, aggregated by categories relevant to this project at national and provincial levels and over the course of time (primarily between 1927 and 2000). The data was then re-aggregated into values that could be longitudinally compared and then layered on aspatial administrative maps. This dissertation contributes to existing body of social policy literature by taking an interdisciplinary approach in looking at the larger socio-economic contexts in which language and education policies are produced.

Beyond hope: Rhetorics of mobility, possibility, and literacy

When writing teachers enter the classroom, they often bring with them a deep faith in the power of literacy to rectify social inequalities and improve their students’ social and economic standing. It is this faith—this hope for change—that draws some writing teachers to locations of social and economic hardship. I am interested in how teachers and theorists construct their own narratives of social mobility, possibility, and literacy. My dissertation analyzes the production and expression of beliefs about literacy in the narratives of a diverse group of writing teachers and theorists, from those beginning their careers to those who are published and widely read. The central questions guiding this study are: How do teachers’ and theorists’ narratives of becoming literate intersect with literacy theories? and How do such literacy narratives intersect with beliefs in the power of literacy to improve individuals’ lives socially, economically, and personally? I contend that the professional literature needs to address more fully how teachers’ and theorists’ personal histories with literacy shape what they see as possible (and desirable) for students, especially those from marginalized communities. A central focus of the dissertation is on how teachers and theorists attempt to resolve a paradox they are likely to encounter in narratives about literacy. On one hand, they are immersed in a popular culture that cherishes narrative links between literacy and economic advancement (and, further, between such advancement and a “good life”). On the other hand, in professional discourse and in teacher preparation courses, they are likely to encounter narratives that complicate an assumed causal relationship between literacy and economic progress. Understanding, through literacy narratives, how teachers and theorists chart a practical path through or around this paradox can be beneficial to literacy education in three ways. First, it can offer direction in professional development and teacher education, addressing how teachers negotiate the boundaries between personal experience, theory, and pedagogy. Second, it can help teachers create spaces wherein students can explore the impact of paradoxical views about the role of literacy on their own lives. Finally, it can offer direction in public policy discourse, extending awareness of what we want—and need—from English language arts education in the twenty-first century. To explore these issues, I draw on case studies and ethnographic observation as well as narrative inquiry into teachers’ and theorists’ published literacy narratives. I situate my findings within three interrelated frames: 1) the narratives of new teachers, 2) the published works of literacy educators and theorists, and 3) my own literacy narrative. My first chapter, “Beyond Hope,” explores the tenuous connections between hope and critique in literacy studies and provides a methodological overview of the study. I argue that scholarship must move beyond a singular focus on either hope or critique in order to identify the transformative potential of literacy in particular circumstances. Analyzing literacy narratives provides a way of locating a critically informed sense of possibility. My second chapter, “Making Teachers, Making Literacy,” explores the intersection between teachers’ lives and the theories they study, based on qualitative analysis of a preservice course for secondary education English teachers. I examine how these preservice English teachers understood literacy, how their narratives of becoming literate and teaching English connected—and did not connect—with theoretical and pedagogical positions, and how these stories might inform their future work as practitioners. Centering primarily on preservice teachers who resisted Nancie Atwell’s pedagogy of possibility because they found it too good to be true, this research concentrates on moments of disjuncture, as expressed in class discussion and in one-on-one interviews, when literacy theories failed to align with aspiring teachers’ understandings of their own experiences and also with what they imagined as possible in disadvantaged educational settings. In my third and fourth chapters, I analyze the narratives of celebrated teachers and theorists who put forth an agenda that emphasizes possibilities through literacy, examining how they negotiate the relationship between their own literacy stories and literacy theories. Specifically, I investigate the narratives of three proponents of critical literacy: Mike Rose, Paulo Freire, and Myles Horton, all highly respected literacy teachers whose working-class backgrounds influenced their commitment to teaching in disenfranchised communities. In chapter 3, “Reading Lives on the Boundary,” I demonstrate how Mike Rose’s 1989 autobiographical text, Lives on the Boundary, juxtaposes rhetorics of mobility with critiques of such possibility. Through an analysis of work published in professional journals, I offer a reception history of Rose’s narrative, focusing specifically on how teachers have negotiated the tension between hope and critique. I follow this analysis with three case studies, drawn from a larger sampling, that inquire into the personal connections that writing teachers make with Lives on the Boundary. The teachers in this study, who provided written responses and participated in audio-recorded follow-up interviews, were asked to compare Rose’s story to their own stories, considering how their personal literacy histories influenced their teaching. My findings illustrate how a group of teachers and theorists have projected their own assessments of what literacy and higher education can and cannot accomplish onto this influential text. In my fourth chapter, “Horton and Freire’s Road as Literacy Narrative,” I concentrate on Myles Horton and Paulo Freire’s 1990 collaborative spoken book, We Make the Road by Walking. Central to my analysis are the educators’ stories about their formative years, including their own primary and secondary education experiences. I argue that We Make the Road by Walking demonstrates how theories of literacy cannot be divorced from personal histories. I begin by examining the spoken book as a literacy narrative that fuses personal and theoretical knowledge, focusing specifically on its authors’ ideas on theory. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope—the intersection of time and space within narrative—I then explore the literacy narratives emerging from the production process of the book, in a video production about Horton and Freire’s meeting, and ultimately in the two men’s reflections on their childhood years (Dialogic). Interspersed with these accounts is archival material on the book’s editorial production that illustrates the value of increased dialogue between personal history and theories of literacy. My fifth chapter is both a reflective analysis and a qualitative study of my work at a men’s medium-high security prison in Illinois, where I conducted research and served as the instructor of an upper-level writing course, “Writing for a Change,” in the spring of 2009. Entitled “Doing Time with Literacy Narratives,” this chapter explores the complex ways in which literacy and incarceration are configured in students’ narratives as well as my own. With and against students’ stories, I juxtapose my own experiences with literacy, particularly in relation to being the son of an imprisoned father. In exploring the intersections between such stories, I demonstrate how literacy narratives can function as a heuristic for exploring beliefs about literacy between teachers and students both inside and outside of the prison-industrial complex. My conclusion pulls together the various themes that emerged in the three frames, from the making of new teachers to the published literacy narratives of teachers and theorists to my own literacy narrative. Writing teachers encounter considerable pressure to align their curricula with one or another theory of literacy, which has the effect of negating the authority of knowledge about literacy gleaned from experience as readers and writers. My dissertation contends that there is much to be gained by finding ways of articulating theories of literacy that encompass teachers’ knowledge of reading and writing as expressed in personal narratives of literacy. While powerful cultural rhetorics of upward social mobility often neutralize the critical potential of teachers’ own narratives of literacy—potential that has been documented by scholars in writing studies and allied disciplines—this is not always the case. The chapters in this dissertation offer evidence that hopeful and critical positions on the transformational possibilities of literacy are not mutually exclusive.

