Læsi sem félagsleg iðja: Dæmi úr íslenskukennslu heyrnarlausra

Abstract

The 2011 national curriculum highlights literacy as one of the main pillars of education, emphasizing that ideas about literacy have been changing. Now, literacy is not only thought of as acquiring specific foundational skills, but centers first and foremost on ˮcreating meaning.“ This meaning creation depends both on individuals’ varied experiences and ˮmultiple situated factors.“ Reading and writing never occur in a vacuum; when we read or write it is in the context of social and cultural circumstances that affect the way we interpret or write different types of texts. In schools, dominant ideas about reading and writing emerge in specific emphases and teaching approaches that create certain opportunities for students. However, these approaches tend to limit students’ ability to utilize their talents and experiences or work from their interests, hindering them from developing as individuals.

But what do these ideas mean to teachers and participants in the field? How can we use the concept of literacy as a social practice to guide our teaching practices, and to develop different teaching approaches? What opportunities do these ideas provide for us to work with literacy in a meaningful way? As a literacy teacher, teacher researcher, and teacher educator, I have been developing ideas about literacy as a social practice to explore and negotiate the reality facing teachers and students within schools.

In this article I discuss what is embedded in sociocultural ideas of literacy, with a special focus on literacy as a social practice. In so doing, I introduce the theoretical constructs of literacy events (læsisatburðir) and literacy practices (læsisiðjur), explaining how they intertwine to create an observable unit while differing in significant ways.

To connect these ideas to the reality of the Icelandic school system I use literacy events developed for teacher research that I conducted as an Icelandic teacher of children who are deaf (Karen Rut Gísladóttir, 2011; 2014), to illuminate how the ideological nature of literacy practices impacts student-teacher interactions within schools. Through this discussion I illuminate the relationship between literacy and power by contextualizing specific events within the competing clinical and sociocultural discourses shaping the field of deaf education. In so doing I utilize the literacy practice model developed by Purcell-Gates, Perry and Briseño (2011) to focus on a specific situation while examining how emergent discursive struggles are influenced by different ways of being in the world.

Within their model, Purcell-Gates et al. (2011) divide literacy practices into three different layers, encouraging educational researchers and practitioners to explore literacy practices from different perspectives. In the first layer, the social purpose, we are encouraged to take a critical stance towards everyday literacy practices found within schools, and to consider the purpose of having students engage in them. In the second layer, the social activity domain, we examine how students’ engagement with different kinds of texts within schools is preparing them to take action or participate in their own lives and society. The third layer, the context, requires us to contextualize everyday events taking place within school within the wider political milieu, exploring how historical and institutional forces celebrate certain cultures and wordsviews while marginalizing others.

In this article I explore in depth a poem written by my student Melkorka (all names are pseudonyms), in which she extends the concept of deafness beyond the invisible lack of the sense of hearing to a physical lack. Focusing on the power dynamics underlying social interaction over a literacy event and the role of historical forces in making that literacy event work, I examine how knowledge creation within the classroom is a dynamic, negotiated process with the ever-present danger of more dominant literacy practices and discourses governing less dominant ones.

This paper is an effort to encourage researchers and practitioners working in Iceland to explore the affordances of using literacy as a social practice to transform assumptions about teaching and learning from the inside out, with the goal of including the multiple experiences and backgrounds students bring to school.