Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education: Global Lessons from a Literacy Education Program 9781350147430, 9781350147461, 9781350147447

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Notes on the Editorial Process
Introduction: Reinventing Teacher Education for the Mexican Context
Part 1: The Historical Context of the Initiative
Chapter 1: Literacy to Soar: The Dream of a “New Mexico”
Chapter 2: Innovation from the Bottom Up: From Street Reading to a Graduate Degree Program in Literacy Studies
Chapter 3: Mexico: Reading Our Times (Mexko: Ma Tihpowakah Tonemilis in the Aztec Nahuatl Language)
Part 2: Social and Cognitive Issues in Literacy Education
Chapter 4: Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education: What Matters in Learning How Language is Used in Social Settings
Chapter 5: Literacies and Everyday Life: A Reflection from Teaching Practice
Chapter 6: The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context: Accommodating Original and Colonial Cultures in One Educational System
Chapter 7: Mind, Society, and Literacy
Part 3: Literacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education
Chapter 8: The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education
Chapter 9: Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs
Part 4: Research and Evaluation
Chapter 10: Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education in Rural Normal Schools in Mexico
Chapter 11: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices
Part 5: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Chapter 12: Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education
Conclusion: Networking Letras para Volar into the Future
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Reinventing Teacher Education Series Editors: Marie Brennan, Viv Ellis, Joce Nuttall, Peter Smagorinsky The series presents robust, critical research studies in the broad field of teacher education, including initial or pre-service preparation, in-service and continuing professional development, from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. It takes an innovative approach to research in the field and an underlying commitment to transforming the education of teachers. Also available in the series The Struggle for Teacher Education, edited by Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen, and Tobias Werler Secondary English Teacher Education in the United States, Donna L. Pasternak, Samantha Caughlan, Heidi L. Hallman, Laura Renzi, and Leslie S. Rush Navigating Teacher Education in Complex and Uncertain Times, Carmen I. Mercado Forthcoming in the series The Promise and Practice of University-Based Teacher Education, Alexandra C. Gunn, Mary F. Hill, David A.G. Berg, and Mavis Haigh Transforming Teacher Education with Mobile Technologies, edited by Kevin Burden and Amanda Naylor

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education Global Lessons from a Literacy Education Program Edited by Yolanda Gayol, Patricia Rosas Chávez, and Peter Smagorinsky

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This edition published in 2022 Copyright © Yolanda Gayol, Patricia Rosas Chávez, Peter Smagorinsky and Contributors Note: All royalties from the sales of this book will be donated to Letras para Volar to support their programs. Yolanda Gayol, Patricia Rosas Chávez, and Peter Smagorinsky have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Catherine Wood All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941209 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4743-0 PB: 978-1-3502-1060-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4744-7 eBook: 978-1-3501-4745-4 Series: Reinventing Teacher Education Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Dedicated to the teachers and students of Mexico

vi

Contents List of Figures Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Notes on the Editorial Process Introduction: Reinventing Teacher Education for the Mexican Context Peter Smagorinsky

ix x xii xiii xvi

1

Part 1 The Historical Context of the Initiative 1 2

3

Literacy to Soar: The Dream of a “New Mexico” Patricia Rosas Chávez 31 Innovation from the Bottom Up: From Street Reading to a Graduate Degree Program in Literacy Studies Yolanda Gayol and Patricia Rosas Chávez 58 Mexico: Reading Our Times (Mexko: Ma Tihpowakah Tonemilis in the Aztec Nahuatl Language) Patricia Rosas Chávez and Yolanda Gayol 93

Part 2 4

5 6

7

Social and Cognitive Issues in Literacy Education

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education: What Matters in Learning How Language is Used in Social Settings Patricia Córdova Abundis Literacies and Everyday Life: A Reflection from Teaching Practice Patricia Cisneros Hernandez The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context: Accommodating Original and Colonial Cultures in One Educational System José Luis Iturrioz Leza Mind, Society, and Literacy Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga

119 139

159 179

Part 3 Literacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education 8

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education Luis Alberto Gutiérrez Díaz de León

201

viii

9

Contents

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs César Lozano

Part 4

Research and Evaluation

10 Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education in Rural Normal Schools in Mexico César Correa Arias 11 Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices Martha Vergara Fregoso and José Antonio Méndez Sanz Part 5

222

245

267

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

12 Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education Rita Alejandra Gracián Flores and Ericka Graciela Staufert Reyes

289

Conclusion: Networking Letras para Volar into the Future Yolanda Gayol and Peter Smagorinsky

302

Appendix Index

311 319

Figures 0.1 2.1

Mexican national flag 4 Amoxtli Training for Reading Facilitators. (A color image is available at https://tinyurl.com/y5gau4z6) 66 2.2 Curricular map, Master’s Degree in Literacy 84 3.1 Contemporary musician playing in a Guadalajaran plaza in the Aztec tradition 98 3.2 Jaguar on a Guadalajaran garage door, surrounded by Aztec icons including Quetzalcóatl 99 3.3 Letras para Volar logo 100 7.1 Integrating schema of human cognition 183 7.2 Cognitive domains and creative thinking 190 7.3 Cognitive differences that affect literacy and require educational attention 193 10.1 Rural Normal School, “Miguel Hidalgo,” in Atequiza, Jalisco 246 10.2 Street artist’s rendering of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College 251

Series Editors’ Preface Teacher education is currently one of the most pressing and topical issues in the field of educational research. Around the world, in a range of countries, there is strong interest in how teachers are prepared, in the content of their pre-service education and training programmes and in measuring and monitoring their effectiveness. Fundamentally, there is a questioning of the role and function of what makes up the ‘good’ or successful teacher in society. There are questions about the place of ethical and moral judgments in teachers’ practice, about the introduction of corporate methods and the role of teachers in innovation. Associated with such questions, government policy agenda around the world address whether and how teachers should be educated or trained as teaching comes to be seen, in some jurisdictions, as a short-term mission rather than as a professional career. For some time now there has been an international concern to reform programmes of pre-service (or initial) teacher education. This movement has been driven by a belief that raising standards in education and raising attainment in schools will only be managed effectively if teacher quality is improved. The best way to reform the teaching profession is through changing their teacher education programmes. However, as these reforms are being enacted, contradictions in policy, practice and curriculum design in pre-service teacher education are increasingly apparent in different national settings. These contradictions are, in part, related to the underlying cultural identity of teaching (as a profession, for example) as well as the distribution of wealth within and across these different societies. In some countries, teacher education is seen as a vital tool in the building of national educational, scientific, cultural, technological and economic infrastructures. In others, teacher education has become a means by which those countries’ human capital can be improved, economic competitiveness leveraged and status as knowledge economies ensured. Yet, while many of the drivers are common across these contexts, the direction of policy and how policies are enacted in practice varies considerably and the role of higher education in teacher preparation is often a significant source of diversity across countries.

Series Editors’ Preface

xi

The Reinventing Teacher Education series presents robust, critical research studies in the broad field of teacher education, including initial or pre-service preparation, in-service education and continuing professional development, from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives and from different national perspectives. The series has an underlying commitment to transforming the education of teachers and aims to support innovative approaches to research in the field. Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education is particularly relevant to this series. It opens up a process for renewal of teacher education – in this case, continuing teacher education – linked to community renewal. Providing multiple perspectives from diverse academic participants in the Masters of Literacy Education at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, as part of their Letros par Volar (Literacy to Soar) project, the book offers careful overview of historical and contemporary issues, with international audiences in mind, debates on literacies, discussion of programme design, research and evaluation, and exemplars, including in STEM education. It includes, also, a contribution from members of the first graduating cohort of the master’s programme, outlining their Manifesto for the Recognition of Literacy as a Human Right, demonstrating the strength of the programme and its outcomes. Such careful provision of diverse aspects of the programme illustrates what is at stake in reinventing teacher education but also how this process can contribute to redressing inequalities of citizenry – which will have resonance in multiple countries. We see the book as contributing to significant international debates on teaching and teacher education in diverse communities in multiple ways. It is timely in addressing a key issue for multi-lingual – and decolonializing – societies, now comprising most countries with Indigenous populations, increased global mobility, immigration and refugee flows. What does it mean to be literate in a global world? Concomitantly, what do teacher educators need to do to ensure not only access to literacies but also successful engagement in cultural and other dimensions of literacies – both in pre-service and continuing teacher education? We are excited with the inclusion of a Mexican focus in providing this internationalized contribution and hope it will also expand central and South American readers of the series, along with those in many countries where decoloniality needs to be prioritized in teacher education. Marie Brennan, Viv Ellis, Joce Nuttall and Peter Smagorinsky Series Editors

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Tonatiuh Bravo Padilla for his unconditional support to Letras para Volar, while he was Chancellor at Universidad de Guadalajara. We also acknowledge and thank the University Center for Architecture and Design Arts. In particular, we thank the President, and the academic secretary, Dolores del Río López, who hosted the first Master’s Program on literacy studies in the nation, which in turn made it possible to organize a pool of specialists who reported their experiences in this book. We also greatly appreciate the support of Bloomsbury, our publisher. Alison Baker skillfully orchestrated the review process with support from Reinventing Teacher Education editorial board members Marie Brennan, Viv Ellis, and Joce Nuttall, and the external reviewers they solicited. Zeba Talkhani and Leela Devi masterfully guided the book through editing and production. This volume benefited greatly from the work of the team at Bloomsbury who helped bring it to completion.

Contributors Patricia Cisneros Hernández is full-time Professor and Researcher at the University of Guadalajara where she teaches subjects such as Conceptual Analysis of the Work of Art, Photography, Artistic Projects, Semiotics of the Image, and Literacy in Everyday Life. She earned her PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her experience and research interests are in Art History, Image Semiotics, Latin American Photography History, and Literacy in Everyday Life. Patricia Córdova Abundis is Full Research Professor at the Department of Literature at the University of Guadalajara. Her PhD dissertation was Sociolinguistics Stereotypes at the Novels of Mexican Revolution, which received an award from the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico. She has served as Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research subjects are Sociolinguistics Analysis and Oral speech in Literary Texts. César Correa Arias is a Full Research Professor at the University of Guadalajara, Associate Professor of the Center for Social Movements of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, France, and Visiting Professor at the University of Granada, Spain. His research concerns subjects and actors of higher education institutions: (a) identities and trajectories, (b) socioanalysis of educational policies in Latin America, and (c) curriculum design and flexibility. Yolanda Isabel Gayol is currently in charge of the Master's project in Literacy, and works as Tutor at Fielding Graduate University. She is a principal architect of Letras para Volar. She earned her PhD in Education from the Pennsylvania State University. She has participated as an adviser to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States. Rita Alejandra Gracián Flores is Coordinator of Language and Communication at the Colegio de Estudios Científicos y Tecnológicos del Estado de Jalisco

xiv

Contributors

(CECyTEJ). She has written for literary anthologies, and as coordinator and coauthor of high school textbooks she has sought to intertwine literature with language learning. She is a founding member of the Asociación de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil de México, A. C. She has participated as member of PEN International, in defense of freedom of expression of writers. Luis Alberto Gutiérrez Díaz de León is currently General Coordinator of Information Technologies of the University of Guadalajara. He obtained his PhD in Computing Science from the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes. He is a member of the University Corporation for Internet Development, the Mexican Academy of Informatics, the Mexican Academy of Engineering, the Mexican Supercomputing Network, and National Association of Information Technology Education Institutions. He is secretary of the Board of Directors of the Jalisco Institute of Information Technologies, and a founding member of the ANUIES – TIC Committee. Jose Luis Iturrioz is a linguist teaching and researching several Mexican indigenous languages in the Department of Studies in Indigenous Languages of the University of Guadalajara. He was presented with the Tenamastle Award by the University Center of Colotlán in 2006 for his contribution to the investigation of the indigenous languages and cultures of the northern region of Jalisco, and in 2007 with the Jalisco Award in the humanistic field. César Lozano is full-time Professor at the ITESO of the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, where he teaches in the bachelor's and master's degree programs. He has taught Mathematics I, Differential Calculus II, Multivariable Calculus and Integral Calculus IV, Differential Equations applied to economic models, Advanced Programming (artificial intelligence topics), Discrete Mathematics, and Statistics. He is presently a PhD candidate in Information Technologies at the University of Guadalajara. José Antonio Méndez Sanz is Professor at the University of Oviedo since 2003. He received a PhD in Philosophy in Salamanca (Pontifical University, April 1986) with a thesis on subjectivation (“Subjectivity, time and language in the philosophy of E. Levinas”). He conducted postdoctoral studies at the University of Tübingen (RFA) (1988–1990) on German post-Kantian idealism, and taught secondary education courses at the Oviedo School of Art (1997–2003). He has published numerous works in the field of ethics, ontology, and philosophy of technology.

Contributors

xv

Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist specializing in academic neurosurgery and cognitive and translational neuroscience. He also holds an appointment as Head of the Institute of Translational Neurosciences at the University of Guadalajara. He is former chair of the Department of Neurosciences at the University of Guadalajara. His interests include history, functional neuroanatomy, neuroethics, neurosurgical research, literature, and neuro-education. Patricia Rosas Chávez currently serves as Coordinator of Educational Innovation and Undergraduate Studies in the General Academic Coordination at the University of Guadalajara, where she leads a curriculum reform. She is Coordinator of the Network of the Central West Region of Tutoring of the ANUIES and is responsible for research on the project of linking the University with the municipality of Tala. She is a principal architect of Letras para Volar. Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Guadalajara. His research has applied sociocultural theory to literacy teaching and learning, literacy teacher education, mental health, discourse processes during classroom discussions, and related topics. He serves as the faculty adviser to the Journal of Language and Literacy Education, which is edited by graduate students in his department at UGA. Ericka Graciela Staufert Reyes is a poet and a first-year doctoral student at the Reading/Writing/Literacy EdD program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education She holds a master’s degree in Literacy from the University of Guadalajara. Her poetic work has been published by the American School Foundation of Guadalajara, A.C., and at the blogs www.colibriexquisito. wordpress.com, and www.ixchelecoalternativas.com/blog/. Her research interests include poetics as a means for critical thinking display, and issues of ethnicity and social class in Mexican classrooms. Martha Vergara Fregoso is currently Professor of the Master and Doctorate in Political Science and the Master in Educational Research, Research at the University Center of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Guadalajara. She holds the rank of National Researcher Level 1, awarded by the National System of Researchers of the National Council of Science and Technology. Her research is centered on education and culture.

Notes on the Editorial Process The following issues are germane to how we attempted to produce a volume written originally for the most part in Spanish and make it accessible to a global English-speaking audience.

Translating and Localizing Chapters This collection includes contributions from authors who, although they had been in dialogue about the program development, wrote their chapters independently of one another. Most chapters were originally written in Spanish. We have attempted to coordinate their work into a more unified perspective, voice, and purpose than the individual chapters provided in their initial versions. In service of these goals, we used the following process for converting the chapters from Spanish to English so that they were both intact in content and transformed for readability and overall coherence. 1. Chapters from Mexico were written in Spanish. Co-editor Yolanda Gayol1 read them and worked with the authors to align their presentation with the academic model of literacy developed at the University of Guadalajara (see Chapter 2). 2. These chapters were then professionally translated from Spanish to English. Translation refers to the process of changing the original language of a text into a more or less literal version in a new language. 3. Co-editor Peter Smagorinsky2 then localized these translations for an English-speaking readership. Localization is a more specialized process of adapting content to suit the needs of readers from other regions, cultures, and other settings where original examples, phrasings, etc. might not resonate. Ideally, this process does not corrupt the authors’ intentions or Gayol is of Mexican mestiza—mixed-race—origin and is bilingual. She has read the contributions in Spanish initially, and then in English following the localization. 2 Smagorinsky is of White US origin and primarily speaks English, with limited Spanish fluency. He has attempted to educate himself about Mexican history, culture, language, and current issues throughout his involvement with the Guadalajaran project. Patricia Rosas is of Mexican mestiza origin and primarily speaks Spanish, with English available for English-only speakers. 1

Notes on the Editorial Process

xvii

colonize their perspective, a potential outcome that the localizer must keep in mind while transforming the text. The localization process has been undertaken alongside the more common editorial task of creating cross-chapter referencing, addressing redundancies, eliminating highly specialized information that is not relevant to the volume’s goals, and editing the whole volume for coherence. Further, it has produced a consistent voice and overall unity across the contributions of authors. The authors had the opportunity to review and approve the localized chapters to reduce the possibility of colonizing their perspective in the effort to produce a coherent final product. Throughout the process, Gayol acted as a bridge to ensure clear communication and agreement in the conversion of the chapters from Spanish to English.

Dilemmas of Referring to Original Mesoamerican Societies3 Many societies, dating to roughly 18,000 BCE, occupied the continents that were invaded, decimated, and colonized by Spanish Conquistadors in the early 1500s. Their inhabitants were descendants of migrants who had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Eastern Asia in a long series of waves that likely involved many ethnic groups, estimated to have taken place as long as 40,000 years ago. The details of this migration remain under investigation, and the reconstruction of this history may never be complete. Of concern in this volume are the societies established in what is now called Mesoamerica, with a focus on Mexico. Mesoamerica is more expansive, consisting of portions of the presentday nations of Mexico (primarily southern Mexico), Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The diverse people in this region spoke languages that included six major groups (Mayan, Oto-Mangue, Mixe–Zoque, Totonacan, Uto-Aztecan, and Chibchan) and many smaller linguistic families, each including abundant dialects. Although their precise numbers are difficult to reconstruct, there are estimates of up to 2,000 languages spoken in Latin America prior to the Spanish invasion (Moreno Fernández, 2006), suggesting great linguistic and cultural variety. Estimates of the number of original languages spoken in present-day Mexico vary. At the high end, “The number of individual languages listed for Thanks to Usree Bhattacharya, Misha Cahnmann-Taylor, and Stephanie Abraham for their input in this complex issue.

3

xviii

Notes on the Editorial Process

Mexico is 292. Of these, 287 are living and 5 are extinct. Of the living languages, 282 are indigenous and 5 are non-indigenous. Furthermore, 1 is institutional, 80 are developing, 74 are vigorous, 88 are in trouble, and 44 are dying” (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019, n. p.). Yet GraphicMaps (2018) claims that “There are over 45 groups of indigenous languages, which in turn have 364 dialects” (n. p.). The Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística (2015) identifies seventy-two original languages currently spoken. The official number of recognized original languages in Mexico is sixty-eight, although El Universal (2019) warns that 60 percent of them are in danger of disappearing. No matter what the count, in spite of what appears to be tremendous cultural diversity, the original people of the region have typically been broadly grouped together from a Eurocentric perspective as a single population, to which a number of names have been applied. These labels include indigenous people, aboriginal people, American Indians, Native Americans, Natives, Native Peoples, Native American Indians, Amerindians, ancient Americans, heritage societies, traditional societies, and First Peoples. They have also been characterized by modifiers such as pre-Conquest, pre-Columbian, pre-Cortesian, pre-Hispanic, precolonial, prehistoric, precontact, autochthonous, endemic, and, no doubt, others. These names have emerged from the colonial perspective and often embody a Eurocentric, patronizing view of those whose societies predated the Spanish Conquest. Some of the terms follow from initial errors in navigational accuracy, such as those associated with the word “Indian,” based on a misconception that the Spanish boats had landed in India. Terms including some version of “America” are linked to Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian contemporary of Christopher Columbus who served as a key navigator in the quest to locate a westerly oceanic trade route from the Mediterranean region to Asia. His name became associated with the continents following Martin Waldseemüller’s publication of Four Voyages of Amerigo in 1507, which brought attention to Vespucci’s realization that he had not landed in Asia, but instead had helped to “discover” a “New World.” Vestiges of these centuries-old labels remain in use in the naming of people as Indians, and the naming of geographic regions such as the West Indies, the Caribbean islands initially believed by Europeans to be the East Indies, now Indonesia. The entrenched nature of these terms suggests the power of colonial imperialism and its impact on history and the social positioning of people relative to European hierarchies. Locating all inhabitants of the region within a single term and its suggestion of homogeneity misrepresents the complexity of the social dynamics of these

Notes on the Editorial Process

xix

societies, given the many conflicts between groups and the different cultures that are bundled together and often conflated. We have had difficulty escaping the homogenization dilemma. Ideally, we would instead refer to the specific ethnic groups or societies and their languages. Yet that labeling practice could be difficult to undertake without providing extensive education in the historical tribal structure of Mexico, which is beyond the purview of this project. We consider our effort to be decolonial, a perspective associated with Latin America that is concerned with critiquing and opposing the Eurocentric domination of people whose cultures have developed outside the Western purview (Quijano, 2007). We recognize the precariousness of claiming a decolonial perspective (see Tuck & Yang, 2012) for a volume that has largely been written in Spanish and localized into English by a White US-based editor for publication by a London-based company. We hope that we have undertaken our task with care and respect, a stance that has required careful attention to the terms used to describe the people whose societies predated European subjugation, many of whose cultures remain vital today. Many of the labels we have listed that are available for these earliest human inhabitants of the continent and their present-day descendants are easy to reject on blatantly colonial grounds. Even those that lack explicit colonial referencing, however, have been critiqued and questioned (Marks, 2014). Indigenous, which has been widely used from an emic, postcolonial/decolonial perspective (e.g., Four Arrows, 2013; Lopez-Gopar, 2014), has also been critiqued for its colonial baggage, given its etymology in both Latin and Greek and its use to position the first inhabitants of lands as subordinate (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). We could not resolve the question of how to find an acultural term to describe human societies. Given the difficulty of listing all extant social, cultural, and linguistic groups when identifying occupants who preceded colonial invasions, and the colonial heritage of most commonly used collective terms, we have settled on original people to describe societies that predated the European invasions. We do so with the recognition that using one term for many ethnic societies suggests that the people are far more similar than their diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and repertoires would indicate.

Spanish-Language Rules and Practices To help readers follow the text, we next provide guidance for those not acquainted with the Spanish language and its customs.

xx

Notes on the Editorial Process

Gendered Language Spanish is a gendered language, with a word’s suffix or the article that introduces a noun indicating the gender of both a person and a thing. Masculine articles are el and los, as in el tiempo (the time) and los hermanos (the brothers); feminine articles are la and las, as in la niña (the young girl) and las mesas (the tables). As these examples indicate, things appear to have arbitrary gender assignments, although some see gender at work, as in el sol (the sun) and la luna (the moon), with the sun interpreted as more powerful and thus masculine, in accordance with patriarchal assumptions. Nouns’ genders are indicated by an -o suffix for masculine, or -a suffice for feminine. Maestro refers to a male teacher, maestra refers to a woman teacher; mestiza refers to a mixed-race woman, mestizo to a mixed-race man; and so on. Masculine nouns that end in consonants, without the o-ending, have a feminine correlate that takes an a-suffix, for example, el doctor for a male doctor, la doctora for a female doctor. Typical of patriarchal systems, mixed-gender groups take the masculine suffix. Not all terms follow this rule, but it is the norm. All such terms reflect a gender binary that is now under interrogation and revision in English, if not yet Spanish. The term Latinx represents an effort from outside Mesoamerica to de-gender the terms for Latino and Latina, which have seen collective nouns such as Latino/a and Latin@ used to replace them without resolving the assumption of a gender binary. Within Mexico, however, there’s no need to distinguish people as Latin[suffix], because they are the primary (often, the exclusive) population and not the subgroup. Latinx is far less likely to appear within nations with Spanish and original people than it is in nations where they are a minoritized population, and can itself be interpreted as a colonial imposition (de Onís, 2017; Hernandez, 2017). There are also seeming contradictions to the general rules. Nouns that end in –ma take a masculine article, for example, el problema (the problem). Some usages seem to violate the rules, for example, el planeta (the planet) and la foto (the photo). But the general rules (la coupled with -a, el coupled with -o) apply to most usages.

Naming Practices In Spanish-language cultures, people have two given names (e.g., Yolanda Isabel) and two surnames (e.g., Gayol Ramírez). Consistent with Spanish patriarchal

Notes on the Editorial Process

xxi

cultural practices, the first surname (located second in the sequence, or third when a middle name is included) has historically been the father's first surname, and the surname that follows is the mother's first surname; more recently a family may choose the order of surnames at birth. Typically, one goes by the given name and the first (father’s) surname only, with the full name used only in legal, formal, and documentary matters (like book authorships). Yolanda Isabel Gayol Ramírez is thus known in everyday usage as Yolanda Gayol. In alphabetical lists such as bibliographies, however, both surnames often appear. On such occasions her scholarship is filed as Gayol Ramírez, Y. Some authors also list their second given name in their formal scholarship, and thus include a second initial in citations. Rita Alejandra Gracián Flores thus should be listed in references as Gracián Flores, R. A. When referencing this volume, please follow these conventions for both the editorial team and for individual chapters by Spanish-surname authors.

Pronunciation Practices The Spanish alphabet has pronunciation rules that are different from those governing English. The following list is incomplete but includes common formations that merit attention. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

The Spanish J is pronounced as if it were an H in English. Jalisco, Guadalajara is thus pronounced “Ha-LEES-ko, Hwa-da-la-HA-ra.” The letter Y can sound like a soft J, such that the name Yolanda might be pronounced Jho-LON-da, although pronouncing it in the fashion of the English Y can also be acceptable. An accent signifies that the syllable should be emphasized in oral speech. Ramírez is thus pronounced Ra-MIR-ez. The presence of a tilde atop the letter n forms a different letter, known as eñe, which is pronounced as if an n were followed by a y, for example, Español is pronounced Es-pa-nyole. Words that include a double-L formation, such as the name Guillermo, should be pronounced as though the two L’s are a Y, for example, GeeYER-mo. The letter X is pronounced as if it is an H. The city of Oaxaca, then, is pronounced Wah-HOK-ah. The letter G has three or four different pronunciations, depending on the source consulted. The pronunciation is dependent on how the letter appears

xxii

Notes on the Editorial Process

in a word. For example, in gato (cat), the g is “hard,” similar to how “get” is pronounced in English. But when the g is followed by e or i, as in gente (people), the g sounds like an h (HEN-teh). The rules can be flexible, often following regional conventions. Words beginning with gua, for instance, are often pronounced with an hw-sound in place of the hard g, as in guacamole (hwa-ka-MO-le) or Guadalajara (Hwa-da-la-HA-ra). This letter can be vexing for outsiders to know how to pronounce; we have only provided a brief introduction. Internet sources can help clarify its other pronunciations. So just do your best. ~The Editors

References de Onís, C. M. (2017). What’s in an “x”?: An exchange about the politics of “Latinx.” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, 1(2), 78–91. Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2019). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (22nd ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online version: http://www. ethnologue.com El Universal. (2019, February 21). 60% of indigenous languages in Mexico may soon disappear. Retrieved August 24, 2019 from https​://ww​w.elu​niver​sal.c​om.mx​/engl​ ish/6​0-ind​igeno​us-la​nguag​es-me​xico-​may-s​oon-d​isapp​ear Four Arrows. (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. GraphicMaps. (2018, May 1). Mexico languages. Retrieved August 24, 2019 from https​://ww​w.gra​phicm​aps.c​om/me​xico/​langu​ages Hernandez, D. (2017, December 17). Op-Ed: The case against ‘Latinx.’ Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 10, 2019 from https​://ww​w.lat​imes.​com/o​pinio​n/op-​ed/ la​-oe-h​ernan​dez-t​he-ca​se-ag​ainst​-lati​nx-20​17121​7-sto​ry.ht​ml Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística. (2015). Encuesta intercensal 2015: Etnicidad. Retrieved February 23, 2019 from http:​//www​.beta​.ineg​i.org​.mx/p​royec​ tos/e​nchog​ares/​espec​iales​/inte​rcens​al/ Lopez-Gopar, M. E. (2014). Teaching English critically to Mexican children. ELT Journal, 68(3), 310–20. Marks. (2014, October 2). What's in a name: Indian, native, aboriginal or indigenous? CBC News. Retrieved July 27, 2019 from https​://ww​w.cbc​.ca/n​ews/c​ anada​/mani​toba/​what-​s-in-​a-nam​e-ind​ian-n​ative​-abor​igina​l-or-​indig​enous​-1.27​ 84518​ Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Notes on the Editorial Process

xxiii

Moreno Fernández, F. (2006). The linguistic diversity of Latin America: Social and political implications. Real Instituto Elcano. Retrieved July 28, 2019 from http:​//www​.real​insti​tutoe​lcano​.org/​wps/p​ortal​/riel​cano_​es/co​nteni​do?WC​M_GLO​ BAL_C​ONTEX​T=/el​cano/​elcan​o_es/​zonas​_es/l​engua​+y+cu​ltura​/ari+​38-20​06 Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–78. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Retrieved July 26, 2019 from http:​// www​.nwic​.edu/​wp-co​ntent​/uplo​ads/2​016/0​8/Dec​oloni​zatio​n-Is-​Not-A​-Meta​phor.​pdf

xxiv

Introduction Reinventing Teacher Education for the Mexican Context Peter Smagorinsky

This volume in Bloomsbury’s Reinventing Teacher Education series is devoted to the reinvention of teacher education in Jalisco, the seventh largest of Mexico’s thirty-two federated states. The vehicle for this reinvention is a graduate program in literacy education founded in relation to the broader program Letras para Volar, literally meaning “Letters to Fly” but figuratively translated as “Literacy to Soar.” Letras para Volar1 is an organization established by the University of Guadalajara.2 It is dedicated to developing the reading of children and youth and fostering their intellectual, critical, and communication skills. It seeks to cultivate new generations of people who use literacy to grow in their capacity to think independently and critically about the social conditions of Mexico. They will, in turn, provide leadership in helping others to identify, understand, and resist political and social manipulation by generating new ideas designed to produce a sustainable, equitable society. Letras para Volar is founded on four principles: encouraging a love of literacy; promoting the value of scientific thought in relation to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education; reviving and supporting Mexican ancestral traditions associated with love for nature, care for the environment, the sense of friendship, and vivid and vital art; and raising social awareness and solidarity. The literacy education master’s degree featured in this volume is among the initiatives serving the larger goals of Letras para Volar. It was developed at the University of Guadalajara, set in Jalisco’s capital and largest city, with satellites in schools and universities around the state. The Reinventing Teacher Education book series aspires to produce volumes of global interest that feature means of http://letrasparavolar.org/ In Spanish, the Universidad de Guadalajara. We have anglicized the name for this collection for the convenience of the English-language readership we anticipate.

1 2

2

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

re-thinking, re-conceptualizing, and re-forming teacher education programs and practices to provide the best possible pedagogical education for prospective and practicing teachers at all grade and age levels. A book focused on a single program in a single national context, therefore, requires some justification for inclusion in this series. The authors in this collection provide an account of how one institution, the University of Guadalajara, developed a literacy education master’s degree program to address the emerging needs of Mexico as it moves forward from its original and colonial heritages and into a new future. We refer to Mexico’s anticipated trajectory as the “New Mexico,” which is not to be confused with the US state of New Mexico and therefore is placed in quotation marks throughout this volume. Envisioning the “New Mexico” requires Letras para Volar’s administrators, faculty, students, and invited participants from other areas of Mexico and abroad to imagine a future in which appropriate, robust literacy education becomes available for students in a nation that has historically lagged in international comparisons. The program founders and planners have needed to take into account, to respect, and to dignify the cultural diversity of the Mexican nation so as to avoid the imposition of dominant cultural values on people of diverse literacy socialization practices. Our effort with this collection is not to provide a model teacher education program that can be taken to global scale. Rather, it is to model a process for how university teacher education programs may reflect critically on their region’s and people’s circumstances and goals in order to craft curricula and instruction that are responsive to the educational needs of the communities they serve. In featuring a single program in a singular national context, we focus on how the process of reflecting on local circumstances has enabled the program architects and participants to develop an educational program that addresses Mexico’s historically low literacy rates and helps move the nation forward in its economic stability and potential. If all teaching and learning are indeed context-dependent (Smagorinsky, 2018), then by focusing on the process of program development, more than on outcomes that might not be adaptable easily (or uneasily) to other settings, this volume fits well within a global book series designed for education faculty seeking to provide literacy teacher education grounded in national, regional, or state concerns and challenges. The volume fills a gap in the teacher education literature, a particularly wide one when the paucity of international attention to Mexican education is taken into account. The absence of global awareness about Mexico and its educational system has produced a reliance on myths and stereotypes for

Introduction

3

images of both Mexicans and immigrants to the United States (Valencia, 2002), largely of a negative and pathologizing sort. This volume contextualizes the teacher education reinvention in Guadalajara such that a realistic, empirical understanding of Mexico is articulated as a framing conception. The Mexican national setting and the focus on cultural grounding for teacher education make this volume unique. The goal is not to generate “best practices” for the field to replicate in other contexts. The notion of “best practices” and “high-leverage practices” that can be “taken to scale” regardless of context has been vigorously contested (Philip et al., 2018; Smagorinsky, 2018), even as standardization and centralized planning have become the new norm in education. This wholesale notion of replicating “what works” pedagogically, whether in school classrooms or in teacher education programs, suggests a human uniformity that is untenable given the situated nature of all human activity and the need for local rather than universal solutions. Rather, this volume aspires to advance global teacher education by illustrating how Mexican literacy teacher education has been deliberately reinvented to anticipate the emerging needs of the “New Mexico” and to address them educationally.

Particulars of the Mexican Context The opening chapters detail the Mexican, Jaliscan, and Guadalajaran cultural contexts and how they call for a unique approach to teacher education. Here I will review briefly some salient aspects of this unique setting as a way to establish this volume, and the literacy education program it features, as sensitive to a particular location’s needs. This positioning illustrates the importance of undertaking careful reflection as part of the process of reinventing teacher education as a situated, responsive, and relevant practice. The Mexican national flag, introduced in 1821 after the War of Independence to end Spanish rule, is adapted from the Mexican army’s flag. It represents a convergence of cultures that must be taken into account in any national literacy initiative (see Figure 0.1). Krauze (1997) describes its components and their ideal meaning as follows: Against a white background, representing the purity of the Catholic religion, flanked by a green that referred to independence and a deep red that conveyed the memory of Spain, the flag bore the emblem of the mystical foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by the Aztecs: an eagle perched on a nopal cactus and devouring a serpent. . . . Mexico was born of multiple reconciliations, of

4

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Figure 0.1  Mexican national flag. an embrace between royalists and Insurgents, between gachupines3, creoles4, Indians, African-Mexicans, mestizos5, and Castes6, between the pre-Hispanic past and the three centuries of colonialism, between the branch and the trunk. (p. 124)

The central image of an eagle perched on a cactus and devouring a rattlesnake symbolizes the founding of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) by Aztecs who were guided by the prophecies of Huitzilopochtli (the god of the sun and war), who told them to build their city at the site where they found such a scene. The flag harmoniously represents the confluent cultures of Spain, Catholicism, and original people. Their coexistence has been conflictual over time, however, an issue that remains unresolved and must be addressed in an educational program that is concerned with inequities. The nation has struggled to realize the potential expressed by Mexican writer, historian, political activist, Supreme Court Justice, and Secretary of Education Justo Sierra Méndez in 1910 at about the time of A Spanish immigrant to the Mexican lands. Spanish-descent people born in Mexico, distinct from the “peninsulars,” those born in Spain. Peninsulars and creoles were often at odds, with peninsulars typically favored in official matters. 5 Mixed-race people descended from a blend of European and the continent’s original people, using the masculine form (mestizo) employed for collective referencing in mixed-gender groups. We follow this convention while aware of the patriarchal tradition behind the usage rules. 6 A broad racial group within the caste and class structure of colonial Mexico that placed Spaniards at the top and the original people at the bottom. This large class included “mulattoes” (mixed-race people of Black and Spanish parentage), mestizos, and “black Indians” born to Black and original ethnic group parents. These three classes mixed and further produced children of even greater racial mixture often known as castas. 3 4

Introduction

5

the Mexican Revolution (a separate conflict from the War of Independence of the early 1800s). He declared that a cultural convergence lies at the heart of Mexican society: “As Mexicans we are the children of two nations, of two races; we were born from the Conquest; our roots are in the land that the indigenous people inhabited and also in the soil of Spain. This fact dominates our whole history; to it we owe our soul” (cited in Krauz, 1997, p. 50). As I next review, that soul is deeply conflicted, with consequences for society in general and literacy education in particular.

A Land of Contrasts in Wealth and Literacy Disparities in wealth characterize the Mexican socioeconomic landscape in general. The World Bank (2016) classifies half of all Mexicans as poor. The program administrators in Guadalajara consistently describe Mexico as a land of contrasts, largely following from tremendous inequalities of wealth, with affluence concentrated in a very small number of people and with taxes extremely low. The nation lacks the infrastructure to help elevate those in poverty to greater economic stability, and as a consequence, people born into nonaffluent families tend to reproduce the social division of labor (Williams, 1977) into a stubbornly rigid, generationally transmitted economic class system. This situation produces a host of societal inequities, including those related to literacy development and the possibilities for schools to change this persistent dynamic. Reading habits, by some measures, are extremely underdeveloped among Mexicans. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reports that Mexico was ranked 107 out of 108 countries in reading proficiency (Proceso, 2015). Paradoxically, Statista (2015) reports that Mexico has a 95 percent literacy rate. Making a statistical argument thus may run aground on discrepancies in how literacy is defined and measured. In the chapters that follow, different statistics are reported about literacy rates, suggesting how unreliable these figures may be, and how dependent they are on the samples selected, the data selected for analysis, the means of measurement, the year of data collection, the biases involved, and other factors. Yet the general opinion among the Guadalajaran faculty supports UNESCO’s report that the rates are low rather than high, and that disparities in wealth help account for them. This characterization is not designed to pathologize the Mexican nation or its educators, for whom the program architects and practitioners share a profound appreciation. At the same time, any educational program developed to address the nation’s low status in literacy rankings must acknowledge

6

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

the country’s persistent challenges. Gómez-Merino, Trejo-Téllez, MéndezCadena, and Hernández-Cázares (2017) report that educational attainment is unacceptably low: Education is the most decisive factor in human development, yet in Mexico current statistics reveal a critical situation at every educational level, as only 1 out of every 10 children entering elementary school obtains a university degree, and less than 0.01% of the population holds a doctoral degree. In addition, international tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reflect the low educational performance of Mexican students in several subject areas. The deficiencies found in the national education system negatively impact innovation indicators. Although there have been major initiatives to reverse underperformance in education, science, technology and innovation (STI), the country has actually seen its global competitiveness ranking fall from 55th in 2013 to 57th in 2015, and structural reforms in education, science and technology proposed since 2012 have still not been successfully implemented. (p. 115)

This performance on assessments may speak to problems with how evaluations are constructed and conducted as much as how people perform on them, but also reinforces the perception that Mexico lacks the educational rates and national promise of many other countries. The alarms raised in reports such as this one have helped to account for the reinvention of teacher education in Guadalajara as a way to shift the national trajectory through formal schooling efforts designed to produce a more economically secure and competitive nation by promoting greater literacy rates. Education alone cannot undo centuries of structural inequity in the broader society. It can, however, help generate tools for reconfiguring society over time to allow a greater range of participation in advancing Mexico’s national interests.

Challenging Inequity in a Land of Contrasts The literacy program in Guadalajara places a heavy emphasis on social justice and antidiscrimination education. Many of the course readings incorporated into syllabi include critical perspectives, that is, those designed to deconstruct power hierarchies and societal inequities, with a focus on colonial domination and its hierarchical positioning of people of non-Spanish descent. The scholarship comes from Mexican, Central American, and South American authors, supplemented by theorists from the United States and Europe. Mexican

Introduction

7

society includes entrenched racism, social hierarchies, and xenophobia that merit critical scrutiny. Racism in Mexico takes on an ethnic and xenophobic cast as immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and other southern nations are viewed as threats to societal stability. Racism is also practiced through the imposition of a “whiteness” standard, with lighter complexions societally favored over darker ones, Spanish features over those of the original people (Manrique, 2016.). These matters must be implicated in literacy education, given that literacy and other life opportunities are often stifled because of assumptions based on lightness and darkness of complexion. Mexican racism comes both in the Spanish colonial legacy and in the discrimination imposed even within racial groups depending on the relative lightness and darkness of skin tone. These prejudicial values have been reinforced in Mexican art and literature from a colonial perspective (Banks, 2006), and have been fiercely contested by subordinated people in both Mexico (Crossa, 2012) and among Mexican Americans in the United States (Ortiz & Telles, 2013). The problem of inequity is revealed in how public education is funded. The teachers in my seminars in Guadalajara have reported class sizes from forty to sixty students, with one claiming an enrollment total of about 400 across eight classes. Schools are so overcrowded that many run on two shifts, with one ending in mid-afternoon, and the other starting then and going through the evening. Teachers may teach a double shift with huge class sizes in both sessions, and are paid by the class rather than according to a contract, losing pay when they miss school. A powerful literacy education is difficult to provide if there are so many students that teachers cannot even learn their names. Reading students’ writing carefully and providing thoughtful feedback is virtually impossible when classrooms and teachers’ schedules are so heavily overloaded. The funding shortages evident in these overcrowded schools and classrooms reflect greater societal inequities. Among the features of the master’s program is a critical perspective designed to help the teachers and their students interrogate their surroundings through such means as action research, and develop strategies for reconstructing them more equitably. Few financially imbalanced societies achieve equity through the voluntary benevolence of the wealthy. The task of enabling opportunity is more revolutionary and typically arises from the lower economic classes whose lives are degraded by injustice (Moore, 1978). The Guadalajaran project recognizes this likelihood and includes a critical dimension designed to promote not just conventional symbolic (e.g., print)

8

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

literacy but also a critical orientation through which literacy may be used for societal restructuring.

Original People and Colonial Heritages The history of the Spanish Conquest of the early 1500s is well documented in many publications. These include firsthand accounts from Conquistador leader Hernán Cortés (1519–1526/2001) and one of his foot soldiers, Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1568/2012). Early Eurocentric third-party narrative retrospectives (e.g., Prescott, 1843) endorse the Conquistadors’ brutal subjugation of the Aztecs, themselves ruthless and domineering among extant Mexican societies. More critical perspectives have since emerged. Diamond (1997), for instance, locates the ability of the Spaniards to destroy a civilization that dwarfed their own army in numbers, not through a superior Christian culture as they assumed, but as a consequence of devastating weaponry and diseases to which the original people lacked immunity. The Spaniards were further enabled by their domestication of the horse and the expansion of their range afforded by its strength, speed, and endurance. The invaders were also assisted by original people who sought liberation from Aztec domination, and by the mistaken belief of Aztec chief Montezuma and others that Cortés might be a new incarnation of the god Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, allowing him and his army unfettered passage to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Emic perspectives from original inhabitants have been added to the historical account of the Conquest, such as Miguel León-Portilla’s (1962) edited collection The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico that have been salvaged from the ruins of the Spanish effort to write the history of the region. This volume’s most recent edition (León-Portilla, 2006) includes expanded material in which the editor has identified yet another reason for the Spaniards’ relatively easy conquest of a much larger army on its own turf. For the Aztecs, A war or battle always commenced with a certain ritual: shields, arrows and cloaks of a special kind were sent to the enemy leaders as a formal declaration that they would soon be attacked. This explains the Aztecs’ surprise when the Spaniards, their guests, suddenly turned on them without any apparent motive and—more important—without the customary ritual warning. (p. xliv)

Mexico is thus a product of a colonial history that characterizes much of the modern world. Whether the conquerors came from England, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, or elsewhere in Europe, extant societies were

Introduction

9

overcome by superior weaponry, technology, exotic diseases, and violations of local rituals. Original people were subordinated to Eurocentric social structures and cultural practices and the Christian religion, with Catholicism the denomination imposed by Spaniards in Mesoamerica and South America and by Portuguese in Brazil. Mexico’s continuing challenge of balancing its original and colonial heritages thus may speak to other nations’ educational efforts to provide an equitable education to a diverse population, especially those with histories of European conquest. Mexico’s original people in the twenty-first century may be unusual in one key regard, however. Original ethnic cultures remain intact throughout Mexico and Mesoamerica, without being segregated on reservations, as they have been in many US states. About 20 percent of Mexico’s population comprises of descendants of original people, distributed across many ethnic groups. About 6.5 percent of Mexicans speak one of the nation’s original languages (see Notes on the Editorial Process for discrepancies in estimating the number of such languages), each recognized officially as a national language. Unlike societies derived from original communities in the United States and other colonized nations, these autonomous heritage communities have the constitutional right to freedom of self-determination. This effort to give original societies complete control over their heritage and ways of living can come into conflict with the goal of developing widespread literacy. Reliance on conventional print for reading and writing may not be practiced among some ethnic groups, and they have a right to determine which literacies serve their cultural domains best. This constitutional provision suggests that in Mexico, attending to other semiotic systems for cultural practices becomes an important consideration in a literacy education program. Yet this attention must be balanced with the need to attempt to boost conventional alphabetic reading and writing abilities among everyday Mexicans around whose needs the Guadalajaran literacy effort has been conceived. The task of raising literacy rates in a culturally complex nation, often measured through narrow means in testing situations rather than everyday use, includes many such challenges. Ironically, at least to those from a colonial heritage, the emphasis on print literacy may be at odds with how writing has historically been used as a means of subordination. In the US context, for instance, Belgarde, LoRé, and Meyer (2010) describe how descendants of the original people in North America are often highly suspicious of written documents and may reject writing as a semiotic system because of the ways in which treaties and other legal papers were constructed to steal their lands and depress their cultures and prospects in life. Colonized people

10

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

may well resent and reject the tools of their oppressors, as strange as it might seem to those embodying Eurocentric values, who view fluency with alphabetic writing as the most essential form of literacy in modern life.

Translanguaging and the Complicated Question of the Mother Tongue7 The editing of this volume’s chapters has required addressing the notion of a “mother tongue” or “first language” in the Mexican context. In their initial drafts, many contributors employed these terms when referring to original people’s heritage languages, or to Spanish as the primary language used in many Mexican homes. According to Eurocentric traditions, national and ethnic languages are treated as discrete, decontextualized linguistic systems (Makalela, 2015) in what Canagarajah (2013a) calls a monolingual orientation. This conception that national languages are separate and distinct means that each person has a first language or mother tongue, to which additional, isolated languages may be added as secondary, tertiary, and so on. The notion of linguistic separation fits well with the ways in which Eurocentric linguists have historically studied languages as spoken or written artifacts amenable to parsing into units and their semantic relationships, with each specific language system treated separately. This monolingual orientation to languages as bounded, discrete systems has been questioned by applied linguists who are interested in people and how they speak and write (e.g., Lantolf, 2006), as opposed to linguists who view languages themselves as objects of study, independent of how people use them in their communicative practices and in their less visible personal thinking. Similar in conception to how applied linguists understand and study speech acts rather than language systems, the construct of translanguaging has emerged to account for language-in-use. Translanguaging helps account for the ways in which people mesh various linguistic codes in communities in which multiple languages, or more than one version of the same language, are commonly employed. García (2011) grounds translanguaging “in the belief that speakers select language features and soft assemble their language practices in ways that fit their communicative needs” (p. 7). The focus is on how people situationally incorporate linguistic features from their repertoires, rather than use whole, Thanks to Judith C. Johnson for her guidance in writing this section; to Leketi Makalela for conversations that helped to formulate my understanding of translanguaging and related constructs in the South African context; and to Usree Bhattacharya and Hilary Janks for feedback on the development of these ideas.

7

Introduction

11

discrete language systems. In doing so they communicate by means of linguistic hybridity in the twenty-first-century globalized world, where access to multiple cultures and languages is widely available for mixing and meshing (Garcia, 2012). Originally developed in Wales as a school pedagogy for students who toggled between, and interwove, English and Welsh in their everyday speech (Baker, 2001; Williams, 1994), trawsieithu—initially translinguifying and later translanguaging in translation (Lewis, Jones, & Baker, 2012)—has been fruitfully applied to contexts in which multiple languages, or multiple vernaculars of the same language, are in play in people’s daily engagement with their social environments. South African scholars (e.g., Makalela, 2013, 2014, 2015), for instance, work within a national context where 11 languages have been established as having official status, even as English is the required language of formal education beginning in grade 4. Many South Africans—and many throughout African nations generally—do not have a single “first” or “home” language, or a “mother tongue” (problematic for gendered reasons as well). Instead, in their daily communication, they rely on a repertoire of linguistic features used relationally and in dialogue with local understandings, expectations, and practices. They might code-switch to use one or a mix of several for specific conversational situations, adapting their speech for communicative competence in relation to the context and its anticipations and needs. These switches involve not only vocabulary and syntax but also accompanying gestures, tones, and other aspects of expression. They often code-mesh to blend conventions, vocabularies, syntaxes, and other communicative functions for their own internal processing or to meet immediate rhetorical needs. This sort of synthesis is practiced in nations like South Africa, India, Mexico, and others where multiple languages are spoken and in nations where varieties of the same national language are viewed hierarchically in school, yet have situational value and are braided in everyday practice by those conversant with multiple dialects (Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy, 2014). The related construct of polylingualism (Jørgensen, 2008) emphasizes how speakers combine and reassemble linguistic features rather than whole language systems into a functional form of expression for code-switching purposes, whether the speaker blends these features consciously or deliberately or not, and whether the speaker has formal linguistic knowledge or not. This construct was originally developed to account for the linguistic practices and awareness among adolescents in Danish schools in “superdiverse” settings, that is, those exhibiting emerging transnationalism in relation to global migrations of increasing

12

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

diversity across the range of demographic categories (Parkin & Arnaut, 2014; Vertovec, 2006). The term “translanguaging” requires clarification in this discussion, given that “language” has more than one meaning. In the sociocultural tradition in which I locate my own work, “language” refers to the sort of abstract system historically of interest to linguistics while “speech” refers to the active use of language of interest to applied linguists and translanguaging theorists and practitioners. Translanguaging involves the active use of speech—whether private, audible, or written—when applied to a speaker’s meshing of different features of languages. It thus includes attention to languages as systems, and to how people employ and intermingle them in speech. García (2011; García & Wei, 2014) has drawn on semiotic theory to argue for a translanguaging conception that includes multiple symbol systems, helping to account for a range of means of expression that includes the sort of artistic representation found throughout Mexican communities. Translanguaging thus extends beyond its original Welsh bilingual education pedagogical concerns and helps account for symbolic expression and representation more broadly, both in formal education and in everyday use outside school. In all of its manifestations, it has a fundamentally active, dynamic dimension that includes horizontal crosspollination across the features of the languages recruited for situational thinking and communication. Translanguaging theorists face a conundrum following from the assumption that in multilingual societies, the idea of a single “mother tongue” or “first language” has become obsolete (Makalela, 2015). The problem remains of how to refer to the primary speech used by people, especially when schools require students to use a colonially imposed European language and when international tests using those languages become the basis for measuring literacy rates. Makalela (personal communication, October 12, 2018) proposes the construct of the “I-language” to refer to how people adapt the various speech features and conventions from their linguistic environments to produce a language medium through which they think and from which they develop a repertoire for communicating situationally through code-switching and code-meshing adaptations. In contrast, “E-languages” or ex-languages—that is, language expectations imposed from outside—refer to the speech conventions through which other people judge one’s linguistic competence. One’s I-language may be multilingual, may involve a variety of dialects of the same language, and may be meshed with not only speech conventions and genres but also images from across the sensory range, emotions, and physical and tonal

Introduction

13

forms of expression. These conventions can produce an unwitting faux pas, such as when a foreign dignitary does not accompany a greeting of a national leader with culturally appropriate gestures. The potential multiplicity of languages of one’s I-language suggests the presence of multiple embodied identities, both personal and cultural, that may coexist within and across individuals. These identities allow for both hybrid senses of self and a repertoire of selves that are situationally available to present oneself socially. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which posits that the structure of a language and related semiotic signs shape its speakers’ frames of mind and interpretations of phenomena, thus requires modification to account for translanguaging practices through which multiple worldviews and related identities and ideologies may be hybridized and expressed according to contextual cues in relation to a person’s or social group’s understandings and intentions. From a translanguaging perspective, the I-language has value on two levels, and the E-language has consequences that, in schooling, cannot be ignored, given that it typically serves as the language of perception and assessment. The I-language is essential for processing ideas in academic disciplines that might present accessibility issues if they are available only in a disciplinary language, such as the specialized language of science or literary analysis. These E-languages can be forbidding at the level of entry, and their strict conventions may stifle efforts, for novices, to talk about them in exploratory ways that allow for stretching one’s thinking and discovering meaning at the point of expression (Barnes, 1992). Providing students with opportunities to engage in their own colloquial, meshed, idiosyncratic speech enables them to process and explore ideas and information, and to construct knowledge based on their prior understandings both ideationally and linguistically. This process of building understanding in familiar language is critical to their success when they will be assessed in more academically sanctioned ways via exams that require them to modify and express these understandings through the formal language of evaluation. Although some theorists dispute the validity of the realities of school evaluation or even the reality of a language system itself (e.g., Otsiju & Pennycook, 2010), schools and literacy measures take them quite seriously. They thus serve as a clear and present reality for teachers and students. The availability of translanguaging does not mean that I-languages are useful only for processing ideas, although they may serve that role in school and in everyday expression. I-languages have value in and of themselves in many other contexts, as do the personal and cultural identities they embody. They

14

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

also enable people from multiliterate backgrounds to draw on and perform their identities in school through languages in other areas of schooling that affirm their personal, home, and community orientations. Translanguaging is thus an important resource to draw on in classrooms, in both multilingual societies like Mexico and in monolinguistic settings with multiple vernaculars in play. Translanguaging has value both as an end in itself and as a means to understanding and performing on tests that provide the basis for broader perceptions of literacy and educational attainment.

Translanguaging and the Mexican Context Mexico is not a monoculture, in spite of the dominance of Spanish colonial society. Rather, it includes populations embodying both cultural diversity following from the many original cultures, and newer practices from immigrants crossing its southern border who face rejection, even as Mexico’s own people are confronted by opposition and discrimination when attempting to relocate to the United States (International Crisis Group, 2018). Guatemala, among the Mesoamerican nations whose people cross into Mexico, includes twenty-one Mayan languages and two non-Mayan languages. Mexico thus is implicated in the conditions resulting from global superdiversity and migration, on top of its extant cultural pluralism. Linguistic variation affects the Mexican context and cannot be overlooked in a literacy education program. The Mexican setting, as I’ve reviewed, includes the colonial imposition of Spanish as the official language, and dozens of languages that have survived from original people. It also includes an artistic tradition grounded in both European means of using art for religious narrative cultural transmission (Smagorinsky, 2009) and the Aztec culture’s similar reliance on visual art for narrative storytelling (Pasztory, 1993) to accompany its Nahuatl hieroglyphic writing system, itself likely derived from prior writing systems from the Xochicalco, Cacaxtla, and Teotihuacan societies that predated the invasion by the Spaniards. My contributions to the editing of these chapters has taken into account the translanguaging phenomenon, although not always overtly. References to Mexicans’ “mother tongue” have been removed so as to efface the notion that each individual has a single language system of primacy and other languages are used additively. In the US context, “Spanglish” is used to describe a Spanish– English blend used by speakers of both languages, and “Chinglish” refers to a similar blend of English and Chinese, primarily from the Cantonese variety.