Youth Expression with Video Surveillance Technology

This qualitative study examines five young Afro-Franco Caribbean males in the Diaspora and their experiences with systems of technology as a tool of oppression and liberation. The study utilized interpretive biography and participatory video research to examine the issues of identity, power/control, surveillance technology, love and freedom. The study made use of a number of data collection methods including interviews, round table discussions, and personal narratives. A hermeneutic theoretical framework is employed to develop an objective view of the problems facing Afro-Franco Caribbean males in the schools and community. The purpose of the study is to provide an environment and new media technology that Afro-Franco Caribbean males can use to engage and discuss their views on issues mentioned above and to ultimately develop a video project to share with the community. Moreover, the study sought to examine an epistemological approach (Creolization) that young black males, particularly Afro-Franco-Caribbean males, might use to communicate, document, and share their everyday experiences in the Diaspora. The findings in the study reveal that the participants are experiencing: (a) a lack of community involvement in the urban space they currently reside, (b) frustration with the perspective of their home country, Haiti, that is commonly shown in mainstream media, and (c) ridicule, shame, and violence in the spaces (school and community) that should be safe. The study provides the community (both local and scholarly) with an opportunity to hear the voices and concerns of youth in the urban space. In addition the study suggests a need for schools to create a critical pedagogical curriculum in which power can be democratically shared.

