Active Justice-Orientated Citizenship and Critical Literacy: The Voices of

Experienced Teachers

Douglas FlemingUniversité d'Ottawa/ University of OttawaFaculty of Education/ Faculté d’éducation

dfleming@uottawa.cahttp://douglasfleming.weebly.com

CERN 2012

Qualitative interview-based study

perspectives of eight veteran adult ESL and literary teachers;

their understandings of the purposes of these forms of education, focusing specifically on citizenship and literacy.

Critical literacy and justice-orientated citizenship are linked and can be taught even at basic levels of English language proficiency.

Theoretical Framework: Active Citizenship

How one’s identity as a citizen can taken up as a participatory role, rather than as a part of a passive status simply conferred on one by a nation state (Kennedy, 2007; Print, 2007).

Three different types of roles: the personally responsible citizen;the participatory citizen; and the justice-oriented citizen.

Justice-oriented citizens “critically assess social, political and economic structures and explore strategies for change that address root causes of problems” (Westheimer & Kahne, 2005, p.29).

Theoretical Framework: Critical Literacy

Literacy is more than a set of skills centered on coding and decoding text:

a form of social practice in which multiple forms of text are negotiated and critically examined (Street, 1984);

relationships between language practice, power relations and identity (Janks, 2010);

home, family, work and community (Papen, 2005);globalization (Castels, 2011);multimodality (New London Group, 1996).

The Historical Context

English as a Second Language (ESL):subject to strong governmental involvement

(Tomkins, 1978); ESL provides “basic language training to adult

newcomers… aimed at facilitating social, cultural and economic integration” (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2006).

Literacy education:literacy education has always been very closely

associated with ESL, social reform and nation building (Tight, 2002);

especially true in Canada (Welton, 1995).

Methodology

8 participants recommended to me as having had extensive work experience in both ESL and literacy;

2 large Continuing Education departments (Ontario & B.C.);

informal semi-structured interviews with an initial start list of questions (career highlights; concrete examples from teaching practice; overall purposes of these forms of education, definitions of citizenship and literacy;

audio taped, transcribed and coded using NVivo software;

ethical review board approval and informed consent.

“This is what the value of literacy is: it is about citizenship. It is about how you get involved, how you understand what your community is, what it is to be a citizen, what you are entitled to, what you should be giving back” (participant 1).

Literacy education must not be limited to reading and writing skills, but must also engage learners in an awareness of what is going on in society: “it’s a consciousness raising kind of thing” (2).

Second language literacy learners do not simply lack graphic language skills. They also quite commonly have “limited vocabulary and an incomplete command of syntax in the target language. In addition, these learners lack an understanding of the culture of the surrounding social environment” (3).

“How you feel about yourself as a part of this community and a part of this place, it is about the stuff that happens around the learning to read. As people learn to read, they start to analyze class and privilege. One of the things that people do in literacy programs is they start to make connections” (4).

Teachers should interweave principles related to “participatory citizenship into everything they do”, so as to help students who are becoming Canadian and “attempting to navigate in our culture and sort of juggling their own culture at the same time” (5).

“Being a good person, being a good citizen, and being a role model for others and bringing in the compassion and the generosity to help others, the vision for future… You need to basic knowledge of what it is you looking into, what the country needs… a good citizen would be a person who is doing his or her best for the betterment of humanity” (6).

Literacy instruction does have a skill-based dimension, but there is a second level that “is like trying to invent a third language” in which students learn self-confidence and autonomy. We help build, “confidence, yes, because if learners feel they are less competent… they cannot articulate their rights and needs” (7).

“I gear my teaching more towards a focus on writing skills, and perhaps even, instead of cultural studies, more on a practicable note in literacy, I would gear more towards getting jobs, resume skills and those types of things” (8).

Half of the participants in this study (1,2,4,7) endorsed justice-orientated versions of citizenship and critical orientations towards literacy. They also made strong links between the two;

Two respondents (5,6) endorsed participatory notions of citizenship and adopted positions that went well beyond skill-based orientations towards literacy;

One respondent (3) conceived of literacy as being more than a set of decoding skills; however, she did not did not emphasize participatory or justice-orientated forms of citizenship;

Another participant (8) had a skill-based definition of literacy and a “fact-based” notion of citizenship. Nonetheless, this teacher conducted multimodal literacy activities and was involved in school participatory citizenship education projects.

Two tensions in the historic and research contexts:skill-based and critical notions of literacy;passive and participatory models of citizenship.

Mirrored in the experiences of my respondents: most of my participants moved in their careers from a

relatively exclusive endorsement of skill-based and passive models of literacy and citizenship to those that were more critical and active;

most did not see skill-based forms of literacy as being necessarily in opposition to those that are more critical;

most saw need to connect one with the other; most saw no need to link the classroom treatment of

citizenship to higher levels of language proficiency.

Implications:

The historic and academic debates in regards to literacy and citizenship are reflected in current teaching practice;

It is not enough to simply say that literacy is more than a set of decoding skills. One must develop concrete classroom methods that link the skill-based literacy needs of learners to a justice orientation towards citizenship.

We should avoid the temptation to link citizenship education to higher levels of English language proficiency.

In short, I believe that we should pay attention to the experiences of these veteran teachers and follow their examples in our professional development, training and practice.