Introduction

15

These examples help to describe the blended forms of languages used by many people where linguistic pluralism is in the air. Mexico’s social, cultural, and linguistic complexity implies that reductive conceptions of speech are inadequate in conceptualizing its literacy practices, even though in school, reductivity is often at work, often to the detriment of the individual and cultural identities that are embodied in the ways in which people employ speech in everyday settings. Schools in which linguistic options are restricted limit both the cognitive growth of students and their capacity for recruiting their cultural identities to enrich their educational experiences (Makalela, 2016). A literacy program that is sensitive to these issues therefore cannot be restrictive, but needs to be sensitive to I-languages and how students may build on them for productive engagement with their formal learning.

Literacy as Multifaceted The recognition of an expansive semiotic tool kit supports the notion that literacy is multimodal (Smagorinsky, 1995; Street, 1999; Wertsch, 1991), a concept woven throughout the Guadalajaran initiative. Yet literacy in the threedimensional world is more than multimodal. It is multisensory beyond the screens of the devices that have thus far occupied and, I would argue, limited the field’s fascination with technology as the sine qua non of the twenty-first century’s conceptions of literacies (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). This perspective is consistent with the notion of translingual literacy that underlies translanguaging, defined by Canagarajah (2013b) as a pragmatic “understanding of the production, circulation, and reception of texts that are always mobile, that draw from diverse languages, symbol systems, and modalities of communication; and that involve inter-community negotiations” (p. 41) for situated communicative competence. When I walk through the Mercado San Juan de Dios in Guadalajara, I am surrounded by intermingled sensations. Musicians of many genres play throughout the immense market’s labyrinthine aisles, and my body moves in tune with their rhythms and melodies. The fragrances of foods and goods waft through the air, and it’s hard to pass through without sampling their flavors. Countless articles of clothing in a stunning variety of colors, styles, and shapes line each corridor of the endless passageways. The sounds of merchants pitching their goods is a constant. Together, they produce a sensuous, cacophonous literacy experience as words become affiliated with all manner of perceptions, consistent with how cognitive psychologists have documented iconic memory as a function of the association of words with images (Long, 1980).

16

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Mexican literacy, of course, has a technological element; cell phones are common possessions, at least where networks are available. But in everyday life, the material, three-dimensional world is a fundamental site for literacy events. Music flows from storefronts throughout the city center, and the streets are populated by musicians representing countless heritages and genres playing for donations. The city is also an active center of street and building art, particularly murals that are often political, cultural, and historical, depicting images that critique injustice, preserve heritages, and provide a vision of Mexican life, accompanied by images from the Catholic tradition. They evoke emotions and cannot be removed from their material settings of street noise, sights, smells, and tastes. These affective aspects of public texts, and the literacy skills required to read them, require attention in literacy education. Engaging emotionally with texts appears a central dimension of teaching for literacy in this context. Widespread print literacy is a very recent demand, dating to the European Enlightenment and its emphasis on writing as the repository of scientific and logical thought (McCagg, 1989), practiced primarily among those with access to elite institutions and opportunities. For the rest, literary and historical narratives have often been told through public art. As I reviewed in the previous section, both European and original people come from cultures in which history is related through art. European churches provided “sermons in stone” to illiterate masses (Smagorinsky, 2009) via sculptural depictions of scriptural narratives that allowed people who couldn’t read the Holy Bible to know its stories. A great deal of Mexican history is told through statuary and murals in public places. This practice dates to the Mayan and Aztec people, who used physical structures to narrate their stories in pyramids, stelas (Mayan sculpted stone shafts), and murals (Coe & Koontz, 2013). The artistic figures themselves occupy the plazas that serve as essential gathering spaces where people socialize, play, relax, buy and sell merchandise, and learn through exposure about culture and history. In contrast with technology-driven “New Literacies” that are fashionable in today’s academia, I have referred to these material texts as “First Literacies” because they share the digital romance’s concern with images without confining them to electronic screens, and because of their primary role in text construction for cultural purposes (Smagorinsky, 2018). Rockwell (2005) cautions against viewing pictorial texts as a social phylogenetic developmental stage that comes prior to the invention of print literacy. Rather than conceiving of them as a less advanced form of textuality, she argues, scholars “can no longer examine literacy along a single continuum that goes from orality (or the absence of the written language), to literacy as the elaborate use of alphabetic language.” Rather, they need to account historically

Introduction

17

for the particular oral-written matrix of each cultural group: “The historical record shows instances of the Mayan’s use of written language, as well as use of oral language forms, to resist domination (or the repression of their Native writing to prevent the spread of the written word among people at the margins of society)” (p. 23). This history of textual resistance remains evident in the street mural culture of Guadalajara and comprises a major dimension of literate everyday life in the city and throughout Mexico and much of Latin America. This multimodal, multisensory, affectively infused, and mystical value system cannot be overlooked if literacy education is to produce the sorts of readers of cultural texts that it is designed to promote. Mexican culture is infused with the spirit of Catholic virgins and shamans from original cultures (see Jacobs, 1998), and belief in their powers remains alive among many people whose right to have faith in them is legally preserved. In this context, then, an education that proceeds with relationships, the supernatural, and emotions sacrificed to meet the neoliberal needs of economic machinery alone will (and according to the teachers in my seminars, often does) alienate students from schoolwork and the forms of literacy it promotes (Comos-Díaz, 2012).

Introduction to the Chapters Part 1 includes several chapters outlining the Mexican context and the role of international collaboration in reconceiving a local educational initiative. Part 2 focuses on the specific needs addressed in the program, from the psychological to the technical to the social. Part 3 addresses the role of literacy in a STEM education. Part 4 attends to the role of research and measurement in literacy practice and education. In Part 5, program enrollees explore their learning during their seminars and reflect on how their experiences worked to benefit their instruction in Jaliscan classrooms; and we close with a look forward as we link Letras para Volar and the literacy education master’s degree with constituents throughout North, Central, and South America, along with Italy, South Africa, the United States, and a growing network of national and international collaborators.

Part 1: The Historical Context of the Initiative Program co-architect and principal administrator Patricia Rosas provides historical context in “Literacy to Soar: The Dream of a New Mexico.” Rosas presents the historical background on the local conditions that have shaped

18

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

current literacy rates and practices in Mexico, including tensions between original and colonial values and practices from pre-Columbian times to the present day. The aim of her overview is to explain the need for establishing a program that contributes to the development of Mexicans’ intellectual potential through habits of reading, writing, active listening, and expressiveness. The first section highlights aspects of original cultures that are indicative of the richness originating and developing long before the Conquest. Rosas then reviews Mexican history during and after colonial rule, leading to the present. She shows how this history has shaped educational efforts, positioning Mexico’s wealth and potential development against issues that threaten the possibilities for a better future. The chapter’s historical overview helps readers understand the context of the program and the issues that prompted the reinvention of teacher education through the Letras para Volar literacy education program that includes the master’s degree program at the University of Guadalajara. Program co-architects Yolanda Gayol and Rosas next detail the factors that led to the conception of a new master’s degree program to serve the “New Mexico” emerging from its historical tensions. This program seeks both to preserve the national heritages and to move society into a greater role on the world stage, beginning with greater prosperity achieved through raised literacy rates. Letras para Volar began with a series of exploratory dynamics for reading and writing shared with children and parents in the plazas of downtown Guadalajara, and evolved to provide a broader series of formal offerings. These activities include the literacy education master’s degree program, which seeks to develop academic leaders among high school teachers and college professors. Working from a critical approach to literacy studies, the master’s degree aspires to prepare teachers who can lead educational innovation in schools and beyond. This reinvention of both teacher and classroom education is founded on the values of equity and inclusiveness across the curriculum to fight back against historical inequities that have worked against the development of a literate society. Rosas and Gayol next provide a program overview that includes an account of the formation process. They situate the program both historically and in light of emerging national needs. Rosas and Gayol review the pillars of the program, including the promotion of students’ engagement with literature, the development of scientific thought in relation to STEM learning, the preservation and maintenance of ancestral traditions, and the cultivation of a sensibility to engage with society with social justice and solidarity. They further review the principal theories drawn on to motivate the program’s structure, process, and contents. To help others consider how they might develop a similar initiative in

Introduction

19

other national contexts, Rosas and Gayol next review the program’s historical background, the formative discussions and actions that produced the program, and the materials, structures, and processes identified to meet the aims of the activities. To cross-fertilize their thinking with other literacy educators and social justice activists, the program also involves a matrix of collaborations with national and international efforts. Finally, they review the key dimensions of the program, including its research apparatus and its commitment to social responsibility.

Part 2: Social and Cognitive Issues in Literacy Education The chapters in Part 2 review the critical knowledge needed to participate rewardingly in the “New Mexico.” They further detail how different dimensions of the master’s degree help the enrolled teachers develop knowledge and pedagogies to help students develop in personally satisfying ways, and help produce a national culture predicated on a collective sense of meaning and common purpose. Patricia Córdova focuses on how the discipline of linguistics—the study of language and its structure—can benefit literacy educators in helping teachers enable students to navigate an increasingly complex discursive and symbolic world. There are many subfields of linguistics, some focusing on language as an abstraction and some on language-in-use. This chapter emphasizes applied linguistics, a field that takes into account historical means of communication, situated communicative practices, psychological factors involved in both producing and consuming comprehensible texts, and other utilitarian issues. This functional approach is central to the social justice orientation of Letras para Volar, one that provides students with tools for learning academic skills and how to apply them critically to societal inequities. The applied approach requires an understanding of how people adapt these abstractions to situated use, suggesting the need for a repertoire of communicative competencies. The chapter begins with attention to language itself, addresses the social consequences of different ways of speaking and writing in different contexts, considers how speech functions in oral and conventional print texts, and finally addresses how linguistics may inform an understanding of expression, representation, and communication in online environments. Patricia Cisneros next describes how the graduate program in literacy education at the University of Guadalajara seeks to disrupt established pedagogical traditions that rely on the rote learning of information, and on

20

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

practices that are abstract, impersonal, and emotionally sterile. The emphasis on everyday life suggests the need for teachers to build on students’ home and community knowledge to make school learning vibrant, relevant, and engaging. The program thus helps its participants to reconceive their own socialization to schooling when it has involved such enculturation. It emphasizes literacy practices that are student-centered and activity-driven, and that are employed to solve problems that matter to the students so that their studies have immediate, practical value and also long-term benefits in their school engagement and life pursuits. This chapter reviews the current state of Mexican education and the historical dilemma of low literacy rates. Cisneros then proposes pedagogical reforms that infuse the program with the intention of making school a more dynamic learning environment for both students and teachers. Whether or not international test scores, a form of abstract learning and assessment, reflect the benefits of this approach is of less concern than whether or not the students embrace their educational learning and apply the lessons to their life experiences and trajectories. José Luis Iturrioz Leza features descendants of original societies, focusing on how their many and varied cultures do and do not mesh with Eurocentric traditions regarding literacy and education. In a nation where scores of original languages and their accompanying cultures remain extant, all learners’ heritages and cultures must be respected if an inclusive educational system and society are to be realized. Achieving this equitable balance, however, is difficult given the fundamental differences between original people’s and Eurocentric values and practices that impose the Spanish language on literacy education. To help teachers construct inclusive schools and classrooms, Letras para Volar broadly and the master’s degree program in particular focus attention on human difference and the flexibility this recognition demands for literacy teachers. This flexibility extends beyond addressing cultural differences across original groups and between original and colonial values and practices. It extends as well to the expansion of textual possibilities beyond traditional print media. The availability of these new, often digital forms of expression, communication, and representation does not displace alphabetic print texts but, rather, produces a coexistence that is complementary and mutually enriching. The “New Mexico” anticipated by Letras para Volar thus needs to embrace a pluralistic conception of literacy and socialization that addresses diversity in its many forms and practices. In the final chapter of Part 2, Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga details how people think when engaged with literacy practices. Much of the approach to considering

Introduction

21

literacy education in this volume centers on social factors. Ramos-Zúñiga examines the relation between the neurological system and literacy to consider the structural and functional origins of human verbal communication. He explores how biological neural networks support the cognitive processes involved in being literate, particularly those involving language and communication. Thinking in literate ways relies on neural impulse routes that activate other cognitive domains. These processes involve an increase in the cognitive reserve; the emotional, creative, and playful qualities of learning processes; reflective, sustained critical thinking; and a connection with executive functions, knowledge management, and cognitive regulation. Attention to the ways in which literacy-oriented thinking helps to shape cognitive architecture, including that of people who exhibit neurodiversity, allows for an understanding of how literacy practices enable new ways of thinking and new approaches to interacting socially. Understanding how literacy activity enhances other cognitive domains, he argues, should contribute to how literacy educators are prepared for work with children and youth as their minds develop thinking processes and social competencies.

Part 3: Literacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education Letras para Volar’s emphasis on STEM learning includes a literacy dimension. Part 3 details how that relation will be established in the master’s degree experience. Luis Gutiérrez takes on the role of technology, the human capacity to transform the surrounding environment via tools, from farming implements to smartphones and beyond. With much commerce and communication now conducted in online spaces, Gutiérrez asserts that a literacy education program designed to treat the needs of a new era ought to address the role of technology in this endeavor. The idea of an Information Age suggests the need for literacy educators to help students learn how to find information online. Yet it is equally critical for the searchers to be discriminating about the information yielded. They need to know how to compare, contrast, analyze, evaluate, and select information that is reliable and valid, and in turn, how to use technological tools to construct their own texts for what ideally are socially just purposes. This chapter explores the intersection of technology and literacy, provides a brief historical context of technology in society, and traces its incorporation into learning processes, including the analytic and reflective skills required for

22

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

discriminating, responsible use. Gutiérrez includes attention to strategies for use and patterns of behavior in literacy, and an understanding of the digital divide that compromises equitable opportunity in an economically polarized nation. This chapter situates technology in a broader social justice framework that requires technology education to attend not only to facility with devices but also to an understanding of its social and cultural consequences. César Lozano next broadens the lens to consider what Mexico needs to do to create a STEM infrastructure on which to anticipate Mexico’s emerging national trajectory. Under the assumption that technology has transformed how people learn and what they learn about, he asserts that literacy educators must address the gap between traditional, pre-digital educational methods and pedagogies that are integrated with emerging technologies and their affordances. Technology, he asserts, has the potential to allow students to study at their own pace, and in dynamic and interactive ways. Yet many of Mexico’s rural areas often have no access to electricity, much less technology, which affects the rural people’s work opportunities. Building a more robust and extensive infrastructure is central to providing equitable access to the worlds that technology affords, a process that Lozano finds lagging. This chapter is concerned with both teachers and their education and broader social factors that constrain what they can do. The notion of infrastructure is social as well as technological, he asserts, suggesting that educators need to shift away from solitary and individualistic cultures of learning and the passive reception of content that have traditionally characterized Mexican school instruction. A literacy education program should critique these methods and generate alternatives that involve collaborative, active, and constructive activity designed to promote literacy serving the interests of the broader culture, which should also be a subject of critique and reflection to meet the emerging needs of Mexico’s national ambitions.

Part 4: Research and Evaluation The program’s credibility rests on the documentation of its success in meeting its stated goals. Teachers also need to be able to study and evaluate their teaching; and a critical literacy perspective engrained in education can teach students about tools for inquiry and interpretation. Part 4 includes two chapters concerned with research and evaluation in a literacy education program. César Correa outlines the role of teachers’ action research as a central practice. Correa reviews the history of action research, a form of practitioner investigation designed to rethink teaching and learning in response to questions generated by teachers in light of their local experiences. Correa finds action research an

Introduction

23

especially valuable component of a literacy education program predicated on critical theory and oriented to social justice, foundational values of Letras para Volar. If a “New Mexico” is to emerge, it needs to rest on egalitarian principles that provide widespread opportunity for access to goods and possibilities. The program’s critical literacy dimension makes literacy an equity issue as much as a reading and writing initiative, consistent with Freirean values of agency and the effort to question and challenge social hierarchies. Correa’s critical stance involves identifying inequity, deconstructing its texts and materiality, envisioning alternatives, and working for equitable social reform. One useful tool in critical inquiry is action research in which teachers investigate inequity and generate alternative possibilities for their teaching and for the conduct of broader activities of schooling and society more generally. These tools can, in turn, be employed by their students as lifelong strategies for interrogating their surroundings and seeking to change them for the greater good. Literacy in this conception is dynamic, generative, inquiry-based, and undertaken in service of a better society. Martha Vergara and José Méndez next provide an account of the theoretical and methodological perspectives behind particular ways of studying the effects of literacy education. They find value in narrative, ethnographic, and practitioner inquiry as ways of assessing the effects of literacy practices, and in ways that simultaneously build on and extend both teachers’ and students’ knowledge. This approach positions teachers as having expertise about their instruction and as generators of knowledge about education. Through this review they propose a method for assessing Letras para Volar and components such as the master’s degree experience. This program’s complexity requires the assessment of a wealth of impact factors, including conventional reading and writing fluency and social dynamics that provide the contexts in which people undertake literacy practices. To assess the program, they argue, multiple methods of evaluation are necessary. If the reinvention of teacher education is to be taken seriously from the outside and to have internal validity, then it is critical to assess it in authentic ways. This chapter reviews those aspects of the program that are amenable to assessment, and the methods that are employed to inquire into the questions that are related to meeting the goals of Letras para Volar.

Part 5: Looking Back and Looking Ahead We close with two chapters. The first presents a collaborative reflection by enrollees on the program’s impact. The second looks to how the program will grow both within and beyond Mexico’s borders as it builds networks with

24

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

colleagues across the continents surrounding Mesoamerica, and in other nations where the values and concerns of Letras para Volar are shared. Master’s degree graduates Rita Alejandra Gracián Flores and Ericka Graciela Staufert Reyes build on their experiences in Letras para Volar to assert a major social justice principle to guide education: that literacy is a human right. To reach this conclusion, they explore the concept of literacy and define it for themselves. The imperative to regard access to literacy as a human right emerged from this process, leading to a commitment to transform their praxis. As noted in other chapters, the major tradition guiding Mexican education relied on rote learning and teacher domination. To make literacy development more likely, they embrace, in contrast, a student-centered approach that both values individuals and considers them in the context of their home life, with individual and social transformation the ultimate goal of education. They experienced the program as transformative theoretically and practically, with such guiding perspectives as New Literacy Studies and critical theory available to situate students in both classrooms and broader contexts and narratives. In literacy education there should be an emphasis on language as a tool for individual liberation, understanding, agency, vision, opportunity, and social solidarity. In keeping with the social justice orientation of the program, their reconception of literacy as a human right and tool of liberation serves as a guiding value in their ongoing growth as teacher scholars. Yolanda Gayol and I close with a brief account of the networking initiative that Letras para Volar has begun as a means for building reciprocal knowledge. Colleagues from the nations to the north and south have been invited to participate in Letras para Volar activities, and these congregations have produced a partnership that is growing. Their expertise and perspectives inform Letras para Volar’s work, and Guadalajara’s emerging role as the hub of engagement, in turn, provides them with our perspective, the process through which the master’s degree program emerged and has been put into practice, and access to one another’s collegiality and experiences. We describe some nascent cooperative projects and suggest ways for educators to function collectively toward commonly shared educational goals.

In Summary These chapters collectively provide a way of thinking about national, societal, and educational challenges and addressing them in a wholly reconceived teacher

Introduction

25

education program. It provides one of the clearest, most fully articulated efforts at reinventing teacher education that I’m aware of. Its design is quite intentional and future-oriented; it is grounded in attention to complex local social challenges; it is informed by cutting-edge theories of teaching, learning, and social dynamics; it has involved a core of Guadalajaran scholars and teachers whose vision has been enriched by perspectives from European, South African, and US visitors; it has benefited from the avid participation of the initial cohorts of teacher enrollees; it is being road-tested in both university classrooms and, by extension, in the schools of the teachers in the program; and it includes a dimension of reflective assessment that will allow for adaptations as the program continues into its next phases. I’m proud to be a part of the effort, and delighted to help introduce these insightful scholars and their conception to a broader global audience, one that I believe will benefit from engagement with the Guadalajaran faculty’s impressive, groundbreaking effort to use education to lift a nation to greater prosperity, equity, and security.

References Baker, C. (2001). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (3rd ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Banks, T. L. (2006). Mestizaje and the Mexican mestizo self: No hay sangre negra, So there is no blackness. Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, 15, 199–233. Barnes, D. (1992). The role of talk in learning. In K. Norman (Ed.), Thinking voices (pp. 123–28). London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton. Belgarde, M. J., LoRé, R. K., & Meyer, R. (2010). American Indian adolescent literacy. In L. Christenbury, R. Bomer, & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Handbook of adolescent literacy research (pp. 415–29). New York, NY: Guilford. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013a). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York, NY: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013b). Negotiating translingual literacy: An enactment. Research in the Teaching of English, 48(1), 40–67. Coe, M. D., & Koontz, R. (2013). Mexico from the Olmecs to the Aztecs (7th ed.). New York, NY: Thames & Hudson. Comos-Díaz, L. (2012). Colored spirituality: The centrality of spirit among ethnic minorities. In L. J. Miller (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psychology and spirituality (pp. 197–206). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York, NY: Routledge.

26

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Cortés, H. (1519–1526/2001). Letters from Mexico (A. Pagden, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Crossa, V. (2012). Play for protest, protest for play: Artisan and vendors’ resistance to displacement in Mexico City. Antipode, 45(4), 826–43. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Diaz del Castillo, B. (1568/2012). The true history of the conquest of New Spain. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Garcia, E. (2012). Linguistic hybridity. In J. A. Banks (Ed.), Encyclopedia of diversity in education (pp. 1399–400). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. García, O. (2011). From language garden to sustainable languaging: Bilingual education in a global world. Perspectives, 34(1), 5–9. García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. London, UK: Palgrave Pivot. Gómez-Merino, C., Trejo-Téllez, L. I., Méndez-Cadena, M. E., & Hernández-Cázares, A. S. (2017). Education, science and technology in Mexico: Challenges for innovation. International Education Studies, 10(5), 115–28. Retrieved May 17, 2018 from https​://fi​les.e​ric.e​d.gov​/full​text/​EJ114​2132.​pdf International Crisis Group. (2018). Mexico’s southern border: Security, violence and migration in the Trump era. Brussels, BE: Author. Retrieved October 14, 2018 from https​://d2​071an​dvip0​wj.cl​oudfr​ont.n​et/06​6-mex​icos-​south​ern-b​order​.pdf Jacobs, D. T. (1998). Primal awareness: A true story of survival, transformation, and awakening with the Rarámuri Shamans of Mexico. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Jørgensen, J. N. (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 161–16. Krauze, E. (1997). Mexico: Biography of power: A history of modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (H. Heifetz, Trans.). New York, NY: HarperCollins. Lantolf, J. P. (2006). Language emergence: Implications for applied linguistics. A sociocultural perspective. Applied Linguistics, 27, 717–28. León-Portilla, M. (Ed.) (1962). The broken spears: The Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico. (A. M. Garibay K., Trans. From Nahuatl into Spanish; L. Kemp, Trans. from Spanish into English). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. León-Portilla, M. (2006). Introduction. In M. León-Portilla (Ed.), The broken spears: The Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico (expanded and updated edition, A. M. Garibay K., Trans. From Nahuatl into Spanish; L. Kemp, Trans. from Spanish into English, pp. xxv–xlix). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lewis, G., Jones, B., & Baker, C. (2012). Translanguaging: Origins and development from school to street and beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation, 18(7), 641–54. DOI: 10.1080/13803611.2012.718488 Long, G. M. (1980). Iconic memory: A review and critique of the study of short-term visual storage. Psychological Bulletin, 88(3), 785–820. Makalela, L. (2013). Translanguaging in Kasi-taal: Rethinking old language boundaries for new language planning. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 42: 111–25.

Introduction

27

Makalela, L. (2014). Teaching indigenous African languages to speakers of other African Languages: The effects of translanguaging for multilingual development. In C. Van der Walt & L. Hibbert (Eds.), Multilingual teaching and learning in higher education in South Africa (pp. 88–104). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Makalela, L. (2015). Moving out of linguistic boxes: The effects of translanguaging strategies for multilingual classrooms. Language and Education, 29(3), 200–217. DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2014.994524 Makalela, L. (2016). Ubuntu translanguaging: An alternative framework for complex multilingual encounters. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 34(3), 187–96. DOI: 10.2989/16073614.2016.1250350 Manrique, L. (2016). Dreaming of a cosmic race: José Vasconcelos and the politics of race in Mexico, 1920s–1930s. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3(1). Retrieved June 17, 2019 from https​://ww​w.tan​dfonl​ine.c​om/do​i/ful​l/10.​1080/​23311​983.2​016.1​21831​6 McCagg, W. O. (1989). The origins of defectology. In W. O. McCagg & L. Siegelbaum (Eds.), The disabled in the Soviet Union: Past and present, theory and practice (pp. 39–62). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Moore, B. (1978). Injustice: The social bases of obedience and revolt. London, UK: M. E. Sharpe. Ortiz, V., & Telles, E. (2013). Racial identity and racial treatment of Mexican Americans. Race and Social Problems, 4(1). Retrieved July 8, 2019 from https​://ww​w.ncb​i.nlm​. nih.​gov/p​mc/ar​ticle​s/PMC​38461​70/ Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 24054. Parkin, D., & Arnaut, K. (2014). Super-diversity & sociolinguistics: A digest. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, Paper 95. Tilburg, Netherlands: Tilburg University. Pasztory, E. (1993). Aztec art. New York, NY: Harry N Abrams. Philip, T. M., Souto-Manning, M., Anderson, L., Horn, I., Andrews, D. J. C., Stillman, J., & Varghese, M. (2018). Making justice peripheral by constructing practice as “core”: How the increasing prominence of core practices challenges teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 70(3), 251–64. Prescott, W. H. (1843/2001). History of the conquest of Mexico. New York, NY: Modern Library. Proceso. (2015, August 31). Mexico, penultimate place of reading among 108 countries. Proceso. Mexico City, Mexico: Author. Retrieved November 13, 2017 from http:​//www​.proc​eso.c​om.mx​/4141​75/me​xico-​penul​timo-​lugar​-de-l​ectur​aent​re-10​8-pai​ses Rockwell, E. (2005). Indigenous accounts of dealing with writing. In T. L. McCarty (Ed.), Language, literacy, and power in schooling (pp. 5–27). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Smagorinsky, P. (1995). Constructing meaning in the disciplines: Reconceptualizing Writing across the curriculum as composing across the curriculum. American Journal of Education, 103, 160–84.

28

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Smagorinsky, P. (2009). The architecture of textuality: A semiotic view of composing in and out of school. In R. Beard, D. Myhill, M. Nystrand, & J. Riley (Eds.), Handbook of writing development (pp. 363–73). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Literacy in teacher education: “It’s the context, stupid.” Journal of Literacy Research, 50(3), 281–303. Statista. (2015). Mexico: Literacy rate from 2005 to 2015, total and by gender. Retrieved April 2, 2018 from https​://ww​w.sta​tista​.com/​stati​stics​/2754​43/li​terac​ y-rat​e-in-​mexic​o/ Street, B. (1999). New literacies in theory and practice: What are the implications for language in education? Linguistics and Education, 10(1), 1–24. The World Bank. (2016). Mexico. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved November 13, 2017 from https​://da​ta.wo​rldba​nk.or​g/cou​ntry/​mexic​o Valencia, R. R. (2002). “Mexican Americans don’t value education!” On the basis of the myth, mythmaking, and debunking. Journal of Latinos and Education, 1(2), 81–103. Vertovec, S. (2006). The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. In Research on immigration and integration in the metropolis, Vol. 06–14: Working Paper Series: Vancouver Centre of Excellence. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, C. (1994). Arfarniad o ddulliau dysgu ac addysgu yng nghyd-destun addysg uwchradd ddwyieithog [An evaluation of teaching and learning methods in the context of bilingual secondary education]. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wales, Bangor, UK. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Young, V. A., Barrett, R., Young-Rivera, Y., & Lovejoy, K. B. (2014). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code-switching, and African American literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Part 1

The Historical Context of the Initiative

30

1

Literacy to Soar The Dream of a “New Mexico” Patricia Rosas Chávez

This chapter situates Letras para Volar, and the master’s degree in literacy education that it includes at the University of Guadalajara, in the history and culture of Mexko: Wewenelwayotlaalli, the Nahuatl phrase for Mexico: Land of Ancestral Roots. This history includes the long period of unadulterated habitation by the land’s original people, whose spirit lives in the poem by the Acolhuan philosopher, warrior, architect, poet, and ruler Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472): We have come to know your beautiful words. The briefest instant, O friends! But brief though it be, long may it live!

If teacher education is to be reinvented to help advance the nation to new, advanced literacy levels it is important to understand how the nation came into being and developed over time. This understanding requires attention to the people who constitute its population, the manner in which its diverse populations produce cultural variation that can be challenging to address in classrooms and educational policies, how its economic history has produced inequities and corruption that circumscribe opportunity and the potential of people from outside the wealthy and dominant elite, and other factors that a literacy education must take into account to achieve its goals. Educators in other nations, especially those with both original people and colonial histories who hope to reinvent literacy teacher education, might benefit from seeing how a historical reflection may inform ambitions to shift a national culture toward a more literate citizenry.

32

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

This chapter reviews central aspects of Mexican history, establishing the convergence of historical pathways that have produced the present, and anticipating how Letras para Volar in general, and the master’s degree in particular, can create a better future in the “New Mexico” we envision.

Mexico: A Brief Introduction The United Mexican States is the southernmost nation in North America and the northernmost nation in Latin America, and is the most populous Spanishspeaking country on earth. It is a democratic, representative, and federal republic composed of thirty-two states. Among them is the national capital Mexico City1, which in 2016 was reclassified as an autonomous state. It is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere with a metropolitan area of over 21 million people. Mexico is bordered to the north by the United States and to the south by Guatemala and Belize. Its 1,964,375 square kilometers makes it the fifteenth largest country in the world (Central Intelligence Agency, 2017) and its 124.5 million inhabitants comprise 1.68 percent of the total world population. It ranks tenth globally in density, with 65.6 persons per square kilometer, no doubt skewed by the great concentration of people in Mexico City and other cities, including Guadalajara. It also includes vast rural areas that are sparsely populated, contributing to challenges in providing equitable education for urban and rural areas, given their vastly different populations and needs. Mexico has a great diversity of climates, from warm-humid and temperate-humid to dry and polar. The land is populated by a rich diversity of flora and fauna that make it one of the twelve countries in the world considered to be megadiverse, since it harbors between 65 percent and 70 percent of global biodiversity (Llorente-Busquets & Ocegueda, 2008). Our ancestors have given Mexico great linguistic variety. Mexico’s official language today is Spanish. Nevertheless, according to estimations from the 2015 intercensal survey by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía), more than seven million people speak an original language, representing 6.52 percent of the country’s total population. Prior to the Spanish Conquest there were more than 200 original languages spoken in modern-day Mexico (Benavides, Del Valle, & Valdés, 2008), of which Mexico City is known in Mexico by four names. Informally it goes by “México.” Its official names include “La Ciudad de México,” “El Distrito Federal,” and “México D.F.”

1

Literacy to Soar

33

at least 68 have survived. Nahuatl (pronounced NÄ-wätl), Maya, Tzeltal ((t)seltäl), and Mixtec (mē-ˈstek) are among the most prominent. Many Mexicans speak more than one language. Roughly 6 percent speak both Spanish and an original language (Statista, 2005); and 2 to 5 percent speak English, with the Secretary of Education predicting that within a generation, Mexico will be fully bilingual in Spanish and English (Mexico News Daily, 2015). This diversity provides Mexico with rich cultural possibilities. It also complicates literacy efforts, which tend to be evaluated according to such narrow assessments as international standardized tests in a single official language, in this case Spanish. This multilingual dimension suggests that a literacy education program should be attentive to the role of translanguaging (see Introduction, this volume), that is, the blending of languages by individuals and groups; and that schools should recognize that the language of testing may produce scores that do not reflect the sophisticated language practices used by people speaking and meshing multiple tongues. This tension between respect for diversity, and an emphasis on literacy development measured through standardized assessments, creates a major challenge for a literacy education initiative. The Mexican constitution provides autonomy to its original cultures, the people of which retain the right to their own language, literacy practices, rites and rituals, and other matters of self-determination. The Mexican lands originally hosted diverse cultures, each possessing its own identity, cosmogony, language, gastronomy, science, and art; and each sharing a dedication to cultivating knowledge, producing art and architecture, valuing friendship, and holding a deep respect for nature.

Mexico’s Great Original Cultures I will review five major societies in the order in which they appeared, beginning with the Olmecs, considered the region’s foundational culture. I will continue with the Maya, and then address the most representative culture of the state of Jalisco where Guadalajara resides, the Huicholes or Wixaritari. Next came the culture that constructed the great Atlantean columns, the Toltecs, and finally the last major civilization before the Spanish Conquest, the Aztecs. These societies were significant on their own terms and have helped to produce the Mexico we know today. They illustrate how original people are not monolithic, as a standardized curriculum would assume, but rather have produced cultural

34

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

streams that remain vital and that converge in Mexico’s overcrowded classrooms. Paz (1985) described this diversity as part of Mexico’s historical legacy: When we consider what Mexico was like at the arrival of Cortés, we are surprised at the large number of cities and cultures, in contrast to the relative homogeneity of their most characteristic traits. The diversity of the indigenous nuclei and the rivalries that lacerated them indicate that Mesoamerica was made up of a complex of autonomous people, nations and cultures, each with its own traditions, exactly as in the Mediterranean and other cultural areas. Mesoamerica was a historical world in itself. (p. 90)

What follows cannot possibly capture the wealth of diversity in the human population of pre-Conquest Mexico. These major civilizations were the dominant, but by no means exclusive, inhabitants of the land.

Olmec Culture In the Nahuatl language, “Olmec” means Land of Olman (rubber). The Olmecs are considered the original civilization of Mesoamerica, appearing simultaneously in the Balsas River basin, the Valley of Mexico, the Gulf Coast facing the Atlantic Ocean, and other areas in this region around the year 1200 BCE (Escalante, 2008). The inhabitants of the region cultivated corn, engaged in fishing and hunting, used precious stones to make offerings, and harvested rubber from local trees (Rusby, 1909). The rubber provided the material for the ball used in the juego de pelota Maya (Maya ballgame), played both recreationally and ritualistically and still played today by descendants of some original groups. The game was banned by Torquemada, the Dominican friar and first Grand Inquisitor, as part of the Spanish effort to eradicate original cultures. Yet it survived as a spiritual performance of the creation of the universe, replicating a battle between gods and demons, with the gods’ victory allowing them to create a new race of humans from the bones of the dead. Olmec social structure consisted of rulers, priests, sages, artists, merchants, farmers, craft-makers, builders, and servants, a hierarchical social organization common to original groups on the continent. The Olmecs lived in tribes led by chiefs called Chichimecatl. Their culture was polytheistic, a belief system that allowed them to absorb the Christian deity following the Conquest without losing their own gods, a process still underway (Gallaher, 2007), and a complicating factor in making clear distinctions between original and colonial people. Their gods were associated with elements of nature such as the sun, volcanoes, water,

Literacy to Soar

35

and agriculture. Their supreme deity was the jaguar, which represented the predecessors of the spirits of nature and took the form of a jaguar-human (see Chapter 3). The Cascajal Block, a tablet-sized writing slab, stands among the most important recent discoveries about the Olmec culture. The Block is approximately 3,000 years old, suggesting that it is the oldest writing on the continent. It consists of sixty-two glyphs and, although its exact meaning has not been deciphered, presumably was produced to express ideas about everyday life. According to MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Stephen D. Houston, “It is the first Olmec evidence of writing. . . . it means nothing less than that the Olmecs had literature, that they were able to communicate their culture to future generations, that they were, in short, a much more complex and rich civilization than we had imagined” (cited in Rodríguez et al., 2006, p. 24). The “we” of his phrasing appears to represent the Western anthropological community within which he worked. The Olmecs themselves had, for centuries, considered their society to be complex and rich. This exercise in perspective-taking illustrates the ways in which outsiders, even those who are considered brilliant, can have difficulty escaping their colonial perspective when forming images of those from foreign cultures. Literacy long predated the arrival of the Spaniards, albeit with a different language, script, and purpose. As Smagorinsky (2011) has argued based on the work of Schmandt-Besserat (2011) and Woods (2010), literacy practices represent cultural orientations and can indicate how a society is organized and how its activities are directed. European writing developed in large part to catalogue Mesopotamian mercantile exchanges, suggesting its capitalist roots. The Olmec script, instead, featured the quality of everyday life. These divergent uses for writing, and the different values they represented, had devastating consequences for the later Mexican societies who were obliterated in large part because their gold was valued and their people commodified to the point of their near-extermination. This monetization of culture was amplified by the Catholic invaders’ disdain for the religions of original people, coupling religion and economy through the implicit association between Christianity and capitalism in colonial expansion (Kenway et al., 2017).

Mayan Culture The Maya were an ancient and enigmatic civilization that called itself the ixi'm winiko'b', which means the People of Maize (corn), a central crop in both diet

36

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

and cosmology. The Mayan territory covered approximately 360,000 square kilometers and included the Southeastern third of present-day Mexico, virtually all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. This culture is, for many, “synonymous with the greatest splendor ever seen” among the region’s original people (Pallán-Gayol, 2011, p. 17). The Maya produced a legacy of architecture, sculpture, ceramics, painting, stone and gem art, feather-based art and attire (highly valued in Mesoamerican art and culture, yet considered ephemeral and thus not of value by European invaders), and products made from cotton fabrics and dyes. These artistic traditions embodied cultural narratives that can be considered early literacy practices, comprising First Literacies (Smagorinsky, 2018) as essential communicative texts representing cultural values through semiotic means, a value taken up in Letras para Volar’s literacy programs. The Maya additionally developed a complex, advanced, and unique writing system, and a numeric system that illustrates how “The evolutionary development of numerical systems [occurs] in relation to the mathematical needs of societies” (Anderson, 1971, p. 54). Their computations allowed them advanced scientific understandings, including their skill in measuring time, through which they developed calendars and astronomical representations, along with a philosophy about the nature of time (Thompson, referenced in León-Portilla, 1968). The Mayan culture’s attention to time produced a variety of calendars to organize its rituals. Among them were the Haab, a 365-day calendar divided into 18 months of 20 days each, with 5 days added to match the earth’s cycle in relation to the sun. They also had a Tzolkin, or 260-day calendar; and a calendar covering a much longer period whose Mayan name is not known, but is now called the Calendar Round, a 52-year cycle of 18,980 days. The Mayan calendar was used to govern the times of their agricultural work, religious ceremonies, and family customs (Maya World Studies Center, 2003). If literacy practices include symbol systems across the semiotic spectrum, the Mayan people were highly developed in their use of texts to represent their reality.

Wixaritari or Huichole Culture The Huichol, or Wixaritari (“the people” in the Huichol language), occupied the Sierra Madre Occidental in the current states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, and Zacatecas. Little is known of their pre-Conquest history beyond the general

Literacy to Soar

37

outlines of their territory (Neurath, 2003). Telléz (2006) described their political organization as having a complex structure that included multiple tiers: The first, related to centers of political, ceremonial and territorial organization of pre-Hispanic origin, has survived to this day. . . . The second consists of the institutions introduced by missionaries and colonial authorities to organize the political life of indigenous peoples: the royal houses and chapels, offices of civil and religious hierarchies of each community, as well as land markers. . . . The third level is composed of a series of civil positions introduced by the Mexican State in the 20th century and associated with the municipality and the agrarian authorities. In spite of their character, they were assimilated into the ceremonial life of the communities. (pp. 4–5)

This process of integration characterizes how original people absorbed Spanish culture without abandoning their own, a factor still relevant in educational efforts that must accommodate multiple traditions to produce a collective effort. Consistent with other original societies, the Wixaritar produced abundant art that served important cultural roles related to the organization and sustenance of their cultural values and thus had a literacy dimension. Wixarika art was sacred, mystical, transpersonal, and collective (Negrín, 1979), representative of the transcendent approach to life that has survived in such forms as Magical Realism as a literary genre. The Wixaritar have also retained their original place names for their cities, despite the fact that the Conquistadors renamed them according to Eurocentric conventions. This effort at cultural preservation was not limited to the era of the Conquest. It remains a challenging facet for life as they fight to preserve their culture in the face of business interests determined to exploit natural resources at the expense of traditions that sustain original ways of life. Like many original cultures, the Wixarika have fought an uphill battle to preserve their traditions and sacred places, with help from such organizations as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has included some Wixarika areas among its World Network of Natural Sacred Sites. Yet this tension between the preservation of original cultures and colonial economic development has characterized post-Conquest life since the arrival of Cortés, and remains a factor in educational initiatives.

Toltec Culture The Toltecs settled in Tula, currently the southwestern state of Hidalgo—named after Miguel Hidalgo, the charismatic Catholic priest and martyred hero of the

38

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Mexican War of Independence of the early 1800s—near Mexico City. Their society traces its origins to the eighth century CE. The word Toltec means “master builders” in the Nahuatl language, referring to its architectural achievements. The Toltec people also produced paintings, sculptures, and pottery, contributing to the semiotic production of communicative and representative texts central to literacy development. They worshiped various deities such as Cinteotl (the goddess of corn), Tláloc (the god of rain), Hueuheteotl (the god of fire), and others. Their society was both theocratic and militaristic, and included caste-like social hierarchies that separated an upper class of rulers, priests, and warriors from a lower class that included artisans, merchants, and farmers. The Toltecs had a major influence on the culture of the later Aztec, Texcocano, and Tlaxcalan societies, all of which comprise the Nahuatl lineage and embody its heritage (León-Portilla, 1961).

Aztec or Nahuas Culture In 1325 CE the Nahuas or Aztecs settled in Mexico-Tenochtitlán, after a quest that led them to a location marked by an eagle atop a cactus devouring a snake, fulfilling a prophecy by the Mexicas’ principal god, Huitzilopochtli. From there, the population and territory expanded to include a wide variety of ethnic groups built from both alliances and subjugation to produce “a political institution whose objective was to maintain the balance of forces in the extensive territory and during expansion” (Monjaraz, 1980, p. 147). Education was very important for the Aztec culture, a value manifested in their development of a system of universal and compulsory education (LeónPortilla, 1961). Children of the nobility went to the Calmecac, the name for the schools where they were instructed in a variety of sciences. The children of the common people went to the Telpochcalli, schools where they were trained in a craft or a trade. In both institutions the community’s moral and ethical values were inculcated, including a love for the land, gratitude toward the gods, dedication to work, and a desire to support their own kind (Rojas, 2005). The Aztecs developed mathematical and scientific systems that they used to order and interpret their surroundings. They had a numbering system using base 20 that employed non-Western markers such as a dot representing a unit of 1, and a bar representing a unit of 5, with each sign’s value following from the position it occupies in the representation of the number. Their scientific

Literacy to Soar

39

understanding led them to develop two calendars, the Xiuhpohualli and the Tonalpohualli. León-Portilla (1956) reports that They had five main cosmological categories involving the narration of the suns: 1) the logical necessity of laying a universal foundation; 2) the temporalization of the world in ages or cycles; 3) the idea of primordial elements; 4) specialization of the universe by directions or quadrants, and 5) the concept of struggle as a model for thinking about cosmic events. (p. 157)

Science and religion were thus fused in their interpretation of the cosmos. The Aztecs developed symbols to represent metaphysical concepts, such as god (Téotl), symbolized by a sun. They also had gods representing movement (Ollin), life (Yoliliztli), night (Yohualli), and day (Ílhuitl). Religion was fundamental for the Aztecs at all social levels. Their polytheistic beliefs produced a great set of gods they worshiped and to whom they offered animal and human sacrifices. Among their main deities were Huitzilopochtli, the god of war; Coatlicue, the goddess of fertility and considered to be the mother of all the gods; Quetzalcóatl, the god of life, the winds, and wisdom; Tezcatlipoca, the god of heaven and earth and the source of power and happiness; Ometéotl, the dual god representing the masculine and feminine essence of creation; and Tláloc, the god of rain, lightning, and earthquakes. Aztec society thus embodied values that emphasized the mystical and cosmological dimensions of life, while also grounding their social order in what would now be considered STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and STEAM (adding the arts) understandings. Although they were the dominant Mexican society at the time of the Spanish invasion, they were vulnerable to a combination of what Diamond (1997) calls guns, germs, and steel, not to mention horses that expanded range and provided a tremendous advantage in battle. Diamond attributes these assets to the affordances of the geography of a national setting and not the superiority of a culture, as believed by the Spaniards and their Christian orientation. Although the Aztecs fell quickly to the Spaniards, their culture has remained strong and evident in modern-day Mexican society.

Summary This brief historical overview has highlighted notable aspects of these major original cultures. Their astronomy, mathematics, writing, and education system provide the cultural and scientific foundations that in part have inspired Letras

40

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

para Volar. From a literacy perspective, these cultures provided First Literacies in the form of various communicative and representational art, images of which still resonate in Mexican society. The original cultures also established hierarchical, caste-oriented social orders that produced inequities of the sort that remain today. The Spaniards are often held responsible for modern-day inequity, and with good reason. However, they replaced one set of inequities with another, one hierarchical order with another, rather than introducing injustice to the region. Indeed, the fall of the Aztecs was in part due to oppressed surrounding tribes who joined the Spaniards to help defeat them. These imbalances undergird many of the challenges that face the Mexican educational system, and have informed the critical perspective that we hope to integrate throughout literacy education as students learn to read the world along with the word in the Freirean (1970) sense, and appropriate tools for addressing discrimination and its pernicious effects on the nation’s prospects for prosperity. Even with this complex and problematic history, these societies have left a proud cultural, literacy, and scientific legacy. Their contributions must serve as part of the foundation for Letras para Volar and the ambition of its master’s degree program of reinventing teacher education for the “New Mexico.”

The Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire But if a foreign enemy dare profane your soil with his sole, Think Oh, dear homeland! That heaven gave you a soldier in each son. Stanza from the Mexican National Anthem

Mexko: Kanpa nochipa tlatewiyah. This phrase means Mexico: Land in a constant struggle. Mexico has, indeed, struggled through the five centuries following the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492 and the subsequent invasion launched from Cuba by Hernán Cortés, which brought a period of genocide known as the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire. In the remarkably short period from 1519 to 1521 CE, the mighty Aztecs, who had dominated the region for two centuries, fell to a relatively small band of invaders led by Cortés. Historical narratives relate how pleasantly amazed the Spaniards were when they arrived at the island that became Mexico City to find a dream-like place with large constructions atop a lake and great causeways that led to the Templo

Literacy to Soar

41

Mayor (the Great Temple). According to León-Portilla (1961), upon their arrival in the Aztec capital, the Conquistadors were impressed to find a people with a great, well-established culture, descended from other advanced cultures, endowed with their own physiognomy. Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1939), a Conquistador under Cortés who wrote a lengthy account of the Spanish Conquest, also describes all the wonders that they encountered when they arrived in Mexico, along with less admiring accounts of the people’s religion and rituals, including human and animal sacrifice and cannibalism: The palaces where we were lodged, how large and well-made they were, of very fine stonework, and the wood from cedars and other good fragrant trees, with large patios and rooms, wondrous things to see, and canopied with borders of cotton. . . . I never tired of looking at the diversity of trees and the fragrance of each one, and walkways full of roses and flowers, and many fruit trees and rose bushes, and a freshwater pond . . . large canoes could enter the gardens from the lagoon without needing to land, passing through an opening that had been made, and everything very whitewashed and splendid, with all sorts of stones and paintings in them; there was much to ponder, and birds of many diversities and breeds that came into the pond. . . . I thought that nowhere in the world had other lands been discovered like these. (p. 308)

There is also a record of the ferocious defense and resistance put up by the Aztecs, whose emperor Montezuma is reported to have interpreted the bearded Europeans on their floating cities, coming from the direction of the rising sun, as the embodiment of the god Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent. He thus initially welcomed them, allowing them easy entry into Tenochtitlán. León-Portilla (1959) reports that In Mexico-Tenochtitlan, aware of the presence of the conquerors in the vicinity of Tetzcoco, Motecuhzoma2 assembled the indigenous chieftains for the last time to discuss whether or not to receive the outsiders peaceably. In spite of the dire omens of Cuitlahuacatzin, Motecuhzoma decided in the end to receive the Spaniards in peace. . . . On their knees, the Indians worshiped them as sons of the Sun, their god. They said that the [return of Quetzalcóatl] that their dear emperor Nezahualpitzintli had told them about many times [had arrived]. (pp. 65–66)

With such access the Spaniards learned of the great reserves of gold this culture had accumulated, something that aroused their ambitions, along with their Motecuhzoma is one of many spellings of Montezuma; others include Moctezuma, Moteczoma, Moteuczomah, Muteczuma, and Mwatazuma.

2

42

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

fundamental goal of converting the original people to Catholicism. When their missionary work failed, they imprisoned Montezuma and waged war on the Aztecs. The alliances the Spaniards made with the peoples who resented Aztec domination provided such assistance as the help of a Tlacochcalcatl (military general) from the ancient city of Cempoalla (see León-Portilla, 1959) who showed them the way, advising them on where to advance and warning them of the places where they would find friends and enemies. The Spaniards were also accompanied by La Malinche, a Nahua who knew the best routes through the mountainous terrain. Other allies against the Aztecs included Tlaxcaltec and Otomi people, who used this coalition to turn the Spaniards against their other enemies, such as the Cholula. In short order the Aztecs fell, the Templo Mayor was razed, and the Spaniards began the process of Christianizing and subordinating original cultures as thoroughly as possible (Matos, 2014).

Education During Colonial Rule These events were followed by three centuries of Spanish domination in what the Europeans called New Spain. The political regime, modeled on that of Spain, had a monarchical base, invested power in the viceroys and clergy, and forced changes in the national order. When the Hapsburgs gave way to the Bourbons in Europe, the resulting Bourbon Reforms “modernized” the Spanish politicaladministrative order, which had reverberations in Mexican politics and social structures, if not so much in education. The reforms were grounded in secular Enlightenment values of “trust in human reason, the discrediting of traditions, opposition to ignorance, the defense of scientific and technological knowledge as a means of transforming the world, and the search, through reason and not so much through religion, for a solution to social problems” (Jauregui, 2008, p. 197). Education, available largely to those born into advantage, was characterized by Christian evangelizing more than formal learning. Gonzalbo (2010) reports that In the 300 years of Spanish rule there was no true educational system, designed and controlled by a higher authority, as we now conceive of it in our IberoAmerican countries, but studies of all levels were established more or less spontaneously as dictated by need. And that organization did not start at the lower levels, as one might suppose, but at the highest level, that of university studies, which was the first concern of those in the cities and of the local authorities. (p. 44)

Literacy to Soar

43

Mexico was no exception in this era to the global lag in developing a comprehensive and compulsory education for its citizens (Soysal & Strang, 1989), or in grounding education in religious training (Curran, 1954). The Mexican government was a reflection of the Spanish system, and thus represented Spanish history and culture and carried out its colonial mission. After three centuries, however, their rule had become onerous, and the people revolted to produce an independent nation.