Quichua-Spanish language contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: revisiting media lengua syncretic language practices

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. Overall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. Overall, 58% of the content words, 39% of the basic vocabulary, and 50% of the subject pronouns in the Salcedo corpus were derived from Spanish. When compared to Muysken’s description of highlander Quichua in the 1970’s, Spanish loanwords have more than doubled in each category. The overall level of Spanish loanwords in Salcedo Quichua has grown to a level between highlander Quichua in the 1970’s and Media Lengua. Similar to Spanish’s lexical influence in Media Lengua, the increase of Spanish borrowings in today’s rural Quichua can be seen in non-basic and basic vocabularies as well as the subject pronoun system. Significantly, most of the growth has occurred through forms of adlexification i.e., doublets, well-established borrowings, and cultural borrowings, suggesting that ‘ordinary’ lexical borrowing is also capable of producing Media Lengua-type sentences. I approach the second objective by investigating two separate phenomena related to structural convergence. The first examines the complex verbal constructions that have developed in Quichua through Spanish loan translations while the second describes the type of Quichua particles that are attached to Spanish lexemes while speaking Spanish. The calquing of the complex verbal constructions from Spanish were employed when speaking standard Quichua. Since this standard form is typically used by language purists, I argue that their use of calques is a strategy of exploiting the full range of expression from Spanish without incorporating any of the Spanish lexemes which would give the appearance of ‘contamination’. The use of Quichua particles in local varieties of Spanish is a defining characteristic of Quichuacized Spanish, spoken most frequently by women and young children in the community. Although the use of Quichua particles was probably not the main catalyst engendering Media Lengua, I argue that its contribution as a source language to other ‘mixed’ varieties, such as Media Lengua, needs to be accounted for in descriptions of BML genesis. Contrary to Muysken’s representation of relatively ‘unmixed’ Spanish and Quichua as the two source languages of Media Lengua, I propose that local varieties of Spanish might have already been ‘mixed’ to a large degree before Media Lengua was created. The third objective attempts to draw a relationship between particular social variables and the use of Spanish loanwords. Whisker Boxplots and ANOVAs were used to determine which social group, if any, have been introducing new Spanish borrowings into the bilingual communities in Salcedo. Specifically, I controlled for age, education, native language, urban migration, and gender. The results indicate that none of the groups in each of the five social variables indicate higher or lower loanword use. The implication of these results are twofold: (a) when lexical borrowing occurs, it is immediately adopted as the community-wide norm and spoken by members from different backgrounds and generations, or (b) this level of Spanish borrowing (58%) is not a recent phenomenon. The fourth and final objective draws on my ethnographic research that addresses the attitudes of syncretic language use. I observed that Quichuacized Spanish and Hispanicized Quichua are highly stigmatized varieties spoken by the country’s most marginalized populations and families, yet within the community, syncretic ways of speaking are in fact the norm. It was shown that there exists a range of different linguistic definitions for ‘Chaupi Lengua’ and other syncretic language practices as well as many contrasting connotations, most of which were negative. One theme that emerged from the interviews was that speaking syncretic varieties of Quichua weakened the consultant’s claim to an indigenous identity. The linguistic and social data presented in this dissertation supports an alternative view to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis, one that has the advantage of operating with well-precedented linguistic processes and which is actually observable in the present-day Salcedo area. The results from the study on lexical borrowing are significant because they demonstrate how a dynamic bilingual speech community has gradually diversified their Quichua lexicon under intense pressure to shift toward Spanish. They also show that Hispanicized Quichua (Quichua with heavy lexical borrowing) clearly arose from adlexification and prolonged lexical borrowing, and is one of at least six identifiable speech styles found in Salcedo. These results challenge particular interpretations of language contact outcomes, such as, ones that depict sources languages as discrete and ‘unmixed.’ The bilingual continuum presented in this thesis shows on the one hand, the range of speech styles that are accessible to different speakers, and on the other hand, the overlapping, syncretic features that are shared among the different registers and language varieties. It was observed that syncretic speech styles in Salcedo are employed by different consultants in varied interactional contexts, and in turn, produce different evaluations by other fellow community members. In the current dissertation, I challenge the claim that relexification and Media Lengua-type sentences develop in isolation and without the influence of other bilingual phenomena. Based on Muysken's Media Lengua example sentences and the speech styles from the Salcedo corpus, I argue that Media Lengua may have arisen as an institutionalized variant of the highly mixed "middle ground" within the range of the Salcedo bilingual continuum discussed above. Such syncretic forms of Spanish and Quichua strongly resemble Media Lengua sentences in Muysken’s research, and therefore demonstrate how its development could have occurred through several different language contact processes and not only through relexification.