The Mexican War of Independence Between 1808 and 1809, the Viceroyalty—the territorial claims of Spain in what they called “New Spain”—struggled economically and experienced a severe drought, stirring widespread anger and resistance. Spanish rule was overthrown finally through the Mexican War of Independence from September 16, 1810 through September 28, 1821. This rebellion was among many wars of independence fought against Spanish rule in its colonies, following the French invasion of Spain during Europe's Napoleonic Wars. The Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire asserted that Today, the Mexican Nation, which for three hundred years had neither its own will nor free use of its voice, leaves behind the oppression under which it has lived . . . and solemnly declares . . . that it is a Sovereign nation and independent of the old Spain with which henceforth it will maintain no other union than that of a close friendship in the terms prescribed by the treaties. (Junta Soberana, 1821)

This independence was followed by a period in which several constitutions were written for a nation populated for the most part by original (about 60 percent) and mestizo people. The caste system continued to favor the Criollo, those with the purest Spanish blood and with wealth-based access to education. Spanish-descent people in Mexico are referred to in the twenty-first century as “blanco/white” to distinguish them from original and mixed-race people, and they remain favored in social judgments. For instance, television programming is often accused of “whitewashing,” featuring light-skinned performers under the assumption that they have greater appeal (Romero, 2018), a problem that an educational system concerned with equity needs to address. Following independence in the early 1800s, Mexico moved to abolish slavery and issued a decree restoring lands that had been seized and absorbed into the haciendas, the feudal plantations characteristic of Spanish rule (Vázquez,

44

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

2008). Peace, however, was not forthcoming; Mexico is, indeed, a land of constant struggle. Vázquez (2008) describes the revolutionary period as one in which “almost the entire population had its life disrupted by 11 years of fighting, experiencing the distortion of 300 years of order and the beginning of a long period of changes” (p. 324). The constitutional regimes changed hands often, and the elites prevailed through the formation of alliances with corrupt officials. In 1821 the Army of the Three Guarantees, the principal military of the revolutionary forces, produced the Plan de Iguala, which guaranteed a commitment to the Catholic religion, independence from Spain, and unity against enemies. The new government would remain a monarchy, a move toward stability that did not immediately materialize. The Spaniards were gone, but Spanish culture remained dominant in many ways. The political and social revolution did not produce a corresponding revolution in education. Since early colonial times, the few primary schools were administered by the city councils, either directly or through teachers’ associations. The city councils played an active role in the creation of municipal schools. They had to rent the premises; finance and supervise their operation; examine, hire, and dismiss the teachers; and invite the parish priest to accredit the teacher’s ability to impart Christian doctrine. These practices remained in place despite a revolving door of heads of state, including a supreme governmental junta, a triumvirate, a regency, an emperor, a president, and a military dictator, among the many authorities that governed the country during the first decades of fragile independent life. According to Vázquez (2008), the National Government had no involvement in primary education beyond promoting it, except in the Federal District and in the territories, so that it did not support it aside from the enactment of laws such as those regarding testaments, which made the donation of a small amount of money obligatory (mandatory bequest) if there were no heirs. (p. 104)

This turbulent administrative period was accompanied by the territorial aggression of the still-expanding United States. US penetration into Texas began in 1820 with the establishment of San Felipe de Austin, founded in 1823 by Stephen F. Austin as the main site in Texas for US colonization and a foothold for claims that Texas was a US territory (Hevia-Frasquieri, 2011). In 1832, former Texas Governor Samuel Houston, on instructions from US President Andrew Jackson, organized the residents who were in rebellion against the Mexican authorities, a struggle that included the infamous thirteen-day Battle of the Alamo in present-day San Antonio in 1836. The victorious Mexican commander

Literacy to Soar

45

of that conflict, the flamboyant and controversial General Antonio López de Santa Anna (see Krauze, 1997), was captured shortly after the battle and forced to sign a treaty recognizing the independence of Texas on the border of the Rio Grande River. The US government declared war on Mexico ten years later, a battle that ended in 1848 with the signing of the Guadalupe–Hidalgo treaty through which Mexico was stripped of a little over half of its territory. In 1853 the Treaty of Mesilla annexed even more Mexican territory that the United States hoped to develop into a transcontinental railroad (Muñoz, 1936). This aggression was opposed by prominent US thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau (1849), whose arrest for refusing to pay taxes to support unjust wars and slavery led him to write, in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, that “when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” To lend respectability to the seizure of these lands, a purchase agreement was proposed. Santa Anna offered the lands for fifty million pesos, but the US diplomat James Gadsden—in whose name this exchange is known as the Gadsden Purchase—claimed that the arid region that eventually became parts of the US states of Arizona and New Mexico was worth only twenty million. Santa Anna’s agreement to this figure did not stop the US Senate from reducing the offer to 10 million pesos, only seven million of which were paid, and only six million of which reached the Mexican treasury. US disrespect for the Mexican people and nation has abated little in the time since. Internal struggles between liberals and conservatives complicated these struggles with the United States. Efforts to achieve a sovereign country and a secular state plunged the country into the War of Reform, a three-year civil war that lasted from 1857 to 1860 between the Liberal Party that had taken power in 1855 under the Plan of Ayutla, and the Conservative Party that resisted its authority. It began on December 17, 1857, with the Plan of Tacubaya, which included the abolition of ecclesiastical and military privileges, the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, the freedom of education, and individual guarantees that granted citizens freedom and equality before the law. The War of Reform produced a series of crises, including the complete depletion of the Mexican treasury. The nation’s main economic engine was driven by the sale of nationalized (i.e., the forced transfer from private to state ownership) and confiscated assets of the clergy, which were drastically reduced when the

46

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

church decreed the penalty of excommunication, prompting President Benito Juárez to suspend the payment of the foreign debt for two years. These measures resulted in an 1861 alliance among England, Spain, and France to force payment of Mexican debt. England and Spain reached an agreement on the payment, while France did not and resorted to the force of arms (National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico [Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México], 1990). The French intervention suffered a military setback on May 5, 1862, at the hands of General Ignacio Zaragoza. However, bereft of resources, Juárez’s forces waned considerably, and the French claimed victory and named Maximilian of Habsburg Emperor of Mexico (Vázquez, 2008). Maximilian turned out to be more liberal than the Mexican conservatives had imagined. He drafted the Statute of the Empire on April 10, 1865, followed by a civil code and an agrarian and labor law that returned lands to original peoples and granted lands to those who had none. “This law,” according to Vázquez (2008), “approved a maximum work day of 10 hours, canceled debts greater than 10 pesos, prohibited corporal punishment and limited company stores” that used a debt-generated system that produced servitude without the possibility of economic independence (p. 312). Furthermore, reports Vázquez, Maximilian “signed a contract for the construction of the railroad from Mexico City to Veracruz and authorized operations for the London Bank of Mexico and South America, to facilitate trade exchanges” (p. 313). Maximilian turned out to be a vigorous champion of human rights for all citizens, including equality and freedom of religion, property, legal access, and the press (Bernal-Gómez, 2012). The laws he decreed on freedom of worship, the abolition of ecclesiastical privilege, and the nationalization of church property brought about confrontation with the clergy (Bernal-Gómez, 2012). Meanwhile, the forces of Benito Juárez—a descendant of original Mexican people who was known to many as The George Washington of Mexico—were advancing, and by early 1867, the empire was reduced to Puebla and Veracruz. The emperor retreated to Queretaro, where he was executed by a firing squad. Vázquez (2008) reports that “The empire having collapsed, Juárez returned to Mexico City on July 16, 1867 and this time the people, who appreciated his struggle to preserve national sovereignty, received him with jubilation” (p. 314). A period of stability and growth came after this stage, known as the Porfiriato, in reference to the period between 1877 and 1911 under the rule of Porfirio Díaz. Porfirio was a controversial character who retained dictatorial power for thirty-four years and made important contributions such as the improvement

Literacy to Soar

47

of Mexico’s foreign relations, free compulsory education, the establishment of various institutions such as the National Bank and the Naval Academy, and the development of the arts, architecture, public works, and transport. He also made the transit of goods tax deductible and improved foreign trade. Porfirio had high hopes that the political unity he had achieved would produce educational unity in what might today be called Mexican cultural literacy à la E. D. Hirsch (1987) or a common core curriculum: “If all Mexicans learn the same thing,” he is reputed to have said, “they will tend to act in the same way.” Porfirio’s retention of power for such a long time and abuses of power such as the suppression of workers’ strikes in Río Blanco and Cananea generated opposition among political groups. Various political figures were unhappy with Porfirio’s lengthy term in office and began to rebel, leading to the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1920.

The Mexican Revolution Francisco I. Madero led the resistance behind the revolution. Under the slogan “Effective Suffrage. No Re-Election” in response to Porfirio’s decades of rule, he contended for the presidency in 1910 and launched a military operation under the Plan of San Luis de Potosí. Madero was arrested, and Porfirio proclaimed himself president again. Hostilities became violent with the participation of various groups, including Catholics who were appalled by the secular state established by the constitution of 1857. Rural revolutionaries advocating for agrarian reform reached lasting legendary status: the magnificently mustachioed and charismatic Emiliano Zapata in the South, the ruthless northerner Francisco “Pancho” Villa, and the eternally rebellious Pascual Orozco. Madero assumed the presidency in 1911 but was assassinated in 1913 in the event known as “Ten Tragic Days (La Decena Trágica).” This coup d’état produced several years of internal power struggles that culminated in 1917 with the creation of yet another constitution. A period of economic growth followed the Mexican Revolution, albeit one occurring within broader political instability (Krauze, 1997). The “Mexican Miracle” provided a period of expansion of the Mexican economy from 1947 to 1970, with a growth of 3–4 percent, coupled with a low 3 percent inflation (Moreno-Brid & Ros, 2010). This pace of economic growth made a variety of advances possible, such as women’s right to vote in 1953 and improvements in health, infrastructure, and education. Illiteracy among the population dropped

48

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

from 62 percent in 1930 to 45 percent in 1960 (Aboites, 2008). In 1895 the percentage of the population that could not read was 82.1; in 1900 it was 77.7; and from 1910 to 1920 it dropped from 72.3 to 66.1. From 1970 to 2000 this figure went from 25.8 percent to 9.5 percent (National Institute of Education Evaluation [Instituto Nacional Evaluación de la Educación], 2010). The democracy for which Madero gave his life took a long time to develop, with one political party in power uninterruptedly for seventy-five years. This domination undermined the integrity of institutions and made way for corruption and impunity that have burdened Mexico through the present. Struggles have occupied a large part of Mexican history, bringing about political instability and the unfortunate effect that education has not grown at a desirable pace. Even the remarkable change in illiteracy from 82.1 percent in 1895 to 42.6 percent in 1950 to 6.9 percent in 2010 took 115 years, leaving nearly ten million people today functionally illiterate, with less than five years of formal education (Narro & Moctezuma, 2012).

Mexko: Aanawak tlaawilpan wan tlaakawilpan Mexico: A Country of Hits and Misses Patria: your maimed terrain is clothed in beads and bright percale. Sweet Land: your house is still so vast that the train rolling by seems only a diminutive Christmas toy. Fragment from the poem “Sweet Land (La Suave Patria)” Ramón López Velarde

Twenty-first-century Mexico remains a country of contrasts. It is heir to rich ancestral cultures and holder of a vast territory with enormous biodiversity and climates that provide tremendous natural wealth in minerals, oil, forests, coasts, water, and land with enough agricultural potential to feed its population with a cuisine of extensive cultural and gastronomic diversity. At the same time, Mexico suffers from poverty and inequity. Richness and diversity coincide with income disparities and exclusion, with detrimental consequences for literacy education and literacy teacher education. On the positive side, UNESCO lists 1,052 world heritage sites across the globe, representing a legacy of sites with great natural and cultural wealth. There are 51 locations in Mexico on this list, including 12 natural resources,

Literacy to Soar

49

37 cultural assets, and 2 that are combined, ranking it first in Latin America and sixth worldwide. Mexico’s abundance explains why Mexico holds such great attraction for tourists. Friendship is a core value of Mexican culture, in spite of areas run by drug cartels that have placed parts of Mexico on international travel alerts (Gaura, 2018). Mexico has become infamous for its notorious drug lords, particularly Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, whose operation originated in Guadalajara. The drug cartels have a complex relationship with the United States, whose drug users and weapons producers provide them with a robust market and limitless resources. These illicit trade avenues allow los narcos to operate with the impunity that follows from their ability to buy police and political protection which shields them, for the most part, from prosecution for the countless deaths and disappearances associated with drug trafficking. Nonetheless, the tourism secretariat reported that Mexico was the sixth most visited country in the world in 2017. The attractions include the affordability of tourism, the variety and quality of the cuisine, the historical sites, the geographic variety, the plushness of its resort cities, its temperate climate, its cultural diversity, its musical traditions, its public displays of art, its hospitality, and much else. To most visitors to most parts of Mexico, the drug traffic is not a factor, leaving the tourist with a safe and rich cultural experience at an affordable price. The luxuries enjoyed by these tourists, however, are not available to much of the Mexican population. Although Mexico’s social hierarchies leave many in poverty and many more in subsistence conditions, the World Bank (2016) found that Mexico ranks fifteenth among the world’s economies. The World Trade Organization (2016) reports that Mexico ranked thirteenth among the world’s leading exporters of goods in 2015 and twelfth in imports. This wealth, however, is concentrated in very few hands. Even as wealth in Mexico doubled between 2004 and 2014, two-thirds of Mexican wealth remains in the hands of 10 percent of the richest families, with 1 percent owning one-third of Mexico’s capital. Not only is there great polarity in Mexican income distribution, it has improved little over time. According to data from the 2016 National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social), 53.4 million people in Mexico live in poverty, representing 43.6 percent of the total population; of these, 9.4 million are in extreme poverty. The National Survey of Income and Expenses (Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos) found in 2016 that the wealthiest Mexicans earn 21 times more than the poorest (INEGI, 2017). Poverty and inequality are a source of other problems

50

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

such as corruption and violence, as indicated by the Corruption Perceptions Index carried out by Transparency International in which Mexico ranked 135 out of 180 countries in 2017, with the highest rank indicating the highest level of corruption.

Education in the Modern Mexican Context: The Way Forward The various structural problems that afflict Mexico have produced problems in the educational system, in turn limiting the opportunities of its less advantaged residents. Seventeen percent of the population held a college degree in 2016, the lowest of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries, whose average is 37 percent (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2017). According to World Bank estimates for 2014, Mexico invested 5.3 percent of its GDP in education. In this regard, Mexico was in forty-ninth place among the 143 countries included in the ranking. In spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP, Mexico’s investment of 0.55 percent in 2015 ranked forty-seventh out of the seventy-nine countries. In the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2016), Mexican students performed well below the means. In reading, only 0.3 percent of students in Mexico scored in the top two levels (5 and 6), with 42 percent of students scoring below level 2. These results were consistent with the findings of the National Tests for the Evaluation of Learning (Pruebas Nacionales para la Evaluación de los Aprendizajes) in 2016. The national average obtained at the lowest level of proficiency in the area of language and communication was 45 percent. These data are corroborated by other indicators and studies that affirm that people in Mexico do not read very much or consider reading an activity with recreational, educational, and transformational relevance. For example, according to the National Reading Survey (Encuesta Nacional de Lectura), the typical Mexican reads 5.3 books per year on average; 3.5 percent of them are read according to taste, and 1.8 percent according to necessity. Among the reasons reported for not reading, 40.6 percent alleged lack of time and 26.8 percent, lack of interest (INEGI, 2017). Yet the Survey on Reading Modules (Encuesta sobre Módulos de Lectura) showed that over three-fourths of the population is capable of understanding all or most of what they read.

Literacy to Soar

51

Given the shortage of volition for reading, formal education serves as the main vehicle for promoting literacy development in Mexico. When young people do read, they appear to be following imperatives set by teachers and parents rather than reading according to their own interests and needs (National Council for Culture and the Arts [Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes], 2015). In the absence of institutional capacities in civil society, school-based literacy education that promotes critical thinking becomes essential. When the collective memory fails with respect to the consequences of corruption and violence, there must be instruction in history so that people understand what they will repeat if they do not learn from past errors. When complexity does not allow for easily understanding the fundamental processes of nature and society, training in scientific thinking is fundamental. When confusion reigns, and adopting a right course of action becomes difficult and complicated, a culture of informed, critical thinking is essential. When we are distressed by the shame of being seen by the world in terms of violence, crimes, and corruption, it is our duty to rescue the honor of our country and the best of our history and culture through school studies. Reading and writing, along with more extended understandings of literacy that encompass broader semiotic systems that follow from First Literacies, are fundamental elements of education. Competence in reading and writing habituate young people to textual codes that enable further, more complex understandings. Literacy transcends simple decoding and comprehension, adding the critical dimension of reflecting on written texts and the social questions they raise. This stance enables a reader to interpret and use these meanings to develop knowledge, feelings, motivations, and a sense of transcendence. Such proficiency develops along with higher-order cognitive skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication, all of which can be applied to questions of social equity that are central to Letras para Volar and its ambition to transform the nation through both textual literacy and critical literacy. Literacy is not simply cognitive and intellectual; it has a powerful emotional dimension. A recent program in Letras para Volar featured panels of elementary, early teen, and late teen students testifying about why they read (Smagorinsky, 2016). Many of their motivations sprang from their emotional engagement with literature and the imaginative response they had to the texts. They do not read to pass tests or prove their proficiency. They read volitionally to develop relationships with other readers, explore new worlds, broaden their social horizons and understandings, connect with characters, live more meaningful lives, and develop into the type of person they hope to become. This affective

52

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

dimension, more than imperatives from adults to read academically and dispassionately, motivated their desire to grow as readers and develop more sophisticated literacy practices. In this sense, understood socially, reading translates into identity: We are what we read, but we also read what we are. The key components of reading are linguistic understanding and the context that defines and affirms readers. Active listening and expressiveness complement and enrich the ability to read and write. Therefore, developing these skills is not only part of the foundation of education. It stands as the very basis of what we are as a society. Reading at school should not be limited to informational textbooks of the sort currently valorized in US educational policy such as the Common Core State Standards. It is also necessary to promote a critical reading of the space where students experience the curriculum as, in one sense, pleasant, personal, recreational, and identify-forming, and in another, a means for developing both a feeling for social responsibility and a tool for effecting social change toward greater inclusion and equity. Despite the shortfalls, Mexico can surmount its problems through its brilliant grandeur. Taking up the cosmogony of diverse original cultures again, we are ready to dream. This dreaming, in the best sense of the word, means imagining the magnificence that a “New Mexico” can achieve. We have begun this labor under the banner of education that empowers dialogue, knowledge, and understanding, and that therefore sets us free. We want to combat hardened illiteracy, which according to Páramo (2017) goes beyond the institutions, habits, customs, and styles of thought in a society as a whole, and that constitutes a key element in the genesis of a nation’s underdevelopment. Our work in Letras para Volar is fundamentally concerned with defying the odds produced by historical injustice and producing a more coherent, equitable, and promising future.

References Aboites, L. (2008). El último tramo, 1929-2000. In P. Escalante Gonzalbo, B. García Martínez, L. Jáuregui, J. Z. Vázquez, E. Speckman Guerra, J. Garcíadiego, & L. Aboites (Eds.), La nueva historia mínima de México (pp. 469–521). México City, Mexico: El Colegio de México. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://nu​eva-a​ lianz​a.org​.mx/n​ube/l​ibros​/2015​/nuev​a-his​toria​-de-m​exico​-ilus​trada​/hist​oria-​de-me​ xico-​todo.​pdf Anderson, W. F. (1971). Arithmetic in Maya numerals. American Antiquity, 36(1), 54–63.

Literacy to Soar

53

Benavides, G., Del Valle, S., & Valdés, S. (2008). La diversidad lingüística en México y en Puebla. In A. Moreno (Ed.), El valor de la diversidad (meta) lingüística: Actas del VIII congreso de lingüística general (pp. 17–35). Madrid, Spain: Autonomous University of Madrid. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//elv​ira.l​llf.u​am.es​/ clg8​/acta​s/pdf​/pape​rCLG1​5.pdf​ Bernal-Gómez, B. (2012). México y las leyes liberales de Maximiliano de Habsburgo. Hechos y Derechos, 11. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://re​vista​s.jur​idica​ s.una​m.mx/​index​.php/​hecho​s-y-d​erech​os/ar​ticle​/view​/6731​/8667​ Central Intelligence Agency. (2017). The world factbook: Mexico. Langley, VA: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://ww​w.cia​.gov/​libra​ry/pu​blica​tions​/the-​ world​-fact​book/​geos/​mx.ht​ml Centro de Estudios del Mundo Maya. (2003). El calendario Maya. México City, Mexico: Author. Retrieved from http:​//www​.maya​calen​dar.c​om/ma​yacal​endar​/losc​alend​arios​ mayas​.html​ Consejo Nacional de la Evaluación de la Política Social. (2016). Resultados de pobreza en México 2016 a nivel nacional y por entidades federativas. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.cone​val.o​rg.mx​/Medi​cion/​MP/Pa​ginas​/Pobr​ eza_2​016.a​spx Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. (2015). Encuesta Nacional de Lectura y Escritura 2015–2018. México City, Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones Económicas, Administrativas y Sociales del Instituto Politécnico Nacional. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://ob​serva​torio​.libr​osmex​ico.m​x/fil​es/en​cuest​a_nac​ional​_2015​.pdf Curran, F. X. (1954). The churches and the schools: American Protestantism and popular elementary education. Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs and steel: The fates of human societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Díaz del Castillo, B. (1939). Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. México City, Mexico: Pedro Robredo. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​ .cerv​antes​virtu​al.co​m/obr​a-vis​or/hi​stori​a-ver​dader​a-de-​la-co​nquis​ta-de​-la-n​ueva-​ espan​a-tom​o-i--​0/htm​l/ Escalante, G. (2008). El México antiguo. In P. Escalante Gonzalbo, B. García Martínez, L. Jáuregui, J. Z. Vázquez, E. Speckman Guerra, J. Garcíadiego, & L. Aboites (Eds.), La nueva historia mínima de México (pp. 24–109). México City, Mexico: El Colegio de México. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://nu​eva-a​lianz​a.org​.mx/n​ube/l​ ibros​/2015​/nuev​a-his​toria​-de-m​exico​-ilus​trada​/hist​oria-​de-me​xico-​todo.​pdf Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gallaher, C. (2007). The role of protestant missionaries in Mexico’s indigenous awakening. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 26(1), 88–111. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from https​://ww​w.dip​lomat​ie.go​uv.fr​/IMG/​pdf/p​rotes​tanti​ndige​ne.pd​f Gaura, E. (October 4, 2018). 20  places in Mexico foreigners should never set foot in. The Travel. Retrieved February 24, 2019, from https​://ww​w.the​trave​l.com​/20-p​laces​ -in-m​exico​-fore​igner​s-sho​uld-n​ever-​set-f​oot-i​n/

54

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Gonzalbo, P. (2010). El virreinato y el nuevo orden. In D. Tanck (Ed.), Historia mínima de la educación en México (pp. 36–66). México City, Mexico: El Colegio de México. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://ad​olfos​anpe.​files​.word​press​.com/​2013/​03/ la​-educ​acion​-emn-​mexic​o.pdf​ Hevia-Frasquieri, M. (2011). El gigante de las siete leguas. Prontuario ilustrado de las agresiones de Estados Unidos contra los pueblos de nuestra América. Havana, Cuba: CIHSE, Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de la Seguridad del Estado, MININT. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://is​suu.c​om/ha​nsmej​iague​rrero​/docs​/9722​ 5447-​el-gi​gante​-de-l​as-si​ete-l​e Hirsch, E. D. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. Boston, MA: Houghton & Mifflin. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. (August 21, 2016). Presentación de resultados: Encuesta nacional de ingresos y gastos en los hogares 2016. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.beta​.ineg​i.org​.mx/c​onten​idos/​proye​ctos/​encho​ gares​/regu​lares​/enig​h/nc/​2016/​doc/p​resen​tacio​n_res​ultad​os_en​igh20​16.pd​f Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. (2017). Módulo sobre lectura MOLEC: Principales resultados febrero 2017. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//int​ernet​ .cont​enido​s.ine​gi.or​g.mx/​conte​nidos​/prod​uctos​/prod​_serv​/cont​enido​s/esp​anol/​ bvine​gi/pr​oduct​os/nu​eva_e​struc​/prom​o/res​ultad​os_mo​lec_f​eb17.​pdf Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones en México. (1990). La intervención francesa y el segundo imperio. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​ ://ar​chivo​s.jur​idica​s.una​m.mx/​www/b​jv/li​bros/​7/340​3/10.​pdf Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación. (2010). Panorama Educativo de México: Indicadores del sistema educativo nacional. México City, Mexico: INEE. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.inee​.edu.​mx/bi​e/map​a_ind​ica/2​010/P​ anora​maEdu​cativ​oDeMe​xico/​CS/CS​03/20​10_CS​03__c​-vinc​ulo.p​df Jauregui, L. (2008). Las reformas borbónicas. In P. Escalante Gonzalbo, B. García Martínez, L. Jáuregui, J. Z. Vázquez, E. Speckman Guerra, J. Garcíadiego, & L. Aboites (Eds.), La nueva historia mínima de México (pp. 200–241). México City, Mexico: El Colegio de México. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://nu​eva-a​ lianz​a.org​.mx/n​ube/l​ibros​/2015​/nuev​a-his​toria​-de-m​exico​-ilus​trada​/hist​oria-​de-me​ xico-​todo.​pdf Junta Soberana. (1821). Acta de independencia del Imperio Mexicano pronunciada por su Junta Soberana congregada en la capital el 28 de septiembre de 1821. México City, Mexico: Independencia y Soberanía, Secretaría de Gobernación, Archivo General de la Nación. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.bibl​iotec​a.tv/​artma​n2/pu​ blish​/1821​_124/​Segun​da_y_​defin​itiva​_Acta​_de_I​ndepe​ndenc​ia_de​l_Imp​_167.​shtml​ Kenway, J., Fahey, J., Epstein, D., Koh, A., McCarthy, C., & Rizvi, F. (2017). Class choreographies. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Krauze, E. (1997). Mexico: Biography of power: A history of modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (H. Heifetz, Trans.). New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Literacy to Soar

55

León-Portilla, M. (1956). La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes. México City, Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.hist​orica​s.una​m.mx/​publi​cacio​nes/p​ublic​adigi​tal/l​ibros​/filo​sofia​/046_​ 04_14​_acae​cer_t​empor​al.pd​f León-Portilla, M. (1959). Visión de los vencidos. México City, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.icta​ l.org​/publ​ic/do​wnloa​ds-ol​d/201​3-201​7/leo​nport​illam​iguel​lavis​ionde​losve​ncido​s.pdf​ León-Portilla, M. (1961). Los antiguos Mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares. México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. León-Portilla, M. (1968). Tiempo y realidad en el pensamiento Maya: Ensayo de acercamiento. México City, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Llorente-Busquets, J., & Ocegueda, S. (2008). Estado del conocimiento de la biota. In J. Sarukhán (Ed.), Conocimiento actual de la biodiversidad (pp. 283–322). México City, Mexico: National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.biod​ivers​idad.​gob.m​x/pai​s/pdf​/CapN​atMex​/ Vol%​20I/I​11_Es​tadoc​onoci​mient​o.pdf​ Matos, R. (2014). Destrucción del templo mayor de Tenochtitlán. Arqueología Mexicana, 56(1), 10–32. Retrieved February 23, 2019 from http:​//arq​ueolo​giame​ xican​a.mx/​mexic​o-ant​iguo/​destr​uccio​n-del​-temp​lo-ma​yor-d​e-ten​ochti​tlan Mexico News Daily. (September 12, 2015). Secretary forecasts a bilingual Mexico: Education Secretariat is preparing a national English program. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https​://me​xicon​ewsda​ily.c​om/ne​ws/se​creta​ry-fo​recas​ts-a-​bilin​gual-​ mexic​o/ Monjaraz, J. (1980). La nobleza Mexica surgimiento y consolidación. México City, Mexico: Edicol. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://bo​oks.g​oogle​.com.​mx/bo​ oks/a​bout/​La_no​bleza​_mexi​ca.ht​ml?id​=n-UU​AAAAY​AAJ&r​edir_​esc=y​ Moreno-Brid, J., & Ros, J. (2010). La dimensión internacional de la economía Mexicana. In S. Kuntz (Ed.), Historia económica general de México: De la colonia a nuestros días (pp. 757–90). México City, Mexico: El Colegio de México y Secretaría de Economía. Muñoz, R. (1936). Santa Anna: El dictador resplandeciente. México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://es​.scri​bd.co​m/doc​ ument​/3626​54698​/Sant​a-Ann​a-El-​Dicta​dor-R​espla​n-Raf​ael-F​-Muno​z Narro, J., & Moctezuma, D. (2012). Analfabetismo en México: Una deuda pendiente. Realidad. Datos y Espacio: Revista Internacional de Estadística y Geografía, 3, 5‒17. Negrín, J. (1979). Los huicholes: Arte y creencias de los peregrinos de los dioses. El correo de la UNESCO, 32(1), 16–19. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//une​ sdoc.​unesc​o.org​/imag​es/00​04/00​0440/​04406​4so.p​df Neurath, J. (2003). Huicholes: Pueblos indígenas del México contemporáneo. México City, Mexico: Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://ww​w.gob​.mx/c​ms/up​loads​/atta​chmen​t/fil​e/112​23/ hu​ichol​es.pd​f

56

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos. (2016). Programa para la evaluación internacional de alumnos (PISA) 2015 Resultados. México City, Mexico: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://ww​w.oec​d.org​/pisa​/PISA​-2015​ -Mexi​co-ES​P.pdf​ Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos. (2017). México-Nota País- Panorama de la Educación 2017. México City, Mexico: Author. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.oecd​.org/​educa​tion/​skill​s-bey​ond-s​chool​/EAG2​ 017CN​-Mexi​co-Sp​anish​.pdf Pallán-Gayol, C. (2011). Breve historia de los Mayas. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Nowtilus S. L. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.aglu​tinae​ditor​es.co​m/med​ia/re​ sourc​es/pu​blic/​90/90​d8/90​d8215​ae629​455d8​7b7cc​0b004​af26d​.pdf Páramo, R. (2017). Analfabetismo: Una discapacidad innombrable. Reflexiones sobre libros, lectura y escritura. In P. Rosas (Ed.), Lectoescritura, análisis y experiencias (pp. 10–33). México City, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara. Paz, O. (1985). The labyrinth of solitude and other writings (L. Kemp, Y. Milos, & R. P. Belash, Trans.) New York, NY: Grove Press. Rodríguez, M., Ortíz, P., Coe, M., Diehl, R., Houston, S., Taube, K., & Delgado, A. (2006). Sobre el bloque labrado de El Cascajal. Jaltipan, MX. Arqueología Mexicana, 14(84), 6–8. Rojas, O. (2005). La educación entre los Aztecas. Ethos Educativo, 33(34), 154–60. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://es​.scri​bd.co​m/doc​ument​/9995​1423/​La-Ed​ ucaci​on-En​tre-L​os-Az​tecas​ Romero, A. (September 28, 2018). Netflix struck Reality TV gold — & the heart of colorism with Made in Mexico. Refinery29. Retrieved July 9, 2019, from https​://ww​ w.ref​i nery​29.co​m/en-​us/20​18/09​/2108​51/ne​tflix​-made​-in-m​exico​-revi​ew-ri​ch-wh​ ite-c​ast-b​ackla​sh Rusby, H. H. (September, 1909). The rubber plants of Mexico. Torreya, 9(9), 177–84. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from https​://ww​w.jst​or.or​g/sta​ble/p​df/40​59484​8.pdf​ Schmandt-Besserat, D. (February, 2011). How writing came about. Keynote address presented at the Writing Research Across Borders II Conference, George Mason University, Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia. Smagorinsky, P. (2011). Vygotsky and literacy research: A methodological framework. Boston, MA: Sense. Smagorinsky, P. (2016, November 29). Common Core turns students into literary critics. Does it turn them into lifelong readers? Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from http:​//www​.pete​rsmag​orins​ky.ne​t/Abo​ut/PD​F/ Op-​Ed/Gu​adala​jara.​html Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Literacy in teacher education: “It’s the context, stupid.” Journal of Literacy Research, 50(3), 281–303. Available at http:​//www​.pete​rsmag​orins​ky.ne​t/ Abo​ut/PD​F/JLR​/JLR2​018.p​df Soysal, Y. N., & Strang, D. (1989). Construction of the first mass education systems in nineteenth-century Europe. Sociology of Education, 62(4), 277–88

Literacy to Soar

57

Statista. (2005). Mexico: Distribution of languages in 2005. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https​://ww​w.sta​tista​.com/​stati​stics​/2754​40/la​nguag​es-in​-mexi​co/ Telléz, V. (2006). La reorganización del recinto ceremonial (Tukipa) huichol de Guadalupe Ocotán, Nayarit, México. México City, Mexico: Fundación para el Avance de Estudios Mesoamericanos. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from http://www.famsi.org/ reports/05083es/ Thoreau, H. D. (1849). On the duty of civil disobedience. Retrieved March 1, 2019, from http:​//xro​ads.v​irgin​ia.ed​u/~hy​per2/​thore​au/ci​vil.h​tml Transparency International. (2017). Corruption perceptions index 2016. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​://ww​w.tra​nspar​ency.​org/n​ews/f​eatur​e/cor​rupti​on_pe​ rcept​ions_​index​_2016​ Vázquez, J. (2008). De la independencia a la consolidación republicana. In P. Escalante Gonzalbo, B. García Martínez, L. Jáuregui, J. Z. Vázquez, E. Speckman Guerra, J. Garcíadiego, & L. Aboites (Eds.), Nueva historia mínima de México (pp. 245–324). México City, Mexico: El Colegio de México. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https​ ://nu​eva-a​lianz​a.org​.mx/n​ube/l​ibros​/2015​/nuev​a-his​toria​-de-m​exico​-ilus​trada​/hist​ oria-​de-me​xico-​todo.​pdf Woods, C. (Ed.) (2010). Visible language: Inventions of writing in the ancient Middle East and beyond. Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Retrieved June 18, 2019, from http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/oimp32.pdf World Bank. (2014). GDP in education. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https://datos. bancomundial.org/ World Bank. (2016). Gross domestic product (US dollars at current prices). Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https://datos.bancomundial.org/

2

Innovation from the Bottom Up From Street Reading to a Graduate Degree Program in Literacy Studies Yolanda Gayol and Patricia Rosas Chávez

We want Mexican students to write the world

~ Gayol and Rosas’s twist on Freire and Macado’s (1987) Literacy: Reading the Word & the World This chapter details the factors that led to the conception of Letras para Volar, designed to serve the “New Mexico” emerging from historical tensions. This graduate degree program seeks both to preserve the many and varied heritages that have historically populated Mexico and to move its society into a greater role on the world stage, beginning with greater prosperity achieved through raised literacy rates. As the umbrella program that includes the reinvention of teacher education at the University of Guadalajara, Letras para Volar has evolved from a series of ludic dynamics for reading and writing shared with children and parents in the plazas of downtown Guadalajara, to a graduate degree program seeking to develop academic leaders among high school teachers and university professors. “Ludic” refers to qualities of playful activity and gamification, that is, learning through activities that are constructed with game-like features such as rewards, levels of achievement, and other elements undertaken either cooperatively or competitively. In these situations, students are “learning content and practicing literacy skills as if they were playing a game, making the educational experience both challenging and fun” (Kingsley & Grabner-Hagen, 2015). This approach of engaging students in “serious games” (Van der Spek & van Oostendorp, 2011, p. 741) stands in great contrast to the rote nature of learning as historically practiced in Mexican schools. The program aspires to prepare its graduates for leadership in educational innovation designed to serve both individuals’ literacy growth and, more

Innovation from the Bottom Up

59

broadly, a more equitable, literate, and economically sustainable society. For this purpose, the program was built on an academic framework that combines quality, equity, and inclusiveness across the curriculum in order to promote innovation in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. In what follows, we detail the program’s genesis and situate it in historical issues that have produced the need for a literacy program designed to improve the low literacy rates that have long characterized Mexican society (see Chapter 1).

Conception, Development, and Implementation of Letras para Volar We next provide background on the conception, development, and implementation of Letras para Volar, with attention to the program’s origins, shifts in literacy conceptions, historical problems in literacy education in Mexico, the role of literacy education in human development, and the challenges of the legacy of colonialism and the role of literacy in decolonization, that is, the effort to mitigate or dismantle colonial influences on original people (Fanon, 1963; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Program Origins Literacy was an alien word when we, as Letras para Volar’s central architects, proposed a new interinstitutional Master’s Program in Literacy Studies to the University of Guadalajara. This graduate degree was designed to promote better instruction in reading, writing, and related capacities, with reading paramount given its role in modern society and given that it is subject to tests in international literacy rankings. The initial set of instructors in the prototype consisted of an itinerant succession of volunteers. This approach limited our effort to establish the habit and pleasure of reading among children in schools located in lowincome neighborhoods. The need to continually locate, recruit, and prepare temporary reading facilitators produced discontinuity and turnover that made the program difficult to grow and sustain. This initial piloting suggested the need for a more formal, institutional approach. During the master’s degree program’s approval process, reviewers at the university were unfamiliar with the term literacy, and recommended that we shift to a more familiar term. We instead chose to increase the visibility of this concept in academia and society, to make the term literacy and its practice in everyday and academic life a central concern of Mexican education.

60

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Enthusiasm for literacy has since grown significantly at the University of Guadalajara. We are, as of this writing, working with our third cohort of graduate students in this program, housed in the Center for Art, Architecture and Design, a site that gives literacy meaning across symbol systems and extends it beyond its association with alphabetic reading and writing. Beyond these enrollments, Letras para Volar provides a series of online courses on literacy, publishes papers, organizes international literacy events, collaborates with such long-standing events as the Guadalajara International Book Fair, and has become involved with national and international experts and decision-makers in education. The word literacidad (literacy) was included in Article 3 of the Mexican Constitution, revised on Teachers Day, May 15, 2019, which addresses the role of education in Mexican society (Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2019). This official imperative made literacy education a new responsibility for Mexican teachers (Gayol, 2019). Along with the legislators who approved this constitutional reform, we aspire to help literacy contribute to improved quality, inclusiveness, motivation, and results in the classroom and in students’ lives outside school.

Early Assessment in Light of Shifts in Conception The evaluation component of Letras para Volar has supported the program’s effectiveness in reaching its lofty goals (see Chapters 10 and 11). Fijalkow, Fijalkow, and Franco (2017) studied the results of the initial efforts to improve reading, writing, and expressive practices with 5,000 children, finding that the program’s activities increased students’ reading appreciation, social consciousness, solidarity, and interest in science. The ludic dynamics used in the program change archaic practices that view reading as simply “understanding” and that rely on silent reading for instruction (Cassany, 2006; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013). The evaluation includes attention to comprehension of texts, but adds a variety of social measures that capture contextual and processual issues implicated in advancing reading practices. Together, these dimensions of literacy exceed the bureaucratic emphasis on neoliberal accountability, in which, according to Campano, Ghiso, Yee, and Pantoja (2013), “the ‘success’ of school, teacher, or student is, in large part, tied to questions of literacy” (p. 314) as measured by comprehension tests that assume that students’ authentic social practices can be captured in institutional testing situations. Campano et al. offer the alternative of coalitional literacies, that is, “critical social practices whereby community members enact language and literacy across cultural boundaries in order to

Innovation from the Bottom Up

61

learn from others, be reflective with respect to social location, foster empathy, cultivate affective bonds, and promote inclusion in the service of progressive change” (p. 314). This conception has less bureaucratic appeal because it is not easily reducible to numeric accountability, but has more educational appeal in that it addresses the social factors that contribute to literacy practices.

Historical Problems of Conceptualizing Literacy Education Latin American educational practices have long emphasized reading and writing as formalist, reactive processes involving little agency, creativity, or construction of meaning, in both schools and universities. Carlino (2008) explored writing practices in higher education in Argentina and compared them with those of diverse Anglo-Saxon cultures, with a focus on 10 universities in Argentina, 12 in Australia, 79 in the United States, and 24 in Canada. She found that in Argentina, students do not learn how to write or proofread, or to analyze or reflect; they write only “for the purpose of being evaluated” (p. 159) by measures that accept only one correct answer. Writing is conceived as a basic ability, learned once and forever in 6–12 education as a series of rules to be followed. The assumption is that the students are then competent writers when they arrive at college. University instructors, in turn, assume that they do not have the responsibility of teaching students how to write, which is a job they assign to schoolteachers and language specialists. This problem is chronic in US schools as well; Kittle (2006) is among many who finds a “blame game” at work among university composition instructors who complain about the writing skills of incoming students and fault high school teachers for their infelicities. Some remedial programs in Argentine universities are offered to provide general writing rules, instead of disciplinary or situated and meaningful writing. This limited, “basic” conception of writing echoes Giroux’s (1997) concern that writing is “merely regarded as a technical ability, reduced to a rude and simple instrumentalism, divorced from content, ideation and normative reinforcement” (p. 101). Giroux’s conclusion is drawn from outside the Argentine context that concerns Carlino, suggesting that formalism in writing is not exclusive to Latin America, even as the problems Giroux identifies are more endemic to US secondary schools than universities, which are Carlino’s concern. Carlino found that in Anglo-Saxon countries, university faculty pay great attention to disciplinary writing, viewing it as a social competence particular to each community of practice, and variable according to the disciplines, institutions, and geography. Extrapolating from Argentina to the rest of South America and

62

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Mesoamerica, Carlino advocates for teaching reading and writing across the curriculum in Latin American countries (see Ferreiro & Gómez Palacio, 1997, for the elementary school context), a recommendation built into Letras para Volar’s programming. We thus seek to shift school literacy to more constructivist instruction, assuming that universities will, in turn, conceive of writing in more than technical terms.

Literacy and Human Development The emotions involved in learning (Smagorinsky, 2016; Smagorinsky & Daigle, 2012) are rarely considered central to education in Mexican classrooms. Yet the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2015) has identified the importance of empathy, inclusion, and sense of belonging for school retention and success. This emphasis goes beyond the technical dimensions of reading and writing that are historically stressed in literacy instruction in Mexico, and emphasizes the role of emotional engagement in developing human potential in social and cultural contexts. This affective component of literacy benefits from critical literacy principles that help with the construction of warm and receptive environments in the schools and their surrounding communities, a value that has been built into Letras para Volar. Language—along with other symbol systems that comprise multiliteracies— enables the formulation, representation, and expression of ideas, meaning, and intentionality through spoken and written speech. This capacity has helped humans to expand, appropriate geographical spaces, and extract and transform planetary resources, a process captured by the notion of the Anthropocene, which is concerned with humanity’s impact on the environment, for good or ill (see Cole, 2019, for the role of sociocultural theories in studying how people affect nature). Jacobs and Jacobs-Spencer (2001) argue that harmonious relationships with nature are central to the perspectives of original people and thus should be acknowledged in character education, and education more broadly considered, as a curriculum-wide emphasis. The study of speech has become the province of social scientists, linguists, and others who take the cultural, historical, and social perspective that informs Letras para Volar. Speech acts—as expressions of consciousness, means of thinking, and forms of representation (Vygotsky, 1987)—make possible the accumulation and transmission of multiple forms of knowledge: theoretical and technological, scientific and speculative, aesthetic and cultural, historical and experiential. Speech acts have opened the door to the establishment of

Innovation from the Bottom Up

63

social institutions. As Petit, Segovia, and Sánchez (1999) put it, “To a great extent, what determines the life of human beings is the weight of words, or the weight of its absence; reading, having a dialogue with the other allows rearranging the symbolic universe, recomposing identity, constructing meaning” (p. 21).

Colonialism and Decolonialism Languages vary in different locations and evolve over time in relation to broader changes, including new forms of communication, translanguaging (see Introduction), human geography and migrations, and other factors (Fischer, 1999). Clashes for imperial domination, such as those affecting colonized nations like Mexico, can affect language development and obliterate or subordinate original languages (Prieto, 2014), a crucial problem that Letras para Volar attempts to address. The character and identity of the oppressed people change dramatically over time since knowledge, beliefs, and worldviews are embedded in speech acts. Mexican anthropologist and historian of Aztec literature Miguel León-Portilla (2010) portrays, in a dramatic and poetic way, the human loss experienced with language extinction: English When a language dies When a language dies the divine things, stars, sun and moon; human things, think and feel, are not reflected anymore in that mirror. When a language dies everything in the world, seas and rivers, animals and plants, neither think, nor pronounce with glimpses and sounds that do not exist anymore. When a language dies it closes to all the peoples of the world a window, a door, a peek differently to what it is to be and life on earth. When a language dies, his words of love,

Náhuatl Ihcuac thalhtolli ye miqui Ihcuac tlahtolli ye miqui mochi in teoyotl, cicitlaltin, tonatiuh ihuan metztli; mochi in tlacayotl, neyolnonotzaliztli ihuan huelicamatiliztli, ayocmo neci inon tezcapan.   Ihcuac tlahtolli ye miqui, mochi tlamantli in cemanahuac, teoatl, atoyatl, yolcame, cuauhtin ihuan xihuitl ayocmo nemililoh, ayocmo tenehualoh, tlachializtica ihuan caquiliztica ayocmo nemih.   Inhuac tlahtolli ye miqui, cemihcac motzacuah nohuian altepepan in tlanexillotl, in quixohuayan.

64

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

intonation of pain and haunt, maybe old songs, stories, speeches, prayers, nobody, what were they, will reach to repeat. When a language dies, many have died and many may die. Mirrors forever broken, shadow of voices forever silenced: humanity is impoverished.

In ye tlamahuizolo occetica in mochi mani ihuan yoli in tlalticpac.   Ihcuac tlahtolli ye miqui, itlazohticatlahtol, imehualizeltemiliztli ihuan tetlazotlaliztli, ahzo huehueh cuicatl, ahnozo tlahtolli, tlatlauhtiliztli, amaca, in yuh ocatcah, hueliz occepa quintenquixtiz.   Ihcuac tlahtolli ye miqui, occequintin ye omiqueh ihuan miec huel miquizqueh. Tezcatl maniz puztecqui, netzatzililiztli icehuallo cemihcac necahualoh: totlacayo motolinia.

This verse captures the painful loss of Mexico’s original heritages and challenges Letras para Volar to understand historical shifts in demographics, domination, and identities among Mexican people. We want to prevent further loss of the ways of expression among the heirs of ancient peoples, while simultaneously advancing Mexico into a new era. This tension among the preservation of original languages and cultures, the dominance of Spanish language and institutions, the possibility that English will be emphasized at the expense of original languages to promote commerce (Mexico News Daily, 2015), and the need to move the nation into a new cultural and economic future is a central issue in Mexico and a specific concern of Letras para Volar and the master’s degree program in literacy education.

Original People and Their Colonization In this section we summarize the historical factors that have shaped the present that Letras para Volar is attempting to reform for greater equity and inclusion (see Chapter 1). This history concerns to a large degree the effects of the Spanish Conquest and subsequent colonization that have subordinated the region’s original people and their cultures to European ways and means. The inequities that followed from centuries of oppression continue to make Mexico a place

Innovation from the Bottom Up

65

of great economic and social contrasts, including differential literacy rates that maintain an informal caste system that positions lighter-skinned and Spanishspeaking people at the top of the social order and darker speakers of original languages in subaltern positions.

Literacy in Aztec Culture Original people in Mexico did not have alphabetic writing systems; instead, they coded their languages in hieroglyphs. They also relied heavily on memorization, which made it “possible to record many poems and traditions that would otherwise have been lost forever” following the Conquest and the introduction of the Spanish language (León-Portilla, 2006, pp. xliv–xlv). Children of the elite were educated in schools called Calmecac, and the rest attended schools for practical knowledge called Telpochcalli. Tenochtitlán, the main city of the Aztec empire, had schools, houses of music, and libraries. Scribes (Tlacuilos) had a special status, and reading was reputedly an elaborated ritual. The word for reading was the same as for singing and dancing, in that they sang with the feet (Jiménez, 1990), suggesting ancient roots to what is conceived in the twentyfirst century as “New Literacies” in multimodal form, yet is more properly understood as First Literacies tracing back millennia (Smagorinsky, 2018). A single term, cuicatlamilitzi, referred to music, chorus, reading, and singing. Instruments were not “played”; people “sang” with them. Ethnomusicologists (e.g., Both, 2007) report that the music of these eras cannot be recreated because the codices depicting rhythm and instrumentation were destroyed. However, chronicles of the sixteenth century report the richness of Mexican music. The emotions evoked ranged widely and included extreme sadness when played during sacrificial ceremonies, great solemnity when played during temple rituals, and a variety of cheerful, funny, sweet, and tender moods when played for entertainment at the imperial palace. Some instruments were considered the voice of gods, such as the belief that drums inhabited the House of the Sun; the Aztecs regarded themselves as the People of the Sun. All these traditions were suddenly lost when invading Spanish forces led by Hernán Cortés landed and, within two years, defeated the Aztecs and burned the codices in the libraries. Few Aztec and Mayan manuscripts remain. Yet their legacy endures thanks to the writing in pyramids and stelas, which are ceremonial inscriptions in stone that commemorate important historical events. These fragmented remains and some colonial testimonies reveal the advanced knowledge that the original Mexicans had about history, theology, mathematics,

66

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

time, location, science (astronomy, biology, chemistry), medicine, literature, poetry, law, ethics, and civil rights (see Chapter 1). They also preserved the writing system that allowed this knowledge to endure across the ages. These ancient practices inform the modern-day Letras para Volar, where the Náhuatl (from the Uto-Aztecan family of languages) word amoxtli (book) represents our program and our commitment to preserve the legacy of original peoples (see Figure 2.1). Amoxtli embeds way of knowing of ancient Mexico, a culture very different from those originating in Europe. The epistemological framework imposed by the West is dualistic, binary, segmented, and abstract. It privileges rationality over emotion, science over art. Contrarily, Mesoamerican people did not fragment knowledge. They did not distinguish among theological, scientific, and humanistic worldviews. All knowledge was interconnected in a holistic manner. Astronomy was the basis for architectural selection of spaces, and was intrinsically linked to mathematics, agriculture, rituals, arts, crafts, music, and sociocultural relations. Amoxtli, then, is not simply a synonym for

Figure 2.1  Amoxtli Training for Reading Facilitators. (A color image is available at https://tinyurl.com/y5gau4z6).

Innovation from the Bottom Up

67

book. It represents a holistic way of understanding interconnected knowledge, tradition, and future, a vision still extant among people descendant from original Mesoamericans (Jacobs, 1998).

Colonizing Lands, Languages, Cultures, and Souls The original people of Mesoamerica spoke many languages falling into six major groups: Mayan, Oto-Mangue, Mixe–Zoque, Totonacan, Uto-Aztecan, and Chibchan. These superordinate categories included 125 linguistic families and roughly 2,000 languages (Reilly, 2016). In 1492, along with Christopher Columbus’s landing in what he believed to be China, a second historical watershed event took place in Europe when Elio Antonio de Nebrija, Bishop of Avila, Spain, published a book on Spanish grammar. Until then, Latin was the language spoken by the Spanish government and historically taught in schools, with the sole exception of King Alfonso X of Castile, León, and Galicia (1221–1284), who used vernacular language to carry on his government duties. Bishop Nebrija’s grammar was the first of its kind among modern European languages. He wrote it for the specific purpose of dominating the souls of conquered people and suppressing their languages and cultures. Nebrija persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile that the Castilian language could become a tool of conquest, given that imposing a common language could homogenize their growing empire and ensure the dominance of Spanish culture. This policy of linguistic oppression helped the Spaniards to subjugate the people of “New Spain” for three hundred years through three principles: unity of language, unity of government, and unity of the Catholic faith. In 1516 Cortés invaded the continent and urged King Charles V to send priests to evangelize the people living there. In 1524, after the subjugation of the region’s societies, twelve Franciscan friars, emulating the twelve Biblical apostles, were sent to convert the people to Catholicism and teach the Spanish language. These early missionaries set the stage for many subsequent waves of conversions undertaken by Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican friars and their companions. The Spaniards also imported technologies such as the first Mexican printing machine in 1539, which allowed the production of texts in original languages to accompany imported Spanish books and manuals. This early wave of friars worked with mystical enthusiasm, using extensive powers and resources to convert peoples’ languages and religious beliefs from their own to those of Spanish culture. The official policy was that “all children of native rulers should be handed over to the friars so that they would learn

68

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

‘reading and writing, the Spanish language and Christian doctrine’” (Jiménez, 1990, p. 11). Steck (1943) concluded that, from the colonial perspective, It was the elementary school universally introduced and wisely organized that contributed immensely to making the Indians what Spain wanted then to be: contented, peaceful, law abiding, and useful citizens [no longer] enslaved and illiterate, because now they could read books that enlightened and comforted them and they could present their grievances in writing to the authorities and even write to each other. (cited by Jimenez, 1990, p. 17)

In 1541 Jerónimo López reported with patronizing pride that the friars took many Aztec boys under their custody and taught them to read and write, saying “they know everything that is going on in the world from one ocean to the other, easily that which could not have been before” (Garcia Icazbalceta, 1896, pp. 149–50). This practice was resisted by Spaniards who did not want Mexican descendants from the original societies to compete for their jobs and be their equals, a dynamic common in colonized nations. This belief persists even today in the United States, as evidenced by Donald J. Trump’s 2015 claim that Mexican immigrants are “taking our jobs. They’re taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us.” Language then became an instrument for stratification. People from original societies had limited access to education in literacy in the language of privilege. In 1570, Philip II—who, in addition to being King of Spain, also reigned as King of Castile and Aragon, King of Portugal, King of Naples and Sicily, King of England and Ireland, Duke of Milan by marriage, and Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands—declared Náhuatl to be the official tongue of the original people. Their children were not taught to write any longer, just to read so they could learn the basics of Catholicism by memorizing prayers. They were not allowed to sit in the classrooms but could stay outside on the patio to listen to the teacher from afar. Education in Latin became a privilege for children of the colonizers. The resources to educate children from original societies shrank as funds were shifted to educate the children of Spanish families under the belief that education for descendants of original people was a waste of time and resources (Jiménez, 1990). For the next 200 years, education stagnated for Mexicans whose societies predated Cortés.

Effects of the Past on the Present The year 2019 was designated the Year of Indigenous Languages by the United Nations. Yet the historic oppression of original languages has made them hard

Innovation from the Bottom Up

69

to revive. In 1800, 60 percent of the population spoke a language of original people. In 1910 this proportion dropped to 15 percent. In 2019, there remain eleven language families with 369 linguistic varieties. Only sixty-eight languages have survived from among the thousands in pre-Columbian times (see Notes on the Editorial Process for discrepant information on these statistics). These are spoken by 7.3 million of the 25 million who self-identify as original people (National Institute of Statistics and Geography, 2015). Both Spanish and an original language are spoken by 5.7 percent of Mexicans, and 0.8 percent speak an original language only, whereas 92.7 percent of the population only speak Spanish (Central Intelligence Agency, 2018). The three most widely spoken original languages are Náhuatl, Tselzal, and Mayan. Preserving Mexico’s ancient languages, and by extension their cultures, is an extremely complex challenge that requires acknowledgment of centuries of marginalization, discrimination, symbolic annihilation (Gerbner & Gross, 1976), symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), stigmatization (Goffman, 1963), and erasure (Byrne, 2003). Dominant groups built hegemonic discourses and instituted social practices to prevent people belonging to subordinated cultures from having opportunities, incentives, and recognition. Their stories became invisible because they lost the right to be present or represented in prominent spaces and narratives. The arrival of Spanish colonizers meant the destruction of languages, culture, religion, ceremonial cities, libraries, books, musical instruments, and scientific and artistic knowledge. It meant servitude and family separation, the depletion of natural resources, and the establishment of forced labor. Von Humboldt (1966) reported, in 1811, a wide range of exploitations of the continent’s resources, including silver, sugar, vanilla, tobacco, dyes, and other goods produced for export. Understanding how this painful past influences the present is part of a process for establishing emerging pedagogies. Traces of the practices developed by the Spanish friars have survived the Mexican social movements of Independence in the early 1800s and Revolution in the early 1900s. These vestiges include instruction in syllabic (sign-sound) matching as the definition of literacy, the emphasis on reading over writing, a value on passive text decoding over meaning-making, and rote instruction. Presently, schools spend a big portion of students’ time trying to subordinate their homegrown speech and other cultural practices to those considered appropriate in school (Smagorinsky, 2016), alienating them from the institution and replicating colonial-era stratification. Letras para Volar aspires to create a continual dialogue on decolonization of epistemologies with faculty, students, and guest scholars to value, recover, and sustain our ancient legacy and

70

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

understand our postcolonial identity. Understanding and recovering Mexico’s original traditions is central to the mission of Letras para Volar and the master’s degree in literacy education.

The Twentieth Century: Mexico in the Context of Global Literacy Initiatives At the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1921, the first post-revolution Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos, established numerous schools and launched an important literacy initiative to provide classic literature to poor peasants. Vasconcelos was committed to apprenticing Mexican students to Eurocentric high culture via “mestizaje ideology,” that is, the fusion of races and cultures [that was] endorsed by Mexican intellectuals as a crucial process of national development and unification . . . the legacy of [which] can be observed [through the present] in varied forms of everyday life: the continuous denial of race and racism in public discourse; the fact that “mejorar la raza” [improve the race] is a popular saying and aspiration; the late-night infomercials selling skin-lightening products; the whiteness pervading primetime telenovelas—all of which highlight that mestizo is not so much a state of being but of becoming something more. (Manrique, 2016, n. p.)

Post-revolutionary educators made a commitment to expanding educational opportunities for children and adults who had previously been denied such access, albeit with what Manrique argues was a eugenics motive designed to homogenize Mexican society in a European image that both was racially biased and positioned women as subordinate. This new emphasis on literacy came in the context of a global recognition that high literacy rates are critical to an enlightened and prosperous society.

Global Initiatives Since the 1960s, UNESCO policies and programs were adopted in Latin America with uncertain results. Literacy in these measures is conceived of as basic reading and writing instruction for vulnerable populations of “developing countries,” a classification in which the United Nations (2014) still considers Mexico to fall. Advancing literacy rates has been a major priority in the UN (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, n. d. a.). Education (1948,

Innovation from the Bottom Up

71

Article 26) and literacy (1975) were declared human rights by this organization. In October 1963, UNESCO’s general director, René Maheu, introduced a program to “liquidate illiteracy” in the world (United Nations, 1963, p. 165). In 1966, UNESCO established International Literacy Day on September 8. In 1975, the Persépolis Declaration defined literacy as a contribution to the liberation of humanity, surpassing beliefs in the adequacy of reading, writing, and arithmetic: literacy creates the conditions for the acquisition of a critical consciousness of the contradictions of society in which man1 lives and of its aims; it also stimulates initiative and his participation in the creation of projects capable of acting upon the world, of transforming it, and of defining the aims of an authentic human development. It should open the way to a mastery of techniques and human relations. Literacy is not an end in itself. It is a fundamental human right. (International Symposium for Literacy, 1975, p. 2)

In 1976 UNESCO estimated that 800 million adults in the world still could not read and write. The general director at that time, Amadou Mathar Bow, made a call to allocate military resources to literacy programs “since a single bombardier, including its equipment was equivalent to the annual salary of 250,000 instructors” (Maheu, cited by Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979, p. 15). The year 1990 was declared International Literacy Year during the World Declaration of Education for All. In this document, literacy, oral expression, problem-solving, and numeracy were considered essential skills for people of all ages. In 2000, UNESCO organized the World Education Forum in Dakar, adopting the Dakar Framework for Action that places literacy as a priority in its agenda. The goal was less ambitious this time. They expected to reduce to 50 percent the proportion of adults lacking reading and writing skills to a “functional” level. The UN then established 2003–2012 as the United Nations Literacy Decade to improve literacy rates in the world (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, n. d. a). Wagner (2011) identified three major problems that made it difficult to assess the progress of all these UNESCO initiatives. First, the indicators selected were the projection of illiteracy rates based on the first major international report on literacy published in 1978, rather than the children’s actual school performance. Second, country data were old, incomplete, or nonexistent. Third, surveys were based on the self-perception of literacy levels, rather than derived from direct measurement of learning gains.

We retain the language of the original, in spite of its representation of all humanity as male, which was an acceptable synecdoche at the time the document was produced.

1

72

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Early in the twenty-first century, the OECD gained prominence in defining the world’s educational policy, initially through Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in math and language comprehension and later for direct intervention in the planning of national educational reforms. The OECD considers the goal for education to be employability, emphasizing education for the labor market, a neoliberal value that has infiltrated global views of education through the present. Presently, UNESCO is engaged in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which has the stated goal of “scaling up functional literacy levels for youth and adults who lack basic literacy skills. . . . 750 million youth and adults cannot read and write and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, n. d. b, n. p.). Such programs have been around for three quarters of a century without producing the results sought by their architects, suggesting that these challenges require more than declarations and ideals. They need to be accompanied by sustained, well-funded efforts to address the poverty and discrimination that have conspired to produce illiteracy to begin with.

Mexico in the Global Context As the ideas of a networked society (Castells, 1996) and globalization (Hirst, Thompson, & Bromley, 2009) increased in importance, public education in Mexico adopted new international agendas more enthusiastically, including measuring comparative learning gains in education through standardized testing (Stromquist, 2000). Coauthor Yolanda Gayol participated in developing a policy of testing in the early 1990s and in developing the National Center for Evaluation, which is charged with designing, developing, and applying entrance exams for college admission and assessments for professional certification. She also contributed to the early North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) integration of education into its mission, and collaborated in the development of a pre-OECD testing project for fifteen-year-old students from Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Other initiatives supported by Mexico have been implemented. Between 1995 and 1998, the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with the Regional Center to Promote the Book in Latin America, established the program Podemos Leer y Escribir (We can Read and Write) (Hederich & Charría, 1999), followed by the National Program of Reading in Mexican schools. This initiative included book

Innovation from the Bottom Up

73

provision, school libraries, teacher training, and parent engagement, all noble goals that have yet to be fully implemented or formally evaluated. At the inception of Letras para Volar, the low test results of fifteen-year-old Mexican students became a major policy concern in K-20 education. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (2015), Students in Mexico score 423 points in reading, on average, below the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] average of 493 points . . . and comparable with the mean performance of students in Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, Moldova, Montenegro, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey. . . . About 20% of students in OECD countries, on average, do not attain the baseline level of proficiency in reading, considered the level of proficiency at which students begin to demonstrate the reading skills that will enable them to participate effectively and productively in life. In Mexico, 42% of students perform below Level 2 in reading.

This emphasis on test scores did not, however, provide a well-rounded understanding of factors surrounding literacy development, particularly the social factors that have historically suppressed opportunities for Mexican people from outside the cultural and economic elite: The reiteration on the economic impact of education should not neglect the social and political preparation of students, particularly in universities. The productive processes do not work in a cultural vacuum; it requires values and attitudes of responsibility, solidarity, critical thinking, discipline and respect to law and the collective goodness; all these values are promoted by general education. (Pallán Figueroa, 1992, p. 78)

When Letras para Volar analysts reflected on OCED’s limited view of literacy, they were concerned that the tests merely emphasized reading comprehension, defined as The ability to understand, evaluate, use and interact with written texts to participate in society, attain individual goals and develop the individual knowledge and potential. Literacy includes a range of abilities going from the de-codification of words and written sentences to the comprehension, interpretation and evaluation of complex texts. It does not involve text production (writing). (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013, p. 4; emphasis added)

This definition focuses on individuals and, as the friars did in the eighteenth century, limited literacy practices to reading with no attention to writing.

74

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Letras para Volar needed to develop a conceptual framework acknowledging the importance of hands-on intervention and composition in the reading and writing experiences designed for children and adolescents. Thus, we moved beyond OCED’s understanding of literacy by studying, planning, and designing our own academic model. In doing so, our planners and practitioners have posed the question: Why is literacy defined by test scores to predefine limits in the potential of major portions of the world population? How have test scores become the prophecy of children’s economic and social futures? Toward what end, and on whose behalf, is literacy conceived, operationalized, and measured so restrictively?

Configuring an Academic Model of Literacy In designing Letras para Volar, we were aware that knowledge, relations, and identities in new cohorts of students are more complex than ever because societies are immersed in mediated and instantaneous communication frameworks. Labor, social interaction, and entertainment have transitioned from the material, local, semi-closed system to a virtual, global, open system without boundaries. Such a system tends to blend identities, cultures, and languages. In this new context, time, space, and linear behavior vanish while transactions accelerate. Meanwhile, poverty is increasing. Power and planetary resources are concentrated to a point in which the twenty-six richest people have the wealth of 3.8 billion people, most of whom live on less than $5.50 a day (Oxfam, 2019; The World Bank, 2018). Meanwhile, as we advocate for the preservation and encouragement of original languages, Internet World Stats (2019) reports that English is by far the dominant online language. Spanish ranks a distant third after Chinese, which has highly restrictive regulations about internet use (Ming & Choudhury, 2017). Even so, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic are the fastestgrowing languages used in virtual spaces. These tensions complicate any efforts to provide literacy education in a world and nation that include competing priorities and practices, along with original languages struggling to survive in a world that overwhelmingly conducts its business in languages of dominance. In striking contrast to these profound changes, public secondary schools in Mexico lag in technology resources and access, and do not address the risks and benefits of cyberculture. Teachers continue to instruct students through national values, disciplinary knowledge, and “universal” assumptions that are ossified in printed texts and transmitted through the authoritative voice of the

Innovation from the Bottom Up

75

teacher. These educational practices assume the presence of closed, pristine environments unadulterated by factors of context and amenable to education via abstraction in the European tradition. Everyday events in the economic and political environments of the locality, the nation, and the world are often elided in favor of academic concepts and generalizations available in textbooks. Similarly, students’ emotions, vernacular languages, family backgrounds, stories, cultures, interests, motivations, and literacies are effaced from classroom practices. Students are treated as data, as a number in the attendance list, as a final grade at the end of the course, as closed or distant average numbers in international tests, as a generic other with a prefigured fate (Ambrosio, 2013). The premise through which the school institution operates is that all students are equal and all of them have the potential to achieve their individual goals because they receive the same content provided by the same teacher. Learning is assumed to be a consequence of the will of learners to succeed or fail; see, for instance, Asian American Duckworth’s (2018) notion of “grit” as the principal factor in human opportunity, uncomplicated by social factors and measurable through a “Grit Scale” that reduces a person to a single number (see Kirchgasler, 2018, and others for challenges to the validity of this construct). In this discourse, the responsibility of school failure is placed on the students’ shoulders, and by implication, on their teachers. Assessment is reduced to the students’ ability to get correct answers on tests of “objective” knowledge. Epistemological traditions such as structuralism (the linguistics of Saussure), empiricism (the analytics of Russell and the behaviorism of Skinner), cognitivism (the stage theory of human development of Piaget and cognitive psychology of Neisser), rationalism (the psycholinguistics of Chomsky), and the European Enlightenment’s scientific rationalism (Descartes) helped to provide this value. Yet the absence of attention to the contexts of human development, those that produce inequity and differential socialization, makes these approaches inadequate for understanding complex educational challenges such as raising literacy rates typically assessed in the language of privilege while also respecting and honoring the cultures of people from outside that linguistic heritage. From the perspective of the dominant, acontextual historical perspective that we are working against, it is irrelevant whether literacies, discourses, and contexts have radically changed in recent decades, because knowledge is assumed to be universal. This belief ignores research showing the intersection of numerous variables that affect the possibilities of achievement in school and beyond (Berliner, 2014). In contrast to the notion that contexts are irrelevant, this research has found that socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity,

76

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

location, sociocultural origin (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2016b), religious (or nonreligious) beliefs, sexual preferences, skin color, principal languages, and vocabulary richness are all closely related to the language of instruction (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2008). Inequities in these areas also produce threats to cultural identities (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002), stigmatization (Goffman, 1963), disregard for different abilities (Correa Alzate, 2008), symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1979), differential cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), social assumptions embedded in the hidden curriculum designed to homogenize students rather than respect difference (Smagorinsky, Boggs, Jakubiak, & Wilson, 2010), access to educational resources (Daniel, Kanwar, & Uvalić-Trumbić, 2009), and individual characteristics of students (Veenstra & Kuyper, 2004). This averted gaze from complex social factors includes inattention to the quality of teaching, overcrowded classrooms, the richness and availability of pedagogical resources, or the organization of expressive activities. At the end, access to college can be predicted by the student’s zip code more than students’ competence, potential, or grit (Hillman, 2016). The motto “calladitos y sentaditos se ven más bonitos” [being quiet and seated make you look beautiful] is a common phrase designed to promote obedience among Mexican children (Gayol, quoted in Loera, 2018, n. p.). This imperative makes classrooms orderly but makes school an intellectually dull place. Learners transit through the gloom of the school tunnel, learning to read and transcribe the written code and getting acquainted with basic mathematical operations. After enrollment, they are pressured to abandon their left hands and their emotions. Those principles still prevail in most Mexican schools, where students learn not to challenge the teacher’s or the text’s authority or knowledge or challenge other orthodoxies. They, instead, learn to recognize their place in the socioeconomic pyramid, detached from their language, traditions, interests, funds of knowledge, and other factors that contribute to how they live culturally (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). They are pressured to adopt the preferred identities imposed by colonialization and commodify their lives to maximize their value over that of others. Sixteen or twenty years in the dreary, abstract, segmented, disciplinary world tends to produce a docile citizenry. Women in particular are taught to understand the importance of staying in the shadows, being manageable, earning less, working more, not competing with males for opportunities and resources, being excluded from leadership positions, and accepting without opposition their

Innovation from the Bottom Up

77

effacement from history, science, and philosophy. School and society may have taught women to denigrate their own bodies, have disdain for local knowledge, language and culture, and fill all these empty spaces through consumption (Mies, 2014). LGBTQ+ people have historically faced even greater discrimination, often with legal consequences for “indecency,” even as their rights in Mexico have become more available in accompaniment with international trends toward greater inclusion and less oppression of this demographic. Letras para Volar has been designed to address and resist these inequalities, with literacies and critical literacies among the tools emphasized in the program.

The Emergence of a New Pedagogy In the first half of the twentieth century, literacy was translated into Spanish as alfabetización, which refers to simple decoding skills involved in reading or writing a print text (Real Academia Española, n. d.). Alfabetización refers to learning the alphabet and how to combine its letters into larger formations, similar to phonics instruction, but not to entering a literate culture (Ferreiro, 2001). However, literacy goes well beyond decoding alphabetic combinations, in terms of both morphological matters (Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006) and social factors (Street, 2005). Cassany and Castellà (2010) define literacidad (literacy) as referring to a broad spectrum of knowledge, social practices, values and attitudes related with the social use of written texts in each community. Specifically, literacy includes command and use of the alphabetic code, the receptive and productive construction of texts, the knowledge and use of functions and purposes of the diverse discourse genres, of each social environment, the roles adopted by the reader and the author, the social values associated with those roles (identity, status social position), the knowledge construction with those texts and that it circulates in the community, the worldview presented and transmitted, etc. (p. 354)

Our rejection of autonomous notions of literacy—those viewed as universal and acontextual—led Letras para Volar to a social turn (Durst, 2006) as conceived by Campano et al. (2013), Smagorinsky (2001, 2011), Street (2005, 2011), and others. New Literacy Studies (NLS), which defines literacy as a social practice, typically takes an ethnographic perspective used to understand multiliteracy, biliteracy, electronic literacy, and critical literacy (Cassany, 2006). Multiliteracies assert that, in the twenty-first century, people interact with multimodal texts

78

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

and genres that are integrated for multiple purposes (Kress, 2010), suggesting that a literacy education requires an understanding of how to incorporate multiple means in their communicative practices, all socially situated. Among the challenges of respecting linguistic diversity is to emphasize a medium (the internet) commandeered by a small set of languages of dominance and simultaneously preserve and cultivate original languages among people who may not view technology as a sign of progress. In Letras para Volar, NLS approaches are integrated with Paulo Freire’s critical literacy (Janks, 2017), given the history of inequity and the role we see for literacy to help challenge and alter institutions and practices that perpetuate injustice. Freire’s work emerged within the context of liberation theology in Latin America, which sought to end oppressive practices toward poor people and resist the colonial perspective that positioned nations like Mexico as “backward” and “underdeveloped” (Illich, 2008). Freire (1970) unveiled the oppressive roles of discourse and showed how schools can cultivate the potential for students to work toward liberation and freedom. Schools, he asserted, view students as vessels into which teachers pour knowledge that students repeat verbatim, consistent with the notions of literacy that we reject. Schools further impose evaluations that focus on students’ ability to repeat what they are told by teachers and texts instead of constructing their own meaning, which socially oriented, constructivist pedagogies view as optimal. Furthermore, Freire advocated for an education that helps students raise their consciousness about the oppressive forms of language used to reproduce inequity and sustain domination to develop a critical understanding of the world, that is, one oriented to deconstructing power relationships and replacing them with more equitable conditions. A central practice in his pedagogy is to enact democratic, rather than authoritarian, dialogues with the students, using their own insights to identify problems in everyday life settings and generate responses. Critical dialogue enables students to identify the language structures that keep the poor in conditions of silence and submission, that emphasize the docility expected of those who follow the maxim calladitos y sentaditos se ven más bonitos (being quiet and seated make you look beautiful). Rather than accepting and acceding to the rules imposed by authority, students engaged in critical dialogue are able “to perceive their own living conditions and imagine a different fate” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 24). Through conscientization, derived from the Portuguese term conscientização and grounded in Marxist critical theory, one undertakes reflection, collective action, and reflective action to arrive at a deep

Innovation from the Bottom Up

79

understanding of the world that includes awareness of social and political contradictions associated with power inequities. This frame of mind empowers students to identify and resist oppression and participate in imagining and producing conditions of greater inclusion and equity.

Basic Principles of Guadalajara’s Academic Model Arriving at a Meaning for Literacy Literacy is considered a set of practices enabling meaning-making of a text within a context. A text is any configuration of signs with representational or communicative intention. It could refer to analog or digital written symbols, images, multimedia products, material or symbolic cultural artifacts, or other configurations of signs. In this approach, text and context are inseparable, and are derived from historical intertexts (relations across texts; Kristeva, 1980) and intercontexts (relations across social contexts; Floriani, 1993) (Smagorinsky, 2001). Literacy gains coherence within social practices grouped in permeable discourse communities. These practices could relate to academic literacy, information literacy, aesthetic literacy, or recreational literacy. They occur in either specialized or ordinary language. These communities (family, schools, churches, scientific communities) establish patterns regulating their practices, which include beliefs and values perceived as acceptable, predetermined, and given. The Academic Model adopted by Letras para Volar was developed within a competency-based curriculum approach, adopting UNESCO’s idea of competencies, which emphasize “learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together” (Delors, 1996, pp. 20–21). From this perspective, competencies relate knowledge gains with individual and group aspirations and social inclusion. Our notion of competency further attends to how it is achieved and understood situationally, and how theory and practice are mutually informative and thus contribute to the development of concepts (Vygotsky, 1987). In contrast, the OECD’s model of competencies emphasizes workplace readiness as the ultimate goal of education, consistent with the neoliberal values embedded in market-oriented education that views people as human capital (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2016a). Our Academic Model moves beyond literacy conceptions that emphasize grammar, writing, and reading, seeking to develop literacy pedagogies at all educational levels and in all subjects (Bazerman et al., 2016). We aspire to move

80

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

beyond passive learning to make students agents of their learning through active participation that includes, in every instructional sequence, situated reading, writing, listening, and aesthetic, cultural, or personal expression. In this way, students are placed at the center of the educational processes, and their voices matter. These activities support and integrate language development since the focus of attention is placed on how particular communities adopt texts, embrace (or not) the norms and values conveyed in speech acts, and develop contextualized literacy practices, all of which help to develop a sense of belonging toward the school communities. We conceive students as cultural beings in a process of human development, instead of as data points or labor-force carriers.

Assumptions Motivating Letras para Volar’s Design and Process Letras para Volar is designed to enable students to thread their stories and motivations into the curriculum. Critical learning theories orchestrate formal and vernacular literacies. They help students and teachers unveil the power relationships between groups who regulate the production and distribution of discourses. This analytic ability, in conjunction with the agency that follows from infusing the curriculum with their life experiences, helps to promote social responsibility that questions and takes action to address inequality (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 1998). The development of our academic program took into account the following question: What are the competencies required of teacher-leaders who graduate from the program and initiate change in their schools, in order to ensure that literacy practices are developed to instill abilities among educators, students, and community members, for the purpose of broadening the possibilities of individual, cultural, and professional achievement of literate activists in schools and in out-ofschool contexts? The answer to this question provides the goals for Letras para Volar’s work to cultivate a cohort of teacher-leaders who help produce the “New Mexico” required for prosperity for present and future generations. Goals. Our program is predicated on establishing and working toward the following goals:

Role and Status of Students ●●

●●

Position students at the center of the educational process. Understand students as unique individuals by introducing their multiple literacies and motivations in the curriculum and building community and instruction on the foundation they provide.

Innovation from the Bottom Up

81

Social Environments and Engagement ●●

●●

●●

Establish an environment of camaraderie, equity, and respect for difference. Promote collaborative work and knowledge production using collective knowledge and intelligence and solidarity networks in material and virtual environments. Model the development of learning competencies for the purpose of servicelearning and participatory inquiry designed to advance and energize local communities.

Curriculum and Instruction ●●

●●

●●

●●

Imbue appreciation for reading, writing, and expressiveness through literacy practices across the curriculum. Design curricula using textual transliteration—the translation of terms and concepts across language systems and social languages (see Introduction on translanguaging)—to reinforce cognition through complementary activities by combining linguistic, cognitive, creative, and ludic practices in a balanced way. Develop pedagogies that conceive of literacy as extending beyond the reading comprehension models and taking social factors into account in order to organize learning activities through critical reading, text production, and social action. Analyze multimodality, understanding the benefits and dangers of material and virtual environments, with particular emphasis on technology as a tool conveying technical and cultural capabilities, accompanied by psychological tools (Kim, 2012) that enable the development of technological literacy.

Critical Consciousness ●●

●●

●●

Increase the awareness of the power of language and other symbol systems through a continual interrogation of texts in terms of message, structure, and mechanisms used to configure identities as they relate to social media, market practices, and relations that produce inequity and exclusion. Increase the students’ awareness of how epistemological positioning has an impact on the scope of interpretation and the path of practices chosen to understand and intervene in social and educational settings. Analyze the extent to which literacy practices related to human diversity are supported, appropriated, sustained, or obstructed by the communities regulating their use.

82 ●●

●●

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Compare and contrast situations, resources, and strategies to increase literacy practices among individuals and school communities, with particular attention to historically oppressed groups, including women, immigrants, original people, those raised in poverty, and others. Develop critical inquiry practices for inclusiveness, equity, and social justice.

Assessment ●●

●●

Evaluate the local impact of literacy practices undertaken by students’ families, schools, social communities, and disciplinary communities. Learn and apply tools for evaluating students’ learning in relation to instruction, and, in turn, evaluate teaching practices through systematic reflection on the outcomes of instruction.

Pedagogical practices. Based on these general goals, teachers who emerge from Letras para Volar should improve their capacities to ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Plan, design, develop, and implement transliterate teacher education programs across the curriculum for the purpose of improving students’ performance in K-20 and nonformal education. Introduce pedagogies for reading, writing, and transliterate forms of expression while recognizing the students’ strengths, valuing the plurality of their backgrounds, acknowledging the diversity of their literacies, and giving them the opportunity to manifest the uniqueness of their voices. Through these strategies, teachers who graduate from the program should be able to develop their students’ cognitive and affective learning in demonstrable ways, as well as their appreciation of honesty and camaraderie. These teachers’ students will be able to apply these competencies in everyday life settings as they interact with texts and people in material and virtual environments. Promote empowering practices among students, teachers, and communities to develop service-learning, investigative tools, a commitment to promoting integrity in community life, and academic activism for inclusiveness, equity, and social justice. Use multimodal means to understand how texts are associated with intentions, values, power, and the configuration of identities, and to help their students to develop these capacities. Apply interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and evaluation methods to understand and improve literacy practices in schools and communities. Develop and manage high-quality literacy programs.

Innovation from the Bottom Up

83

Program Construction in Light of Program Assumptions and Goals The two-year Letras para Volar master’s degree program has been in operation since 2016 to reach these goals. The curriculum includes eight required courses, four methodological courses, and six areas of specialization. The purpose of the required courses is to understand the development of approaches to language and technology, from the early days of Western philosophy to the contemporary focus on neurocognitive science and New Literacy Studies, considering hermeneutical, empiricist, and systemic epistemologies. They also learn theories and disciplines that advance their understanding of language as a discipline; the historical and developmental emergence of speech acts in one or more languages; and a range of research methods to investigate the effects of their teaching. Figure 2.2 provides the curriculum map translated into English; the Appendix to this chapter describes the program requirements in greater detail, translated from Spanish. While developing the curriculum, we understood that literacy education should not be conceived as a closed initiative. Its character, organization, and goals should respond to the way in which a learning society takes advantage of collective intelligence (Levy, 2004; Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). The learning society assembled to help plan, design, and teach the program has included an international network of seasoned literacy scholars along with the faculty at University of Guadalajara and other Mexican institutions. The core affiliated faculty include Enrico Bocciolesi, from E-Campus (in Italy), who is an expert in digital literacies; Gerald Campano, an immigrant-community literacy researcher and activist from the University of Pennsylvania; María Paula Ghiso from Teachers College, Columbia University, whose research investigates literacy in multilingual and transnational contexts via participatory and community-based methodologies; and Peter Smagorinsky from the University of Georgia, who has applied sociocultural theories of L. S. Vygotsky to literacy education. This collective values horizontal collaboration, and offers conference presentations, courses, and seminars to teachers and graduate students each semester. Academic mobility is another important principle for teachers who enroll in the program. The first cohort spent their last semester at the National Autonomous University of Mexico learning approaches to linguistics, semantics, and discourse analysis. Two students spent one semester in Argentina, another group participated in two-week learning and school visits in Spain, and two

84

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

BCO: Basic Compulsory Requirements BPO: Basic Particular Requirements OA: Electives

1st Semester BCO Territory of knowledge and literacy

BCO

BCO Cognitive BCO Neuroscience and Literacy BCO Qualitative and Mixed Research Methods in Literacy BPO Language and Literature: Textual Genres BCO Literacy in Everyday Life BPO Graduation Seminar I

BCO

BPO

OA BPO

2nd Semester Evolution of Language, Technology and Literacies Pedagogy of Literacy Across the Curriculum Quantitative and Mixed Research Methods in Literacy Language and Literature: Textual Production Selected Topics I Graduation Seminar II

3rd Semester

4th Semester

BPO Literacy and BPO Graduation Neuroeducation Seminar II in Related Processes with the Media The student BPO Inclusive Pedagogical will choose one Models of the Areas of Specialization and OA Selected Topics take II appropriate courses BPO Linguistics and Philology

BPO Speech Analysis BPO Graduation Seminar III

Figure 2.2  Curricular map, Master’s Degree in Literacy.

students were presenters at an international conference in literacy in Great Britain. In 2019, three students visited Colombia for academic development, and one has enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania doctoral program. As part of a reciprocal arrangement, Gerald Campano’s graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania have become regular participants in Letras para Volar programs in Guadalajara.

Conclusion Creating the “New Mexico” starts with quality of education and research and is strengthened with equity and inclusion. It relies on an exceptional faculty, research-informed curricula, meaningful pedagogies, respect for Mexico’s

Innovation from the Bottom Up

85

Areas of Specialization

Multimedia Basic and Literacies Early Education Digital Pedagogy of Literacies Early and Elementary School Literacy Film Neurological Literacy Development of Children

Middle and High School Education Pedagogy of Adolescent Literacy

Adolescent Psychology and Sociology

Art Literacy

Pedagogy of Elementary School Mathematical Literacy

Pedagogy of Elementary School Scientific Literacy

Higher Education

Management of Literacy Programs Analysis of Educational and Cultural Policies

Inclusive Pedagogies

Young Adult Psychology and Sociology

Design and Implementation of Literacy Projects and Programs

Pedagogy of Middle and High School Mathematical Literacy

Pedagogy of College and PostGraduate Mathematical Literacy

Assessment of Literacy Projects and Programs

Literacy Pedagogy for Populations with Cognitive Challenges Literacy Pedagogy for Populations with Visual, Auditory, and Motor Challenges

Pedagogy of Middle and High School Scientific Literacy

Pedagogy of College and PostGraduate Scientific Literacy

Assessment of Literacy Learning

Pedagogy of Literacy in Higher Education

Literacy Pedagogy for Priority Populations

Figure 2.2  Continued.

many ethnic and linguistic communities, and a deep understanding of student voices, identities, needs, and motivations. The emphasis on New Literacy Studies engages learners, gives practical meaning to abstract ways of knowing, and reaches out to local and remote communities; attention to First Literacies helps to ground literacy education in ancient textual traditions. Collaboration with local communities contributes to the improvement of their living conditions and the expansion of their horizons of possibility, one of three substantive functions of public higher education institutions in Mexico. Thus far, this pioneering effort threading quality, equity, and inclusion across the curriculum through critical literacy has produced cohorts of teachers who are well prepared to take on the

86

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

challenges of raising literacy rates in Mexico. Each iteration of the program produces reflection on how to grow it for continual improvement and impact, based on data collected across many dimensions (see Chapters 10 and 11). This organic understanding of the program’s operation and effects should lead to continued improvement in meeting the ambitious goals that motivated the conception of Letras para Volar and whose results are already evident in the classrooms of Mexican teachers.

References Ambrosio, J. (2013). Changing the subject: Neoliberalism and accountability in public education. Educational Studies, 49(4), 316–33. DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2013.783835 Barton, D., Hamilton, M., & Ivanic, R. (1998). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in contexts. New York, NY: Routledge. Bazerman, C., Little, J., Bethel, L. Chavtkin, T., Fouquet, D., & Garufis, J. (2016). Escribir a través del currículum. Una guía de referencia. Córdoba, AR: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Berliner, D. C. (2014). Exogenous variables and value-added assessments: A fatal flaw. Teachers College Record, 116(1), 1–31. Both, A. A. (2007). Aztec music culture. The World of Music, 49(2), 91–104. Bourdieu, P. (1979). Symbolic power. Critique of Anthropology, 4, 77–85. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). La reproducción. Elementos para una teoría del sistema de enseñanza. Barcelona, Spain: Laia. Byrne, D. (2003). The ethos of return: Erasure and reinstatement of aboriginal visibility in the Australian historical landscape. Recent Work in Historical Archaeology in Australia and New Zealand, 37(1), 73–86. Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., Yee, M., & Pantoja, A. (2013). Toward community research and coalitional literacy practices for educational justice. Language Arts, 90(5), 314–26. Carlino, P. (2008). Leer y escribir en la universidad, una nueva cultura ¿porqué es necesaria la alfabetización académica? In Los desafíos de la lectura y la escritura en la educación superior: Caminos posibles. Cali, Colombia: Universidad Autónoma de Occidente. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://ww​w.aac​ademi​ca.or​g/pau​la.ca​rlino​/162.​pdf Cassany, D. (2006). Tras las líneas. Sobre la lectura contemporánea. Barcelona, ES: Anagrama. Cassany, D., & Castellà, J. M. (2010). Aproximación a la literacidad crítica. Perspectiva, 28(2), 353–474. Castells, M. (1996). El surgimiento de la sociedad en red. La sociedad de la información: Economía, sociedad y cultura, v. 1. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Central Intelligence Agency. (2018). Mexico, languages. CIA world factbook. Langley, VA: Author. Reviewed in https​://ww​w.cia​.gov/​libra​ry/pu​blica​tions​/the-​world​-fact​book/​

Innovation from the Bottom Up

87

Cole, M. (2019, April). Creating the new Anthropocene person: Vygotsky in the age of global warming. Presentation made at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, ON. Correa Alzate, I. (2008). La integración escolar para población con necesidades especiales. Medellín, CO: Aula Abierta Magisterio. Daniel, J., Kanwar, A., & Uvalić-Trumbić, S. (2009). Breaking higher education’s iron triangle: Access, cost, and quality. Change: The magazine of higher learning. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http:​//oas​is.co​l.org​/bits​tream​/hand​le/11​599/1​442/2​009_D​anile​ Kanwa​rUval​icTru​mbic_​Break​ingIr​onTri​angle​_Tran​scrip​t.pdf​ Delors, J. (1996). Learning: The treasure within. Report to UNESCO of the International Commision of Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris, France: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Diario Oficial de la Federación. (2019, May 15). México: Gobierno Constitucional de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. México City, Mexico: Author. Duckworth, A. (2018). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribner. Durst, R. K. (2006). Writing at the postsecondary level. In P. Smagorinsky (Ed.), Research on composition: Multiple perspectives on two decades of change (pp. 78–107). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press. Ferreiro, E. (2001). Pasado y presente de los verbos leer y escribir. México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ferreiro, E., & Gómez Palacio, M. (1997). Nuevas perspectivas sobre los procesos de lectura y escritura. Resultado de investigaciones con más de mil niños en donde distingue ocho niveles de conceptualización de la escritura (17th edition). Publisher Siglo XXI. https​://op​enlib​rary.​org/p​ublis​hers/​Siglo​_XXI.​ Open Library is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Other projects include the Wayback Machine, archive.org and archive-it.org. Ferreiro, E., & Teberosky, A. (1979). Los sistemas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño. México City, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Fijalkow, J., Fijalkow, E., & Franco, M. (2017). ¿Leer es un placer? Una evaluación del programa Letras para Volar. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Fischer, S. R. (1999). Breve historia del lenguaje. Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial. Floriani, A. (1993). Negotiating what counts: Roles and relationships, content and meaning, texts and contexts. Linguistics and Education, 5, 241–74. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogía del oprimido. Montevideo, Uruguay: Tierra Nueva. Freire, P., & Macado, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Garcia Icazbalceta, J. (1896). La instrucción pública en México durante el siglo XVI. Obras Completas (vol. 1). México City, Mexico: Impresores de Agiieros.

88

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Gayol, Y. (2019, May 27). Literacidad en la reforma educativa Mexicana de 2019. U2000: Crónica de la Educación Superior, 7, 7. Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26(2), 173–99. Giroux, H. (1997). Los profesores como intelectuales. Hacia una pedagogía crítica del aprendizaje. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós. Goffman, I. (1963). Stigma. New York, NY: Simon & Shuster. González, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C. (Eds). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Hederich, C., & Charria, M. (1999). Impacto del proyecto ‘Podemos Leer y Escribir’ en el desarrollo de la cultura escrita en las escuelas latinoamericanas. Revista Folios, 10, 1–16. Hillman, N. W. (2016). Geography of college opportunity: The case of education deserts. American Educational Research Journal, 53(4), 987–1021. Hirst, P., Thompson, G., & Bromley, S. (2009). Globalization in context. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Illich, I. (2008). Ivan Illich: Obras reunidas (Reviewed by V. Borremans and J. Sicilia). México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. International Symposium for Literacy. (1975). Declaration of Persepolis. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from http:​//www​.unes​co.or​g/edu​catio​n/pdf​/PERS​EP_E.​PDF Internet World Stats. (2019). Internet world users by language. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://ww​w.int​ernet​world​stats​.com/​stats​7.htm​ Jacobs, D. T. (1998). Primal awareness: A true story of survival, transformation, and awakening with the Rarámuri shamans of Mexico. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Jacobs, D. T., & Jacobs-Spencer, J. (2001). Teaching virtues: Building character across the curriculum. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Janks, H. (2017). Critical literacy and the social justice project of education. English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 16(2), 132–44. Jiménez, R. T. (1990). The history of reading and the uses of literacy in colonial Mexico. Technical report No. 494. Urbana, IL: Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kim, M. S. (2012). Cultural-historical activity theory perspectives on constructing ICT-mediated metaphors of teaching and learning. European Journal of Teacher Education, 35(4), 435–48. Kingsley, T. L., & Grabner-Hagen, M. M. (2015). Gamification: Questing to integrate content knowledge, literacy, and 21st-century learning. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 59(1), 51–61. Kirchgasler, C. (2018). True grit? Making a scientific object and pedagogical tool. American Educational Research Journal, 55(4), 693–720. Kittle, P. (2006). It’s not the high school teacher’s fault: An alternative to the blame game. In P. Sullivan & H. Tinberg (Eds.), What is college writing? (pp. 134–46). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Innovation from the Bottom Up

89

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. New York, NY: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. León-Portilla, M. (2006). Introduction. In M. León-Portilla (Ed.), The broken spears: The Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico (expanded and updated edition) (pp. xxv–xlix). (A. M. Garibay Kintana, Trans. From Nahuatl into Spanish; L. Kemp, Trans. from Spanish into English). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Levy, P. (2004). La inteligencia colectiva. Por una antropología del ciberespacio. Washington, DC: Organización Panamericana de la Salud. Loera, M. E. (2018, November 24). Educate young people to develop their critical conscience. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Retrieved June 12, 2019, from http:​// www​.udg.​mx/es​/noti​cia/e​ducar​-jove​nes-p​ara-d​esarr​ollar​-su-c​oncie​ncia-​criti​ca Manrique, L. (2016). Dreaming of a cosmic race: José Vasconcelos and the politics of race in Mexico, 1920s–1930s. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3(1). Retrieved June 17, 2019, from https​://ww​w.tan​dfonl​ine.c​om/do​i/ful​l/10.​1080/​23311​983.2​016.1​21831​6 Mexico News Daily. (2015, September 12). Secretary forecasts a bilingual Mexico: Education Secretariat is preparing a national English program. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https​://me​xicon​ewsda​ily.c​om/ne​ws/se​creta​ry-fo​recas​ts-a-​bilin​gual-​mexic​o/ Mies, M. (2014). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ming, C., & Choudhury, S. R. (2017, October 26). China has launched another crackdown on the internet—But it’s different this time. CNBC. Retrieved July 9, 2019, from https​://ww​w.cnb​c.com​/2017​/10/2​6/chi​na-in​terne​t-cen​sorsh​ip-ne​w-cra​ ckdow​ns-an​d-rul​es-ar​e-her​e-to-​stay.​html Nagy, W., Berninger, V. W., & Abbott, R. D. (2006). Contributions of morphology beyond phonology to literacy outcomes of upper elementary and middle-school students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 134–47. National Institute of Statistics and Geography. (2015). Intercensal Survey 2015. Retrieved April 1, 2020, from http://en.www.inegi.org.mx/programas/intercensal/2015/ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2013). Skilled for life? Key findings from the survey of adult skills. Paris, France: Author. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://ww​w.oec​d.org​/skil​ls/pi​aac/S​kills​Outlo​ok_20​13_eb​ook.p​df Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2015). PISA 2015 Mexico. Key findings. Paris, France: Author. Reviewed in https​://do​cs.go​ogle.​com/d​ocume​ nt/d/​1E78c​1US6c​1CCXE​a8Ygp​NJnH3​T8lcm​WmwIX​ZnSAU​s7YU/​edit Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2016a). Enhancing employability: Report prepared for the G20 employment working group, with inputs from the International Monetary Fund. Paris, France: Author. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2016b). PISA. Estudiantes de bajo rendimiento. Porqué se quedan atrás y cómo ayudarles. Resultados Principales. Paris, France: Author.

90

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Oxfam. (2019). Public good or private wealth? Oxford, UK: Author. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://ww​w.oxf​amame​rica.​org/s​tatic​/medi​a/fil​es/bp​-publ​ic-go​od-or​priv​ate-w​ealth​-2101​19-en​.pdf Pallán Figueroa, C. (1992). Escolaridad, fuerza de trabajo y universidad frente al Tratado de Libre Comercio. In G. Guevara Niebla & N. García Canclini (Eds.), La educación y la cultura ante el Tratado de Libre Comercio (pp. 95–144). México City, Mexico: Nueva Imagen. Petit, M., Segovia, R., & Sánchez, D. L. (1999). Nuevos acercamientos a los jóvenes y la lectura. México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Portilla, M. L. (2010). Cuando muere una lengua. Revista de la Universidad de México, 82. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from http:​//www​.revi​stade​launi​versi​dad.u​nam.m​x/821​ 0/leo​n/82l​eon.h​tml Prieto, C. (2014). Cinco mil años de palabras. México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Programme for International Student Assessment. (2015). PISA 2015: Results in focus. Paris, France: Author. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://ww​w.oec​d.org​/pisa​/pisa​2015​-resu​lts-i​n-foc​us.pd​f Real Academia Española. (n. d.). Diccionario de la lengua española. Madrid, Spain: Real Academia de la Lengua. Retrieved June 12, 2019, from https://dle.rae. es/?id=1jZSGJY Reilly, P. (2016). The monk and the mariposa: Franciscan acculturation in Mexico 1520–1550. Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Kent, UK. Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). What is the “dialogical method” of teaching? Journal of Education, 169(3), 11–31. Smagorinsky, P. (2001). If meaning is constructed, what is it made from?: Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational Research, 71, 133–69. Smagorinsky, P. (2011). Vygotsky and literacy research: A methodological framework. Boston, MA: Sense. Smagorinsky, P. (August 16, 2016). Seminar in literacy studies [oral presentation]. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Literacy in teacher education: “It’s the context, stupid.” Journal of Literacy Research, 50(3), 281–303. Smagorinsky, P., Boggs, G. L., Jakubiak, C. A., & Wilson, A. A. (2010). The implied character curriculum in vocational and nonvocational English classes: Designing social futures for working class students and their teachers. Journal of Research in Character Education, 8(2), 1–23. Smagorinsky, P., & Daigle, E. A. (2012). The role of affect in students’ writing for school. In E. L. Grigorenko, E. Mambrino, & D. D. Preiss (Eds.), Writing: A mosaic of new perspectives (pp. 293–307). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Steck, F. B. (1943). Education in Spanish North America during the sixteenth century. Washington, DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference.

Innovation from the Bottom Up

91

Steele, C., Spencer, S. J., & Aronson, J. (2002). Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 34(1), 370–440. Street, B. (2005). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy development, ethnography and education. Essex, UK: Pearson. Street, B. (2011). Literacy inequalities in theory and practice: The power to name and define. International Journal of Educational Development, 31(6), 580–86. Stromquist, N. P. (2000). Nongovernmental organizations and the education of adult women. In R. Cortina & N. P. Stromquist (Eds.), Distant alliances: Promoting education for girls and women in Latin America (pp. 75–101). New York, NY: Routledge Falmer. The World Bank. (October 17, 2018). Almost half of the world population lives with $5.50 a day. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://ww​w.wor​ldban​k.org​/en/n​ews/p​ ress-​relea​se/20​18/10​/17/n​early​-half​-the-​world​-live​s-on-​less-​than-​550-a​-day Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. United Nations. (1963). Science and technology for development: Report on the United Nations Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of the Less Developed Areas. Volume I. New York, NY: Author. Retrieved June 15, 2019, from https​://di​gital​libra​ry.un​.org/​recor​d/721​213/f​i les/​E_CON​F.39_​1%28V​ol.I%​ 29-EN​.pdf United Nations. (2014). World economic situation and prospects 2014. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https​://ww​w.un.​org/e​n/dev​elopm​ent/d​esa/p​olicy​/wesp​/wesp​_curr​ent/2​ 014we​sp_co​untry​_clas​sific​ation​.pdf United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (December 10, 1948). Universal declaration of human rights. Paris, France: Author. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2008). Mother tongue matters: Local language as a key to effective learning. Paris, France: Author. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (n. d. a). Five decades of literacy work. Paris, France: Author. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https​://en​.unes​ co.or​g/the​mes/l​itera​cy-al​l/fiv​e-dec​ades United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (n. d. b). Literacy. Paris, France: Author. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https​://en​.unes​co.or​g/the​mes/l​ itera​cy-al​l Van der Spek, E. D., & van Oostendorp, H. (2011). Measuring learning in serious games: A case study with structural assessment. Educational Technology Research and Development, 59(6), 741–63. Veenstra, R., & Kuyper, H. (2004). Effective students and families: The importance of individual characteristics for achievement in high school. Educational Research and Evaluation, 10(1), 41–70. Von Humboldt, A. (1966). Political essay on the kingdom of New Spain (J. Black, Trans.). New York, NY: AMS Press. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from http:​//www​.avhu​mbold​

92

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

t.net​/avhd​ata/P​oliti​cal%2​0Essa​y%20o​n%20t​he%20​Kingd​om%20​of%20​New%2​0Spai​ n/Vol​3/Com​plete​/Vol3​_comp​lete.​pdf Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (R. Rieber & A. Carton, Eds.; N. Minick, Trans., vol. 1, pp. 39–285). New York, NY: Plenum. Wagner, D. A. (2011). What happened to literacy? Historical and conceptual perspectives on literacy in UNESCO. International Journal of Educational Development, 31, 319–23. Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330, 686–88.

3

Mexico Reading Our Times (Mexko: Ma Tihpowakah Tonemilis in the Aztec Nahuatl Language) Patricia Rosas Chávez and Yolanda Gayol

By reading the word you read the world. ~ Paulo Freire Throughout this volume we travel through our own veins. We know more about who we are because we know more about our origins. No longer are we that race of Mexica1 warriors whose language and temples were displaced by another cosmogony and architecture. Nor are we those mestizos who were perplexed by the novelty of having a huge country in their hands without knowing how much it belonged to them. We know more about our country with both its strengths and its weaknesses; we know what ails it. This Tonantzin—in classical Aztec mythology and among present-day Nahuas “Mother Earth”2 or “Goddess of Sustenance”—is ours, and we hold it in our hands. We have the right and the duty to reimagine it, recreate it, rebuild it. Our desire now is to dream of a “New Mexico”: a bright Mexico that recovers the best of its ancient roots and traditions from the Old World; a Mexico that, having learned about and recognized its history, opts for the new; a Mexico that, having learned from its failures, prepares to unleash its literacy potential and soar. In this chapter, we describe the Letras para Volar program, and the teacher education program within its offerings, as an instrument of social justice that aims at improving educational results so that science and humanism might

1 2

The Mexica were the Nahuatl-speaking people who ruled the Aztec Empire. In Mexican culture “Mother Earth” does not carry the sexist connotations it has developed in English (Milner-Barry, 2015).

94

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

prevail in Mexico, making it a worthy heir to the natural, cultural, and economic wealth it possesses. In this dream of a “New Mexico,” education is our starting point, with reading as a fundamental element. We understand “reading” as a phenomenon that includes both technical and social dimensions. Jolibert and Gloton (2003) maintain that reading involves both decoding alphabetic texts and encoding them with meaning (cf. Smagorinsky, 2001): Someone who has not learned to master the graphic system that enables a person to simultaneously code through writing and decode by decrypting transmitted messages is bereft of the ability to read. . . . Someone who cannot communicate with someone else through the identity of languages is bereft of the ability to read. . . . Someone who does not understand a text with an essentially critical spiritual attitude is bereft of the ability to read. . . . The power of reading is given only to those who know how to make reading an eminently active operation, one of expectation and questioning, an attitude of recreating an external thought, assuming they know how to listen and do listen to themselves. (p. 19)

Furthermore, for Freire (1981) reading is a form of social action: Reading of the world precedes reading of the word, so the subsequent reading of the latter cannot dispense with the continued reading of the former. Language and reality are dynamically linked. Comprehension of the text, achieved through critical reading, implies the perception of relationships between text and context. (p. 1)

In this sense, reading the world is reading our times because our context, the product of historical evolution, is taking us to a new reality. Context, therefore, is past, present, and future. To want to read Mexico is to want to know more of its history in order to better interpret the present and plan for the future. Letras para Volar was founded in 2010 as a result of this desire. It is a program with the goal of producing social change through the development of proficiency in reading and writing at all educational levels, while also recognizing the importance of reading texts in other symbol systems. The activities of Letras para Volar are supported by the academic work of the University of Guadalajara and its relationship with the community in which it is immersed. The program is based on the design and implementation of teaching materials that invite students to establish the habit of reading by associating it with playful and expressive activities, that is, of learning by doing, saying, and writing. We envision the development of competence in reading and writing as basic tools for navigating the world. We assume that the critical appropriation

Mexico

95

of reading, writing, active listening, and expressiveness will benefit people individually and through what these abilities provide for a society. Through Letras para Volar, we hope to contribute to the training of independent, critical readers with leadership skills, who will use those abilities to help construct a more egalitarian national society. We hope that people will be able to use language and other symbol systems to think about and produce texts through which an equitable culture may emerge from Mexico’s history of oppression and injustice, and do so within the cacophony of deception produced through the media.

Pillars of the Letras para Volar Program Letras para Volar seeks to develop Mexican people’s intellectual potential by orchestrating their higher-order cognitive skills to make their reading experiences engaging, meaningful, and illuminating. They must weave together critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, symbolic thought and expression, and the emotions that underlie thinking (Haidt, 2012). To that end, strategies and teaching materials have been developed that promote Letras para Volar’s philosophical pillars: engaging with literature, the development of scientific thought, the presence of Mexico’s ancestral traditions emerging from the arts, and the cultivation of a value on social justice and solidarity among teachers and their students.

Engagement with Literature Reading should be pleasurable and emotive, as well as useful. This value positions reading as a recreational, spontaneous activity, driven by readers’ intellectual emotions and concerns that inspire them to explore themselves in the words of others. Literature requires imaginative engagement as part of these processes. Manguel (2007) argues that reading is the art of giving life to the page, of establishing a loving relationship with a text in which intimate experience and foreign words—one’s own vocabulary and someone else’s literature—converge and intermingle like the waters of two rivers, merging into a single flow in which we can no longer distinguish whether a phrase that comes to mind when we have lost a friend—“I do not forgive a loved one’s death,” for example—is our own or Miguel Hernández’s. That incorporation of the text, that feeling in our own skin, living through a chronicle

96

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education of experiences foreign to our own, seeing the world through the enlightened eyes of a poet, a narrator, a wordsmith, is what I call the art of reading. (pp. 4–5)

The literary element of the program seeks to cultivate a love of reading by including imaginative works that engage students’ interests and invite their dedication. This dimension also aims to develop greater proficiency in reading by taking advantage of a reader’s emotional connection, adding a vibrancy that, in turn, produces a greater interest in reading. Young people’s response to high-interest fictional narratives that speak to their concerns and pursuits is often animated by their imaginations, while also helping them focus on textual details to best follow the story. Although functional literacy is a central aim of Letras para Volar, the program encourages challenges that rely on sophisticated interpretive acts beyond the decoding that produces what some consider to be comprehension skills.

The Development of Scientific Thought Reading is a powerful means of finding answers and explanations for multiple questions and unsettled matters. Therefore, it is necessary to arouse curiosity through a desire to know, experiment with, and interpret natural and social phenomena. The third article of the Mexican Constitution3 is designed to address the effects of a lack of education and of uncritical or orthodox positions. We believe that reading is a great support in combating the fundamentalisms that segregate society, hurt harmonious coexistence, and limit democratic development. Reading makes it possible to acquire knowledge, learn about other cultures and worldviews, develop empathy and solidarity, and understand human differences and similarities to better understand and respect otherness. See especially: I. Freedom of religious beliefs being guaranteed by Article 24: the standard which shall guide such education shall be maintained entirely apart from any religious doctrine and, based on the results of scientific progress, shall strive against ignorance and its effects, servitudes, fanaticism, and prejudices. Moreover: a. It shall be democratic, considering democracy not only as a legal structure and a political regimen, but as a system of life founded on a constant economic, social, and cultural betterment of the people; b. It shall be national insofar as—without hostility or exclusiveness—it shall achieve the understanding of our problems, the utilization of our resources, the defense of our political independence, the assurance of our economic independence, and the continuity and growth of our culture; and c. It shall contribute to better human relationships, not only with the elements which it contributes toward strengthening and at the same time inculcating, together with respect for the dignity of the person and the integrity of the family, the conviction of the general interest of society, but also by the care which it devotes to the ideals of brotherhood and equality of rights of all men, avoiding privileges of race, creed, class, sex, or persons. . . . VI. Elementary education shall be compulsory. VII. All education given by the State shall be free.

3

Mexico

97

Facility in reading enables scientific understandings that inform citizenship, as asserted by Russell (1988): Science, as its name suggests, is, first of all, knowledge. . . . Gradually, however, the aspect of science as knowledge has been relegated to secondary importance by the aspect of science as manipulative power. By conferring science upon us, this power of manipulation is why it has more social than artistic importance. Science, as a pursuit of truth, is equal, but not superior, to art. Science as a technique, although it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire. Science, as a technique, has a consequence, the derivations of which are not yet fully in sight; namely, that it makes new forms of human society possible and even necessary. (pp. 5–6)

Just as it is important for children and youth to engage imaginatively with fictional texts, they need to read nonfiction with knowledge and discrimination. This is not to say that science is not a human construction (see Latour & Woolgar, 1979). Rather, it is to say that as a human construction, scientific (or any technical) writing requires critical reading to evaluate its claims and evidence and understand what is motivating its intentions.

Mexico’s Ancestral Traditions Concerning Nature, Friendship, and Art It is important to know about and honor our origins and ancient traditions, which provide the foundation for who we are today. Reading enables understanding of the languages, art, customs, ways of life, and the world views of the original peoples, and helps to promote their recognition and appreciation (see Pasztory, 1983, for a detailed understanding of the interrelationships among these factors). The following fragments of Aztec Nahuatl poem I have Arrived Here (He llegado Aquí) by Nezahualcóyotl represent the literary tradition: With longing I desire, I crave friendship, nobility, community. With flowery songs I live.

This value is further evident in the Tecayehuatzin Dream of Words (Sueño de Palabras): “Friends, please hear this dream of words! In spring time, the golden bud of the corn gives us life: the tender red corn refreshes us, but knowing that the hearts of our friends are faithful to us is a rich necklace.”

98

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

In addition to these linguistic traditions, Mexican culture is informed and motivated by other artistic forms. Many musical traditions are alive and thriving in Mexico. Although post-Conquest genres such as mariachi combine European and original traditions, the ancient genres remain current in both art and performance. Figure 3.1 shows a modern-day musician performing in a Guadalajaran plaza in the tradition of Aztec musicians in ceremonial events. Mexico’s visual art tradition is also a key form of cultural representation and transmission. Figure 3.2 comes from the street mural culture and features a garage door painted with a jaguar, surrounded by Aztec imagery, including Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent, to the right. Like all major Mesoamerican civilizations, the early Mexican societies included a jaguar god, often in relation to shamanism. Jaguars have historically been revered for their power, size, speed, and ability to survive, and remain important figures in Mesoamerican iconography as among the most central deities in ancient Mexico and elsewhere. The jaguar is associated with the night and, consequently, power, the supernatural, and the underworld. In Mesoamerican religion, Nahual refers to a human being who has the power to transform either spiritually or physically into an animal form, often a jaguar. The greatest of all Nahual gods is Quetzalcóatl, who was related to gods of the wind, the planet Venus, the dawn, merchants, arts, crafts, learning, knowledge, and the priesthood. Quetzalcóatl remains a familiar icon

Figure 3.1  Contemporary musician playing in a Guadalajaran plaza in the Aztec tradition. (From the personal collection of Peter Smagorinsky. A color image is available at https://tinyurl.com/y5gau4z6).

Mexico

99

Figure 3.2  Jaguar on a Guadalajaran garage door, surrounded by Aztec icons including Quetzalcóatl (From the personal collection of Peter Smagorinsky. A color image is available at https://tinyurl.com/y5gau4z6)

in Mexican art, literature, and culture, long after the Spanish Conquest and the Europeanization of the nation. Outside the influence of formal academic programs, these traditions are maintained by artists, authors, and musicians who value their original heritages. Although the “New Mexico” that Letras para Volar hopes to produce is responsive to emerging technologies and social movements, it cannot lose sight of the historical factors that produced the nation and the traditions still curated and performed by its people.

The Cultivation of Social Justice and Solidarity Reading is an inexhaustible resource for promoting dialogue, awareness, and interest in addressing and resolving social problems. Freire (1969) is among the central influences on the Letras para Volar program because of his commitment to equity and liberation. He asserts that awareness of the contexts that surround people is fundamental to changing situations of oppression and the silencing of expression. He conceives of education as a loving and supportive act that must be mediated by true dialogue in order to promote communication, generate empathy, and move beyond magical or naïve conceptions of reality. To Freire, “the nature of action corresponds to the nature of understanding. If understanding is critical, or preponderantly critical, action will also be critical. If understanding

100

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

is magical, action will also be magical” (p.102). In a country where poverty and inequality grow exponentially, reading is a means of generating awareness and cultivating social justice with solidarity and attention to real rather than imagined problems and solutions. As other chapters in this volume assert, reading critically is central to knowing how to identify spurious, specious, and dysinformational thinking in texts, making reading far more sophisticated than simply decoding words on a page. Reading and writing are not passive acts. Rather, they involve constructive thinking on the part of the reader and embody social action, a value central to the program and to a Freirean conception of the potential of education to transform society from its socioeconomic castes to more egalitarian relationships and possibilities.

Theoretical Synthesis in Letras para Volar These principles are synthesized in the program’s logo (see Figure 3.3), whose symbols represent communication and language. They indicate how texts can appear in different modes—a book, for example—and that they can flow like water and wind, like thought itself. Beneath the book there is an open hand, a universal symbol of friendship and welcome between humans. It resembles a wing, an open door to overcoming all limitations and promoting the imagination of what might be. The outstretched hand that shares the book is friendly and communicates the idea that through education people can come together and grow. From these philosophical pillars, Gayol and Rosas (2017) conceived the theoretical bases for the program, which have undergone continual testing,

Figure 3.3  Letras para Volar logo. (A color image is available at https://tinyurl.com/ y5gau4z6).

Mexico

101

reflection, and revision. We have taken Freire’s (1970) precepts as theories of learning, and used them to generate discussion that enables a critical analysis of context in order to reveal domination/subordination relationships and the consequences of submission, silencing, and symbolic annihilation. We have synthesized Freire’s critical approach with Illich’s (1970) view that organizations benefit when they develop collaborative networks that encourage open-ended, continual dialogue, and solidarity, facilitating the exchange of experiences and association among people who share common interests. The synergy available from these networks promotes alternative learning mechanisms to develop capacities in a free and rewarding way. We have also adopted Smagorinsky’s (2001) sociocultural point of view that text is interpreted in terms of context, of the power relationships that are found there, of the reader’s own experiences and perspectives. This perspective emphasizes the importance of accessing cultural constructs and other narratives in order to unravel all the potential that exists in a given text. Additionally, we have taken certain aspects of facilitation theories from Freire (1970) to cultivate horizontal and positive relationships, and from Cooperrider, Whitney, and Stavros (2008), whose notion of appreciative inquiry emphasizes the promotion of social relationships based on an open, positive, horizontal, and democratic attitude for collective action with no other incentives than organization and collaboration. All of these perspectives embody positioning theory (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1999), which “aims to examine and explore the distribution of rights and duties to speak and behave in certain ways among the participants of face-to-face interaction or intra-group relations. These rights and duties set the basis for the discursive construction of interpersonal positions and positioning” and thus produce hierarchical relationships among people (Hirvonen, 2016, p. 1). The pedagogical dimension or curriculum of Letras para Volar and the master’s degree program has been set in motion with the selection of readings and the design of pedagogical strategies in which the philosophical pillars are intertwined with the development of higher-order cognitive abilities. These faculties include critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, and communication, which rely on play, dialogue, inclusivity, and equity. We understand curriculum here, not in the scholarly and structuring sense of a course of study, but as the foundation of the contents and methodologies that promote learning. Our perspective further includes the dimensions of psychomotor, emotional, ethical, cognitive, and social learning organized and based on the didactic sequence of Bybee’s (2014), 5 E’s translated as Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate,

102

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

and Evaluate. These theories share an emphasis on understanding cultural mediation, promoting critical literacy, cultivating a disposition to inquire and change, learning textual skills for consuming and producing material, grasping both technical and imaginative techniques in textual production, and conceiving of literacy as both a pragmatic and a sociopolitical skill set. We next review how the program itself was developed, offering a model for how to build an academic program in a national context as a means for moving a society forward into its next developmental stage.

The Process of Program Development: Key Dimensions Letras para Volar works as a system in which formative processes, research, and social responsibility are continually articulated and fed back into a dynamic and unfinished spiral of knowledge that maps out goals and strategies for achieving the “New Mexico” we have dreamed of. As the program develops and as we seek community involvement both within and outside the institution, we collect data on and investigate its impact, theories, and curricula, and modify its methodologies and practices. Through this process, we identify new forms of action for the necessary adjustments and redirection of the program, always looking for ways to extend the benefits to university students and the community as a whole. We next detail the process of program formation and development, and the considerations we have taken to produce a context-sensitive teacher education program reinvented as part of our hope to reconstruct the context of Mexican society toward a more equitable nation. The university was founded as the Royal University of Guadalajara in 1792 and renamed the University of Guadalajara (Universidad de Guadalajara en Espanol) in 1925. Enrolling 287,760 students, it operates as a network of fifteen thematic and regional campuses in the state of Jalisco, accompanied by a virtual university system and high schools under its jurisdiction enrolling roughly 160,000 students. The University of Guadalajara is the state public university with the highest number of postgraduate programs recognized by Mexico’s National Quality Postgraduate Program (Programa Nacional de Posgrados de Calidad) of the National Council of Science and Technology (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología—CONACYT). It has the largest number of undergraduate programs in the Register of High Academic Performance of the National Center for the Evaluation of Higher Education (Centro Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación Superior—CENEVAL). Its educational programs are diverse, balanced

Mexico

103

across the fields of the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Health, Exact Sciences, and Engineering. Letras para Volar was launched in 2010 in collaboration with Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California, where co-architect Yolanda Gayol held a faculty appointment. The University of Guadalajara recognized Letras para Volar as a program in 2015, and the master’s degree program began operating in 2016. The objectives of this program are to ensure that the teachers enrolled know about and can apply literacy theories and methodologies; that they understand the processes of signification and communication of thought and language; and that they will intervene in the practice of education through the design, operation, and evaluation of projects in the different fields of literacy. Although the program embraces such notions as multiliteracies and the consideration of a variety of semiotic means (including the music and art depicted earlier), the most critical problem facing Mexico concerns the reading of print texts, as identified in international comparisons (see Introduction). We focused primary attention, then, on teaching the reading of the written word, and, in turn, of the world it represents, as Freire would advise. The program architects sought to identify the processes that prepare reading teachers for their work, the design of teaching strategies and materials, the design of workshops aimed at diverse audiences, the design and teaching of the master’s degree in literacy, and the creation of systematic spaces for reflection on the program’s progress and future needs. The University of Guadalajara has identified a teacher who acts as a reading specialist in each of the 174 high schools in its system, which covers 87 percent of municipalities in Jalisco. These cities and towns serve as home to 98.75 percent of the Jalisco population. Letras para Volar has developed various materials to train them and support their practice. These resources include a reading guide, three literary collections, pedagogical materials to go along with the readings in these collections, and an alphabet box that consists of a set of play materials whose purpose is to motivate reading, enrich vocabulary, and reinforce spelling (Rosas, 2017a). The alphabet box is accompanied by training activities for teachers, which help them to learn about strategies for the efficient use of this material and, simultaneously, to document their practice, enrich the activities, and provide new games. The early success of this feature has led the faculty to produce additional alphabet boxes for elementary and middle schools, aimed at the development of recreational activities in Spanish and English. The training process has included preparation for social service providers who go to schools and hospitals systematically to promote reading, and we

104

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

have continually analyzed, reflected on, and reconsidered how this process works. At the beginning, we focused their preparation on learning about and becoming fluent with the instructional materials. Subsequently, we sought to promote a taste for reading, the importance of developing this skill, and the theories and pedagogy that underpin the program. This phenomenon embodies the Nahuatl term amoxtli (see Chapter 2; Rosas, 2017b), roughly translated as the inscription of words or images to produce a meaningful text, often in book form. A prime assumption of Letras para Volar is that, as the US educational theorist Dewey (1897) would advocate, people learn by doing, and doing is based on specific needs. Inquiry and research are essential to finding efficient ways of acting in relation to these needs. In this way, the design of teaching strategies for the elementary level began in 2010, based on the philosophical pillars we have outlined. The idea of games was the starting point for interaction, because there was no culture of reading appreciation in these schools. We piloted these materials, got feedback from colleagues from Fielding University, and revised them to produce the materials used to train the first social service providers who went to the elementary schools. Documentary analysis on theories and cases related to this type of activity led us to reformulate the design model until it incorporated the elements that were published. To date, a total of 233 pedagogical materials have been designed: 136 for the elementary level, 28 for middle school, and 69 for high school. Additionally, to make our participation possible in different open and community spaces such as fairs and festivals, our faculty have developed seventy workshops for teachers, students, promoters, and parents that address topics that are directly related to the needs and concerns of the participating community.

Formative Processes Letras para Volar has a highly social, collaborative character. It does not attempt to solve Mexico’s literacy challenge alone. Rather, it partners with a variety of entities to promote literacy in coordinated, complementary ways that ideally will be more robust in concert than they would be individually. This collaborative dimension, we argue, should be part of any complex effort to address a social problem through education. We next detail how this program integrated its activities with other literacy-related initiatives to provide a robust experience for the teachers enrolled in the program, in conjunction with the state’s broader effort to promote literacy.

Mexico

105

Within-Institution Partnerships. In 2016, the University of Guadalajara centers of Social Sciences, Health, and Art, Architecture, and Design collaborated with Letras para Volar to offer the Master’s Degree in Literacy. Their goal was to contribute to the training of education professionals and promote reading practices, active listening, expressiveness, and the production of texts in all disciplines and at all levels of the educational system. These activities were designed to promote both the habit of reading and the development of higherorder skills among students and the low-income population whose reading test scores were low; these higher-order skills include the Freirean notion of reading the world in the word. Recruiting colleagues from across the university expanded the expertise available to plan and teach the program. Sponsored Events. Letras para Volar routinely holds two annual events: Academic Week; and the Reading, Writing, Listening and Expressiveness Encounter in Higher Education (Encuentro de Lectura, Escritura, Escucha y Expresividad en la Educación Superior—ELES). There are eight editions of Academic Week. In these programs we assess the strategies for the promotion of reading and writing, and study a number of issues that lead to a better understanding of our context as a way to improve reading instruction and student growth. ELES is a space for researchers and academics to discuss the processes of reading, writing, active listening, expressiveness, and literacy. Coordination with Other Literacy Initiatives. For more than three decades, the University of Guadalajara has been organizing the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), an event that brings together the largest number of Spanishspeaking publishers in the world. In addition to selling books, the FIL is the venue for numerous academic, political, and cultural events—including programs sponsored by Letras para Volar—that have made it the largest fair of its kind in the world. The educational tradition of the University of Guadalajara is based on the principles of democracy, inclusion, and social responsibility, which are aligned with FIL’s editorial and cultural tradition. To promote social responsibility, Letras para Volar has partnered with a relatively new festival that is fast becoming a tradition of Jalisco society: the Festival of Books on World Book Day. The program starts off with a literary parade in which books and their depictions of their characters take to the streets, stimulating curiosity and interest in reading. Participation in the parade occurs voluntarily among the schools that wish to participate in a competition for the best float. Previously, students of Literature, Plastic (in US terms, Visual, for example, painting, ceramics, sculpture, etc.) and Performing Arts from the University of Guadalajara would work with students and teachers from the public schools to

106

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

help them in the selection of the book to represent, as well as in designing the float. Students pursuing a degree in Industrial Design have participated by creating a standard platform on which to build the traveling stage. Visits to other countries by the Letras para Volar service providers take the program’s social responsibility activities to international sites to share our literacy practices (see Chapter 12 for more on this networking). They also aim to develop their leadership skills and contribute to the growth of their global skills as they become spokespersons for the program and ambassadors of our practices for reading and writing promotion. To date, our reading and writing dynamics have been shared with elementary schools in Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, and Philadelphia in the United States. Letras para Volar has formed important alliances with various civil society organizations to share the benefits of collective action. We have signed eleven agreements so far with civil society organizations. Also, within the university itself, there is participation on the advisery committees of the Fernando del Paso Chair of Art, Poetics and Literature, and the Hugo Gutiérrez Vega Chair of Poetry and Cultural Journalism. Both chairs intend to preserve and spread the legacy of these two influential Mexican writers. Letras para Volar has also served the nation in times of crisis. On September 19, 2017, the nation was hit by the devastating Puebla earthquake, which struck with an estimated magnitude of 7.1 and lasted for about 20 seconds. The earthquake caused damage in the Mexican states of Puebla and Morelos and in the Greater Mexico City area. The carnage included the collapse of more than 40 buildings, roughly 370 deaths, and over 6,000 injuries. Long-term effects included the destruction of a good bit of the national electronic infrastructure. Letras para Volar helped to respond to the quake by joining the Solidarity Reading Brigades who visited, and brought comfort to, survivors in Oaxaca and Morelos. Since then, the work of the Brigades has been extended and sustained to support caravans of migrants on their way through Guadalajara, seeking a better life while being scorned and rejected by those with whom they seek asylum. Reading activities bring students closer to the lives and difficulties of the people who migrate and help them understand the situation they are going through. International Collaboration. Letras para Volar has benefited from consultations with international colleagues to inform the development of its program. This reliance on external consultants should not suggest any inadequacy on the part of the Mexican architects. Rather, they found themselves drawn to scholars from other nations whose ideas could contribute to the effort in the areas of curriculum development, course content, the teaching of program

Mexico

107

seminars, the provision of plenary talks at program-sponsored conferences, and general advisement and consultation at all points of the program’s development and offering. From the United States, Yolanda Gayol (born in Mexico but now stationed in the United States) has been a central figure in the program’s construction from the outset and throughout its development and implementation. Gerald Campano from the University of Pennsylvania, Maria Paulo Ghiso from Teachers College, Columbia University, and Peter Smagorinsky from the University of Georgia were recruited during the initial planning and have continued to participate in week-long seminars and conferences for the teachers participating in the programs. We enlisted the help of colleagues from Fielding University to help us develop our first pedagogical strategies, including Anna Distefano, Germany Joyce, Annabelle Nelson, Four Arrows, and Jenny Edwards. Enrico Bocciolesi from Italy, José Antonio Méndez Sanz from Spain, Jacques and Elaine Fijalkov from France, and others have also participated in these activities and events, lending their expertise to various aspects of the program. We have also raised funds from generous donors such as José María Limón and Guadalupe Mejía, and have forged relationships with school principals and activists from a variety of US cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, and Philadelphia. Finally, the collaboration that produced this volume has dedicated all royalties from sales to supporting Letras para Volar’s programs. Through this international cooperative effort, the program has been able to benefit from perspectives from outside their national context to generate ideas contributing to the ultimate form and process of the program. These collaborations have produced such joint efforts as the 2018 Educational Innovation, Leadership and Literacy Seminar organized by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Guadalajara under the auspices of Letras para Volar. The aim is to establish it as a permanent binational research seminar on these topics. These formative processes generated the other two key dimensions behind the Letras para Volar literacy education program, research and social responsibility, which promote literacy beyond the basic process of decoding text, and introduce Freirean critical literacy as a vehicle for creating a “New Mexico” founded on more egalitarian principles.

Research Dimension The program includes a research dimension (see Chapters 10 and 11), not only to measure reading scores for comparative rankings and ratings but also from

108

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

the emic perspective available through action research. These practitionerand student-led investigations document the program’s impact and scope, the effectiveness of its training processes, its pedagogical design, and its management. They further provide literacy educators with possible learning tools to use in their own teaching, as outlined in Chapter 11. The evaluation dimensions thus produce information not only on reading competency, often through test score data, but also on the social justice issues that the program is designed to include as part of a literacy education. Continual research and reflection on findings from these inquiries inform the development of Letras para Volar. The program is concerned with systematically observing, documenting, evaluating, and giving feedback through participatory action research designed to transform our praxis in relation to our theoretical and pedagogical foundations. Reason and Bradbury (2008) describe these benefits: A primary purpose of action research is to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in the everyday conduct of their lives. A wider purpose of action research is to contribute through this practical knowledge to increased well-being—economic, political, psychological, spiritual—of human persons and communities, and to a more equitable and sustainable relationship with the wider ecology of the planet of which we are an intrinsic part. Action research, therefore, is about working toward practical outcomes, and also about creating new forms of understanding, since action without reflection and understanding is blind, just as theory without action is meaningless. (p. 4)

The research activities that have been carried out in Letras para Volar can be grouped under three categories: those related to the development of literacy skills, literacy practices, and process evaluation. The Development of Literacy Skills. Developing literacy capabilities is a central aim of Letras para Volar. The program has relied on research in both reading as a skill and reading as a means for critical inquiry. Pedagogical Strategies and Administrative Processes. The pilot study of the first teaching materials for the elementary and high school level was conducted in 2010 in schools and public squares, in the company of, and with feedback from, colleagues from Fielding Graduate University. The findings from these studies produced new strategies that we adjusted after we monitored how they were received by students in school and how well aligned they were with the theoretical foundations and the pedagogical principles of Letras para Volar. This process culminated with the publication of elementary school teaching material

Mexico

109

(Rosas & Tadeo, 2017, 2018) with more publications forthcoming with each stage of development and evaluation. Both experimental and action research contributed to the investigative element of the program. In one evaluation study of reading and writing in high schools, two contrasting groups were formed: one control group that followed traditional rote learning, and one that was experimental, using Letras para Volar strategies. Both groups used the collections of narratives, poetry, and essays that had been distributed to the 174 high schools of the University of Guadalajara. The results found that students using the materials and practices promoted by Letras para Volar made greater reading gains on posttests than did those of the control group (Mendoza, Padilla, & Franco, 2016). Learning to Read. The University of Guadalajara’s graduate programs include a research dimension that has produced studies on the effectiveness of the program. The first master’s thesis in this vein (Cobián, 2013) studied eighteen fifth-grade students and their reading development in relation to Letras para Volar materials featuring electronic and printed media. In contrast with the sort of rote instruction common in Mexican schools, the students used twenty reading strategies for six months, with the research finding that the strategies increased interest and curiosity in reading, especially for science and horror genres, as they drew on their prior knowledge to inform and invigorate their reading experiences. A side benefit was that the children expressed greater interest in participating in literacy activities with their parents. The use of master’s thesis research continues. Students are now investigating how the alphabet box games included in the program affect students’ motivation to read and the degree to which their fluency in Spanish improves. Students have undertaken studies of urban narratives, plastic (visual) arts, memes and critical thinking, logical-mathematical thinking, digital literacy, and other topics related to the program’s mission. Gómez (2014), for instance, published the first evaluation of the Program’s management in a master’s thesis, one of several inquiries into the administration of Letras para Volar. Reading Motivation. Fijalkow, Fijalkow, and Franco (2017) conducted research on the impact of Letras para Volar in the elementary schools they visited. This pre-post evaluation included 5,000 girls and boys divided into control and experimental groups to investigate the extent to which pleasure in reading is developed through our program, finding increased interest in reading among the experimental groups in contrast with the control group. Research is underway on how to develop critical and creative thinking, problem-solving,

110

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

and communication through the strategies of reading and writing, with a sample and a population similar to the one described earlier. Social Dimensions of Literacy. Letras para Volar assumes that decoding skills are necessary but insufficient for reading to produce the social changes involved in producing the “New Mexico.” The studies we have just reviewed involve reading the word. The following research efforts have been designed to investigate how the students in Mexican schools learn to read the world. Urbaliteracy. The Urbaliteracy research project is carried out in conjunction with the municipality of Zapopan, graduates from the School of Architecture of Grenoble, France, and two University of Guadalajara centers: Art, Architecture and Design (CUAAD), and Social Sciences and Humanities (CUSH). Urbaliteracy was coined from the fusion of the notions of urbanism and literacy and involves reading, writing, listening, and expression, as well as questioning and resignifying public spaces. The concept refers to the ability to read critically, not only words but also the symbols and languages narrated by the physical spaces of one’s everyday environment. From our perspective, literacy requires participation in sociocultural practices, in which text and context are inseparable. Thus, Urbaliteracy is conceived as a means of contributing to the development of capacities that the community of a neighborhood develops for reading, writing, appropriating, critically rewriting its environment, and collaborating in the reconstruction of their spatial identities. The Urbaliteracy project began in 2017 and remains underway. Its investigators include students from the Government Administration and Public Policies, International Business, Marketing, and Environmental Management and Economics departments. They undertook field work in the Lomas del Batán neighborhood in Zapopan, the city bordering Guadalajara to the northwest. A multidisciplinary technical advisery committee composed of University of Guadalajara faculty has been enlisted to advise the researchers on the project and tap into the community to help understand its effects. As with other assessments of the program, Urbaliteracy builds on the university’s research mission and practices to provide students with opportunities to develop their research skills in service of helping to inform Letras para Volar administrators and practitioners about how to continue to refine the program’s practices. Ideal Worlds. This interdisciplinary research project aims at learning, through manipulable materials, about the conception of an ideal world conceived by girls and boys from elementary school. After the students envision this best of all possible worlds, they are provided with readings designed to challenge, inform, and extend their thinking and discussions so they may revise their conceptions

Mexico

111

and narratives. The project is carried out with social service providers and academics in the Plastic (Visual) Arts, Psychology, Communication, Hispanic Literature, and Education. First reports show that the main problems expressed by girls and boys are related to ecology and public insecurity.

Social Responsibility Our attention to social responsibility concerns relationships with the community in which an intervention is immersed, and connections among various actors to support the life and literacy prospects of the most disadvantaged citizens, both as a society and country. Letras para Volar operates through social service providers from the University of Guadalajara. Because higher education in public universities is free, graduating students must give back to the society that supported their studies with 480 hours of voluntary work. They conduct an extracurricular reading program that is taught through interinstitutional collaboration agreements in public elementary and middle schools in the state of Jalisco. They also provide service to civilian hospitals, homes, and marginalized neighborhoods. Throughout the school year, we work permanently in 98 elementary schools, 18 middle schools, 4 homes, 2 civilian hospitals, 21 community brigades, 1 library, and 1 reading room. One-hundred and forty-five agencies benefit from the activities, with 534 facilitators serving 46,319 children and adolescents each week as of this writing. They work with pedagogical strategies that have been studied and found effective (Rosas, Cobián, & Tadeo, 2017), including weekly reading clubs that promote reading for enjoyment and understanding. The aim is that the young people’s enjoyment of this activity will become contagious and expand the program. The free supply of books in a country with few readers is critical. For this reason, the Letras para Volar agenda has considered the printing and distribution of books as a priority that provides access to reading for children and young people in Jalisco. Cummins (2015) analyzed various research projects that show that access to printed books improves school performance. According to the OECD, 43 percent of the households in Mexico own between 0 and 10 books, while only 8 percent have more than 100 books, unlike the 40 percent reported by the average OECD countries. Alberto Manguel, Director of the National Library of Argentina and literati of some renown, stated the value of owning books: “I once stole a tempting book; I took it to my house, hidden in my coat pocket, not just because I had to read it; I also needed to consider it mine”

112

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

(2014, p. 29). Owning a book allows it to become a personal resource and valued possession: “I do not like,” he has said, “being forbidden to write in the margins of the books I borrow. I do not like having to return books in which I discover something amazing or precious. Like a voracious looter, I want the books I read to be mine” (2010, p. 27). Currently Letras para Volar has produced eight collections of printed books and a children’s newspaper (La Gacetita, The Gazette), along with free digital access to all of the publications: 1. Caminante (The Traveler) literature collection, anthologized by Fernando del Paso Morante, Cervantes Prize winner in 2015, Doctor Honoris Causa (honorary doctorate) by the University of Guadalajara, and director of the Octavio Paz4 Ibero-American Library, a facility belonging to the University of Guadalajara. It consists of 20 titles with a print run of 150,000 copies. 2. Hugo Gutiérrez Vega poetry collection, which consists of 30 titles with a print run of 250,000 copies; the first 10 titles were chosen by the poet, playwright, and diplomat from Jalisco, Hugo Gutiérrez Vega, who also guided the trend for the selection of successive volumes. 3. Collection of Essays by Carlos Fernando Romero Vevia consisting of 20 titles and a print run of 150,000 copies. Vevia himself made the selections for this collection. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Guadalajara. He has dedicated his life to the teaching of Literature and Philosophy and has been part of the faculty since 1975. 4. Reading Promotion collection, dedicated to the distribution of teaching materials and research related to reading and writing. Currently, it consists of 7 titles with a print run of 81,500 copies. 5. Friends of Letras para Volar collection, designed to put books and e-books in the hands and on the devices of children and young people free of charge. Currently, this collection consists of 17 titles with a print run of 111,000 books. 6. Letras para Volar collection—Unite, produced in conjunction with the US-based Unite for Literacy, which has published fifteen titles in digital format while seeking funds for publishing printed versions so that every child owns at least one book. The Mexican poet and diplomat who was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, among many other awards. His El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) is considered a classic meditation on the soul of the Mexican people.

4

Mexico

113

7. Small Walkers Collection, designed to help children and youth write stories for their peers. Its purpose is to develop writing skill at the same time as reading, giving a voice to students and empowering them. Currently it consists of 3 titles and a print run of 200 copies. 8. Readings to Color, a collection that combines legends of Mexico’s original people, with drawings children can color. It consists of 3 titles with a print run of 5,500 copies. 9. La Gacetita5, a newspaper for Mexican children6 published monthly as an insert in La Gaceta (The Gazette) of the University of Guadalajara with a print run of 45,000 copies. Additionally, 7,000 Gacetitas are printed and distributed to the beneficiary elementary schools of the Letras para Volar program. Twenty-nine editions of this material have been published to this point. La Gacetita has sections on science, art, ecology, economy, famous people from Jalisco, countries, games, gastronomy, history, literature, technology, hobbies, and animals. The conception of its sections, design, and content was the product of focus groups with elementary school children. Its editorial board includes prominent writers and poets as well as children and adolescents. The impact of these nine initiatives amounts to a total of 117 titles with a print run of 749,200 books and 1,508,000 copies of La Gacetita. The publications are available at trade fairs and cultural festivals where workshops are offered for promoters of reading, teachers, and parents. Letras para Volar has participated in the Book Fair in Spanish in Los Angeles, California (LéaLA), the Yucatan International Reading Fair (FILEY), the Autumn Reading Festival organized by the State Center for Culture and the Arts of Jalisco (CECA), the October Festivals of Guadalajara, and the Cultural and Educational Festival Papirolas7. From 2010 to 2018, nearly 300,000 students and adults in schools, hospitals, homes, neighborhoods, fairs, and festivals have benefited from these offerings.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of the activities and scope that Letras para Volar has developed, from its inception to the present. There is a lot of -ito and -ita are diminutive suffixes in Spanish, each gendered; La Gacetita is thus a children’s Gaceta. See, for example, http:​//www​.gace​ta.ud​g.mx/​flash​/gt/9​98/G9​98_GT​.pdf 7 Papirolas comes from the word papyrus and refers to the action of flexing a paper to make figures, similar to origami. The festival promotes creativity for the purpose of increasing social consciousness in children and adolescents. The festival website is http://papirolas.udg.mx/. 5 6

114

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

work yet to be done to make it a great movement of critical literacy in service of developing a “New Mexico.” Mexican ethnoecologist Víctor Toledo (1991), renowned for his research and theory regarding relations between original cultures and the natural world, has said that Defending the multiple aspects of this country must be a watchword for every Mexican in love with the blood that runs through their land, its present and its history, its appearance and its depth. In its diversity, our country finds and confronts a feature that is essential to the standardizing paradigms upon which the heavy, almost sclerotic, industrial societies have been erected; and it also finds a wellspring from which to derive new productive, technological, social and cultural configurations that are also in alignment with nature. (p. 2)

A Mexican literacy program must therefore align with the spiritual, emotional, and natural dimensions of life that produce a passion for reading the world and the word and making the world a more enlightened and harmonious place. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1940) has argued that “to love something is to be committed to its existence, to not admit, inasmuch as one is able, the possibility of a universe where that object is absent” (p. 6). We unblushingly declare that love for literature is one of our philosophical pillars, against the backdrop of this message of longing for and dreaming of a new and brighter, and a more equitable, familial, and supportive Mexico.

References Bybee, R. (2014). Instructional model: Personal reflections and contemporary implications. Science and Children, 51(8), 10–13. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from http:​//sch​d.ws/​hoste​d_fil​es/ca​be201​7/da/​5E%20​instr​uctio​nal%2​0Mode​l%20R​.%20B​ ybee%​20NOT​ES.pd​f Cobián, S. (2013). Apropiación de lectura en medios electrónicos e impresos de niños del programa Letras para Volar, que cursan 5to grado de una escuela pública de la Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Guadalajara, Jalisco, MX. Cooperrider, D. L., Whitney, D., & Stavros, J. M. (2008). Appreciative inquiry handbook, for leaders of change, 2nd ed. Brunswick, OH: Crown Custom Publishing. Cummins, J. (2015). Language differences that influence reading development: Instructional implications of alternative interpretations of the research evidence. In P. Afflerbach (Ed.), Handbook of individual differences in reading: Reader, text and context (pp. 223–44). New York, NY: Routledge.

Mexico

115

Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. The School Journal, 54(3), 77–80. Fijalkow, F., Fijalkow, E., & Franco, M. (2017). ¿Leer es un placer? Una evaluación del programa Letras para Volar. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Freire, P. (1969). La educación como práctica de libertad. México City, Mexico: Siglo XXI. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogía del oprimido. México City, Mexico: Siglo XXI. Freire, P. (1981). La importancia del acto de leer. Congreso Brasileño de lectura, Campinas, Sao Paulo, BR. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https​://pe​rio.u​nlp.e​ du.ar​/cate​dras/​syste​m/fil​es/la​_impo​rtanc​ia_de​l_act​o_de_​leer.​pdf Gayol, Y., & Rosas Chávez, P. (2017). Fundamentos teóricos para la lectura y la escritiura. In P. Rosas Chávez (ed.), Lectoescritura. Análisis y experiencias (pp. 103‒15). Guadalajara, Jalisco, México: Universidad de Guadalajara, Letras para Volar y Red Universitaria de Universidades Lectoras. ISBN 978 607 742 780 3. Gómez, S. (2014). Evaluación de procesos del programa de fomento a la lectura “Letras para Volar” en escuelas primarias de la Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Guadalajara, Jalisco, MX. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Vintage. Harré, R., & Van Langenhove, L. (1999). Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Hirvonen, P. (2016). Positioning theory and small-group interaction: Social and task positioning in the context of joint decision-making. SAGE Open, 1–15. Retrieved June 18, 2019, from https​://jo​urnal​s.sag​epub.​com/d​oi/pd​f/10.​1177/​21582​44016​ 65558​4 Illich, I. (1970). La sociedad desescolarizada. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Godot. Jolibert, J., & Gloton, R. (2003). El poder de leer: Técnicas, procedimientos y orientaciones para la enseñanza y aprendizaje de la lectura. Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Gedisa. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Manguel, A. (March 30, 2007). El lector y su doble. Cátedra Latinoamericana Julio Cortázar, Universidad de Guadalajara. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from www.j​ corta​zar.u​dg.mx​/site​s/def​ault/​files​/Mang​uel.p​df Manguel, A. (2010). Mientras embalo mi biblioteca: Una elegía y diez discreciones. Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial. Manguel, A. (2014). Una historia de la lectura. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Mendoza, L., Padilla, M., & Franco, M. (2016). Estrategias didácticas para la apropiación de la lectura: Educación media superior. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Milner-Barry, S. (December 1, 2015). The term “Mother Nature” reinforces the idea that both women and nature should be subjugated. Quartz. Retrieved February 17, 2019,

116

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

from https​://qz​.com/​56283​3/the​-term​-moth​er-na​ture-​reinf​orces​-the-​idea-​that-​both-​ women​-and-​natur​e-sho​uld-b​e-sub​jugat​ed/ Ortega, J. (1940). Estudios sobre el amor. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Espasa-Calpe. Pasztory, E. (1983). Aztec art. New York, NY: Abrams. Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (2008). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rosas, P. (2017a). Caja de letras: Juegos para el fortalecimiento del español. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Rosas, P. (2017b). Amoxtli. Capacitación para promotores de lectura. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Rosas, P., & Tadeo, A. (2017). Estrategias didácticas para la apropiación de la lectura. Educación primaria. Primera parte. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Rosas, P., & Tadeo, A. (2018). Estrategias didácticas para la apropiación de la lectura. Educación primaria. Segunda parte. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Russell, B. (1988). El panorama de la ciencia. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Lord Cochrane. Smagorinsky, P. (2001). If meaning is constructed, what is it made from? Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 133–69. Toledo, V. (1991). México diverso: Un libro como espejo. Ciencias, 23(1), 62–63. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from http:​//www​.revi​staci​encia​s.una​m.mx/​image​s/sto​ ries/​Artic​les/2​3/CNS​02312​.pdf

Part 2

Social and Cognitive Issues in Literacy Education

118

4

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education What Matters in Learning How Language is Used in Social Settings Patricia Córdova Abundis

This chapter focuses on how the discipline of linguistics can benefit literacy educators in helping students navigate an increasingly complex discursive and symbolic world. Linguistics refers to the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. There is no single “linguistics.” Rather, linguists sort themselves into a set of subfields that take different approaches to understanding how languages are constructed and how communicative systems work, including those that involve more than words. These fields include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, applied linguistics, and others. This chapter makes no effort to review each of these areas of inquiry and analysis or relate them to this volume’s purpose. Rather, it is concerned with situating language study within the broader project of developing a literate Mexican society through a newly conceived literacy education degree program. In the degree program featured in this volume, literacy education needs to have a practical emphasis. This focus means that the linguistic knowledge included in the program needs to have applied usage that takes into account historical means of communication, situated communicative practices, psychological factors involved in both producing and consuming comprehensible texts, and other utilitarian issues that, while practical, are also deeply theoretical. It thus includes elements of several of the subfields that now concern linguists. What it does not undertake is the sort of abstract, syntactic breakdown that was central to linguistics’ founding structuralist endeavor of understanding the systematic construction of a language, independent of how people use language

120

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

to make sense of the world. It thus eschews attention to the minutiae of sentence formation, unless that attention can produce insights into how to engage with society as a literate, civic participant. This functional, rather than structural, approach is central to the social justice orientation of Letras para Volar. A social justice education provides learners with tools for both learning academic skills (analysis, narrative, description, historicizing, etc.) and learning how to apply them critically to social inequities. Simply learning how to break sentences and discourses into component parts produces an understanding of the language itself as an abstract entity. That emphasis presumes that the language is a discrete system worthy of study, regardless of how people put it into play. The applied approach taken in this program relies on an understanding of how people adapt these abstractions to situated use, and how various status markers are associated with using different variants of a language in different communities of practice. These status issues are often at the heart of how injustices are produced through the privileging of particular discourses. People who wish to develop a repertoire of communicative competencies thus benefit from understanding how certain structures of speech have consequences for becoming a respected speaker in a variety of contexts, a flexibility that multiplies one’s prospects for being affirmed and succeeding in a host of social and cultural settings. This chapter begins with attention to language itself, addresses the social consequences of different ways of speaking and writing in different contexts, considers how speech functions in oral and conventional print texts, and finally addresses how linguistics may inform an understanding of expression, representation, and communication in online environments.

From Language Systems to Language Use Languages are systems of algorithmic bases in which it is possible to establish a finite set of operations—a “standard” form of a language—but whose combinations are theoretically infinite. This idea led Chomsky (2006) to consider the possibility of an inherent universal grammar that provides the template upon which all languages are learned. These deep elemental structures of all languages manifest themselves in the superficial structures of each language. Chomsky (2008) argues that a series of biological conditions leads individuals to acquire a language: “We define ‘universal grammar’ [UG] as the system of principles, conditions and rules that are elements or properties of all human

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

121

languages, not just by accident, but by necessity; naturally, I refer to biological not logical necessity. Thus, it can be said that UG expresses ‘the essence of all human languages’” (p. 32). To Chomsky (2006), differences between languages are accidental, since they share a universal foundation with a biological basis. Chomsky refers to a language’s hidden architecture as the “invisible simple,” its system and its subsystems. This shared internal mechanism, he argued, relies on a set of factors inherent to the development of any language in the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic realms. Chomsky's linguistic studies assume the universal nature of cognition and its processes, a belief that has been challenged by those from social paradigms who reject universal, biological conceptions of mentation (e.g., Greenhill et al., 2017). Chomsky’s (2017) claim that “the capacity for language depends on the common biological legacy” (p. 33) thus has met with skepticism among many who do not see biology as the central issue in human development, focusing instead on socialization to cultural practices (Cole, 1996). Despite questions about the universality of an inborn disposition to overlay a language on a universal grammatical cognitive structure, Chomsky’s work remains relevant. Whether or not grammar has a universal, inherently human basis, Chomsky (2017) asserted that language is a finite system with infinite capacity, which may be possible with or without humanity-wide universals. These capacities and how they develop are a function of the social surroundings of learning to speak, a premise available in Vygotsky’s (1987) assertion that human thinking is social in origin. In this conception, people may have a basic shared biological makeup, but how that makeup, especially its mental faculties, develops is a consequence of the specific sorts of people, practices, conventions, values, institutions, and other social dimensions they engage with as they mature from infancy to adulthood toward the “higher mental functions” that a culture promotes. One can accept the fact that language possibilities are infinite whether or not one accepts the premise of an inborn mechanism that provides the grammar of language. Chomsky questions the assertion that the main function of language is communication, which he considers to be a human invention. Language also structures internal thinking through which worldviews are developed and carried out. Here he is consistent with Vygotsky (1987), whose conception of “inner speech” posits that people learn how to use language socially to begin with, then appropriate speech conventions for use in private cognition that has no externally communicative function until the person speaks to or produces texts for another. Syntax, the combining of simple and complex sentences, enables

122

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

ordered thinking, no matter how sophisticated the idea. This understanding can lead to improper social judgments when a dominant grammatical structure is viewed as having superior cognitive benefits. For example, in the United States, African American English follows a coherent systematic set of principles, yet is viewed by many White people in the United States as inferior and associated with faulty thinking (Harris & Schroeder, 2013). There remain linguists who study language as abstract systems (e.g., Bennett & Elfner, 2018), focusing on parsing them into interrelated component parts. However, the literacy education program outlined in this volume assumes that knowing the systemic nature of language, and how this structure manifests broader social ideologies, is not a sufficient object of study (Barthes, 1967). Labov (1983) argues that language structures only take on meaning in social use. Sociolinguistics, which is concerned with language-in-use, aims to find the patterns that characterize usage within linguistic communities. The applied knowledge emphasized in this literacy education program follows from this assumption that linguistic knowledge needs to account for everyday speech usage, and not be primarily concerned with structural analysis in and of itself.

The Relational Dimension of Oral and Written Speech Intersubjectivity refers to the manner in which two people share an interpretation of a social situation, including those involving speech (Verhagen, 2005). For a speaker and listener to have mutual understanding of the situation, they require either similar sorts of socialization or a disposition to take on the perspective of the other and interpret the situation in a mutually agreeable way. This stance enables the participants to rely on similar assumptions and communicative means in interpreting spoken language, to fill in the gaps that oral speech may produce in ways that are consistent with one another’s intentions. In contrast, written speech makes fewer assumptions about reader-writer relationships, and requires more explication for readers and writers to reach a state that Nystrand (1986) describes as being “in tune” with one another. Intersubjectivity is often implicitly available when speakers share cultural backgrounds, but needs to be produced deliberately when they do not. A literacy education program needs to account for the ways in which speech has this very social dimension and requires much more than a knowledge of linguistic structure for understanding. It relies on participants’ ability to take on the perspective of

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

123

cultural others to increase the chances for mutual understanding. Language use is not static, but subject to human interpretation involving inferences based on the degree to which mutually shared understandings of how language embodies meaning are available. Variations in how people speak do not threaten a language’s sustainability over time. They do, however, help to situate a speaker or listener culturally. What matters to the literacy educator is how people communicate through speech, not whether or not those communicative practices match what textbooks describe as the “standard” version of a language, one that may vary nationally. British and US English, for instance, are very similar yet involve different usages. British people may say “whilst,” for instance, whereas “while” is preferred in the United States, with “whilst” signaling a speaker’s pretentiousness, unless that speaker is British, in which case it might cue social deference to what is perceived as a higher culture. Chilean Spanish and Mexican Spanish involve similar differences. Often these different usages vary by national region and cultural group as well. Literacy education thus involves not just an understanding of a pristine textbook version of a language, but how the language varies in usage across groups, and how those differences may be interpreted. In the United States, for instance, there are “status errors” that are associated with different variations, especially when they violate official grammatical rules (Hairston, 1981). To educated people, a subject-verb disagreement in English, for instance, is constructed as a far more serious, status-lowering violation of norms than is a dangling preposition. Even so, some cultural groups have developed conventions that deliberately violate rules, such as the double-negative, which in African American speech is intended to show emphasis (e.g., “You ain’t got nothin’”) (Mehlig, 2009). Although it may involve a rule violation to those dedicated to textbook English, it is appropriate among those for whom doublenegatives provide a means of making a point forcefully. The consistency of the application of this rule has resulted in the proposal for different standards for speaking English, such as African American English (Spears, 2015), and gendered versions within those standards (Lanehart, 2009). These same principles are at work in the Spanish variants spoken throughout Mexico and the colonized world. The degree to which a means of expression has high or low status thus is a matter of how a context helps to shape impressions. A literacy education program that is responsive to an emerging context should help teachers and their students inquire into what is situationally appropriate in making social judgments about

124

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

language usage. The research on status errors centers on how highly educated people judge errors in texts, and so represents their values and the prestige they bestow on various speech conventions. Literacy educators can help teachers take a variety of perspectives on what is situationally appropriate with language use and what sorts of status follow from particular usages in various settings. A speaker of a rural or regional dialect will benefit from adapting to the norms expected in other settings, especially those involving transnational communication where a particular version of a social language and speech genre are expected. This adaptation demonstrates intellectual flexibility in code-switching, if not a higher cognitive level in speaking according to any rules of dialect. This verbal suppleness does, however, indicate social awareness and understanding of how to adapt to speak in ways that fit within local attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes. To Delpit (1995), an expanded repertoire of dialects and speech genres enables people from historically marginalized groups to adopt the codes of power in their speech. That is, they can code-switch to adapt situationally so that they speak in ways that give them access to privilege, economic opportunity, and respect within spheres of influence. To some, this sort of adaptation is culturally harmful, requiring members of low-status social and cultural groups to abandon their customs to, in US-based racial terms, “act White” and thus betray their origins (see Ogbu, 2004). This phenomenon can be extrapolated to societies where White and Black could stand for any Dominant and Marginalized groups. These matters of status, colonialization, adaptation, situational appropriateness, racialized and cultural speech patterns, and related matters should all be included in a literacy education program designed to produce a literate citizenry capable of navigating a variety of settings to their satisfaction and prosperity. These navigations can include disruptions that may or may not be deliberate, as when, in 2019, newly elected US Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat and the first Palestinian–American elected to Congress, said at a public event, “We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!” in reference to President Donald J. Trump. This speech violated established discursive traditions of speaking according to conventions of courtesy in public office, yet may, in turn, serve to deconstruct those norms and shift them toward what many consider to be profane means of expression. Norms thus produce expectations but not rules, and all evolve organically in relation to manners of usage and issues of power in who determines what is and is not appropriate situationally.

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

125

Linguistics and Oral Communication How people speak can produce a variety of consequences for the speaker’s ability to communicate clearly, gain listeners’ attention and respect, make points, and otherwise create impressions that add or detract value from the content of expression through the social acceptance of the utterance. This knowledge can undoubtedly be accumulated without the formal study of language among those who can adapt to speech norms situated in discourse communities, even as such language use can be explained in very technical ways. For instance, linguists assert that a phoneme acquires meaning when it is pronounced in one way or another, but within the system it also takes on meaning when it is combined with other phonemes to form a morpheme. In Spanish, the morpheme ando/iendo (equivalent to ing in English) signifies movement at that time and may be used to form gerunds in Spanish, as in Me gusta jugando básquetbol (I like playing basketball). By combining morphemes, a speaker can form words by derivation, composition, or parasynthesis. Few people who are not professional linguists could provide such a syntactic analysis, yet people speak competently every day with no formal knowledge of language structures at all. Relying on experiential knowledge from engaging with oral and written speech, they might coin new words, or new styles with which to say them: carpool (composition), bromance (derivation), limo (shortening). They may engage in translanguaging (see Introduction) by speaking Spanglish or mixing vernaculars in thought or speech. Often young people, or new members of a community of speakers, generate the greatest number of neologisms (Stojičić, 2004), and young people rarely possess the arcane knowledge of the professional linguist or grammarian. Literacy educators benefit from understanding that students may be “incorrect” in their language use according to their textbook, yet innovators with speech in their communicative actions. The syntax of oral speech will typically depart from that of written speech in ways that merit attention in a literacy education program. In spoken speech, 1. Sentences do not necessarily follow textbook standards for syntactic structure, such as the canonical elements of the sentence in Spanish: Subject + Verb + Objects + Complements. 2. Syntax may be interrupted or thrown off by repetition or by fillers that are designed to reinforce meaning. Fillers in English include “you know” and “you see.” Spanish includes fillers such as pues, equivalent to the English filler word “well . . . ” used to open a sentence to show indecisiveness (see Greenwald, 2019, for a more extensive list).

126

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

3. In the formation and relationships among clauses in spoken syntax, there may be an increase of coordination or juxtaposition (e.g., the use of conjunctions to produce compound sentences) over subordination (e.g., the inclusion of dependent clauses to produce complex sentences). 4. In Spanish, dislocations or hanging topics (the unusual movement of direct objects toward the beginning of the sentence) may be employed in ways that might appear awkward in writing. In English, this phenomenon is demonstrated by the Star Wars character Yoda’s reliance on such phrasings as “When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?” Oral syntax that includes these grammatical structures, however, is not disordered or unsystematic. It has structural elements so that listeners can follow the message or train of thought. Oral speech lacks the referential quality of a written text that can be reread, and so repetition and reiteration may be appropriate. The speaker also typically has an audience who gives cues that signify how the message has come across, which, in turn, signals to the savvy speaker what means of clarification are necessary. For both speaker and listener, nonverbal cues may contribute significantly to how effectively the two are communicating. Narbona (1995) has called oral syntax “a parceled syntax,” in which the speaker seems to proceed in a rhythm of approximation and error, yet still weaves the words into a coherent idea. Glossematics refers to the analysis of the distribution and interrelationship among the smallest linguistic units (words, stems, grammatical elements, intonations, or word order) that signify meaning. Hjelmslev (1974) asserts that these elements are so seamlessly woven into the fabric of written and spoken speech that they serve as “non-signs” (Durkheim, 1895), invisible yet structurally critical. Yet linguistic components in and of themselves have no meaning. They become meaningful when used socially. This book, for instance, is filled with squiggles on pages. Readers have learned that these squiggles are coded for particular sounds, and are bundled into “words” and “sentences” and longer texts that follow conventional, invented rules in the language system they are designed to represent. Words and sentences and longer texts, in turn, are comprised of smaller entities that similarly have no inherent meaning. All of these phenomena are social; the squiggles and their combinations have no innate meaning. Phonemes are regarded by Hjemsley and others as “building blocks” of language that may appear in countless combinations, each having significance

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

127

within the social context of usage. In Spanish, for example, the sibilant phoneme /s/ can be aspirated, and annulled as occurs in Mexico; pronounced affricately, as in Chile or Madrid; or it can be nasalized when its position is at the end of a word, as happens with some speakers from Jalisco, Mexico, of rural origin. More broadly, the “J” in Jalisco takes a Spanish pronunciation so that the state is pronounced (using conventions from English) “Halisco.” If the language were Slavic, it would be pronounced “Yalisco” (as in Sarajevo), and if in the United States, the city would follow British phonetics and sound like “Jalisco,” even as some US place names follow Spanish pronunciation conventions (e.g., San Jose is pronounced San Hose-ay). This phonetic variability follows from the speaker’s national, geographic, and cultural location in ways that suggest the speaker’s social status. Pronunciation can affect a listener’s interpretation of the speaker’s education, reliability, intelligence, or other qualities, often in stereotypical and debilitating ways. These social consequences of speaking through particular conventions are the province of a literacy education program with a social justice emphasis and the mission to promote communicative competence (Hymes, 1974) among a national citizenry. Allophones—the multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language—become significant when they are pronounced in a social context where speech conventions suggest social class affiliation. The subdiscipline of forensic linguistics aims to train specialists to identify linguistic features that reveal the regional, professional, and group origin of a speaker. Literacy educators benefit from knowing about the status associated with specific pronunciations and teaching students to understand their consequences in different social settings. Settings involving people with high levels of education or where urban dialects are spoken may privilege certain pronunciations. They may discriminate against pronunciations associated with rural communities or other social groups who lack prestige in specialized settings, whether the listeners are experts in linguistics or not. At the same time, conceivably a highly educated person would have difficulty finding acceptance among rural people because the dialect of Spanish spoken might be interpreted as elitist and alien. Hudson (1981) analyzed recordings of two British speakers, one with a rural accent and another with a London accent, reading texts with the same content. Listeners attributed greater intelligence and reliability to the urban accent. These judgments can be racialized as well. Baugh (2017), for instance, found that when he made phone calls to prospective US employers using voices that mimicked distinctive African American and Mexican American accents, “racial profiling”

128

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

led to discriminatory responses that worked against those whose speech suggests a minoritized racial identity. And once again, a speaker of “standard” English might struggle for acceptance among those to whom African American English or Spanglish is the norm. Such judgments are always situational and relative to the locus of power in social exchanges. Sociolinguistic research has shown that when there is cognitive uncertainty between two speakers, prior judgment will be made according to the speakers’ stereotypes and sociolinguistic prejudices. If listeners do not know the speaker, they are likely to rely on stereotypes to form an impression based on the speaker’s accent, pronunciation, tone, and other means of conveying socially infused meaning that originate with phonemes, themselves neutral but when in use, laden with social implications and meaning. Refraining from such linguistic prejudices requires linguistic awareness of the social meaning that allophones can imply, and a disposition to treat others equitably, itself often a function of how one has been socialized to view others (Bicchieri, Muldoon, & Sontuoso, 2018). The literacy educator benefits from knowing how phonemes acquire meaning in social usage. Acceptance or rejection of another person, based on how that person speaks, is a consequence of how one is socialized to conventions and status hierarchies. Both speaker and listener are situated within ideologies that frame their interpretations of the other. The literacy educator should be attentive to how a dialect signifies a cultural identity and thus is susceptible to stigmatization. Mexicans who pronounce strong vowels (a, e, o) as weak (i, u)—pronouncing, for example, “Istus zapatos son míos” instead of “Estos zapatos son míos”—suggest a rural origin and identity that will, in turn, prompt evaluative responses from listeners of different cultural groups. Meaning thus resides not simply in the words of a spoken or written text, but in the subtext of pronunciation, the presence of non-signs through which identities are suggested, and other people’s interpretations of those identities. A non-sign takes on meaning according to a speaker’s phonetic execution, one that imbues it with added value. The conception of language as a system of verbal signs assumes that a language is made up of nonsignificant units, those that in and of themselves convey no meaning. The systematic combination of linguistic components, however, is only of interest to the abstract linguist. What matters to literacy educators is how linguistics is applied in real communication events, how words take on meaning in usage, and how the context of usage suggests identities, ideologies, and other sociocultural facets of being human.

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

129

Oral speech, when not heavily rehearsed or read from a written text, has a spontaneous, emergent character that allows for errors and omissions that can be repaired on the fly, often in relation to cues provided by a listener. It may involve “structural limping”: when a speaker’s phrasing seems to suffer structurally or syntactically, yet the context enables a listener to make sense of the utterance by filling in gaps. Its extemporaneous nature allows for less deliberation about crafting the ideas, the mode of expression, and the cultural formation that has produced them in a speaker. Status markers may easily emerge when speech is unplanned, and developing a degree of discipline in oral speech may be a literacy skill that matters when people hope to create specific impressions with listeners. Spontaneous oral speech is different in key regards from written speech, which is amenable to multiple readings before being submitted to readers, at least in its historic uses. Modern-day electronic communication, covered later in this chapter, may resemble oral speech in its rapid exchanges via messaging, social media, and other textual forms, and thus in its less reflective capacities. The following section addresses literacy education in relation to formal, deliberative written texts; the chapter’s final section is concerned with online communication that has this less restrained character.

Written Speech and Its Particular Demands A formal written text allows an author time to reflect on and revise its contents and form. The temporal and physical distances between writer and readers prohibit opportunities for immediate feedback and the reading of a listener’s gestural and expressive cues, which may accompany speech and help a speaker know when to repair omissions and clarify meaning. These possibilities are greater when the listener is present rather than when the exchange takes place through a medium such as a telephone, where the absence of visuals makes such cues less evident. Oral speech typically involves paralinguistic codes—that is, non-lexical forms of expression such as gestures and intonation—that are employed to convey meaning; and speakers may repeat themselves to reinforce their intentions. Such measures are not necessary, and might appear redundant, in written speech, because the text’s permanence enables a reader to reread any portion of it. Presumably, a written text and its opportunities for reflection and revision imbue it with greater intended meaning than oral speech might, even as writers

130

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

and speakers alike can misunderstand how their expression may be interpreted by others. This redundancy in written texts might be deliberate, however, when ideas are complex and bear repeating (Horning, 1991). This chapter, for instance, includes the repetition of key ideas as a means of reinforcement, and many points are repeated across the chapters of the volume, both for deliberate redundancy and to accommodate readers who don’t read every chapter. Ideally, these redundancies will not suggest inattentive editing of one’s own writing, as Van der Veer (1997) observes in translating Vygotsky, whose texts were filled with repetition and reiteration to reinforce difficult concepts, or perhaps suggest an indifference to his readers’ needs. But not all texts are meant to be read for clear information or sincere cultural narratives. Social cohesion may be undermined when texts are constructed to destabilize, confuse, and upset social cohesion, as the phenomena of propaganda and fake news demonstrate. Although the computer purportedly ushered in a new Information Age, the simultaneous emergence of a Disinformation Age designed to disrupt and deceive has required a skeptical, critical stance in relation to texts. Although literacy has often been associated with intelligence (e.g., Barnes, Tager, Satariano, & Yaffe, 2004), people who never learned to read or write can be wise and smart, as ancient nonliterate people demonstrated. Yet literacy has emerged as a value in the modern world, including multiliteracies that involve semiotic systems beyond language. Life has become increasingly complex, as have the symbol systems that surround people in society. The global, cosmopolitan environment, which the media and mass transport have fostered, requires a new form of relationship between individuals and their contexts. At the same time, heritage groups in Mexico are constitutionally protected if they choose to eschew the technological revolution and rely on traditional ways of living, including how they represent ideas textually. As Belgarde, LoRé, and Meyer (2009) argue, many original people reject colonial influences, including the value on print literacy, which historically has been used in such vehicles as treaties to rob them of their lands and other assets. Societies like Mexico that house both original and colonial cultures are thus often conflicted about the role of print literacy in the conduct of both daily and historical life. Social cohesion has long been maintained by storytelling and other means, well before the stories were committed to print texts. The Greek raconteur Homer was an oral storyteller, not a novelist, whose narratives were later preserved in print; and both Spanish colonial and original Mexican narratives have historically been conveyed through a variety of means, including

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

131

oral traditions, the depiction of stories in murals and other artwork, and print texts (Pasztory, 1983; Smagorinsky, 2018). It is incumbent on the modern educator of a society with both original and colonial cultures to recognize and respect how people preserve their ways and means, and to understand literacy broadly and democratically. These values may dignify the lives of people who wish to adhere to their historical social values while also helping others to develop the most refined understandings of language use and their role within semiotic means so as to navigate their environments with confidence and satisfaction. Understanding the potentially fraudulent messaging of texts, such as the manner in which contracts with “fine print” have been constructed to deceive and exploit, and the more recent phenomenon of “deepfake” videos that allow everyday people to produce Hollywood special effects to misrepresent reality, remains important as new forms of deception become available. Toward this end, understanding linguistic structure is beneficial but insufficient. Rather, such constructs as communicative competence within sociocultural contours are important to grasp as part of educational growth and social competency. Literacy educators thus must do more than encourage the study of syntax. They must get more specifically at how syntax—itself not meaningful—produces meaningful expression when combined with other communicative practices, and how those practices may be differentially interpreted and understood by people from different cultural perspectives. These factors are at work in both spoken and written speech. Tusón (1989) argues that a language’s lexicon is important, given that historical and social changes are manifested essentially in the vocabulary of a language, while syntax remains relatively constant, even as most languages are expressed through a variety of dialects that involve both terminological and syntactic variation and developments. Written texts create demands on readers because of their deliberate crafting and calculated structure and intended meanings, often in ways that manifest both linguistic and ideational complexity. Even this calculation can send unanticipated messages, such as when a twentyfirst-century writer relies on masculine pronouns to signify humanity, indicating an embedded paternalism at what might be an unconscious level. Spontaneous speech, except perhaps from the minds and mouths of a language’s most articulate people, in contrast, may rely on more rapid orchestrations of elements that, in turn, make fewer contemplative demands on listeners. In Spanish, for instance, subordination such as the inclusion of modifying clauses is likely in writing but less common in spontaneous speech. Language systems thus manifest themselves

132

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

in different ways depending on the channel it uses (orality or writing), on the style that is required according to the communicative situation, and on how the speaker’s socialization and other demographic variables contribute to identity and an accompanying social persona. Oral and written speech thus involve more than the organization of syntactically related words. Social factors suggest appropriate meanings associated with collections of words and how they may be interpreted in specific contexts. The interpretation of a lexical variant is carried out in a border area where meaning is related to the world of referents, of things and environments of use that provide nuance to the meaning itself. The abstract linguist might be concerned with the placement of words in relation to one another, irrespective of the setting of use. The literacy educator is more concerned, however, with meanings in contextualized usage: How does this expression take on meaning in terms of the construction of sentences and texts? How do others interpret this meaning in light of their own linguistic socialization? How does intersubjectivity contribute to mutual understanding? How do different modes of expression affect how one is interpreted from situation to situation? In both written and oral texts, lexical variation suggests the social, historical, and cultural affiliation of the speaker. Profession, educational level, gender, geographical origin, age, and time period can all be inferred through a speaker’s lexicon, phrasings, and manner of expression. At the same time, a speaker or writer can create a persona suggesting an identity as a way to mask intentions. These social impressions can be produced in both oral and written speech. In a world of many possibilities, people may use hybrid dialects through which they hope to manufacture intersubjectivity with other speakers and those who are privy to their exchanges. A literacy education program should thus go beyond linguistic analysis of spoken and written texts, and attend more to how meaning is constructed by both speakers and readers/listeners in relation to a host of social signals that accompany the combination of words into longer speech units. This attention should further include an understanding of how personas may be fabricated to achieve duplicitous ends in a world in which myriad possibilities for fraud and deception are available and continually being expanded. Syntax itself lacks emotion, yet much human expression is fundamentally emotional, suggesting that linguistic analysis in a literacy education program must go beyond the study of language as an abstract system subject to structural violations in use. Emotions have been found to be central to how people think; “reason” tends to follow emotion, rather than bypass it for clarity (Haidt, 2012). Through the pushing of emotional buttons, logic can be bypassed altogether and

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

133

responses may be invited through terms and images that allow for manipulation and for such deceptions as propaganda to succeed. When a speaker can achieve a feeling of intersubjectivity with listeners and readers, the resulting sense of familiarity and affiliation may contribute to a message’s persuasiveness and impact. A literacy education program should address these possibilities to help teachers prepare their students for the complex world they will enter, one filled with potential traps and shams. Knowing the rhetorical tricks through which this messaging is created is of immense importance to people in a world in which treachery is common, and should be central to a literacy education. The appreciation of styles when language is used has given rise to pragmatic analyses and discourse analysis, which mutually inform one another whether it is directed to spoken or written speech. The pragmatic stance analyzes forms of intercommunication that occur in specific situations: courtesy, insults, orders, invitations, communicative intentions that contrast with what has been said; they are all schemes through which pragmatic analysis develops. Discourse analysis has focused on the social and ideological predisposition of those who speak and those who listen. Discourse analysis is thus concerned more broadly with ideologies and identities than with the particulars of smaller speech units. Traditionally, language education has focused more on linguistic structure than on meaning, deception, ideology, political intentions, and other deeper sociocultural factors in how words convey meaning. A useful literacy education program attends to each function, with a focus on meaning so that linguistic knowledge has the potential to enhance both communication and the interpretation of other people’s expressions.

Literacy in Online Spaces Online spaces have produced unique means of using speech that are continually growing (Marwick & Boyd, 2010). These environments include processes that emerged from print-text speech, but that have expanded well beyond the traditional confines of writing on paper. Literacy educators need to develop competencies in their students that enable them to address a connected, global world in which the online media provide discourses through which ideas and ideologies are embodied. A literacy education program needs to help teachers identify the manner in which people use online discourses to represent and misrepresent the world, and develop pedagogies that help students navigate this complex and perplexing environment with authority and skill.

134

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Networked communication systems have made it possible to share digital texts instantaneously and simultaneously among millions of readers (Scolari, 2008). This complex form of textual exchange requires critical thinking to process and make sense of for everyday users and researchers as well. This online environment allows for the sharing of points and perspectives that rely on oversimplification and emotionally dominated response. Consider the verbal and other semiotic means that are involved with producing a meme, a tweet, or a post designed to advance a sociopolitical perspective. The virtual environment enables messaging that is based on disqualification, segregation, and polarization of social groups, and on the rousing of emotions through images and high-impact words. Propaganda and disinformation are not new phenomena, but have achieved new potentials given the ways in which the internet can spread messages in the manner of a brushfire: fast, furious, and far-reaching. The origin of this problem is the culture of the ephemeral, of the simultaneous, and of the rapid, in conjunction with highly emotional political environments that create polarized views and expression that are amenable to the distortions of a virtual reality. In this environment, literacy studies aim at explaining how the reading and writing of myriad sorts of texts function, the importance of knowing how to read them, and how twenty-first-century individuals can develop critical faculties through reading and writing. This knowledge is essential if people are to navigate this volatile environment of verbal waste, where the risk of being swept away by the social tide of deliberately crafted stereotypes is real. The strategic identification of emotional triggers through words and other symbols has enabled the manipulation of the new digital masses of internet users. These triggers appear in an environment where form often matters more than content. Judgments, information, and linguistic stereotypes are trafficked through such means as fake news, the essential purpose of which is to establish polarizing, superficial arguments amplified by friction between social groups that, in turn, gives these messages an emotional rush in a virtual world driven by speed and vertigo. A literacy education program needs to attend to the consequences of living in a liquid modernity (Bauman, 2015), in which rapid change is the norm. It further must engage with the possibility that societies now have reached an “age of emptiness” (Lipovetsky, 2002) characterized by a shift away from ideals predicated on the idea that an ideology (e.g., feminism) or critical method (e.g., poststructuralism) can produce widespread human emancipation. This grand idealism has been replaced in this conception with the hope that committed individuals can effect smaller changes through concerted action. Simply, then, including readings of Karl Marx, Judith Butler, and Paolo

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

135

Freire in a literacy education program will not produce cultural revolution and a just society, even as these texts may help to provoke discussion and reflection that may create some movement toward those ends. In this sense, language conventions are part of a rapidly changing world that requires linguistic adaptations to new social conceptions to embody emerging ideologies. Notions of established “standard” versions of a language—the historical province of the linguist—need to be adapted to this liquid environment and the loss of a sense of permanence it has produced. Literacy educators must understand that historical “writing comprehension practices” (Cassany, 2006, p. 38) have evolved into a broader semiotic universe. Yet, print literacy itself once served as a radical idea, one many millennia in arrears of First Literacies: the use of art and other nonverbal texts to convey cultural narratives, beginning with drawings on cave walls and extending through the modern-day street mural culture of Mexico and other societies (Smagorinsky, 2018). The online environment includes a host of nonverbal codes that require understanding and interpretation. It, no doubt, also involves what Cassany asserts are key to the reading and writing of conventional print texts: the study of the written code, an understanding of discursive genres, the roles of author and reader, forms of thought, identity and status of individuals collectively and as a community, and attention to values and cultural representations. Conceiving of literacy as an area of study suggests abandoning the classical separation of disciplines such as grammar, philosophy, linguistics, philology, sociology, and anthropology in order to return to a comprehensive grasp of the facts of language that includes understanding textual genres, the written code, and the identity that is projected in discourses. The aim of literacy studies in an era dominated by digital texts is to address contemporary issues of communication that are manifested in the use of verbal language in relation to other semiotic systems. This goal is not exclusive to literacy studies, since pragmatics, discourse analysis, educational research, communication studies, and conversational analysis involve the analysis of language. If the emerging world relies on communication within digitally mediated environments, then textual language and speech conventions, along with their accompanying symbol systems, are of primary importance for the analysis of literacy (Fairclough, 1995), without elevating linguistics to a supreme position among analytic traditions. The goal is much more modest: to show how there is an elementary knowledge that linguistics provides for the analysis of modern-day communication practices, both for speakers/writers and listeners/readers. Linguistics is to literacy studies what drawing is to painting: it provides elementary tools for recognizing the

136

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

lines, structures, perspectives, functions, and dynamics that operate under the canvas of the texts that people produce and consume.

Conclusion This chapter has made the case that linguistic knowledge can greatly inform a literacy education program. Knowing syntax contributes to this knowledge, but is insufficient in developing a civic dimension in education. The use of speech conventions relies on systemic restrictions that enable mutual understanding, and creative freedom that enables linguistic variety through which cultural identities may be expressed. Speech conventions can also mask real intentions when deception is the goal. Learning how to read other people’s spoken and written texts, and the social investment of meaning that motivate them, thus is central to being literate. This learning includes understanding the regularities of speech that occur in specific contexts so as to infer unspoken meanings, a feature of conversational analysis. What is potentially perilous about deducing meaning from speech patterns, however, is a misreading of contexts and configurations and assigning intentions when people might be invoking other discursive traditions from those produced and, thus, anticipated by the speakers (Shelton & Smagorinsky, 2017). Language itself may be only one of many expressive means employed by a speaker, who may include other elements: hand gestures and facial expressions when speaking, the use of fonts and accompanying images when writing. Ultimately, a literacy education program should emphasize the constant tension between system and variation and the social factors involved in both producing and responding to texts and linguistic events.

References Barnes, D. E., Tager, I. B., Satariano, W. A., & Yaffe, K. (2004). The relationship between literacy and cognition in well-educated elders. Journal of Gerontology, 59A(4), 390–95. Barthes, R. (1967). Writing degree zero (A. Lavers & C. Smith, Trans.). London, UK: Jonathan Cape. Baugh, J. (2017). Linguistic profiling and discrimination. In O. García, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and society (pp. 349–68). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Linguistic Knowledge and Literacy Education

137

Bauman, Z. (2015). Liquid life. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós. Belgarde, M. J., LoRé, R. K., & Meyer, R. (2009). American Indian adolescent literacy. In L. Christenbury, R. Bomer, & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Handbook of adolescent literacy research (pp. 415–30). New York, NY: Guilford. Bennett, R., & Elfner, E. (2018). The syntax–prosody interface. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 151–71. Bicchieri, C., Muldoon, R., & Sontuoso, A. (2018). Social norms. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved January 18, 2019, from https​://pl​ato.s​tanfo​rd.ed​u/ent​ries/​ socia​l-nor​ms/#E​arlTh​eoSoc​i Cassany, D. (2006). Tras las líneas. Barcelona, Spain: Anagrama. Chomsky, N. (2006). Language and mind. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (2008). Lenguaje, sociedad y cognición. México City, Mexico: Trillas. Chomsky, N. (2017). What kind of creatures are we? Barcelona, Spain: Ariel. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The New Press. Durkheim, E. (1895/1982). The rules of sociological method. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. New York, NY: Longman. Greenhill, S. J., Wu, C.-H., Hua, X., Dunn, M., Levinson, S. C., & Gray, R. D. (2017). Evolutionary dynamics of language systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(42), E8822–29. Greenwald, H. (2019). Fill in the gaps: 13 common Spanish filler words you’ve gotta learn. FluentU Spanish Language and Culture Blog. Retrieved July 9, 2019, from https​ ://ww​w.flu​entu.​com/b​log/s​panis​h/spa​nish-​fille​r-wor​ds/ Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Vintage. Hairston, M. (1981). Not all errors are created equal: Nonacademic readers in the professions respond to lapses in usage. College English, 43, 794–806. Harris, Y. R., & Schroeder, V. M. (2013). Language deficits or differences: What we know about African American Vernacular English in the 21st Century. International Education Studies, 6(4), 194–204. Hjelmslev, L. (1974). Prolegomena to a theory of language. Madrid, Spain: Gredos. Horning, A. (1991). Readable writing: The role of cohesion and redundancy. Journal of Advanced Composition, 11(1), 135–45. Hudson, R. A. (1981). La sociolingüística. Barcelona, Spain: Anagrama. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. (1983). Modelos sociolingüísticos. Madrid, Spain: Cátedra. Lanehart, S. L. (Ed.) (2009). African American women’s language: Discourse, education, and identity. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

138

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Lipovetsky, G. (2002). La era del vacío: Ensayos sobre el individualismo contemporáneo. Barcelona, Spain: Anagrama. Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1) 114–33. Mehlig, M. (2009). “I don’t want no double negation!”: Negative constructions in African American Vernacular English. Munich, Germany: GRIN Academic Publishing. Narbona, A. (1995). Español coloquial y variación lingüística. In El español coloquial. Actas del I Simposio sobre análisis del discurso oral (pp. 31–42). Almería, Spain: Universidad de Almería. Nystrand, M. (1986). The structure of written communication: Studies in reciprocity between writers and readers. Orlando, FL: Academic. Ogbu, J. (2004). Collective identity and the burden of “acting White” in Black history, community, and education. The Urban Review, 36(1), 1–35. Pasztory, E. (1983). Aztec art. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Scolari, C. (2008). Hipermediaciones. México City, Mexico: Gedisa. Shelton, S. A., & Smagorinsky, P. (2017). Conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and teacher identity construction in interviews. In S. A. Mirhosseini (Ed.), Reflections on qualitative research in language and literacy education (pp. 121–35). New York, NY: Springer. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Literacy in teacher education: “It’s the context, stupid.” Journal of Literacy Research, 50(3), 281–303. Spears, A. K. (2015). African American Standard English. In J. Bloomquist, L. J. Green, & S. J. Lanehart (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (pp. 786–99.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Stojičić, V. (2004). Sociolinguistic stimuli to development of the English lexicon: Language contact and social need. Facta Universitatis, Series in Linguistics and Literature, 3(1), 29–36. Tusón, J. (1989). El lujo del lenguaje. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós. Van der Veer, R. (1997). Translator’s foreword and acknowledgements. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (Vol. 3: Problems of the theory and history of psychology) (R. W. Rieber & J. Wollock, Eds.; R. van der Veer, Trans., pp. v–vi). New York, NY: Plenum. Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructions of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax, and cognition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (vol. 1, pp. 39–285) (R. Rieber & A. Carton, Eds.; N. Minick, Trans.). New York, NY: Plenum.

5

Literacies and Everyday Life A Reflection from Teaching Practice Patricia Cisneros Hernandez

In this chapter I describe how the graduate program in literacy education at the University of Guadalajara seeks to disrupt long-standing instructional traditions that are reliant on rote learning and the presentation of information in abstract, impersonal, emotionally sterile ways. The program’s focus instead encourages teachers to build on students’ home and community knowledge to make school learning vibrant, relevant, and engaging. Letras par Volar’s programs adapt Freire’s precept that “For someone who knows to be able to teach someone who doesn’t know, it is necessary that the teacher knows he1 doesn’t know everything, and that the learner knows he doesn’t ignore everything.” Reconceiving school practice requires the reinvention of teacher education to help teachers shake off the enculturation from their own schooling and adopt new, student-centered, activity-oriented pedagogies. This chapter reviews the current state of education in Mexico, including its low rankings in international comparisons. I also propose pedagogical reforms that may or may not change the test scores that these comparisons are based on, but should make school a more dynamic learning environment for both students and teachers.

Putting Mexican School Achievement to the Test Test-based assessments of achievement in Mexican schools present a dim view of the nation’s educational system. The International Commission on Education, I retain the language of the original in spite of the paternalism it suggests in the twenty-first century, even as Freire’s phrasings have long been criticized as patriarchal (e.g., hooks, 1993).

1

140

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Equity and Economic Competitiveness in Latin America and the Caribbean (CIEECEALC) reports that “The future is at stake” (1998) and that the region is “falling behind” (2001) in testing measures. The independent Advisory Council (2006) reported that education in these countries provides “Quantity without quality” and concluded that Latin American schools are not sufficiently educating the youth in the region. The Advisory Council (2006) also identified four key issues that cause gaps in quality, quantity, and equity of education in Latin America: a lack of standards in required learning and a dearth of performance evaluations, a lack of authority and accountability for results at the school level, a low quality of teaching, and an inadequate investment in primary and secondary education. The Council further noted a growing gap between official rhetoric and school practices. Its report acknowledged that the majority of Latin American countries have made progress in certain respects (increased investment, consolidation of national evaluation systems, definition of standards, delegation of authority and responsibility, etc.) without improving quality, equity, and efficiency. Mexican students, according to the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, perform poorly in academic measures of success. PISA evaluates and monitors trends in the knowledge and skills of students, and presents results of their performance based on scores in science, mathematics, and reading for fifteen-year-olds at the secondary or preparatory level. Schools and students participating in the test are chosen at random, and the results neither prove to be statistically significant at the local level for participating schools nor evaluate a student’s knowledge holistically, as each participant only answers one portion of the full test. Additionally, PISA seeks to identify the extent to which young people are able to show their skills in a range of different contexts (personal, local/national, or global). In mathematical literacy, PISA measures students’ ability to formulate, use, and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. It includes mathematical reasoning and use of concepts, procedures, data, and mathematical tools to describe, explain, and predict phenomena. The reading test assesses the extent to which fifteen-year-olds understand, use, reflect on, and are interested in written texts, whether within or outside a school environment. These organizations measure logical-mathematical, scientific, and linguistic performances. The arts, inter- and intrapersonal relationships, and ecological or environmental education are neither assessed nor emphasized, and so presumably are viewed as incidental to learning and achievement.

Literacies and Everyday Life

141

Questions remain regarding whether raising test scores will improve the economy, or whether adopting educational policies from nations whose test scores top the lists will either boost Mexican students’ scores or improve the national economy. More comprehensively and substantially, Mexico needs to seek long-term strategies that are designed to improve educational services, and to guarantee that graduates are provided with the necessary practical and technological skills for their careers. This emphasis requires educational reform involving teachers, students, and administrators that provide students with essential skills that face the demands of the twenty-first century. Students need proficiencies that include facility with new technologies and an understanding of the relation between school learning and the needs of their daily lives. This growing technological awareness is among the features of the Guadalajaran educational reform effort, linked to students’ personal lives and the role that digital communication plays in them.

Reading and Technology Reading allows learning inside and outside school, and helps develop ways of thinking and being in society. Advances in digital information and communications technology will change the medium but not the imperative to be literate (Coll, 2005). Unlike print texts, screens do not always provide linearly structured texts. Rather, readers proceed according to certain principles of relevance that allow them to construct meaning. The screen trains the readers depending on their uses, functions, and purposes (Kress, 2003). One of the greatest challenges teachers face in this digital environment is to develop critical readers and writers who know how to select and filter information, analyze textual veracity and rigor, interpret texts, and use tools to produce their own texts. Digital technology has produced unprecedented changes in the form of circulation, processing, and appropriation of information and knowledge. Contemporary literacy practices have experienced rapid changes that educators must face with ingenuity and responsibility. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Mexico is a country of nonreaders, ranking 106 out of 107 countries. Mexicans tend to abandon regular reading after finishing their university studies. A nonreader’s learning potential is compromised, because reading can foster the development of higher-order cognitive skills

142

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

such as making inferences, relating, reflecting, developing critical thinking, and collaborating in the formation of democratic and participatory societies. The development of technology and different media requires educators to expand the concept of reading. Depending on the situation and the resources, people may read quickly and out of order. Traditional print literacy works in conjunction with a variety of reading practices on mobile phones and other digital devices. If technological changes are leading to the modification of the concept of reading, reading needs to be understood as a sociocultural act (Cassany, 2004). Academic writing also needs to be modified. Students tend not to write so much on paper anymore. They, instead, take pictures with their cell phones at presentations or edit with word processors that provide different typefaces. They rely on apps to draw and incorporate drawing into their schoolwork with great quality, and to produce tables, design pages, check their spelling, and take advantage of other affordances that offload cognitive demands to technological tools. Learning thus has shifted from developing strategies for remembering information, to learning how to operate technology that stores information. These instruments modify the ways to create, build, and transmit knowledge, and help build bridges between classroom knowledge and everyday life. De Pablos (2010) argues that digital technologies require universities to develop new teaching procedures responsive to the needs of living and learning in a digital society, an imperative we have adopted.

Literacies and Daily Life Educators have often sought to establish links from school to everyday experiences, and the digital age has provided new ways to foster relations between the two. At the University of Guadalajara, we have developed a course called Literacies and Daily Life as part of the Master’s degree in Literacy at the Center of Art, Architecture and Design to explore how everyday literacies can serve as tools for learning and constructing meaning. This section details features of this course as part of a broader effort to reinvent teacher education in the Guadalajaran cultural context.

Key Terms According to Cassany (2006), the singular literacy is linked with the alphabet and connotes a mechanical conception of reading and writing related to formal

Literacies and Everyday Life

143

education. This perspective suggests that those who cannot read print texts are illiterate, uneducated, and ignorant. Like Cassany, Street (1995), Vargas (2015), and others, we use the plural literacies, which suggests a variety of literacies in various forms of texts and media. In the Literacies and Daily Life course, this concept links education to everyday literacy practices, serving as a bridge between knowledge acquired in school and how people use knowledge in everyday life. We define everyday literacies, following Barton and Hamilton (1998), as the ways in which people give meaning to their lives through diverse types of texts (written, imagic, audiovisual, digital, etc.). Literacies are located in the space between thought and text, and, like all human activity, must be inherently social and connected to personal experiences to be considered meaningful. The course begins by reflecting upon and defining literacies as defined by Cassany (2006), with attention to the notions of lettered practice, text, and lettered event. Lettered practice refers to the means of using literacy, including its embodied values, attitudes, feelings, ideologies, identities, and appropriate social interactions. Text refers to any configuration of signs with communicative intent and meaning potential, situated in a particular time and cultural context and constructed from written or digital symbols as well as images, multimedia products, and cultural artifacts, in school and everyday settings (Smagorinsky, 2001). Barton and Hamilton (2005) define lettered event as an activity occurring around an interaction with reading and writing. It involves an episode that is observable, repetitive, and regular; is mediated by a text; and includes a purpose, actors, and language. To study lettered events as a means of connection between academic learning and everyday life, it is important to analyze literacy practices outside the classroom in settings that include ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

New digital cultural objects. The convergence of new and old languages and media (e.g., a graphic novel). The diversity of cultural projects, resulting from diverse thinking and based on multiculturalism. Anti-consumerism as a cultural value. The emergence of virtual communities, networks, and identities.

Course Processes and Emphases Students begin by identifying the lettered events that happen in their own lives, tracking all instances of reading and writing, starting from the most basic levels and mundane practices and distributed across the span of daily activity. Their

144

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

goal is to understand the practices related to literacy in traditional print and in any other medium available in the complex social worlds in which they are immersed. They next identify and become familiar with the different types of reading according to areas, institutions, and contexts of use such as school (e.g., academic reading and writing), administrative regulations (e.g., legal documents), religion (e.g., Biblical readings), health (e.g., prescriptions), and home (e.g., recipes, social media). In each context, the institutions involved determine and regulate the discursive genres used, the type of language expected (standard, formal, or colloquial), and the orders of discourse (Fairclough, 1992) that provide the particular social structuring of semiotic resources in a specific setting. Recruiting all areas and lettered contexts of students allows educators to achieve a holistic, emic (insider’s) view of their reading practice. A global vision, contextualized and interrelated, tries to understand what the students do from their own perspective: why they like comics or social media, what literacy means in their lives, how they integrate it in their lives, etc. Only if educators know the lettered practices of students, understand their point of view, and recognize their own beliefs can they design meaningful educational interventions into their daily lives that will be effective in practice (Hull, 2003). This global vision additionally requires expanding conceptions of reading and writing to incorporate vernacular means of communication and to take into account how the notion of “book” now includes e-books that integrate images, online resources, and much beyond the possibilities afforded by traditional print texts (Cavanaugh, 2002). This emphasis enables teachers to build a divergent view of classic literary culture, which has previously limited written expression to consecrated texts and the canon and lauded the book as the central reference point. The teachers in our program learn how to meet the demands of the present and understand that readers are hybrid and capable of understanding a book version of a classic along with its film adaptation or other format. This broadening of the concept of “the book” extends their possibilities of interacting with their students and connects learning inside and outside the classroom.

Vernacular Literacy Many teachers in Mexico have assumed that a sharp division exists between what students do in school and what they do outside school, producing a gap between the vernacular and the dominant, between literacy in the street or home and in school. In the master’s degree program, we seek to change, analyze, and

Literacies and Everyday Life

145

criticize that position. School learning is important, yet children and youth write in many ways outside school as they engage in everyday activities and participate in vernacular speech communities. Teachers’ understanding of students’ home and social worlds can help them plan meaningful instruction. Cassany (2008) defines vernacular literacies as practices that are personal, informal, flexible, free, voluntary, and personally interesting, especially for those for whom school literacy is standard, formal, rigid, and imposed. Vernacular literacy practices enable freedom and creativity and can promote new forms of literacy that have emotional, playful, and purposeful content related to meaningful social worlds. Yet vernacular literacies are often dismissed in school as unacademic and therefore inappropriate for educational purposes, in spite of the evidence that shows the role of translanguaging in learning (Makalela, 2015; see Introduction), and the role of informal speech and writing in developing ideas (Barnes, 1992). The Literacy in Everyday Life class seeks to develop analytic strategies, reflective practices, and ways to approach and comprehend the various areas in which digital, written, visual, tactile, and spoken expressions manifest in the daily lives of students. Barton and Hamilton (1998) argue that powerful social and education institutions uphold traditional literacy practices. We challenge the academic culture of school that diminishes students’ vernacular literacy practices, encouraging teachers to see the potential of their role in engaging with a variety of discourse genres and their social orientation. We aim to identify what we call Literacy in Everyday Life and find those areas that relate school learning with what students find meaningful in their daily lives. We ask: What strategies should students acquire to be good readers? What are the processes involved in learning the written language, and what teaching conditions are necessary to facilitate these processes and their connection with everyday life? Rote learning typical in school is quite different from meaningful reading or learning. Ausubel (1963) argues that meaningful learning becomes possible when students incorporate new, potentially significant information into prior knowledge. Rote learning is mimetic and may lack significance for the learner, who retains little of what is memorized for testing purposes (Tyler, 1949). Linking school learning in meaningful ways to students’ prior everyday knowledge helps both memory and application. In conventional Mexican schooling the teacher plans activities within limited resources. In the class Literacy in Everyday Life, the teachers enrolled in the course list activities that their students enjoy. This catalog allows teachers to plan instruction that enables students to connect their learning with their daily lives. The teachers report active literacy lives among the

146

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

students, particularly those considered nonreaders. A high school literature teacher, for instance, found that his students spent most of their time in front of a mobile device or on the internet, and built instruction on this foundation. He asked his students to investigate online a historical figure whose name they had seen on street signs, where they lived or walked by as they went home, such as Miguel Hidalgo or Emiliano Zapata. The teacher helped them write their own story about this person and make a small video with their mobile phone. Faculty in the literacy program provide the teachers with ethnographic works that explore the literacy practices of students who classify themselves as seldom readers. This scholarship helps them see that children and youth read actively outside school, engaging with sports journalism, chatting with friends online, writing poetry or fan fiction (see Black, 2008), and engaging in other personally satisfying literacy practices outside the bounds of traditional print books. Gee (1996) views literacy as extending beyond the ability to read and write, arguing that it includes social and ideological practices central to students’ cultural lives. We have adopted this perspective in our master’s program, seeing literacy as a plural, interrelated set of social practices. Gee recommends thinking about digital practices as teaching resources that expand the possibilities in the classroom, incorporating students’ cultural assets and funds of knowledge in instruction as the groundwork for learning about one another’s lives and about academic content. Engaging in critical reading in multimedia genres (advertising, web sites, video games, short films, etc.) is potentially as challenging, if in different ways, as critical reading of print texts. It requires analyzing the relationships among images, sounds, and words to discover their own expressive value to explore, argue, explain, describe, or narrate an understanding, or to contrast textual genres (Lemke, 2005). Buckingham (2008) asserts that the new digital divide— the old divide separated those with and without technological devices or access to the internet—occurs when there are no connections between what students learn in school and what they do outside school, where they are immersed in media. In these settings they have access to an increasingly diverse and commercial media culture that adults often find perplexing. Teachers ought to understand what students need to know about the media they consume beyond questions of technical or functional skills. To Buckingham, children and youth need to develop critical literacy that allows them to understand how information is produced, how it circulates, how it is consumed, and how it makes sense.

Literacies and Everyday Life

147

Gee (2003) notes that virtual spaces are organized from “affinity spaces” that position members around a common task without matching age, gender, or social group, as is typical in age-based school organizations. Common interests bond participants so they get to know each other and form a network as they develop advanced skills about video games. These spaces differ radically from the forms of organization of the classroom, yet might inform how schools could be reconceived to help students develop specific competencies based on common interests and affinity groups. Gee argues that gaming principles could be incorporated into school learning (see Chapter 2 for the gamification of activities in Letras para Volar): ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Interaction: Nothing happens until a player takes an action and makes decisions. Then the game reacts, responds to the player, and presents new problems. Production: Players are not just consumers but creators; they “write” and not just “read”; even at the simplest level, players co-design the games through the actions they take and decisions they make. Risk-Taking: Good games minimize the consequences of failure; players can start from the last game that they lost. Customization: Players can customize a game that suits their learning styles and gameplay. Agency: Players experience a real sense of agency, control, and membership. Well-sequenced problems: Challenges are arranged so that the initial problems allow players to formulate hypotheses to solve future problems.

These gaming principles may be appropriate in the design of activities in which the “player-student” will organize the knowledge by levels of complexity in the manner of a game, working toward realistic, challenging goals. Instruction would enable students to perform activities according to their needs, abilities, and skills.

Ausubel’s Theory of Meaningful Learning and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed Our program puts Ausubel’s (1963) theory of meaningful learning in dialogue with Freire’s (1970) critical theory to help the teachers design an educational project in conjunction with the work led by Maria Acaso and her group of teacher-researchers from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. I next outline these two keystone texts and the theories they embody.

148

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

A Rereading of Meaningful Learning Theory Ausubel (1963) presented a psychological theory of classroom learning that focuses on meaningful learning and its facilitation in schools. Ausubel addresses the complex and significant nature of verbal and symbolic learning. Teachers need to link classroom learning with the daily lives of students for learning to become meaningful. They can achieve this end by enabling new knowledge to be related to relevant prior knowledge of content and process. A teacher might provide ideas, concepts, or clear propositions that students connect to more complex ideas. This relation produces a transformation in cognitive structures, allowing the integration of progressively more differentiated, developed, and stable ideas and meaningful learning. Meaningful learning also involves knowing how to use this knowledge, requiring cognitive restructuring that allows for adaptive thinking. Ausubel (1963) asserts that for meaningful learning to occur, two conditions must obtain. The learner must adopt a strong willingness to learn meaningfully that works in conjunction with potentially significant material that maps onto the cognitive structure of the student in relation to anchoring ideas. To Ausubel the main vehicle of learning is language—an idea requiring modification in the digital age and its multimedia affordances, even as images have embodied information and narratives for many millennia (Smagorinsky, 2018)—that allows communication about concepts. Four pedagogical considerations must be accounted for: progressive differentiation, integrative reconciliation, sequential organization, and consolidation. Novak (1998) and Moreira (2009) have updated Ausubel for later eras. Novak argues that constructing meaning and building new knowledge involve thinking, emotions, and acting, requiring three processes: 1. Relevant previous knowledge: The learner must possess information that is relevant in a nontrivial way to the new information to be learned. 2. Significant material: The knowledge to be learned must be relevant and must include important concepts and propositions. 3. The apprenticeship: The student must learn in a significant way, that is, must decide in a conscious and deliberate way to establish a significant relation between new knowledge and prior knowledge. It is important that the learner develop the capacity for criticism and reflection on the contents, suggesting the potential for synthesizing learning theories with Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy. Learners need both the willingness to learn

Literacies and Everyday Life

149

and a readiness to analyze the materials presented from different perspectives in order to work actively to attribute meaning, and not merely exhibit the appearance of language knowledge. Moreira (2009) poses a subversive education, asserting that knowledge is not in books. Moreira believes that teachers have been mistaken in assuming that the reading of various authors, and paraphrasing them in front of the class—the sort of rote learning that has historically characterized Mexican education— constitutes learning. In contrast, learning involves negotiating meanings socially and posing questions instead of giving answers. Social interaction is essential to an effective episode of teaching. Such incidents occur when the teacher and the student share meaning related to the educational curriculum materials. Gowin (1981) argues that “knowledge is produced in response to questions; all new knowledge results from new questions, often new questions about old questions” (p. 23). Moreira de-emphasizes the textbook and argues for a broader conception of curriculum materials, asserting that relying solely on textbooks works against critical, meaningful learning and serves to deform, rather than form, teaching and learning. In our program we thus propose that teachers generate the principle of unlearning knowledge that prevents students from capturing the shared meanings relative to new knowledge. Students need to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant prior knowledge to engage in critical meaningful learning, and also to learn how to frame and pose questions rather than being subjected to rote learning in school. Instead of starting a subject with a paraphrase of what a particular author said, the teacher starts with a series of questions. Ideally, the practice of forming questions ultimately becomes the province of the students rather than only the teacher, giving them agency in interrogating their surroundings, a principle of Freire’s critical pedagogy.

Paulo Freire in the Digital Age Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a central text in our program. We explore a series of questions about it in our seminars: Who was Paulo Freire? Does the place where he grew up influence his pedagogical discourse? Is it possible to recover and give a new relevance to his philosophical and pedagogical proposal? Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco State, one of the poorest regions of Brazil. He experienced firsthand the difficulties that the masses had to overcome in order to survive the effects of the global economic depression of the 1930s, a ripple effect of the crash of the US stock market in

150

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

1929. He recognized the extreme difficulties a large section of the illiterate population faced. These circumstances decisively influenced his pedagogical approach, especially after he learned that the illiterate were not allowed to vote in Brazil. He called these disenfranchised people “the oppressed” and dedicated his life to designing a psychosocial method of mass literacy to enable Brazilian commoners to gain more control over their lives. Freire’s pedagogical ideas were initially dedicated to educating 15 million illiterate people in Brazil, not only to enable them to read and write but also to make them aware of their oppressed status, knowledge of which can be limited when people have been enculturated to live in degraded circumstances. A paradigm shift in education began away from a hierarchy that positioned a teacher as manager of knowledge and students as receptacles. Reflecting on our teaching practices in several Mexican schools, we discovered that the characterization Freire made then of Brazilian educational systems still sounds very familiar: Schools continue to practice a pedagogical banking model, in which teachers are the knowledge holders and pupils are empty receptacles to be filled. The task of the educator has to change. Transforming society requires transforming its citizens, and educators committed to that responsibility must consciously work for school reform to achieve it. If teachers want students to think, they must provide an education that does not seek to domesticate but to liberate. If we start with an absolute respect for the human being, our education should liberate people from barriers to their personal development. Teachers should instruct students to not only insert themselves into precise economic and social structures but also to develop an awareness of their humanity in the context of societal diversity. Widespread literacy during the mid-twentieth century reinforced the assumption of textual authority. Freire proposed to shift the emphasis from the text to the reader, to take the learner as an active subject of reading, and to conceive of reading as an act of reading the world. Villalobos (2003) proposes the creation of pedagogical tools to help convert Freire’s theory into practice. These tools include hypertext, “a digital multi-lexias [reading-related] structure linked together, and establishing intertextual relationships at various levels of contextualization through verbal means (signs of writing, the spoken word, etc.), and non-verbal (images and sounds)” (Gomez-Martinez, 2001; cited by Villalobos, p. 349). Hypertext embodies the new ways in which the reader can live with various artifacts from different ways and in different areas that overlap with academic activities and daily lives of students. Hypertext documents lead

Literacies and Everyday Life

151

to other texts, and to multimodal writing that combines diverse languages such as oral and written language, images, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphics, and artifacts that students use to communicate different meanings (Gee, 2003). Hypertexts that students use outside the classroom can serve as means to understanding and transforming their world, and to connecting the knowledge of the classroom with skills for life. Freire believes that teachers should help students engage with books by encouraging critical readings driven by questioning and reflection. He also invites teachers to become the guide, tutor, dialogue partner, and motivator. These roles enable them to help their students see links between reading and reflection, between reading and reflective dialogue, that allow students to know and know themselves: It is necessary that the educator, or the teacher, know that your “here and now” are almost always “there” for the learner. Even when the dream of the educator is not only put his “here and now,” and his knowledge, to the will of the learner, he should go beyond the “here and now” with him, to understand, happily, that for the student to overcome his “here,” he must start from the “here” of the student, not his own. (Freire, 1993, p. 55, quoted by Villalobos, 2003, p. 350)

Hypertext can play a role in this process, according to Villalobos, providing freedom in the structure of the text and creating a break with the linear and timeless presentation of the traditional curriculum. The material to be studied is the same; the term to cover such material does not change. What hypertext allows, is that the ordering of the fragments of the material to teach is not arranged to prescribe a pre-set way forward. . . . The structure of hypertext is dialogue: instead of dictating, suggesting a possible route. Encourages the learner to build his2 own way. But also the structure of hypertext must ensure that despite the freedom of the learner, the student has to cover the “distance” predicted; it will be his tour and perhaps his individual conclusions but the subjects in the curriculum will be considered and reflected, along the way. The learner appropriated them as his own work, and therefore through his own reflective process, but the issues remain those considered vital in the curriculum. (p. 351)

Hypertext provides an open structure that allows several resources to incorporate various levels of resources that work simultaneously. If teachers are aware of the possibilities provided by the enormous amount of texts that students interact As I do with Freire’s paternal language, I retain the original phrasing without endorsing its masculine orientation.

2

152

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

with in their daily lives, they can find many ways to use them to create an atmosphere of dialogue in the classroom and outside it. With these possibilities established in our course, I review the work of the researcher Maria Acaso that we have adapted to our purposes in Mexico.

Acaso’s Meaningful Learning from Teaching Practice Acaso (2011) views education as fragmented, unstable, paradoxical, visual, and technological, as is the world around students. What is permanent in this world? She asks. Why does education have to be permanent? These poststructural questions assume that knowledge is generated within rhizomatic, antihierarchical, and fluid structures where the unconscious, both from the generator and from the receiver, questions and subjectivizes everything. Why, she asks, do educators persist in assuming that knowledge has to be programmed and rigidly structured in the classroom? Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the metaphor of the rhizome to characterize nonhierarchical relationships. A rhizome is a plant base that can be divided without disturbing the health of the original root structure from which the division is taken, a phenomenon that makes no specific part of the plant more important or more central than any other. It has been adapted to social thought as a metaphor for representing the distribution of authority across all stakeholders. Acaso and colleagues designed an educational project that assumes that teachers have engaged in an almost impossible task: to constrict knowledge in a series of units organized around specific objectives, based on closed hierarchical models and programmed times and spaces that are very precise and confined. To undertake a rhizomatic educational project, it is necessary to discard authoritarian models. Consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception, this approach abandons all certainty and assumptions about truth. It does not seek, or pretend to find, regularities in assessable goals. Rather, it conceives of the generation of meaning in terms of multiplicity, positions students as knowledge generators, and recognizes teachers as works in progress, continually evaluating and revising their practice. Acaso removes the teacher from the center of instruction, repositioning the teacher as an element of a system where knowledge is generated collaboratively in perpetual growth. In this scheme there are no hierarchies in the branches (to continue the horticultural metaphor), and each one has a significant role in the construction of knowledge. A rhizomatic educational program is a series of

Literacies and Everyday Life

153

connections, and different lines, projecting toward the outside and intersecting with each other. All experiences can contribute to this growth to generate new knowledge structures, which, in turn, will influence other people to generate an infinite structure of knowledge, linked organically, with different speeds, sizes, and pulsations that have no beginning or end. For Acaso (2011), the school is not the main element of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call a principle of unlearning, one with a single, dominant trunk in their horticultural extended metaphor, a conception that centralizes rather than distributes authority. School is not the only place where education happens, a concept of great importance to the approach outlined in this chapter as central to our master’s program; and school books are not the only sources of knowledge. Rather, they are among the knowledge sources available, with others coming from students’ everyday lives and cultural pursuits. Acaso (2011) proposed that the teacher eschew rote learning and emphasize connections through a series of activities that will allow understanding as they develop, relating to each other in a progressive web in which each part can be connected to anything else as a network of organic structures without hierarchies or degrees. She proposes conceiving educational work as webs of understanding that allow knowledge to be constructed from any available sources. For example, in an art history class studying Impressionism, a student may not remember Claude Monet’s name, but may know of a youth wearing a water lily tattoo through a page in Facebook, allowing a connection to the genre. Teaching conceived as a project in constant transformation and open to new possibilities provides a flexible education that takes into account a world always in flux. Acaso (2011) challenges educators to be original and develop a creative, thought of, explicit, and nonviolent educational practice. For example, to teach the syntax of geometry, Silvia Nuere Menendez-Pidal, a professor of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, titled her educational project “Lived Reality, Reality Represented.” Nuere finds the teaching of geometry to be cold and abstract, and perhaps difficult to understand for students. She looks for ways to connect geometric principles with situations of everyday life, such as parking a car, which requires spatial intelligence to calculate distances and not hit anything; or playing sports such as soccer, to calculate the distance between the striker’s position and the goal and the angle and trajectory of the direction of the ball. She starts by reviewing the concept of representation and themes related to geometry and language, then explains the basics of Euclidean geometry: point, line, planes, and scale from artistic and geometric points of view. She next asks

154

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

students to analyze different artistic works in which they can observe, identify, and contrast these elements geometrically. She uses elements of Euclidean geometry and works of art to help students appreciate the use of the elements considered, including point, line, plane, and scale. After familiarizing students with appropriate terms in the context of these tasks, she provides them with everyday examples in order to help them understand geometric principles while also relating them to the structure of art and other everyday texts that students value. Her goals include having students integrate geometry in art and integrate theory and practice. Students develop the skills to know, understand, evaluate, and critically learn different cultural and artistic expressions, and know the relationships among them. To serve this end she involves them in projects such as one she calls I move as a line and I'm trailblazing. The teacher begins by having students write about the journey they take from home to the classroom, to talk about the elements passed along the way, and to imagine how to represent what caught their attention most, using lines, dots, and colors. The teacher encourages students to simplify the ways they see and distill them in symbols. She asks them to imagine that they are little worms moving and leaving a footprint on the ground, and then stopping to turn around and analyze the environment. They might notice store windows or digital advertising screens and imagine that they will leave a circular mark on the ground. This imaginative exercise helps them translate images from their journey to colorful dots and lines. They then think about how to take what they saw, experienced, and felt, and represent them with colors and images. Nuere encourages teachers to enable the students to undertake this activity in total freedom; to allow it to be direct and spontaneous, but at the same time measured; and to help students experiment with new forms of expression and representation. The students draw on personal knowledge and impressions of the material, and connect it with their everyday lives, experiences, perceptions, and classroom knowledge. The students construct their own representation and arrive at personal interpretations, embedded in the web of meaning available through multiple sources and connections. Students draw on their interrelated cognitive, social, cultural, and emotional understandings to construct meaning from this sort of activity. Their daily lives provide the basis for the development of individual, human, useful, and significant knowledge through which they learn about art, geometry, themselves, and their worlds. They will likely remember the official school knowledge of point and the line, which is the academic goal of learning. Yet they will learn

Literacies and Everyday Life

155

these concepts in the context of undertaking potentially useful, meaningful, and engaging inquiries that promote memory and reapplication by being grounded in cultural activity.

Conclusion The Mexican educational system, in part due to severe underfunding, has many deficiencies. Since 1998, the International Commission on Education has warned the Mexican government, and its educational institutions, about the lag they faced compared to other countries, and predicted a risk for the future of the nation. According to OECD data, 55 percent of Mexicans between twentyfive and thirty-four years do not have upper or middle school education, which leaves them without adequate wages for a decent standard of living. More than 50 percent of young Mexicans do not have specialized studies, and the education they have is insufficient. Latin American schools do not adequately educate students in the region, there are no minimum standards required to qualify, there are no reliable performance assessments, and schools have little accountability. Yet, conventional assessments of literacy rely on test scores. In this chapter I have described educational practices that provide more than what can be measured on a test: dispositions to learn, conceptual understandings based on the synthesis of broadly varied experiences and sources, emotional engagement with learning, active participation in inquiries, critical capacities for re-envisioning society, facility with digital and conventional texts and tools, and much more. If schools are to be reformed, then so must school assessment and teacher education in order to encourage the sorts of pedagogies endorsed in this chapter. Further, schools cannot provide themselves with the money needed to lower class size, provide adequate resources, provide meals for impoverished students, pay teachers by yearly contracts and not by classes taught, and atone for the lack of funding provided by citizens and the government. That obligation falls to the citizens and their government. But they can reconceive teaching practices to change the emphasis from rote and abstract learning to active, meaningful, emotionally engaged learning related to the students’ everyday knowledge, informed by a critical perspective that allows students to interrogate and perhaps change their surroundings for greater equity. In contrast to current transmission pedagogies, Mexican educators can reinvent their schools and classrooms to help students develop the skills that allow them to understand, develop critical

156

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

thinking, and construct significant meaning in dialogue with their daily lives. This imperative helps Mexico to realize Freire’s (1970) precept that “for someone who knows to be able to teach someone who doesn’t know, it is necessary that the teacher knows he doesn’t know everything, and that the learner knows he doesn’t ignore everything” (p. 180).

References Acaso, M., Belber, M., Silvia, N., María del, C. M., Noelia, A., & Noemí, A. (2011). Didáctica de las Artes y la cultura visual. Madrid, ES: Akal. Ausubel, D. (1963). The psychology of meaningful verbal learning. New York, NY: Grune & Stratton. Barnes, D. (1992). The role of talk in learning. In K. Norman (Ed.), Thinking voices (pp. 123–28). London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. New York, NY: Routledge. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2005). Literacy, reification, and the dynamics of social interaction. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond communities of practice: Language power and social context (pp. 1435). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Black, R. W. (2008). Adolescents and online fan fiction. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Buckingham, D. (2008). Repensar el aprendizaje en la era de la cultura digital. El Monitor de la Educación, 5(18). Retrieved May 22, 2017, from http:​//www​.me. g​ov.ar​/moni​tor/n​ro0/p​df/mo​nitor​18.pd​f Cassany, D. (2004). Explorando las necesidades actuales de comprensión; aproximaciones a la comprensión crítica. Lectura y Vida, 25(2), 1–14. Retrieved June 19, 2019, from http:​//www​.xtec​.cat/​~ilop​ez15/​mater​ials/​compr​ensio​lecto​ra/ex​ plora​ndone​cesid​adesa​ctual​esdec​ompre​nsion​.pdf Cassany, D. (2006). Tras las líneas. Sobre la lectura contemporánea. Barcelona, Spain: Anagrama. Cassany, D. (2008). Prácticas letradas contemporáneas. Retrieved May 22, 2017, from https​://me​dia.u​tp.ed​u.co/​refer​encia​s-bib​liogr​afica​s/upl​oads/​refer​encia​s/lib​ro/29​ 7-pra​ctica​s-let​radas​-cont​empor​aneas​pdf-B​Z40e-​libro​.pdf Cavanaugh, T. (2002). EBooks and accommodations: Is this the future of print accommodation? Teaching Exceptional Children, 35(2), 56–61. Retrieved June 19, 2019, from http:​//www​.cs.u​nibo.​it/ci​anca/​wwwpa​ges/c​dd/ca​vanau​gh.pd​f Coll, C. (2005). Lectura y alfabetismo en la sociedad de la información. Uocpapers, 1, 4–9. Retrieved May 22, 2017, from http:​//www​.uoc.​edu/u​ocpap​ers/1​/dt/e​sp/co​ ll.pd​f

Literacies and Everyday Life

157

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. De Pablos, J. (2010). Higher education and the knowledge society. Information and digital competencies. In Information and digital competencies in higher education [online monograph]. Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento (RUSC). 7(2), UOC. Retrieved March 17, 2020 from https​://li​nk.sp​ringe​r.com​/cont​ent/p​df/ 10​.7238​/rusc​.v7i2​.977.​pdf Fairclough N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogía del oprimido. México City, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno. Freire, P. (1990/1969). La educación como práctica de la libertad. México City, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gowin, D. B. (1981). Educating. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. hooks, b. (1993). bell  hooks speaking about Paulo Freire—The man, his work. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 146–54). New York, NY: Routledge. Hull, G. (2003). Youth culture and digital media: New literacies for new times. Research in the Teaching of English, 38, 229–33. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. New York, NY: Routledge. Lemke, J. (2005). Toward critical multimedia literacy: Technology, research, and politics. In M. C. McKenna, L. D. Labbo, R. D. Kieffer, & D. Reinking (Eds.), International handbook of literacy and technology, Volume 2 (pp. 314). Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum. Makalela, L. (2015). Moving out of linguistic boxes: The effects of translanguaging strategies for multilingual classrooms. Language and Education, 29(3), 200–217. DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2014.994524 Moreira, M. A. (2009). Aprendizaje significativo de las ciencias: Condiciones de ocurrencia, progresividad y criticidad. Diapositivas expuestas en las jornadas de ceyn. Retrieved May 22, 2017, from http:​//jor​nadas​ceyn.​fahce​.unlp​.edu.​ar/ii​-jorn​adas-​ 2009/​morei​ra Novak, J. D. (1998). Learning, creating, and using knowledge: Concept maps as facilitative tools in schools and corporations. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Smagorinsky, P. (2001). If meaning is constructed, what is it made from?: Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational Research, 71, 133–69. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Literacy in teacher education: “It’s the context, stupid.” Journal of Literacy Research, 50(3), 281–303. Street, B. V. (1995). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography, and education. New York, NY: Longman.

158

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Tyler, R. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vargas, F. A. (2015). Literacidad crítica y literacidades digitales: ¿Una relación necesaria? (Una aproximación a un marco teórico para la lectura crítica). In Revista Folios (pp. 139–60). No. 42. Cali, Colombia: Universidad del Valle. Villalobos, J. (2003) “El docente y actividades de enseñanza / aprendizaje: algunas consideraciones teóricas y sugerencias prácticas”. Educere, 7, 22, julioseptiembre, pp. 1706 Universidad de los Andes Mérida, Venezuela. Retrieved June 22, 2017 from https​://ww​w.red​alyc.​org/a​rticu​lo.oa​?id=3​56022​06.

6

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context Accommodating Original and Colonial Cultures in One Educational System José Luis Iturrioz Leza

If a literacy education program aspires to respect all of a nation’s cultures and peoples, it needs to take an inclusive approach to diverse communicative practices. In countries with a colonial history—especially those like Mexico in which original communities still coexist with colonial societies—the integration of pluralistic cultural practices can provide educators with a considerable challenge. They must simultaneously (1) take into account the dominant society’s commitment to industry, technology, and print literacy and the educational demands that this emphasis places on schools, and (2) be sensitive to, respectful of, and responsive to the traditional ways in which original people have historically conducted their lives. The twenty-first century is a complex time in which the world changes at a rapid pace, yet in which the preservation of historical ways of living is critical to the survival of people and their languages, customs, and cultures, all of which contribute to and enrich the Mexican national culture and identity. Mexico has taken steps to ensure that its original people’s cultures are allowed to flourish on their own terms and not be subordinated to the colonial culture following from the Spanish Conquest. The nation has signed many international treaties and has accepted a long series of petitions, mainly from organizations representing original people from all over the continent, that call for legislation that would abandon the concept of homogeneous citizenship based on the negation of original peoples and cultures. The Constitution of the United

160

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Mexican States has been reformed to establish that “the Mexican Nation is unique and indivisible,” as stated in Article 2: The nation has a multicultural composition based originally on its indigenous peoples [and recognizes] the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination [that] shall be exercised in a constitutional framework of autonomy which will guarantee national unity [to] decide on their internal forms of coexistence and social, economic, political and cultural organization [and to] apply their own normative systems in the regulation and settlement of internal conflicts, subject to the general principles of the Constitution. (http​://co​mpara​tivec​onsti​tutio​nspro​ ject.​org/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/UN​AM-Me​xican​-Cons​titut​ion_v​f.pdf​?6c89​12)1

This legal shift opens new perspectives of coexistence in diversity that will trigger a cascade of changes requiring the transformation of the educational system at all levels. Based on the Constitution, the Law of Indigenous Peoples’ Linguistic Rights (2003) recognizes individual and collective rights of original ethnic societies whose cultures remain intact in an industrialized, technical world, and their right to an education: Article 3. Indigenous languages are an integral part of the national cultural and linguistic heritage. The plurality of indigenous languages is one of the main expressions of the multicultural composition of the Mexican Nation. Article 11. The federal and state education authorities will guarantee that the indigenous population has access to compulsory, bilingual and intercultural education. . . . Likewise, at the intermediate and higher levels, interculturality, multilingualism and respect for diversity and linguistic rights will be encouraged. (http​s://w​w w.gl​obal-​regul​ation​.com/​trans​latio​n/mex​ico/1​42499​1/law​-gene​ ral-o​f-lin​guist​ic-ri​ghts-​of-in​digen​ous-p​eople​s.htm​l)

The text concludes by saying that “speakers of indigenous languages will have access to compulsory education in their own language and in Spanish.” All citizens and institutions are called to respect a new order that, without diminishing the general interests of the nation, honors the cultural, linguistic, educational, and religious rights of hitherto marginalized peoples who have their own histories, cultures, world views, and languages. If many of the continent’s original cultures are marginalized and in danger of disappearing, the cause is grounded in the negative perception following colonization that they have endured for five centuries. The impoverishment and diminishment of original cultures constitute a national crisis, since this void produces the irreparable loss Note: Translations provided by the author may not be congruent with those available in other versions of the same texts.

1

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

161

of invaluable knowledge developed over millennia. The integration of original peoples into Mexican society should not displace their languages, destroy their cultures, dismantle their social organization and system of authority, abolish their customs and beliefs, and assimilate them into the dominant society, as has been the case in the United States and many other nations formed in the wake of European colonization. It relies, in contrast, on working from a position of respect for, and the revitalization and strengthening of, these elements.

Non-Replacement Education Research is needed into original languages and cultures so that instructional materials, dictionaries, and adequate teaching manuals can be prepared knowledgeably on a variety of subjects at the different educational levels. If children descended from original societies are to be educated effectively in their own language and culture (and not only in Spanish-legacy traditions and practices), they first of all need good materials related to that culture. The formal teaching of a language cannot be carried out without a relatively advanced level of research and the application of that research to practice in a coordinated manner. During colonial times, the purpose of studying original languages, apart from breaking the communicative barrier, was to translate the basic texts of Christianity for missionary conversion. Later the policy of Hispanization was imposed (Contreras, 1986). Although both Christianization and Hispanization involve colonization, Critics have been careful to distinguish between two pedagogical programs targeting the indigenous population—Christianization and Hispanization— which, in turn, reveal the divergent sets of interests that inspired their supporters. The Spanish crown, on one hand, pushed a program of “Castilianization” in the New World through royal legislation that, even before 1535, required the indigenous to learn “Christianity, decent morals, good government, and the Castilian language.” On the other hand, the Mendicant friars who taught at and ran the colegios [colleges] resisted this tendency. More invested in Christianization than Hispanization, at least at the Colegio de Santa Cruz, they privileged the study of Latin and Nahuatl while purposefully marginalizing Castilian. (Nemser, 2011, p. 73)

These two colonialist strategies continue today in the practices of various institutions. Some are religious and pursue the goal of translating the Bible into as many original languages as possible as a tool for their missionary work.

162

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Those responsible for public education have advocated for the teaching of and in original languages in primary education prior to shifting to Spanish. Universities support research, but not its application to the development of original languages, thus promoting the appropriation of cultural assets without any benefit to the communities themselves. “Bilingual bicultural education,” followed by intercultural bilingual education, has historically socialized children and young people into the dominant culture, distancing them from their traditional knowledge and customs. This situation has begun to change. The quality of linguistic research has been increasing, and there are more and more institutions, programs, and projects aimed at training cadres of descendants of original people who are beginning to assume leadership roles in the revitalization of their languages and cultural traditions. They have done so through instruments that until now had been eroding them, including school, radio, books, television, the press, and the internet. In general, however, the lag is still substantial. The Department of Studies in Indigenous Languages of the University of Guadalajara has, since the mid-1980s, conducted grammatical and lexical research on the continent’s original languages, especially in the western area of Mexico and in the Uto-Aztecan language family. Efforts have been directed mainly at the development of a comprehensive scientific grammar, an educational grammar, and a comprehensive lexicon of the Huichol language. These scholars have produced over 100,000 articles based on detailed field research in every domain of culture: nature, handcrafts, diseases and herbal medicine, gastronomy, onymic (naming) systems, and other aspects of daily, historically grounded life. These investigations have been designed to produce better training of bilingual teachers, the preparation of texts for schools, and the sharing of knowledge both inside and outside communities of people whose ancestors were original inhabitants. The mediums for this education have been books that are distributed among the population; courses at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels; talks; participation in the agricultural cycle; and festivities and ceremonies. This project would not have been possible without the incorporation of young people as permanent collaborators during their academic training, acting as bridges to the community of speakers. Bilingual teachers teach children to read and write both in their own language and in Spanish, and do so in circumstances of diglossia2 in which the Spanish Diglossia refers to a situation in which two languages, or two varieties of the same language, are used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers. The term is typically used with languages that include both “standard” and local varieties. The notion of translanguaging,

2

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

163

language has overwhelming predominance over the original language. In many cases, bilingual teachers from original societies have had little instruction in and about their own language and culture. They are better able to understand and teach Spanish, without elementary understandings of the grammar and lexicon of their own language. As a result, they apply the linguistic knowledge they have acquired about Spanish to their own language, lacking instructional guidance for teaching their original language. Their challenges call for formal preparation to teach multilinguistic students. If this situation is a consequence of the depreciation of original languages and cultures, the people themselves are vulnerable to internalizing society’s negative attitudes about themselves and feeling culturally inferior. This problem becomes exacerbated by the rigidity of official programs and the resistance to opening spaces for true intercultural education. In educational planning, program design, and content selection, educators must overcome prejudices that seriously hamper development. The prejudice that original languages are not modern or cultural, not capable of supporting a formal education, is deeply engrained and widespread, suggesting that people speaking original languages must replace them with Spanish or English. The cultural condition of people whose ancestors were original inhabitants of the continent, however, is not the result of deficiencies in the design of their languages. It follows instead from colonial condescension, unequal treatment, and lack of opportunities. It is often said that these languages lack writing, and that without writing there can be no formal education, even though many original languages did have a textual dimension. It is possible, however, to introduce a writing system for a language, as Sequoyah did for the Cherokee language following the colonization of the United States (Cushman, 2011). It is not so easy to use it to produce a sufficient range of instructional materials. It is easier and cheaper to publish the same texts for the entire school population in the language of conquest, reducing production in original languages to a few basic reading books.

Reflections on Literacy There has been much talk, and much has been written, about the importance of writing for the development of peoples and societies, about the differences reviewed in the Introdution, refers to their integration in thinking and speech, rather than their use in separate social realms.

164

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

between spoken and written language, and about the relation between old and new communication technologies. Judgments about ancient languages from outside the European sphere are often poorly differentiated and tainted with a variety of prejudices. Many people, including academics, express their surprise or fascination with the fact that languages such as Otomi, Tlapanec, Huichol, or Zapotec can be written on a computer. Yet, the problem of computer word processing in these languages does not lie in their structure. Rather, it is grounded in the organization of Eurocentric keyboards and programs involved in displaying the alphabetical signs (or other type of symbols) on the computer screen via commands sent from the keyboard. A keyboard designed for writing in English can cause problems when writing in Spanish, which does not mean that Spanish is a language less suitable for being written. Languages that are not grounded in European language families are even less amenable to adaptation to these structures. Speakers of Wixárika (Huichol) and other languages, for example, frequently encounter difficulties because the people who work in the Bureau of Vital Statistics do not know how to write certain names and are reluctant to accept them, solely on the basis of their linguistic structure and its incompatibility with Eurocentric technology and its narrow possibilities. The words writing and reading, like many other linguistic terms, are often used ambiguously or vaguely. They can refer to the management of a system of graphic signals such as letters or phonograms or logograms. In this sense, modern people can read an inscription written in an extinct Paleohispanic pre-Roman language like Tartessian that has become extinct in practice if not as part of a foundational linguistic heritage. Reading in this sense means to relate the graphic signs to sounds or equivalent signals in other known languages that are based on the use of the same alphabet, as is the case with the Espanca inscription. This artifact was found in 1985 in Espanca, on the Iberian Peninsula3 near Castro Verde in an archaeological territory where numerous Tartessian4 inscriptions were located. What readers decipher is only one aspect of the signs: the signifier, the material expression, but not the grammar or the meaning. Untermann (1975–1990), a leader in linguistic archaeology on the Iberian Peninsula, added another line to the picture pointing out some equivalences with signs from the Latin alphabet. The same thing can happen in the spoken medium. A few decades ago, those attending Catholic churches heard, read, or recited Latin texts they did not A peninsula that includes present-day Spain and Portugal, along with adjacent lands and Gibraltar. An extinct Paleohispanic language.

3 4

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

165

understand. The recitation consisted of simply reproducing a string of sounds. Similarly, functional illiterates know the mechanics of reading and writing, but they do not know how to compose or understand a written text. The implications of writing go far beyond the mechanical aspects. Many children learn the mechanics of writing in primary school, but they do not know how to read or write fluently in Spanish, much less in original languages. There is very little reading material, nor are there many contexts for writing, in most of the original languages. We have verified that many primary school teachers do not understand a text when they read it in their own original language. This difficulty follows from the fact that in bilingual and intercultural schools, original languages are relegated to the background or marginalized, especially in the subsequent stages of formal education. The teachers do not use the books they receive from the Ministry of Education because they do not understand them, and no one has taught them how to use them. They have learned the mechanics of writing, but not how to read or write in the full sense of the word.

Writing and Mental Development It would be a mistake to think that writing was the origin of abstract and formal thought, and that before writing the only texts that existed were no more elaborate than informal conversations about everyday life. The Soviet researcher Luria (1976) thought that literacy in itself brings about considerable changes in the structure of mental operations. He undertook a study of the diverse cultures assembled under the Soviet Union following the fall of the Russian Romanov dynasty. Uneducated rural Uzbekistanian people from remote regions in the 1930s carried out tasks of sorting objects very differently than did literate people. When asked to “gather the analogous objects together,” many of the illiterate persons gathered the objects they could associate with a concrete and sensory practical situation, those suitable for a known purpose. They were not able to perform the theoretical operation of grouping objects in the abstract category that the research team believed appropriate (see Smagorinsky, 1995, for a critique of Luria’s interpretations). If they were asked to classify a hammer, an axe, a saw, and a log, those with a practical orientation put the saw, the axe, and the log together, leaving out the hammer, which cannot be used to cut firewood. Those sharing the researchers’ frame of mind, in contrast, put the axe, the saw, and the hammer together under the general and abstract category of “tool.” The

166

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

group made up mainly of young people who had received one to two years of schooling could sort the items either practically or abstractly, to the researchers’ approval. Luria’s experiments have been interpreted along the lines of writing being an instrument for the organization of mind, of methodical training for the systematic resolution of tasks, and for the acquisition of thinking and language skills. The specific role of literacy, however, cannot be deduced from the description of the experiments (see Scribner & Cole, 1981). It is difficult to determine the precise role played by literacy in the restructuring of mental operations, since it does not act separately but, rather, in relation to other cultural factors. The group with a practical tendency was populated by those who lacked scholastic education, often originating in very remote areas where social activities focused on maintaining everyday household routines. The group who shared the researchers’ logic included people who had been in the army, worked in collective economies, or participated in more complex forms of social organization, even if they had not had scholastic instruction. The intermediate group included people with little education, but who had experience working in collective economies. When applying and evaluating experiments such as these, many conditions must be accounted for in the environment and in the conditions under which they are applied, including contextualization, the command of the language in which the questions are asked, the approach that is made regarding the purpose of the test, and the lexical structure of the speakers’ first language. If Russian is not their first language, there could be a misunderstanding, a problem likely involved when Mexican people from original societies do not pass the Spanishlanguage tests in university entrance exams. Luria’s experiments can inform educational practice. Education should be carried out in the students’ first languages and in a contextualized manner. Mental operations are built on the basis of the actions carried out in practical activity conducted in local social environments. People adapt their behavior to that of others and their shared cultural heritage. All learning is based on the social construction of knowledge and on the collective experiences encoded in a culture. The construction of knowledge cannot be reduced to passive reception; it is born, rather, from the interactions and collaborations that are organized in social activity. Iturrioz (2009) highlights the relevance of the concept of mental operation for teaching a language system. A teaching institution must bear in mind that its success comes from beginning with the students’ construction of prior, socialized, cultural knowledge. Learning must be meaningful, assimilating

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

167

the new to the known and accommodating the already known to the new, in reciprocal adaptation (see Chapter 6). Otherwise, a cognitive rupture may hinder the acquisition of new knowledge, which will be disconnected from previously acquired knowledge and the social environment that sustained it. In school language and mind develop simultaneously and in relation to one another through a process of mutual formation. This cognitive and linguistic development proceeds within local contours channelled by participation in the practical activities carried out in the learners’ society.

Writing and Literacy It is necessary to distinguish between the communication medium (phonic, graphic, or tactile) and the inherent characteristics of the register being used (Koch & Oesterreicher, 1990).5 Literacy must not be reduced to the mechanics of writing. Literacy implies the ability to communicate complex conceptual constructions. Many university students have difficulties understanding and composing specialized texts, not because they cannot read them, but because they have not developed the necessary competence in a complex area of knowledge. The shortcomings appear both in the spoken medium and in the graphic medium. A written text can be read or recited, and a spoken text can be transcribed without affecting automatically its respective inherent qualities. Features of literacy may be present in a spoken text, and features of orality may be discovered in a written text. There is a selective affinity, however, between spoken text and orality on the one hand and between written text and literacy on the other. This ability or competence for formal or elaborated thinking is called “literacy” because of its traditional association with instrumental writing. Writing facilitates the organization of complex thoughts. The transposition of medium is something very different from the modifications that people implement when they want to transform a scientific text accessible only to specialists into a text for publication understandable to a larger audience; a change of register takes place here that could lead to the alteration of the content. Conversely, a writer can transform the informal notes in a notebook into a dense and rigorously organized article intended for specialists who read a scientific journal. Although the four possible combinations are given, there are two privileged combinations, the association of writing with literacy and the association of See the most recent publication about orality and scripturality by Raible (2019).

5

168

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

speech with orality. Writing is a tool for extending memory and organizing mental operations better. Sounds and graphic symbols differ in their conditions of production and perception, causing both systems to tend toward a complementary distribution of sociocultural uses. The different conditions of communication give rise to different discourse strategies for each one: degrees of planning, syntactic elaboration, and organization of information. People tend to use writing in formal situations and speech in informal ones. The differentiation occurs at all levels and has sociological, psychological, and pedagogical implications. Writing and sociocultural development are in a bidirectional, circular, causal relationship. Certain social and cultural conditions must exist beforehand. New communicative needs arise from a certain complexification of social organization that leads to the development of writing. Vygotsky (1987) was far ahead of his time in claiming that writing should not be taught as something mechanical, part of sensorimotor education, but as part of a process of teaching the written language, because learning the written language also means learning to structure ideas, to conceive and express them in an organized way. Writing is only the initial phase. The global process has cognitive aspects that involve training in abstract formal thought. Writing is not introduced simply to reproduce the spoken language. Written language is part of a cognitive and communicative culture that develops new ways of generating and ordering ideas and makes new ways of transmission possible, but it does not, in itself, guarantee the development of the capacities needed for literacy. Lentin (1988) observed that multiple discourse varieties are available, and that some more elaborate forms of spoken communication already constitute forms of literacy in the broad sense. There is a continuum between orality and literacy. The pedagogical applications of this observation are important.

Literacy before Writing There is evidence of elaborate, abstract thinking before the use of writing. Cultures that are unlettered in the conventional sense may also possess forms of literacy. Rosaldo (1971) revealed the existence of a considerable variety of communicative forms in the Ilongot non-written tradition, many of which are carefully worked out.6 Many Huichol texts recorded in rituals and other formal The Ilongot inhabit the southern mountains of the Sierra Madre and Caraballo, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

6

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

169

situations seem to have been written by persons with an extensive scholastic education based on the use of writing. But that is not the case. The authors never used pen and paper to compose a religious song or to describe events of the remote past, and yet they possess skills that are considered characteristic of literacy. They have undergone a long learning process since they were children, participating in festivities, hunting, rituals of the agricultural cycle, and pilgrimages of the Hikuritaamete (gatherers of peyote). Literacy must be defined broadly to encompass these elaborated discourse practices without written expression. The following Huichol text is elaborate in its expression and content, even though it was never written down until we recorded and transcribed it. It emerged in the spoken medium but uses concepts metaphorically related to the tool of writing to express religious thoughts of great symbolic depth. I provide an abridged version, followed by an English translation, of this text: Hauli meutiwetɨka ˀalí Wilikuta mɨ tuutú makinayali mɨ muwa latikaitɨ mi mɨletaˀutɨwa kupia mayani mɨ ˀAlí wasiechutia mɨ ˀalí yuchelieta mɨ ˀalí Sapawiyeme ˀalí Nɨˀaliwaame mɨ sapa muyuyuawi mɨ ˀalí Halamala mɨ memewatineika mɨ. ˀAlí ˀUsainuli mɨ tuutú makinayali mɨ ˀalí yɨkɨmana mɨ.

miletaˀutɨwa tuutú letɨlayali mi manukuheitɨka mewayeˀɨɨlilɨme ya li ˀutiyuatɨ mɨ ˀAlí nemaachika mɨ ˀalí yuˀawakɨ mɨ ˀalí mukapuluma mɨ mɨlekuˀutɨwa sapa yuyuawimechie ˀAlí Wilikuta mi mɨlekuˀutɨwa ˀalí mɨ waˀusa mɨ tuutú letɨlayali mɨ hi mesiuwanale.

[In Wilikuta, where there are tiered votive candles (hills), a flower machine (the earth) writes out of the depths, making copies (peyotes). To the right (toward the south), at the foot of Waxiewe (sacred stone in San Blas, Nayarit) the marine divinities Sapawiyeme and Nɨˀaliwame (rain and lightning) write on blue sheets (the waves of the sea and of Chapala). ˀUxainuri (fire) is a machine that writes letters of flowers forming lines that carry messages. My older brother (the deer) with the feathers of his horns writes in a book of blue sheets. In Wirikuta blue letters are typed with ink.] Literacy begins to develop the moment texts transcend communicative situations and can be recovered faithfully by other individuals and later

170

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

generations. That is how texts such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Vedic Chants, treatises on geometry, etc. were passed down from antiquity, before being recorded in print. Many Huichol texts existed for hundreds or thousands of years before written versions were produced. Anthropologists came up against an insurmountable wall in the special language used for religious discourse and formal communication in general. They have struggled to understand the Huichol religion because they cannot understand this sophisticated language. The development of an elaborate communicative culture can trigger a process of differentiation of language varieties. Along with informal language, typical of spontaneous communicative situations of daily life, an elaborate language develops with other formal, semantic, and pragmatic properties. The relation between speech and writing, orality and elaborate language is very complex. It would be as false to accept the existence of a fully developed cultural literacy before writing as to admit that a cultural literacy can only exist after writing is introduced. An elaborate language is not born with writing, but the introduction of writing contributes enormously to the development of a more elaborate language with special morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features, poorly suited for spoken language. Elaborate language determines and is likewise determined by the presence of an abstract cognitive culture and forms of communication meant to transcend the space and time of oral communication. These cognitive frames are often associated with formal schooling (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Vygotsky, 1987), but both are developed in a reciprocal, adaptive manner.

Culture Shock Some of the observations made by Wells (1988) about the difference between family and school education have to do with the difference between orality and elaborate communicative culture. Compared with instruction in the family atmosphere of daily life, linguistic competence in the school environment is carried out with changes of content and form. Unlike speech, which is learned through immersion, writing requires and strengthens the development of metalinguistic awareness at different levels of language organization. If, furthermore, the language being taught has other phonological and grammatical characteristics than do those of everyday language, and if communication is subject to other rules than those of family language, then it is not surprising that many children experience culture shock when they enter school (Heath, 1983).

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

171

Instruction in an alphabetic system must be gradual, beginning with nonalphabetic systems and formal variants of the spoken tradition. In the case of communities where children learn a language other than Spanish first, the shock is potentially great, since the change of language comes atop the pervasive change of communicative culture. This phenomenon greatly complicates learning and generates discouragement and abandonment. To address the problems associated with this disjuncture between children and their educational environments, schools would benefit from promoting teaching methods that build on the cultural repertoires of the children in attendance. By attending to the children’s home and community cultures, languages, and symbolic forms of representation, schools may provide a foundation for teaching them additional codes of power (Delpit, 1988) that may expand their repertoires and life possibilities without doing so at the expense of their relationships at home and the cultures they emerge from. Speech and oral communication are much older than writing, and are learned well before writing is introduced in children’s development. The teaching of writing is one of the school’s fundamental tasks before and during the primary grades, and all subsequent formal education depends crucially on writing. Print illiteracy is a barrier that closes one off to a large amount of information, vocational training, and social advancement. Yet, a semiotic view of textuality suggests that depending on the context, alphabetic texts may or may not be optimal for situational communication and expression. Both oral speech and other symbol systems may be more suitable, and even these forms have begun to merge in technology such as TED talks, video documentaries and narratives, and other media. Although the written word is prized in schools, it may not be the most effective way of communicating outside formal education. Despite trying to recover the primacy of spoken language, many linguists turned to writing to illustrate how language works. Writing in this sense facilitates access to linguistic awareness and is the basis of linguistic reflection. BlancheBenveniste (1977), for instance, argues that orality is like a rough draft or an unedited text. Her recognition that speech comes first, both from a historical and a psychogenetic and logogenetic standpoint, positions spoken language as a step toward written language. In the context of a literacy education program, it is important to give a great deal of thought to the relation among culture, textuality in its many forms, spoken speech, and frames of mind; and to reconsider the degree to which these relations figure into situational appropriateness, notions of ontological and phylogenetic development, prestige, and other factors that suggest which communicative form best suits which social occasions.

172

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

The Case of the Wixáritaari (Huichol) The Huichol and other pre-Columbian societies persisting to the present have been able to transmit, without the aid of writing, much knowledge from generation to generation about nature, the gathering and cultivation of plants, hunting and domestication of animals, and technology for the production of handicrafts of all kinds. Thanks to this knowledge, they have been able to survive for hundreds of years in an environment with scarce natural resources. Without writing, they were able to create a complex religion rich in admirable ideas, symbols, and moral advice. Without writing, they developed elaborate discourse forms called niuki weˀemekɨ (in sacred discourse) or niuki ˀepapamekɨ (in big words), complex in form and dense in its conceptual content, typical of the religious domain and formal communicative situations. The Huichol have been able to express innumerable concepts in them that are difficult for outsiders to understand and even more difficult to translate into other languages. Their elaborate discourse genres, understood only by their cognoscenti, are very different from the colloquial speech forms called niuki hekíakamekɨ (in transparent discourse or, as Gonzalo de Berceo says, “román paladino” [the equivalent of “plain English”]) and niuki ˀeniiríikikamekɨ or tsimipepe (understandable speech, little words), which are characterized by their clear, transparent, simple, understandable, plain language. Although the Huichol have not used writing until recent times, they did and do have an elaborate literacy, not because of the medium used (incisions in the stone, ink on paper) but, rather, because of the properties of that elaborate language corresponding to complex thought. In addition to this elaborate oral culture where many texts contain conceptual antecedents to writing, the Huichol developed new forms of communication, such as yarn paintings, beadwork, embroidery, and other media through which they tell stories and communicate the symbolism of their religion and literature. Nature is a book in which divinities are written as messages that only the wise know how to decipher and that artists represent in their texts. The transition from these symbolic writing systems to alphabetic writing, essential for many new communicative situations, is possible. People whose ancestors predated Spanish influence live in their own cultures; have their own languages, customs, and traditions inherited over many generations; and share a communicative culture in which their world view, religion, ethical principles, and moral rules are encoded. Their marginalization with respect to national society and culture is due to their will to preserve their

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

173

language, culture, religion, and acquired knowledge based on their historical ways of interacting with nature. In the eyes of the cultural mainstream, their preservation of these traditions produces poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy; and only integration into a dominant culture can reduce marginalization. The advantages of assimilation are accompanied by the irreparable loss of invaluable cultural treasures. Illiteracy is one of the most important components of marginalization, because writing is an essential vehicle in modern societies for the acquisition of formal knowledge in the school system. But peoples from the continent’s original societies aspire to participate in the cultural mainstream without abandoning their cultures and renouncing their identities by means of developing print literacy with their own languages. They benefit from learning alphabetic expression within the framework of their own cultures. The transition from the spoken word to the storage and transmission of information through writing and modern technologies should be carried out first in their own languages and cultures. The Huichol have an extremely varied and complex communicative culture. Its features range from the most colloquial register used in situations of daily life (kitchen, shop, corn field, etc.) to the abstractions of religious discourse, the full understanding of which calls for recognizing the contributions of the shamans, including very ancient literary discourse traditions. These traditions have been transmitted orally for over a thousand years, only recently taking on a written form. There was no need to resort to writing in an enduring physical medium, because language and the various discourse registers were learned by participating assiduously in the ritual celebrations that make up the annual cycle. The changes brought into the social life of the Huichol in recent decades have opened new communicative spaces that make it advisable, if not necessary, to resort to this new channel of communication: writing. The introduction of writing to cultures that historically have used other means of communication may seem unnecessary at first. It may even be viewed by community members as harmful if it displaces their historical ways of communicating. However, writing can be useful as a complement for textual documentation and for the use of one’s own language in new communicative spaces such as the school, which could thus become an additional medium for the teaching of community-based cultures as a discipline. Many Huichol children spent crucial years of childhood shut away for much of the time in shelter schools, deprived of daily contact with parents and grandparents and of participation in field work and symbolic activities. As a

174

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

result of this separation, they have grown up enculturated to dominant cultural practices. Many young people ignore much of their communities’ traditional knowledge, not even having developed their heritage language beyond the needs of daily communication. Writing can help them recover a part of this knowledge and motivate them to integrate back into traditional communication networks. If school and Western educational strategies have affected the Huichol culture, it is necessary in reciprocation that the Huichol culture enter the school. In this way it can be fully accepted and thus become a genuine instrument of interculturality. It is necessary to set up cadres who are trained in the composition of texts in Wixárika on various scholastic disciplines: mathematics, geography, physics, grammar, etc. The first step toward achieving such a goal is developing a capacity for conventional print literacy. Writing is essential in all communicative spaces that have to do with intercultural contact: school; the system of civil authorities; patron saint celebrations; medical care; community work (organization for carrying out community work such as road construction and maintenance, perimeter fences, and foreign trade); and dialogue with the different legal, legislative, medical, and administrative bodies of the municipal, state, and federal governments. Consistent with this idea, literacy would have the purpose of providing familiarization with the reading and later with the writing of texts related to these domains: medicine (AIDS and other diseases, first aid, pregnancy care, environmental hygiene), administrative texts (budgets, certificates, contracts), law (legal guidance, laws, regulations, communal regulations), informative booklets, maps, periodicals, technical texts, school texts, and other essentials of navigating modern social life. In the Department of Studies in Indigenous Languages of the University of Guadalajara, we have already translated into Wixárika a number of important works: legal texts (Law of Linguistic Rights, Know your Rights, Rights of Children, Education and Technology), medical texts (What is AIDS, Resuscitation Guide or Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Electrical Therapy, Health for Rural Areas), and linguistic texts, mainly the Huichol Didactic Grammar (see this chapter’s references). Several books are planned for the Wixárika Baccalaureate certificate, a University of Guadalajara project that provides an opportunity to assume responsibility within the new legal framework. The first language in both teaching and administration would be the Wixárika, which would not prevent learning Spanish and other languages. We have developed a literacy method for young people and adults who never went to school or who dropped out in the first two years. It is clear that they can learn at a much faster pace than children, but it is crucially important that they

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

175

never again feel the frustration that results from their reluctance to assimilate or the sensation of incompetence. The method consists of teaching writing from the perspective of the Wixárika worldview and cultural context: conceptual background of reading and writing, from pictogram to letter, from the nierika (ideogram) to phonographic writing. In the Huichol culture there are multiple forms of symbolic writing and many concepts related to reading, writing, and interpretation that must be referred to because they constitute the conceptual and semiotic antecedents upon which alphabetic writing can be built. Writing is presented not only in the form of letters but also in the form of logotypes, ideograms, and logograms, from brands of cars to the command icons that appear on computer screens. It is useful to begin by reflecting on these types of signs that, from both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic points of view, precede phonographic writing and even glottography (methods of monitoring the vibrations of the vocal folds) in general. They are easier to learn, and many people are already familiar with them. From a pedagogical point of view, it is not convenient or appropriate to start from scratch when teaching young people and adults to write, as if they had never had contact with the world of writing. In Huichol culture there is a very fine conceptual system for talking about writing, although it does not appear in the form of letters. There are many ritual objects for communication with the gods and for communicating the fundamental ideas of the Huichol religion and worldview to persons. Messages from ancestors are written in nature in many ways, and one must learn how to interpret them. Alphabetic writing can be accepted and learned within this traditional semiotic framework as an extension of its own culture, an amplification of traditional communication techniques and strategies.

Conclusion Some useful conclusions and recommendations for literacy education can be drawn from these reflections. These principles have informed the development of materials for the education of Huichol young people and adults. 1. Writing is a powerful instrument that facilitates individual and social development. 2. Many persons and peoples have used writing to develop and appropriate knowledge that would be inaccessible without it.

176

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

3. Writing makes new forms of communication possible that transcend spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries. 4. The school system would have many limitations without writing; it is not possible to study for a degree in law, geography, engineering, or anything else without writing. 5. Writing helps preserve the past and prepare for the future. Writing enables people to read texts that were written hundreds and thousands of years ago; and people, in turn, can write texts through which future generations can inherit their current knowledge. 6. The transition from an oral culture to a written culture is a gradual process that should not be imposed, but should, instead, spring from the communicative needs generated in the development of each person. 7. Literacy should not be restricted to teaching the material or medial aspects of graphic symbolization, but should be used as an instrument for personal and collective development through new communication strategies and new ways of producing information. 8. The teaching of writing must be inscribed within the framework of a broader concept of writing that also includes signs of another nature used in the production of formal texts or in the use of computers: commas, periods, semicolons, question marks or exclamation points, separation of words in a phrase, sentences, paragraphs, titles of books, chapters, sections and subsections, front and back covers, credit pages, etc. All of these signs account for the complexity involved in arranging correspondence between resources of expressive coherence and resources of semantic and pragmatic coherence in the organization and communication of ideas. 9. The goal of formal literacy education should be the gradual learning of writing and the comprehension of various types of texts as thought develops in a specific domain. 10. Literacy must take place first in languages spoken outside school and in the environment of students’ own culture from the discourse varieties most related to literacy, at least up to the stage of formal operations. The inclusion of a new language should not be intended to replace students’ primary languages, especially if the languages are diametrically opposed from a typological point of view, such as Spanish and Wixárika. 11. Writing does not replace traditional forms of communication. The strategies of spoken communication and those of written transmission must coexist while complementing and enriching one another.

The Challenge of Literacy and Inclusion in the Mexican Context

177

12. In order for writing to be accepted and used, people in the community must understand writing as an extension of traditional communicative channels. 13. Many older Huichols did not go to school, and many young people dropped out in the first years of primary school for various reasons; school and literacy have so far led to deserting one’s culture instead of strengthening it. 14. The use of writing should not be perceived as something foreign, borrowed, or imposed from outside, but as an instrument that emanates from the traditional communicative culture as a result of certain new social, political, educational, and legal needs. Reinventing teacher education requires reexamining the assumptions from which education proceeds. If the inclusion of people from diverse, constitutionally protected communities whose societies predate the Spanish Conquest is an educational goal, then it cannot proceed from assimilationist or deficit premises. This chapter has identified the issues involved in providing an inclusive education that is respectful of all stakeholders’ cultural orientations and practices, one that acknowledges the role of the dominant culture without allowing it to suffocate those very vital communities that provide Mexico with both historical continuity and current ethnic, cultural, and social richness. The challenges in preparing teachers for such important work are great, yet achievable, and must be addressed with care and empathy to move Mexico forward while preserving the knowledge and values predating the Spanish Conquest and its Europeanization of the continent. Mexico will suffer if it only seeks to infuse its society with the Western emphasis on corporate expansion, technological ubiquity, and neoliberal economies. It must value its original people’s presence and contributions, build on them, and move Mexico into the future with their qualities intact as central aspects of the “New Mexico” that this literacy initiative aspires to produce.

References Blanche-Benveniste, C. (1977). Estudios lingüísticos sobre la relación oralidad-escritura. Barcelona, Spain: Gedisa. Contreras García, I. (1986). Bibliografía sobre la castellanización de los grupos indígenas de la República Mexicana. México City, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas.

178

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Cushman, E. (2011). The Cherokee syllabary: Writing the people’s perseverance. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Delpit, L. D. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280–99. Retrieved April 16, 2018, from http:​//lmc​readi​nglis​t.pbw​orks.​com/f​/Delp​it+%2​81988​%29.p​df Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Iturrioz Leza, J. L. (2009). El concepto de operación y la enseñanza de la lengua materna. NIUKI. Revista del Centro Universitario del Norte, 8 (pp. 20–38). Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Koch, P. & Österreicher, W. (1990). Gesprochene sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer. Lentin, L. (1988). La dependencia de lo escrito respecto de lo oral: parámetro fundamental de la primera adquisición del lenguaje. In Hacia una teoría de la lengua escrita (pp. 145–56). Barcelona, Spain: Gedisa. Luria, A. R. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations (M. Cole, Ed.; M. Lopez-Morillas & L. Solotaroff, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nemser, D. J. (2011). Toward a genealogy of Mestizaje: Rethinking race in colonial Mexico. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved April 13, 2018, from http:​//dig​itala​ssets​.lib.​berke​ley.e​du/et​d/ucb​/text​/ Nems​er_be​rkele​y_002​8E_11​452.p​df Raible, W. (2019). Variation in language: How to characterise types of texts and communication strategies between orality and scripturality. Answers given by Koch/ Oesterreicher and by Biber. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 6(2), 157–74. Rosaldo, M. (1971). Context and metaphor in Ilongot oral tradition. Cambridge, MA: Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smagorinsky, P. (1995). The social construction of data: Methodological problems of investigating learning in the zone of proximal development. Review of Educational Research, 65, 191–212. Untermann, J. (1975–1990). Monumenta linguarum hispanicarum (4 vols.). Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (R. Rieber & A. Carton, Eds; N. Minick, Trans., vol. 1, pp. 39–285). New York, NY: Plenum. Wells, G. (1988). The language experience of five-year-old children at home and at school. In J. Cook-Gumperz (Ed.), The social construction of literacy (pp. 85–108). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

7

Mind, Society, and Literacy Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga

The human brain is the result of, at the level of the species, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution; and, at the individual level, a lifetime of biological maturation and social mediation. Originally serving to enable the human animal to perceive and respond to surroundings, the brain has evolved in the subsequent millennia beyond this reactive function to produce complex mechanisms for creative adaptations and for employing tools to enable the navigation and control of the environment. Cognitive neuroscience emerged as a biological field conceived to investigate neural interaction as a primary foundation of thinking processes. Its researchers seek to detail the neurobiological mechanisms that produce, structure, and regulate human communication. This chapter concerns what cognitive neuroscientists have learned about how minds function in relation to the social world to enable literacy activities. It thus provides a biological dimension, one subject to social channelling, to inform how literacy educators serve the “New Mexico.” Networks of perception, integration, and response form the primary elements of intrapersonal and interpersonal communication, and contribute to the development of individual and collective consciousness. Literacy practices involve the orchestration of different cognitive processes involving what are known to neuroscientists as language circuits. These phenomena involve more than simple reflex arcs between sensory perception and the articulation of a verbal response. They are integrated with other networks involving cognitive, psycho-emotional, executive, autonomic, and reflective processes that are associated with free will, flexibility, and emotions. These processes are both biological (genetic) and socially mediated (epigenetic). They are realized through networks including those involved in

180

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

imitation, memory, and learning. They are not fixed at birth, however. They are subject to growth and change due to the brain’s plasticity in its capacity for developing language codes. This uniquely human capability is available through processes originating in the dendrites of neurons and is realized through the psychomotor maturity processes of neurodevelopment. Literacy activity is based in the human capacity for understanding and using language as a cognitive act, yet involves much more from the body’s neural networks. It includes an affiliative dimension that seeks a sense of belonging with social groups. Literacy practices thus involve emotional and moral elements that produce empathy, solidarity, hope, altruism, resilience, and many other affective experiences that enable people to perceive how others feel beyond what they literally say. Neuroeducation may help inform literacy teaching and learning in its emphasis on self-regulation and decision-making. The mind’s actions during literacy events represent synergy with creativity, art, and different forms of cultural expression, including those occurring among neurodiverse people. The most valued works of art have represented the most sublime of human beings’ creative and artistic literacy. As Esaias Tegnér has written, “For most poets, poetry is nothing but a current comment about their private life, a transcription in verse of the prose of destiny.” And yet everyday cognition, including that associated with mundane literacy practices, also involves these networks and actions.

The Evolution of the Human Mind and Communication The human mind has adapted biologically for millennia, and this process has been studied as an evolutionary phenomenon. The brain has served as the crux of a series of structural and functional transformations over the history of the species. Its original function was biological and was based in actions of nerve impulses; it evolved to form specialized structures and more complex neural networks located in the cerebral cortex. The brain’s evolution has occurred at the levels of both macrostructure and microstructure to produce a refined and unique anatomy with direct implications for human individuality, making the human body anatomically similar across the species, but functionally different within social groups in relation to cultural practices. Ontogeny refers to the development of the individual rather than of the species. Its researchers investigate the biological elements that contribute to

Mind, Society, and Literacy

181

the growth and development of the brain beginning with gestation and the prenatal period. Their studies seek to identify a process of neurodevelopment that continues after birth, when mature functions are incorporated into what is available biologically (Acarin, 2012; Bear, Connors, & Paradiso, 2008). The study of these embryonic mechanisms has identified the ectoderm as one of the most important structures from which the nervous system is formed. Literally meaning “outside the skin,” ectoderm refers to the outermost layer of cells or tissue of an embryo in early development, along with related areas such as the epidermis and nerve tissue. The vesicles of the cephalic region—small cellular or extracellular fluid-filled structures—eventually produce the different elements of the brain and the spinal cord, with all their functional connections and links. The surface of the brain provides the site for the densest layer of neurons in the human brain, giving it a wrinkled form whose surface provides it with far more neurons than it would include if it were smooth, as it is in utero. The key site for the concentration of these neurons and networks is the cerebral cortex, whose development is of concern in considering the brain’s relation to literacy and communication. This development follows from a process originating in neural stem cells, located in the center of the brain in its formative stage. These cells produce a series of transformations that flow from the center to the cortex, ultimately settling in a location where they become linked to other neurons and form functional neural networks. This process is evident in the transformation of the smooth brain of a fetus to the wrinkled brain of a baby after thirty-eight to forty weeks. This maturation shortly after birth sets the stage for the development of basic mental functions in terms of engaging with the world through the senses and integrating motor functions. Most significantly, this process enables the development of advanced cognitive functions, including those associated with literacyrelated thinking and action. Neuroscientists have established a direct, proportional relation between an increase in cranial volume and advances in cognitive abilities. Phylogenetically, these increases are evident in the cranial capacity of Homo Habilis (750 cubic centimeters), Homo Heidelbergensis (350 cubic centimeters), Homo Neanderthal (1500 cubic centimeters), and Homo Sapiens (1400 cubic centimeters). Neanderthal’s larger capacity than that of modern Sapiens suggests the importance not only of volume but also of qualitative mass in neural networks and the cortical development, where Sapiens have a greater capacity (Afifi & Bergman, 2006; Ramos-Zúñiga, 2014a).

182

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Paleoanthropological research in Atapuerca in the north of Spain concludes that Homo stood erect and had a structured social life evolved to enable defense, reproduction, and preservation. Homo’s original guttural communication grew into more elaborate verbal forms of expression based on the communicative needs of daily social interaction (Ramos-Zúñiga, 2014a). In this way, human language and communication are based in biology, yet are subject to social mediation. The social effects are enabled by the brain’s architecture in conjunction with engagement with cultural practices and environmental stimuli, including the need to communicate via speech amid a world dominated by faster, stronger creatures and a volatile geographic and atmospheric environment. Indeed, some have postulated that what enabled human survival was its formation into social groups, more than the solitary intelligence of its individuals (Baumeister, 2005; Stetsenko, 2009, 2011). It is thus crucial to understand how societies develop and how communicative tools, including speech, enable more cohesive communities with a capacity for survival. Although Darwin (1859) is often viewed as having proposed an individualistic “survival of the fittest” interpretation of evolution, in fact he described collective survival as well, in which communicative capacities were central to organization and cultural reproduction over time. Prior to what is now understood as “literacy,” people developed speech as a primary means of communication, laying the basis for the construction of texts that convey information and meaning designed to structure societies in specific ways (Schmandt-Besserat, 2011).

Cognitive Domains Neuroscientists have studied advanced, integrated cognition whose complex processes are enabled by the circuitry in neural networks centered in the cerebral cortex. They have used such tools as magnetic resonance imaging (Brodmann, 1909; Penfield, 1938) to map the cortical brain. These researchers have identified cognitive domains related to memory and learning processes that are relevant to how to teach for literacy development. Most germane to this challenge, these researchers have mapped how people think as they engage in reflection in relation to problem-solving (Bennet, Dennett, Hacker, & Searle, 2007; Conn, 1995). Neuroscientists have identified both typical and atypical cognitive patterns involved in memory, cognitive processing speed, attention, and executive

Mind, Society, and Literacy

183

functions. These fundamental capacities have been parsed for their roles in what Gardner (1983) calls multiple intelligences, a theory that views cognition falling into eight domains, including the linguistic intelligence that is central to literacy, and interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences that are involved when social and reflective purposes are involved. Gardner’s other intelligences— mathematical/logical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, and naturalistic— may also come into play during literacy activity, depending on how “literacy” is defined and enacted and how people orchestrate knowledge in relation to texts. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has come under criticism for its lack of empirical validation (e.g., Waterhouse, 2006, among many others), so it should not be taken as gospel. Even for skeptics, however, it may have heuristic value in liberating educators’ assumptions about the ways in which cognition has been historically conceived in schools.

Basic foundational Basic and disciplinary knowledge Information and communication technologies Literacity

Skills for life and work Cultural competencies Ethical and emotional balance

Human cognition

Humanistic

Metacognition

Creativity Critical thinking Problem solving Communication Collaboration

Figure 7.1  Integrating schema of human cognition. Copyright owned by Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga.

184

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Comprehension, knowledge, and application represent the axis of cognitive functioning, enabling more complex tasks involving analysis, synthesis, and evaluation that allow for adaptation, problem-solving in changing environments, and the capacity for empathy and resilience. Figure 7.1 summarizes this integrative model, which is made up of three elementary blocks—fundamental, metacognitive, and humanistic—out of which specific actions originate. Chomsky (2003) described two basic capacities for identifying the achievements of education in terms of the cognitive processes of learning, memory, behavior, and their bases in linguistics: the ability to question, and the ability to create. Analytical and critical cognitive processes are integrated and provide the foundation for creative thinking. Creativity is realized in many areas of life, not just in fields considered wholly imaginative such as art, but also in tool creation and, to Scribner (1997), in the most mundane and repetitive of human acts, including factory work. It is important to keep in mind that creative thinking is not solely the province of the lone genius, but an everyday phenomenon undertaken by people in routine activity, including textual engagement. Literacy educators must keep in mind that readers’ engagement with texts is inevitably more than reactive. Instead, readers are constructive and creative, bringing to texts understandings and schemata that require interpretive, imaginative cognition, no matter how precise and literal the text being read might be (Smagorinsky, 2001).

The Language Map Broca (1861, for motor functions) and Wernicke (1875/1995, for sensory functions) produced a basic map of the cortical regions of language that helps account for its role in thinking. This map provided a structural outline and described the role of the brain’s cortex and the dominance of the left hemisphere in human language and communication. Sensory perception processes are related biologically to those that affect hearing. This neural network is implicated in a host of other processes. These functions include the processing of information in conjunction with other senses; connections with the motor area of language in the frontal lobe; functions central to memory, including its psycho-emotional elements, reflective, analytical, and executive functions; and functions of assertiveness and inhibition (Catani & Sandrone, 2015; Damasio, 1994; Ramos-Zúñiga, 2014b).

Mind, Society, and Literacy

185

These elements collectively produce a system of human language for conventional print literacy activities, while including possibilities for understanding other meaning-laden symbols such as linguistic codes, semiotic signs, tactile images (e.g., Braille), sign language, and computer and technological symbols. This functional network provides the basic schema for perception related to receptive and retention processes in learning. The biological network that makes human speech possible accounts for the processing of sensory input and more advanced processes involved in literacy development. Its role extends to a variety of other cognitive potentials, such as verbal motor response, writing in a print medium, nonverbal expression, the emotional response to a perception, or a response to a verbal command. Within any culture, both the grammatical aspects of language and the variations available in social languages, regional dialects, speech genres, and other nuanced uses of speech are central to appropriate communicative speech, and thus to attendant literacy activities. Reflective thinking, critical thinking, creativity, and assertiveness rely on experiential elements from previous learning, along with the knowledge of when to remain silent. Literacy involves more than the deciphering and discernment of texts. It must be linked to reactive and premeditated processes derived from critical thinking, which lead to executive tasks and decision-making. It must support the pragmatic part of education that seeks to shape how people act by teaching them new information and practices (Arsuaga & Martín-Loeches, 2013; Doidge, 2007), including those necessary to engage fruitfully with print literacy and with other literacies that serve a communicative or expressive role in social groups.

Literacy and Mental Processes This chapter takes the perspective that “the hoary myth of ‘nature versus [nurture1]’ [constitutes] a false dichotomy that continues to haunt the psychological sciences” (Norenzayan, Schaller, & Heine, 2010). Rather, like the contributors to their volume, this chapter assumes that evolutionary psychology and cultural psychology are complementary. This balance suggests the need to understand both the biological evolution of the brain over hundreds of thousands of years and the manner in which specific forms of thinking are shaped by cultures and Norenzayan et al.’s text, at least in the version consulted for this chapter, actually says “nature versus nature,” which is presumably an error.

1

186

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

their practices in briefer cultural history and within generations. This volume, and the program of study it describes, is especially concerned with the relation between mental development and practices associated with literacy. From the perspective of cognitive psychology and its biological orientation, literacy is enabled by neural networks that resemble the workings of a computer operating according to an input unit, a processing unit, and an output unit. Significantly, the computer model lacks certain human elements like emotions, passions, culture, and social goals, at least at this point in the development of robotics. From a strictly neurological perspective, however, it can help identify processes through which cognition unfolds. In a computer, input might come through the keyboard or information taken from a digital file, or it might come directly from a global network to which people are connected and the information they wish to receive or that arrives uninvited. Literacy may thus involve textual forms beyond conventional alphabetic print and include the variety of communicative, semiotic means available to modern humans in technological societies. When people read, they may do so for a variety of purposes and employ a range of processes. This variation might follow from text types, reader goals, local practices in disciplinary communities, instructional emphases, and many other influences (Smagorinsky & Mayer, 2014). Once the pathway of perception and deciphering has been defined according to the communicative code being used (print text, color code, sign, musical note, grammar rule, etc.), a relay is made to configure the entire context of the text’s message. In literacy education, these processes are fundamental because the more instructional resources and tools used in comprehending and making sense of a text, the greater the possibilities of retention in memory. For example, in one enduring finding from cognitive psychology, people remember more when reading is accompanied by images and sounds designed to suggest creative, emotional, and playful moods, and when the reading experience affords multiple iterations, than they do when reading is undertaken in a monotone, without reinforcement through rereading and without accompanying sensory information (Sperling, 1960). The cerebral cortex accounts for how people classify information, link it to prior knowledge, identify its priorities, apply an executive function for that which requires an immediate response, review information that requires more clarity, and resolve elements with emotional relevance. This multifaceted view of learning emphasizes the need for education to proceed on many sensory fronts, including literacy learning, so that it takes advantage of the widest possible range

Mind, Society, and Literacy

187

of human perception and cognitive processing a culture may afford, in order to abet what a person’s biological structure and process provides. Knowledge thus involves more than accessing and processing information. It is concerned with identifying a meaning, a purpose, an objective, and an anticipation of its consequences. This complex web of understanding suggests the need for a broader, cultural knowledge society and knowledge economy. In these communities of practice, the cognitive processes that begin in literacy yield different dividends, which give it a specific value, beyond information and its processing in the fashion of a computer. What matters socially and educationally is the transformative potential of learning. Mental processes across the cognitive spectrum are nourished by literacy, suggesting the importance of addressing literacy as a multifaceted phenomenon that includes such agentive acts as questioning and creating and such human functions as intrapersonal reflection and interpersonal engagement. These processes involve psycho-emotional elements not presently available in computer models. People do more than compute and process information. They appreciate beauty, weep over emotional matters, and live an affectively driven life that cannot be excluded from accounts of teaching and learning (Damasio, 1994). Moral emotions produce empathy and feeling what others feel, altruism and giving to others, and solidarity and respecting equity and justice for others (Haidt, 2012; Wallon, 1938). People also engage in such future-oriented, emotional acts when they hope for outcomes. These anticipations cannot be explained through current computer models, in spite of their predictive capabilities based on algorithms (Chalmers, 1996; Churchland, 2012; Dietrich & Haider, 2016; Ramos-Zúñiga, 2014b, 2015). The understanding that literacy involves more than computer-like information processing, and is a whole-body phenomenon undertaken in relation to the social world and its history, has important implications for a literacy education for teachers. A literacy education must go well beyond decoding words and longer texts. It needs to address engagement with texts as meaningful collections of signs requiring inference and constructive, emotionally motivated responses (Smagorinsky, 2001, 2018).

Literacy and Neural Plasticity Literacy, from a purely neurobiological perspective, originates in neuronal mechanisms that involve the characteristics and permeability of the cell

188

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

membrane, electrophysiological activation by stimuli, and the transmission of those impulses through specific neural pathways to link with other neurons via chemical and electrical synapses. A chemical synapse through a neurotransmitter enables the retransmission of the information to the next neuron. These neuronal and cognitive processes occur for readers every time they engage with a text, and are malleable in character. They represent tangible, volumetric, and structural spaces, available in dendritic spines that resemble the thorns on the stem of a rose bush, growing in form and volume as part of the learning processes. This malleability is central to neurodevelopment and the acquisition of new skills and abilities on the sensory, motor, and cognitive planes. Environmental factors produce specific pathways for growth as they help to shape how the nervous system responds. An isolated neuron would have no functional expectations; the neuron that is communicating through axo-dendritic networks “socializes” its information and sustains a constantly interacting and growing social network (Kandel, Jessel, & Schwartz, 2005; Ramos-Zúñiga, 2014a). The human mind is thus not analogous to an off-the-shelf computer whose hardware works the same as every other computer’s. Rather, its functions are shaped by social interactions that themselves are predicated on historical cultural practices (Vygotsky, 1987). Furthermore, neural flexibility is fundamental for rehabilitation processes designed to restore an absent or debilitated function, either by means of existing pathways or through alternative neural paths that provide a roundabout means of mediation (Vygotsky, 1993). This rerouting of neurological functions is available in language therapy, physical therapy, social therapy, and cognitive rehabilitation, either to rehabilitate a function or to develop alternative means of achieving the same end (e.g., reading via Braille). Literacy is thus a function of a genetically provided electrophysiological and biochemical brain system that is under continual transformation in relation to environmental conditions. This reliance on both biological architecture and social mediation has implications for literacy development, including learning languages, reading and writing as both basic processes and socially mediated acts, communicating via various sign systems and the specialized symbols on electronic devices, and other communicative competencies. From an educational standpoint, each of these possibilities should inform literacy teaching and learning. In areas like special education and other fields concerned with human diversity and atypical bodily structure, understanding the mind’s elastic character and the importance of environmental support is key to providing

Mind, Society, and Literacy

189

appropriate guidance and settings that give learners an affirmational context leading to future capabilities with social value (Smagorinsky, 2016). These social considerations allow for the restructuring of neural pathways to enable more normative functioning, particularly following such events as a stroke that may drastically alter a person’s possibilities in life (Manes, 2015), a concern of adult literacy programs if not necessarily teacher education programs in which young adults are enrolled.

Literacy and Neuroeducation Cognitive neuroscientists have mapped the workings of the brain, and its more distributed character known as mind, more clearly. This conception has epistemological, methodological, and pragmatic considerations, which have generated bridges between evolutionary neurobiology and the concerns of cultural psychology in areas such as behavior, cognition in relation to environments, emotional dimensions of thinking, and related contextual issues. This approach has given rise to the recognition of neuroscience by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a paradigm linking education with the social sciences, such that biology is understood in relation to culture. This view regards literacy as a central educational practice, both as a general set of principles and practices and as more specific understandings particular to disciplinary communities of practice. Education, and teacher education, assume the importance of understanding cognitive processes in order to move beyond notions of teaching and learning associated with the transmission of information. Information is more than processed. It becomes integrated with the human need to understand the world via value systems, to filter information through emotions, and to use information for transformative purposes (Benarós, Lipina, Segretin, Hermida, & Colombo, 2010; Glickstein, 2014). Learning involves a host of actions including playful experimentation, emotional engagement, reflective thinking, analysis-synthesis, deduction, making inferences, discernment, mental flexibility, decision-making, executive functioning, and other generative actions. These capabilities suggest that a literacy education that is limited to remembering information works at a relatively low level that assumes the need for “basic” mastery before these seemingly more advanced undertakings may begin. Instead, literacy education needs to put information to work by teaching critical, reflective, inferential, and skeptical

190

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

dispositions and skills; emphasizing problem-posing and problem-solving; including opportunities for playing with ideas; exploring how emotions shape cognition; and otherwise using literacy for authentic purposes. This emphasis is compatible with ideas available throughout this volume, such as the need for a Freirean critical literacy education to engage both teachers and learners in inquiries into social injustice and help identify solutions to persistent inequities in their surroundings. Emotions occupy a fundamental place in motivational processes and creativity, especially when readers are taken into account (see Figure 7.2). In this way, creativity links not only with productivity but also with cultural and artistic expression, the quest for happiness, and personal and social well-being. Institutions such as the Organization of American States have offered a series of fundamental objectives for education since 2015. These goals include early childhood care and education, universal primary education, learning for young people and adults, and literacy, equity, and quality in education. These aims all involve literacy and require an innovative educational commitment that is predicated on understandings from neuroscience and cultural psychology, suggesting that literacy teachers benefit from understanding the biological factors in becoming literate (Blank, 2013; Gazzaniga, 2012; Kwint & Wingate,

Cognitive domains linked to creative thinking.

Functional impact

Evolutionary algorithms

Adaptation, compensation, perception of systems, multitasking platforms, problem solving, awareness of time lines

Prediction processes

Ability to think in terms of the future, prediction of events, cognitive and pragmatic anticipation, expectation, risks and decision making.

Creative diversity

Creative networks, multitasking, global thinking, multicultural enrichment.

Global networks

Global benchmarks, competitiveness, indicators, reward.

Systematization of tasks

Cognitive maps, management guides, organizational charts, diagrams, critical thinking, systems theory.

Collaborative networks

Teamwork, solidarity, empathy, common goals.

Creativity for personal satisfaction

Enjoyment of tasks, reward, recognition, assigned values, well-being, mindfulness.

Figure 7.2  Cognitive domains and creative thinking. Copyright owned by Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga.

Mind, Society, and Literacy

191

2012) without losing sight of how these factors are shaped culturally. Cognitive neuroscience offers educators the following premises to inform their work: ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Brain functioning allows learning and self-regulation. The brain accounts for human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral identity. Cognition may proceed from the imitation of models, with the understanding that imitation is not “mindless” but typically involves adaptation and some degree of creative thinking (see Vygotsky, 1987). Emotional relays contribute to learning processes. The brain is subject to input from different perceptual sources, so education needs to be attentive to the full sensory experience in teaching and learning. Genetic (biological) and epigenetic (environmental) influences are fundamental for helping a learning process take specific shape. The ability of the brain to retain and transform knowledge is an active, permanent, and malleable process. The brain provides neurological routes that enable people to integrate learning. Creative integration of cognitive processes enables people to experience such feelings as enjoyment, psycho-emotional balance, and well-being.

Neurodiversity and Literacy Creativity may be realized in the rarified genius of the artist (Eysenck, 1995), the mundane routines of factory workers (Scribner, 1997), and everything in between. From the standpoint of the German notion of kultur, if one can overlook its Aryan suggestion of racism, creativity produces the most significant artifacts of a society in literature, music, theater, art, and other sublime expressions of human creativity. Artistic genius in some cases follows from neurodivergence that produces unusual perspectives and forms. Dostoevsky’s description of the convulsive crisis in The Idiot, the symphonies of R. Schumann, the impetuous impressionistic artwork of van Gogh, the hypergraphia of the mystical literature of Saint Teresa of Jesus or Saint John of the Cross: All exhibit extraordinary thinking and the texts such thinking produces (Bogousslavsky & Dieguez, 2013). Statistical norms of typical conduct do not suggest the deficiency of other ways of being. The Savant syndrome gives the bearer an extraordinary ability for certain skills such as mathematics in some people on the autism spectrum that belie their difficulties with conventional communication and socialization

192

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

skills (Tammet, 2007). High-functioning autistics might exhibit an “Asperger’s Advantage” in their unusual ability to focus on tasks in detail (Smagorinsky, 2014). The “manic” episodes in bipolar disorder are highly active and productive and may contribute to the creation of art or amplify performance in other fields (Forney, 2012). The ingestion of drugs has produced unusual creative work from Thomas De Quincey, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others and has been central to many cultural rituals such as those involving naturally occurring hallucinogens like peyote (Ramos-Zúñiga et al., 2011). Creative literacy may emerge from genius to produce significant art for the ages or may be undertaken by everyday people in their representation of their understandings or execution of tasks. It relies on a mosaic of perceptual interactions, of particular reactions of each biological brain, and of multiple artistic expressions that are part of cognitive networks available through social interaction. There is no single source for creativity, but, instead, an integration of creativity with cognition, emotions, artistic communities and their values, social concerns that motivate expressions, and much more. Cognitive impairment of either biological or traumatic origins affects these possibilities, both in the limitations they may impose and in the possibilities they may create, depending on how the individual interprets them and how the individual’s social surroundings support various forms of expression. In education, the issue of memory is important, both because it often forms the basis of assessment in rote learning and because it matters in being creative (see Figure 7.3). Literacy teachers need to understand these phenomena to see the world from the perspective of their diverse students, and to design instruction appropriate to their developmental levels, proximity to evolutionary norms, and cultural experiences that shape their worldviews and actions (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994; Sacks, 1985). Providing an education that is responsive to neurodiversity cannot view departures from norms as necessarily deficient (Vygotsky, 1993). When rehabilitation of a declining ability or providing an alternative to an absent capability is a goal, literacy practices may promote the development of functions considered necessary for satisfactory navigation of the world. Reading, descriptive analysis, card games and practices, puzzles, daily agendas, experiential descriptions, music, dance, evocation of past information, etc. are part of the cognitive rehabilitation tools that are applied to people with symptoms of dementia such as Alzheimer's. Illness, aging, dementia, and other geriatric challenges create the need for support networks and rehabilitation,

Mind, Society, and Literacy • Perceptual failures (visual, auditory). Inattention, poor concentration.

• Indecision, loss of confidence, procrastination, limited multitasking ability.

Attention

Memory

Executive function

Psychomotor speed

193 • Alterations in recent memory, failure in the association of events, difficulty in calculation, slow reasoning.

• Slowness, lack of focus, altered gross and fine motor skills.

Figure 7.3  Cognitive differences that affect literacy and require educational attention. Copyright owned by Rodrigo Ramos-Zúñiga.

and infrastructures that respect and promote facilities for enabling fulfilling participation in social life (Andreasen, 2001). Yet the elderly are not the only ones who deserve such support. The full neurodiverse population deserves similar dignity and opportunity in learning how to manage their social lives amid people who appreciate their assets and help them develop their potential in life, with literacy development a key dimension to their satisfaction and participation in their communities (Smagorinsky, 2016).

Conclusion Literacy as a cognitive function represents a transdisciplinary expression of human thought. Neuroscientists have identified new routes for identifying, processing, and transforming the information and narratives available in texts into knowledge through a series of cognitive domains that are in continual interaction through the activation of different sensory and perceptual modalities and their respective functional links. Conventional print literacy practices are based in cognitive maps through which human communication and its different interpretive and discernment purposes are configured to generate different responses. The brain provides

194

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

the ability to consolidate knowledge with different psycho-emotional, abstract, and executive function relays that allow for more than simply the processing of information. Self-direction, decision-making, and initiative are required to realize the potential of the transformative practice of education and its balance with human and biological ecosystems (Coplan & Goldie, 2014; Coronado, 2014). The brain’s plasticity provides an extraordinary opportunity to achieve an educational molding of the human brain to consolidate intrapersonal and interpersonal processes that will define social behavior. Literacy is one of the most powerful tools, since it is related to one of the most elementary and distinctive cognitive structures of Home Sapiens and their ability to communicate through language and communication in all its variants (Fuster, 2015). Teacher educators need not become conversant with the full range of neurological processes that contribute to literacy development, and might find the technical details in this chapter overwhelming. The point is not to have teacher educators, and subsequently the teachers they instruct or the teachers’ students in Mexican schools, be able to explain learning in terms of neuroscience. What matters is the understanding that biology and culture are complementary aspects of human development; the realization that the mind has a malleable character that makes instruction a critical mediator of that development; the understanding that literacy is multifaceted and multisensory and goes beyond decoding squiggles on a page as letters and words; and the understanding that teacher educators have a responsibility to understand these factors on some level and help teachers develop ways to teach in ways that promote literacy in service of social and personal goals. In the Guadalajaran context featured in this volume, such an education might involve understanding that the Eurocentric, colonial, technical society that governs mainstream life produces different frames of mind than do the scores of original cultures in the state, nation, and continent. This perspective might help teachers move away from hierarchical conceptions of human difference, based on culture, neurology, and other factors, and consider how literacy functions in the daily lives of members of diverse communities (see Chapter 5). Understanding “the brain” thus involves recognizing its general neurological makeup and functions, and knowing that this organ takes shape in relation to engagement with others. No doubt this understanding would inform teacher education in any national or cultural setting, requiring teacher educators and teachers to create contexts that recognize biological factors and social factors in conceiving of a literacy education. This multifaceted conception of thinking and

Mind, Society, and Literacy

195

being literate is necessary if the future of a society is to be built on a foundation of informed education that is appropriate to the needs of learners and the cultures they, in turn, occupy and help to shape.

References Acarin, N. (2012). El cerebro del rey. Vida, sexo, conducta, envejecimiento y muerte de los humanos [The King’s brain: Life, sex, behavior, aging and death of human beings] (9th ed.). Barcelona, Spain: RBA Libros. Afifi, A. K., & Bergman, R. A. (2006). Neuroanatomía funcional. Texto y atlas [Functional neuroanatomy] (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Andreasen, N. (2001). Brave new brain: Conquering mental illness in the era of the genome. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Arsuaga, J. L., & Martín-Loeches, M. (2013). El sello indeleble. Pasado, presente y futuro del ser humano [The indelible seal. Past, present and future of humankind]. Barcelona, Spain: Debate. Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The cultural animal: Human nature, meaning, and social life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bear, M., Connors, B., & Paradiso, M. (2008). Neurociencia. La exploración del cerebro [Neuroscience: The exploration of the brain] (3rd ed.). Barcelona, Spain: Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott W & W. Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50(1–3), 7–15. Benarós, S., Lipina, S., Segretin, A., Hermida, J., & Colombo, J. (2010). Neurociencia y educación: hacia la construcción de puentes interactivos [Neuroscience and education: Towards the construction of interactive bridges]. Revista de Neurología (Rev Neurol.), 50(3), 179–86. Bennett, M.R., Dennett, D.C., Hacker, P.M., Searle, J.R., & Robinson, D. N. (2007). Neuroscience and philosophy: Brain, mind, and language. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Blank, R. H. (2013). Intervention in the brain: Politics, policy and ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bogousslavsky, J., & Dieguez, S. (2013). Literary medicine: Brain disease and doctors in novels, theater and film. Basilea, Switzerland: Karger. Broca, P. (1861). Perte de la parole, ramollissement chronique et destruction partielle du lobe anterieur gauche du cerveau [Loss of speech, chronic softening and partial destruction of the left anterior lobe of the brain]. Bulletin de la Société Française d'Anthropologie, 2, 235–38. Brodmann, K. (1909). Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Grosshirnrinde [Comparative location of the cerebral cortex]. Leipzig, Germany: Johann Ambrosius Barth.

196

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Catani, M., & Sandrone, S. (2015). Brain renaissance: From Vesalius to modern neuroscience. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, N. (2003). Chomsky on democracy and education. New York, NY: Routledge Falmer. Churchland, P. S. (2012). Brain trust: What neuroscience tells us about morality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conn, P. M. (1995). Neuroscience in medicine. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company. Coplan, A. K., & Goldie, P. (2014). Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Coronado, M. (2014). Escribir, crear, contar [Write, create, count]. Barcelona, Spain: Instituto Cervantes-Espasa. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’s error. New York, NY: Grosset/Putnam. Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London, UK: John Murray. Dietrich, A., & Haider, H. A. (2016). Neurocognitive framework for human creative thought. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–7. Doidge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself. New York, NY: Penguin. Eysenck, H. J. (1995). Genius: The natural history of creativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Forney, E. (2012). Marbles: Mania, depression, Michelangelo and me. New York, NY: Avery. Fuster, J. (2015). Neurociencia: Los cimientos cerebrales de nuestra libertad [Neuroscience, the brain foundations of our freedom]. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of the mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gazzaniga, M. S. (2012). ¿Quién manda aquí? El libre albedrío y la ciencia del cerebro [Who is in charge here? Free will and the science of brain]. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós. Glickstein, M. (2014). Neuroscience: A historical introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Vintage. Kandel, E., Jessel, T., & Schwartz, J. (2005). Neurociencia y conducta [Neuroscience and behavior]. Madrid, Spain: Pearson Prentice Hall. Kwint, M., & Wingate, R. (2012). Brains: The mind as a matter. London, UK: Wellcome Trust. Manes, F. (2015). Usar el cerebro [Using the brain]. Barcelona, Spain: Planeta de Libros. Norenzayan, A., Schaller, M., & Heine, S. J. (2010). Introduction. In M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S. J. Heine, T. Yamagishi, & T. Kameda (Eds.), Evolution, culture, and the human mind (pp. 1–5). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Penfield, W. (1938). The cerebral cortex in man I: The cerebral cortex and consciousness. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 40(3), 417–42.

Mind, Society, and Literacy

197

Ramos-Zúñiga, R. (2014a). Guía básica en neurociencias (Basic guide in neurosciences) (2nd ed.) Barcelona, Spain: Elsevier. Ramos-Zúñiga, R. (2014b). Neuroethics as a new epistemological perspective in neuroscience. Revista de Neurologia, 58(4), 145–46. Ramos-Zúñiga, R. (2015). Neuroethics are more than the bioethics of neuroscience. Surgical Neurology International, 6(24), 6–24. Ramos-Zúñiga, R., Quiñones-Hinojosa, A., Ochoa-Plascencia, M. R., Casillas-Espinosa, P. M., & Sanchez-Prieto, J. A. (2011). The brain and creativity. Archivos de Ciencia, 3(2), 204–7. Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2011, February). How writing came about. Keynote address presented at the Writing Research Across Borders II, George Mason University, Washington, DC/Northern Virginia. Scribner, S. (1997). Mind and social practice: Selected writings of Sylvia Scribner (E. Tobach, R. Joffe. Falmagne, M. Brown Parlee, L. M. W. Martin, & A. Scribner Kapelman, Eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smagorinsky, P. (2001). If meaning is constructed, what is it made from?: Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational Research, 71, 133–69. Smagorinsky, P. (2014, November 26). Taking the diss out of disability. Teachers College Record. Available at http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/TCR/TCR2014.html Smagorinsky, P. (Ed.). (2016). Creativity and community among autism-spectrum youth: Creating positive social updrafts through play and performance. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Emotion, reason, and argument: Teaching persuasive writing in tense times. English Journal, 107(5), 98–101. Smagorinsky, P., & Mayer, R. E. (2014). Learning to be literate. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 605–25). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs, 74, 1–29. Stetsenko, A. (2009). Vygotsky and the conceptual revolution in developmental sciences: Towards a unified (non-additive) account of human development. In M. Fleer, M. Hedegaard, & J. R. H. Tudge (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2009: Childhood studies and the impact of globalization: Policies and practices at global and local levels (pp. 125–41). New York, NY: Routledge. Stetsenko, A. (2011). Darwin and Vygotsky on development: An exegesis on human nature. In M. Kontopodis, C. Wulf, & B. Fichtner (Eds.), Children, culture and education: Cultural, historical, anthropological perspectives (pp. 25–41). New York, NY: Springer. Tammet, D. (2007). Born on a blue day: Inside the extraordinary mind of an autistic savant. New York, NY: The Free Press.

198

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (Vol. 1, pp. 39–285) (R. Rieber & A. Carton, Eds.; N. Minick, Trans.). New York, NY: Plenum. Vygotsky, L. S. (1993). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. Volume 2: The fundamentals of defectology (abnormal psychology and learning disabilities) (R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton, Eds.; J. E. Knox & C. B. Stevens, Trans.). New York, NY: Plenum. Wallon, H. (1938). La vie mentale [Mental life]. Paris, France: Editions Sociales. Waterhouse, L. (2006). Multiple intelligences, the Mozart effect, and emotional intelligence: A critical review. Educational Psychologist, 41(4), 207–25. Wernicke, K. (1875/1995). The aphasia symptom-complex: A psychological study on an anatomical basis (1875). In P. Eling (Ed.), Reader in the history of aphasia: From Franz Gall to Norman Geschwind (pp. 69–89). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Part 3

Literacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education

200

8

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education Luis Alberto Gutiérrez Díaz de León

“Technology” in this chapter refers to the means by which humans transform the surrounding environment via tools. Although today technology tends to refer to devices that can be plugged in and that are used to produce and read digital texts, historically it has referred to a variety of tools for navigating life. Early humans used technologies to hunt and cook their food, to record their histories in cave paintings, to defend themselves from their enemies and predatory creatures, and to carry out many other daily and ritualistic functions. These technologies included spears, hammers, stone bowls, brushes, daggers, and other material implements created or adapted to maintain societies and help their members survive and flourish. Later, the pencil served as an exciting new technology (Baron, 2009). These technologies continue to coexist alongside what are now considered the technical tools of modern life, from cell phones to vast computer networks. The twenty-first century has been heralded as the “Information Age” because of the ubiquity of ways of automating, optimizing, and facilitating the activities people must perform at work, in school, or in daily life. Recently, with the proliferation of “fake news,” that “information” is of increasingly dubious veracity, a problem that can be addressed through education. According to the Digital Gap University Veracruzana project, digital literacy in the twenty-first century refers to the search, use, and manipulation of information (Aguilar, Ramírez, & López, 2014, p. 125). Scientific and technological advances are taking place at a dizzying pace. The environment is being transformed, including both the virtual world available via digital devices and the material world where infrastructural elements occupy the landscape and affect the natural world. For instance, there is now a crisis in bird populations because nearly 7 million birds die every year

202

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

after flying into cell phone towers (Longcore et al., 2013), a number that is sure to grow as societies become increasingly dependent on mobile devices. Many gadgets are now affordable, allowing for a comfortable and prosperous life via their affordances. There is evidence that they, in turn, shape how people think. Learning processes remain the same: People develop abilities through observation, insightful imitation, adaptation, and practice. Digital technologies, however, provide different pathways to undertake these processes from those historically practiced. Yet, the Prussian model of education implemented in the eighteenth century remains in effect in schools. One consideration for educators, then, concerns how to adapt educational practice to take into account how technology may change teaching and learning. Consider, for instance, how someone begins an internet search. Especially in an era of “fake news” and deceptive or downright fraudulent “information” that shows up in searches, it’s important for the searcher to be discriminating about the information yielded. An astute user of the internet should know how to compare, contrast, analyze, evaluate, and select information that is reliable and valid. Technology-based education must address this issue if people are to be informed participants in a global economy where the entry ramps are often digital. What matters is learning appropriate practices for navigating this territory and its many pitfalls. Not only does the internet include a good deal of dubious and fraudulent content—a phenomenon to which scholarship has not been immune (Andreopoulos, 2001, and many more recent cases)—it provides an endless series of distractions for students who prefer its social possibilities to its academic benefits. This chapter explores the intersection of technology and literacy, provides a brief historical context of technology, and traces its incorporation into learning processes, including the analytic and reflective skills required for discriminating, responsible use. I will describe both the strategies for use and patterns of behavior in literacy, and one of the main obstacles to developing a fully literate digital society: the digital divide. This phrase refers to inequality in the use of media and access to information generally attributed to economic disparities, accompanied by a cognitive gap that hinders the reflection and the full adoption of knowledge that, in this case, is found in cyberspace. In other words, as Kim (2012) has argued, simply being provided with technology tools without simultaneously developing corresponding psychological tools for using them appropriately is insufficient for learning to teach and learn in a digital society. Technology initiatives that focus on gadgets rather than thinking are likely to have limited effects on learning and do not take

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

203

advantage of the rich affordances available from sophisticated understandings of how to think and act through the mediation of technological tools.

The Evolution of Technology for Literacy Technology has been part of human life since the first tools were developed to affect the environment early in human history. Basalla (2011) proposes that people develop tools in response to needs, such that necessity is the parent of invention of both technologies and attendant materials and practices. The invention of the automobile, for instance, opened new possibilities for how to navigate society, producing the need for and, thus, invention of interstate highways and other related elements, such as chain hotels and motels to accommodate travelers (Halberstam, 1994). Cars were originally luxury items owned only by the wealthy. Their greater possibilities only became evident after roads became constructed of asphalt rather than cobblestone, and after their availability and affordability became more widespread through mass production in factories, creating new needs that required additional inventions to satisfy. The modern computer era has had a similar history. Computers in the 1940s were mammoth, room-occupying machines only used for highly sophisticated calculations, such as weather forecasting (Dizikes, 2011). The invention of the personal computer, like the manufacture of the affordable Model T car by Ford in 1908, produced both a new invention and a new set of needs and demands, all met robustly by the explosion of the computer industry. The availability of the internet in the mid-1990s was instrumental in giving personal computers a vast new set of possibilities, and in giving the computer industry a major challenge in responding to emerging needs and potentials. Companies that couldn’t adapt went out of business; Atari, which dominated the early gaming market, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2013, although it has since been bought with the goal of restoring it competitively. Meanwhile, the recent crises of internet hacking, theft, and piracy, and the proliferation of fraudulent “news” designed to gain political advantage, show how every development produces new challenges and demands that require additional technological advances. Technology crises, caused both by accident (e.g., the fire that paralyzed the Atlanta airport in Georgia, United States, in December, 2017) and by human interference (e.g., the many security breaches affecting web-based institutions in the twenty-first century) have demonstrated the frailties of depending on technology in a connected, globalized society. Yet, the computer is foundational

204

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

to the Information Age because of its rapid access to information, goods, and communication. Living securely in this age has become a daily struggle, and understanding the pitfalls of internet dependency should inform educational practice that claims a digital orientation. Education provides an important setting for socialization that is critical to human development. Schooling has experienced profound changes in how knowledge gets constructed, learned, and adapted, with digital technologies playing a major role in recent decades. In this century, the computer or digital device is the object, the tool, the technology that many students use to carry out their daily tasks. Smart phones not only make and receive calls but include expanding multitasking and multimedia functions, many of which have an online dimension. The phone has thus become a tool used in daily life, in education, and in the commerce of entrepreneurs great and small (Kalman & Hernández, 2018). With this expansion of usage, users must learn caution to make themselves less vulnerable to the security breaches and deceptions seemingly inherent to electronically connected communities. The internet has a role in schooling as different platforms for the management and creation of virtual courses, conceptual maps, synoptic tables, discussion forums, opinion, and information are readily available, if often of a dubious nature due to the possibilities that online sites provide for abuse. Both the availability of multiple legitimate sources and the problem of myriads of bogus “information” sites suggest the need for web-based learning to be concerned with source analysis and evaluation, and “deepfake” videos now pose a threat to the credibility of any information available online. This analytic imperative requires learners to take on a volitional, critical stance in relation to what the internet provides. Further, the interaction between the teacher and the student should be horizontal rather than hierarchical. Teachers who position themselves as fellow inquirers must continually stay up to date and in dialogue with students about what they are searching for, how they evaluate material, and what they do with what they find; and should be aware of how students use digital potentials to construct texts of their own for entry into the virtual world of communication. A digital dimension can help meet many learning needs, and can create more needs and thus more technologies, including those needed for security. Although early computers largely served computational needs, they soon were more frequently employed for word processing. The development of faster processors and related technologies allowed for the creation of other nonmathematical uses involving a range of images (Computer History Museum, 2018). Through these developments, both conventional print literacy and the multiliteracies covering

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

205

diverse sign systems often are carried out on digital devices. Acknowledging the role of technology in literacy education, and thus teacher education as it is reinvented in Mexico and beyond, is a critical aspect of the literacy effort we are undertaking to prepare Mexican children and youth for the emerging needs of the next decades.

Digital Literacy: Technology for Literacy and Literacy for Technology The previous sections of this chapter review how technologies support literacy as tools for the access, development, evaluation, appropriation, and construction of knowledge. Technologies potentially expand possibilities for teaching and learning, from providing access to information and sources of knowledge to constructing original texts for entry into the national knowledge and opinion base to promote social change (Johnson, Chisam, Smagorinsky, & Wargo, 2018). Technology is also, in and of itself, an object of literacy. Technology has not only facilitated the activities of daily life and those of scientific development. Internet-based media have also produced new forms of communication, including interaction between people from any part of the world. Technology has both provided tools for the development of these competences and generated the need for new skills and new literacies to navigate a globalized world connected by the internet. Educators must respond to the needs to analyze and interpret the worlds available online. Marchant Díaz (n. d.) finds that a technology-enhanced education involves challenges concerning ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

differentiation between digital literacies and traditional literacies in conception and manifestation; adoption of a new theory of knowledge, such as theory of The Creative Organization of Knowledge, which posits that new knowledge must be engaged through new technologies (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995); organization of hypertext; understanding of literacies as global and simultaneous, systemic knowledge; overcoming of “digital divides” that are often the consequence of economic inequities.

Three levels of illiteracy are involved in developing a technology emphasis in education, and need to be understood and addressed: absolute, functional, and

206

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

digital. Absolute illiteracy, which has been the main concern of public policies and development programs, refers to limited capabilities for reading and writing verbal texts when schooling has not been available. Functional illiteracy refers to a precarious command of written language and basic mathematical operations. Digital illiteracy indicates the absence of skills specific to the use of technologies, and access to information and tools for constructing texts. The challenges of education in countries like Mexico include providing reading and writing proficiency to the entire population in order to help people engage with textual worlds appropriately, including the historical emphasis on print texts and the expanded semiotic conception that includes texts produced in any sign system.

Use of Devices and Network Gutiérrez Díaz de León (2016) reports that 94 percent of students at the top level of the University of Guadalajara, one of the largest universities in Mexico, have access to the internet from their mobile devices. They spend nearly six-and-a-half hours a day online, mostly for social and leisure purposes. Educators need to be concerned with how these media are used for information, communication, and knowledge creation in order for this usage to have leverage in formal learning in school. In the labyrinth of possibilities opened up by the advantages of the internet, not everything available is educational or even true. Much of what is available to children and youth involves gaming or social networking that falls outside the interests of the school curriculum, although each of these media can be educational, if not necessarily in the scholastic sense. The appeal of these affordances often overshadows studying in the attention spans of young people. Cassany (2005) states the problem succinctly: “On the Internet garbage and mud are mixed with pearls and jewelry. This is the greatness and weakness of the network” (p. 221). It is thus important to emphasize tools and competencies that promote facility with literacies, particularly as they involve digital technologies. Literacy education should be concerned with developing psychological tools for the responsible use of digital tools such that young people learn how to discern, classify, evaluate, and establish criteria for the appropriation of knowledge and for its critical analysis (Kim, 2012). Further, youth should learn how to construct texts using digital media so that they serve as both consumers and producers of knowledge. Education’s role in young people’s technology use, then, should go

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

207

beyond knowing how tools work and extend into knowing how texts function, how communication works, how various sign systems embed meaning, and much more.

Access to Information and Selection of Information The availability of advanced technologies and access to the web has opened up the spectrum of information to which people have access. There is so much information in the network, and of varying degrees of veracity, that it can be difficult to sort through it all to identify what is reliable. Indeed, the internet has helped to produce a “post-Truth” era in which shared standards for truth have disappeared (Biesecker, 2018). This phenomenon has been traced to Nietzsche (1967), who dismissed the whole notion of an absolute, objective truth, and replaced it with perspectivism, the belief that in the absence of an absolute truth, there are only perspectives on worldly realities. Educators face the challenge that many internet sources provide contradictory, often fraudulent information, at times through error, at times with the deliberate effort to warp reality toward the author’s ideological perspective. What matters to the discriminating internet user is not finding information, but reading it with discernment (Allen, Nodelman, & Zalta, 2002). It is important, then, for students to read internet sources with a critical mind to determine the degree to which they are reliable, comprehensive, and current. Allen et al. (2002) find that meeting all three criteria can be difficult. With printed books, readers assume that the authors are experts whose authority can be investigated with additional searching and verification, trusting that the publisher has integrity in producing its volumes. In contrast, internet-based texts might be anonymous, or produced by people with fraudulent claims to authority, because there may be no vetting procedures, as is the case with books published by reputable publishers, even as such volumes are often met with critical responses by reviewers. On the other hand, print books cannot be maintained as an updated source, because as fixed texts, they may cease to be valid after a few years, or perhaps months or weeks, depending on the subject of study. The speed with which internet encyclopedias surpassed print encyclopedias in reliability demonstrates this phenomenon well. Wikipedia, for instance, can provide daily updates on any topic, and has increasingly built in safeguards against unreliable editing, while a shelf of hardbound Encyclopedia Britannicas is

208

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

fixed at the point of publication. Other, more interactive media such as listservs, bulletin boards, and connected communities involve similar problems of source veracity and require users to learn how to evaluate the authority of a speaker. The educational challenge facing technology-based teaching and learning, solely from the perspective of consuming information, then concerns how to develop ways and skills to evaluate sources and discriminate between what is reliable and what is not, and to consider whether or not there is an objective reality to begin with, or at least a world guided by consensus. Further challenges are involved in the production of texts that students upload to the virtual world.

Technology for Science and Culture Technologies make information accessible and potentially facilitate teaching and learning processes. They also help generate new knowledge and allow young people to contribute to the composition and practices of their cultures. Digital technology has offered a range of new, and increasingly growing, perspectives, styles, and worldviews. Technology is responsible for new ways of seeing the world. Various sciences rely on new technologies to enhance their investigations, from observations of deep space to subterranean explorations of archaeological sites. Cultures have expanded into new forms of expression of arts, politics, scholarship, entertainment, and other areas through which individuals form their identities in enriched ways, extending beyond their geographical and social context. General teaching and learning processes are modified through the use of communication devices and networks. Specific knowledge areas grow and develop subareas and objects of study based on the tendencies and needs identified in the different industries and among software designers. For example, technologies have had an impact on the creation and development of disciplines such as biomedicine, mechatronics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and many other fields, and have held the interest of literacy researchers ever since personal computers became available. Gleason (1981) wrote at the dawn of this era: “Some call it a ‘revolution,’ or a ‘quantum leap,’ or a ‘major innovation.’ Others say, ‘It’s just another fad,’ or ‘We’ll never be able to afford it,’ or ‘Just wait, it’ll go away.’ The ‘it’ is the explosion of the microcomputer onto the educational scene” (p. 7). And like the pencil, “it” has now become an everyday technological tool unlikely to go away. Politically, the twenty-first century has shown how political decisions become affected by online communities in fundraising, perspective-sharing, and in

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

209

many cases, fraud, albeit of a sort practiced before the advent of the internet. Social movements—including the US (and soon thereafter, global) phenomena of #BlackLivesMatter over police shootings of unarmed African Americans, #MeToo over abuse of women, and #NowIsTheTime over unfettered gun access— demonstrate how social media have been employed to promote a more equitable society. Simultaneously, movements designed to perpetuate oppression have also flourished, in spite of domain bans from major providers such as Google and GoDaddy, via “dark web” sites that now host The Daily Stormer and other White Supremacist organizations (Robertson, 2017). In the global community of the twenty-first century, the internet has forever altered the forms of power and social dynamics required to be a knowledgeable citizen, and a technologyinfused education needs to address the emergent, fluid nature of knowledge in this new communicative landscape. The media that lie at the base, such as codes and language, have been transformed, and are still undergoing constant change, due to the penetration of technologies in all areas of everyday life. The evident and accelerated alterations in the forms of communication, in the social codes, in the new languages and the transformed languages, represent an important challenge for educators: Who should adapt to whom? Which codes must be understood to become a web-based learner and contributor? Which emerging needs will influence which educational practices? Which “languages” are important to know to become a well-informed consumer and producer of the internet? Educators face these challenges and more, undoubtedly including those questions yet to be posed as current technologies develop new tools and their affordances and pitfalls.

New Forms of Literacy The presence of technology in education, research, work, and daily life has changed people’s practical activity. The typical practices of the production and consumption of texts have been transformed, even when the content itself might be relatively stable. Cassany (2005) considers digital literacies to require new practices and new critical perspectives to evaluate sources, arguing that technology requires attention to four phenomena: 1. multiliteracy, or simultaneous access to a multiplicity of texts on the same subject; 2. biliteracy, or access to many texts in multiple languages;

210

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

3. electronic literacy, or production of texts in synchronous and asynchronous media through multiple genres and mass media, all requiring analysis and understanding; 4. critical literacy, or the need for critical analysis and discrimination to evaluate the multiplicity of texts and their manifold authors, positions, and ideologies, especially those that produce power differentials in society. Ideally, educators can teach young people these four means of engaging knowledgeably and responsibly with internet sources so as to maximize their potential and enable them to read, as Freire (1985) might say, the world in the word, or the ideology behind the semiotic text, that they find online.

The Digital Divide and Literacy Information and communication technologies offer great possibilities to strengthen the development of current societies. Students can now access endless amounts of information and opinion along with perspectives available through the arts, and can use or produce instructional videos to learn procedures for anything from repairing a faucet to undertaking a qualitative data analysis for social science research. Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have opened the doors to a greater number of information resources and have given rise to new forms of interaction that provide communities of practice. Through such forums, people and collectives may share and critique knowledge to become politically active, participate in decision-making and governmental processes, and generate and develop knowledge on myriad topics. In spite of these gleaming possibilities, the internet has both produced and been affected by inequalities. Among them is the “digital divide” or “digital gap,” which refers to a space between those with both technology and technological savvy, and those who either cannot afford it or have limited opportunities to use it (Alva, 2015). Cyranek (2008) explains the problem as one in which “billions of people are excluded from the development of ICTs as a potential development tool and cannot access the production or circulation of knowledge, being left out of the education, culture, and integral development” (p. 87). To Cyranek, ICT serves as a fundamental engine for development and progress in the globalized economy. If these tools, indeed, make life more manageable, then providing better service for the have-nots ought to be a societal goal, and an educational concern.

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

211

The digital divide, however, is not only about access. It also concerns the use and appropriation of new technologies, a consequence at least in part following from lack of access. However, if people own devices and use them in limited ways based on questionable sources—unless Nietzsche (1967) is right and no source is more reliable than another, simply providing a variety of perspectives—they might also be considered to be on the wrong end of the divide. The International Communications Union (ICU) finds that The digital gap is based on aspects of access, but also those related to the use of ICT. Therefore, three types of digital divide are proposed: access, based on the differences between people who can access and those who do not have access to ICT; the use, based on people who know how to use them and those who do not; and those of quality of use, based on differences among the users themselves. (Leal, 2007, p. 4; emphasis added)

The digital divide involves related problems such that addressing only one, such as access, can be misleading in addressing the problem. To return to Kim’s (2012) point, attending only to the presence of a device is superficial. Without addressing the development of psychological as well as technological tools, educators are not dedicating themselves to the more important issue in human development. Vygotsky’s (1987) emphasis on the development of “higher mental processes”—thinking that is shaped by cultural beliefs, values, and practices— suggests the importance of using education to advance students’ appropriation of culturally laden psychological tools through which concepts may be refined and used to act on the world, including those related to technology use. The first gap to close is the one of access. The UNESCO (2016) has concluded that the global information society only makes sense if the development of knowledge societies is fostered. Such societies include members who have the necessary skills to perform a critical and analytical reading that allows them to appropriate reliable information found on the internet to participate in their community in a conscious and autonomous manner. The concept of knowledge societies is not limited to the information society (Bindé, 2005). Beyond the acquisition of information, knowledge societies aspire to produce social, cultural, and economic transformations for the sustainable development of nations through the access to information and freedom of expression. These social transformations cannot be made concrete if there are great differences between people who can or cannot access, and cannot use responsibly, information and knowledge. Critical literacy thus serves as an essential aspect for the development of knowledge societies (Cyranek, 2008). To take advantage of technological

212

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

literacies that are characteristic of knowledge societies, ICTs need to be used to the fullest extent. UNESCO declares that “The knowledge society must be able to integrate each of its members and promote new forms of solidarity with present and future generations. They should not be marginalized in knowledge societies, being that this is a public good that must be available to all” (quoted in Leal, 2007, p. 2). A knowledge society should integrate a wide range of participants, allowing multiple perspectives to inform its culture and practices. Nations with highly developed technological infrastructures function differently than do those like Mexico, whose affordances lag. Yet, virtually every nation experiences a digital divide and, thus, social inequality. Crovi (2004) asserts that “until now, technologies have been added instead of displaced, and when they do so, there is a concentrated technological accumulation in social networks that can pay for them” (p. 19). The concentration of technologies in affluent, Westernized countries has produced a digital divide between nations. It affects the quality of life of the people, since not all have the same opportunities to take advantage of the benefits and potentials that technologies allow. At the same time, those who lack technology cannot be defrauded, hacked, and robbed by felonious or nefarious electronic miscreants. Nietzsche’s (1967) perspectivism suggests that the wired existence so prized by many may be less optimal for all, and that communities composed of people from original societies that reject such modern affordances might not be missing out on so much after all (see Cisler, 2000). Alva (2015) infers that the digital divide is one of the “new faces” of the inequality in the twenty-first century. The gap is a complex problem mediated by power relations, generated and sustained by far-reaching economic, political, and social structures. Information and communication technologies have been adopted mostly in countries with more presence in the economic and innovation sectors. Even though ICT services are increasingly simple to acquire, more than half of the world’s population, that is, 3.9 billion people, do not have access to the internet and thus are excluded from the extensive information resources and knowledge it provides (International Telecommunications Union, 2016). The internet is available in technologically developed countries for 81 percent of the population, roughly double that of nations considered technologically developing; and only 15 percent of people living in nations with little technology infrastructure can get online. In Mexico, 65.5 million (59.5 percent) people six years or older use the internet, ranking below Brazil (67.5 percent), Argentina (79.4 percent), and Chile (79.9 percent) (Internet Word Stats, cited in Islas,

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

213

2017). Although the figures in Mexico are on the rise, the nation lags behind its neighbors, a worrisome problem if the economic potential of the country is to be realized in the “New Mexico” envisioned by Letras para Volar. Reducing the digital divide in access to the ICT in Mexico should continue to be a priority. A significant number of people remain outside the knowledge society due simply to problems of access. The development of a Mexican knowledge society has been late in coming: Until 2016, roughly half of Mexico’s states were lagging in ICT availability. States such as Oaxaca and Chiapas registered very low percentages, 20.6 and 13.3 percent, in contrast to only two above 70 percent: Sonora and Baja California Sur (INEGI, 2017). The digital divide must be gauged through measures beyond the telecommunications infrastructure, such as the number of computers, access to the internet, or the use of smartphones. Factors such as economic income and education are also determinants of access and usage. Internet access and activity are significantly associated with the level of education of the people (National Institute of Statistics and Geography, 2017). Among the most highly educated people, nine out of ten, as well as four out of five of those with Higher Secondary education (high school or equivalent), have incorporated the use of the internet in their usual activities, while 48.7 percent of people with a basic educational level (primary or secondary) use the internet routinely. People with low educational levels undoubtedly use technology less frequently, due to a lack of money and appropriate skills. To reduce the digital divide, educational programs must provide better access to technological tools and teach psychological tools for using them fluently; but they must also reduce social problems such as poverty or lack of educational opportunities. Only then will they be able, according to Alva (2015), “to take advantage of the opportunities for the development of the country that the ICTs can provide, in terms of generating of knowledge and supporting productive activities” (p. 20). Again, however, there is the possibility that colonial mentalities toward original people may assume that they are “behind” when their cultures do not embrace technology or capitalist economies, suggesting that broadened perspectives need to be recruited to address the emergence of the “New Mexico” aspired to in the development of Letras para Volar and the master’s degree in literacy, one that honors the continent’s people’s original ways of knowing in the context of the broader goal of making Mexico economically competitive and sustainable. The lack of access and appropriation of ICTs denies people learning opportunities, and overcoming this technology deficit is a first-order priority for the majority of Mexicans whose futures are anticipated by these literacy

214

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

initiatives. Reducing the digital gap is a complex and indispensable task to stop the increase in social inequalities among individuals by taking advantage of the opportunities that the ICT can bring to the development of productive activities and competitiveness. Providing access, however, does not ensure that individuals use and appropriate these resources in a reflective or critical manner; such sophisticated usage requires time and attention in school and other learning environments. The mere incorporation of the ICT in all production processes will not allow the integration of countries lacking strong technology networks into the global economy. Overcoming the digital divide will broaden access to the benefits associated with the ICTs and thus allow nations and their citizens to enter the global market: Reducing the digital gap by implementing telecommunications and information infrastructure does not necessarily reduce the socioeconomic disparity. In reality, it is an interdisciplinary problem whose main objectives are sustainable development and not the provision of technology. The reduction of the digital gap will impact human development, as long as they are incorporated into projects and initiatives of material, intellectual and moral education that ensure its continuity and sustainability. (Serrano Santoyo & Martínez Martínez, 2003, p. 19)

As emphasized throughout this chapter, providing access to technology to those who embrace it is a first, but insufficient step. Learning how to think in new ways that map on to digital processes and potentials is required in order for digital tools to serve as levers to economic development and communicative competence in the global network.

Literacy and the Digital Divide The internet’s emergence as a means of mass communication in everyday life has changed the demand for reading. Internet consumers require print literacy basics and an expanding range of “reading” abilities to navigate content presented through many sorts of images. These competencies necessitate the development of social and cognitive processes for understanding and evaluation, requiring public policies that promote and develop digital literacy (Marchant, 2010). According to Crovi (2004), in an information and knowledge society a technological infrastructure is the first step, after which people require cognitive tools for selecting, ranking, interpreting, and making use of information to

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

215

improve their quality of life. Developing these critical faculties should be an educational priority (Berrío-Zapata, 2012). The digital divide, however, produces both material and dispositional inequalities for those on the impoverished end of the gap. Those with neither affluence, education, nor devices may view the internet as invasive and alienating (Adorno & Horkheimer, cited in Berrío-Zapata, 2012). Technology is never a panacea, only a potential, for improving life. Overlooking its downsides imperils any educational initiative designed to expand technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Reducing the digital divide requires a concerted, national effort (Crovi, 2004), involving interventions that are linked to: 1. technology infrastructure for universal high-speed access; 2. knowledge specifically related to the development of psychological tools appropriate to technology use; 3. information that allows the digital divide to be identified and understood; 4. economic disparities that limit ICT access at the individual, governmental, and private sector levels; 5. participation via technology in national politics through opportunities for individuals and nations to express themselves and intervene in the decisions of a global world. The global use of ICT has increased. Yet, issues of access have remained and in some cases deepened in relation to the literacy needs and infrastructures of each society. This divide includes usage differences based on differential literacy rates and access to education for critical thinking and problem-solving (Berrío-Zapata, 2012). Formal education remains a key arena in which societal problems are addressed, including the “new inequality” that has been generated in the Information Age. Correa Gutiérrez, Reséndiz Balderas, Bañales Faz, Bazaldúa Zamarripa, and Zamarripa Franco (2014) argue that educators should “Focus attention on the development of digital skills, abilities and attitudes (encompassed under the concept of digital competence), as it is accepted that the most important gap is in the extension and quality of the human knowledge and its learning. Therefore, it is not essentially a digital gap, but an educational one” (p. 24). Teacher educators share this responsibility for technological education so that teachers may, in turn, enable their students to maximize their learning potential as well as their circumstances allow. According to Cabrero (2004), education is essential to reducing the digital divide, providing the psychological tools that allow devices to be used in robust

216

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

ways. Emerging media allow a myriad of different formats and discursive genres based on combinations of semiotic codes (Vargas Franco, 2015). However, the fact that so much information is available through so many different platforms does not guarantee that people know how to use them all appropriately. Correa Gutiérrez et al. (2014) assert that “information can remain a set of undifferentiated data until it is processed and analyzed with discernment and a critical spirit to select what is most useful for a purpose, which highlights the importance of cognitive abilities” (p.27). Achieving broad participation in a knowledge society requires that educators make digital literacy competencies a priority so that citizens have the ability to evaluate the information contained on the internet in terms of its quality and reliability (Cabrero, 2004), and to know how to use the tools of digital composition in the creation and distribution of their own texts. UNESCO (2008) has proposed that “Information can be an instrument of the knowledge in itself, because it requires elements that can be incorporated as knowledge, while the information contains mostly content determined by commercial interests, which can even delay or interfere with the incorporation of knowledge” (p.17). In this framework, the levels of literacy of individuals are fundamental for the development of knowledge societies if Mexico is to strive toward UNESCO’s ideal of “unlimited possibilities so that all humanity is finally subject to free information of the exclusions of the market” (p.62). Participation in twenty-first-century societies requires people to know how to responsibly investigate, identify, evaluate, reflect on, select, and use the information found online. These practices are related to one’s degree of digital literacy and where one stands in relation to the digital divide. Factors affecting digital access and fluency include ●●

●●

●●

●●

Economic Resources, including the price of computers and telecommunications and the cost of investment in infrastructure. Geography, in particular the challenge of providing infrastructure and access to remote areas. Age, particularly the issue that younger people are more willing to use new technologies than older people. Sex, as evidenced in the way that in Mexico and other countries still building technology infrastructures, more men than women have developed conventional literacies.

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education ●●

●●

217

Language, especially the fact that most online texts are written in English. Employment, a factor that follows from how internet access is only available at work or at cybercafés, making employment an advantage for access.

All these factors, and others—including the priorities and perspectives of original people whose cultures eschew technology—that are rarely considered in technology glorification, contribute to the social separations associated with and affecting the use of ICT. These factors influence access to new technologies, and the development of psychological tools for understanding how to exploit them and help users develop related cultural capital for gaining status in society (Cobo & Moravec, 2011).

Conclusion Assuming that access to the technology alone will solve the problems of education or poverty is misguided, since providing a tablet or smartphone to people does not necessarily mean that they will know how to use it for their development. In some cases the technology is available, but there are no pedagogical strategies that integrate them into the teaching-learning processes in such a way that they effectively pay for the quality education of the students. In this context, if education is going to offer access to new technologies, it will be important to take into account factors such as content and language, literacy and education, and community and institutional structures (Warschauer & Niiya, 2014). Devices alone are insufficient. The adoption of the ICT in educational practices can potentially enhance learning processes if they are integrated into teaching models with innovative perspectives that promote critical thinking, accompanied by a change of attitudes and learning new skills. It is thus the task of educators working toward Mexico’s future to prepare teachers with both conventional understandings of pedagogy and ways of thinking through new psychological tools appropriate to the digital age. This education can never become static, because every day, technology changes, along with the demands made on its users. Teacher education thus must be reinvented to create space for addressing technology as a means of learning useful, reliable information, and producing and sharing texts via online media. Mexico, which lacks the infrastructure of its US neighbor and other nations with advanced technology societies, has multiple challenges in reaching its goal of universal access to information, opinion, entertainment, and other online

218

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

resources. Some needs, such as infrastructure development, remain outside teachers’ purview and possibilities. Yet, universities tend to be in the vanguard of societal change and provide opportunities for teachers to learn about what is available, and what might be available in the years ahead. Teacher education programs thus have a responsibility to prepare teachers for both what is and what likely will be, while also attending to the heritages of people who may reject technology and, instead, hope to live in harmony with the natural world. If teacher education is to be reinvented for a “New Mexico,” then addressing the various digital divides while respecting the values of the region’s original inhabitants—a fundamental tension in any literacy initiative in a nation with a colonial history that includes constitutionally protected original cultures— should be among its priorities.

References Aguilar Trejo, J., Ramírez Martinell, A., & López González, R. (2014). Academic digital literacy of the university students: A case study. Electronic Journal of Research and Teaching, 11, 123–46. Allen, C., Nodelman, U., & Zalta, E. N. (2002). The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: A developed dynamic reference work. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from https://plato. stanford.edu/pubs/sep.pdf Alva de la Selva, A. R. (2015). Los nuevos rostros de la desigualdad en el siglo xxi: La brecha digital. Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 60(223), 265–86. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.revi​stas.​unam.​mx/in​dex.p​hp/rm​cpys/​artic​ le/vi​ew/45​387/4​0864 Andreopoulos, S. (2001). The unhealthy alliance between academia and corporate America. Western Journal of Medicine, 175(4), 225–26. Baron, D. (2009). A better pencil: Readers, writers, and the digital revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Basalla, G. (2011). Diversity, necessity and evolution. In The evolution of the technology (pp. 13–40). Barcelona, Spain: Drakontos Editorial Crítica. Berrío-Zapata, C. (2012). Entre la Alfabetización Informacional y la Brecha Digital: Reflexiones para una reconceptualización de los fenómenos de exclusión digital. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 35(1), 39‒53. Biesecker, B. A. (2018). Guest editor’s introduction: Toward an archaeogenealogy of post-truth. Special issue on Post-Truth. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 51(4), 329–41. Bindé, J. (2005). Toward knowledge societies. Paris, France: United Nations. Cabrero, J. (2005). Predisposiciones hacia la televisión/vídeo y libro: su relación con algunas variables. Pixel BIT Revista de Medios y Educación, 4, 77‒89.

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

219

Cassany, D. (2005). Investigations and proposals on current literacy: Multiliteracy, internet and criticality. Paper presented at the UNESCO Cathedral for Reading and Writing, Concepción, CL. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from http:​//www​2.ude​c.cl/​cated​ raune​sco/0​5CASS​ANY.p​df Cisler, S. (2000, March). Introduction: The internet and indigenous groups. Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, n. p. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from https​://ww​w.cul​ tural​survi​val.o​rg/pu​blica​tions​/cult​ural-​survi​val-q​uarte​rly/i​ntrod​uctio​n-int​ernet​ -and-​indig​enous​-grou​ps Cobo, C., & Moravec, J. W. (2011). Invisible learning: Toward a new ecology of education. Barcelona, Spain: Publications and Editions of the University of Barcelona. Computer History Museum. (2018). Timeline of computer history. Retrieved April 17, 2018, from http:​//www​.comp​uterh​istor​y.org​/time​line/​compu​ters/​ Correa Gutiérrez, S., Reséndiz Balderas, E., Bañales Faz, G., Bazaldúa Zamarripa, J. A., & Zamarripa Franco, R. A. (2014). The digital divide and the education system in Mexico. In H. Manzanilla Granados & I. Rojas Moreno (Eds.), Information and communication technologies in the Mexican educational system (pp. 23–58). Bloomington, IN: Palibrio. Retrieved from https​://ww​w.res​earch​ gate.​net/p​ublic​ation​/3042​16213​_La_b​recha​_digi​tal_y​_el_s​istem​a_edu​cativ​o_en_​ Mexic​o Crovi Druetta, D. (2004). Internet en las elecciones de 2003. Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 46(190), 113‒27. https​://do​i.org​/10.2​2201/​fcpys​.2448​ 492xe​.2004​.190.​42436​ Cyranek, G. (2008). Stages towards the knowledge societies. Montevideo, Uruguay: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Dizikes, P. (2011, June 7). Wind, war and weathermen. MIT News. Retrieved April 17, 2018, from http:​//new​s.mit​.edu/​2011/​timel​ine-f​oreca​sting​-0607​ Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21. Gleason, G. T. (1981). Microcomputers in education: The state of the art. Educational Technology, 21(3), 7–18. Gutiérrez Díaz de León, A. (2016). Study of habits of use of ICT in the university net of the University of Guadalajara. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Halberstam, D. (1994). The fifties. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. International Telecommunications Union. (2016). ITU releases 2016 ICT figures. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https​://ww​w.itu​.int/​en/ me​diace​ntre/​Pages​/2016​-PR30​.aspx​ Islas, O. (2017, April 21). Global penetration of internet. The Universal. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from http:​//www​.elun​ivers​al.co​m.mx/​entra​da-de​-opin​ion/c​olumn​a/ oct​avio-​islas​/tech​bit/2​017/0​4/21/​penet​racio​n-mun​dial-​de-in​terne​t Johnson, L. L., Chisam, J., Smagorinsky, P., & Wargo, K. (2018). Beyond publication: Social action as the ultimate stage of a writing process. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 18, 1–21.

220

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Kalman, J., & Hernández, O. (2018). The making of survival: Technology, literacy, and learning in two microenterprises in Mexico City. Information Technologies & International Development, 14, 81‒95. Kim, M. S. (2012). Cultural-historical activity theory perspectives on the construction of ICT-mediated teaching metaphors. European Journal of Teacher Education, 35(4), 435–48. Leal, E. T. (2007). The information and communication technologies (ICT) and the digital gap: Its impact on Mexican society. Journal of the University and Knowledge Society, 4, 315–19. Longcore, T., Rich, C., Mineau, P., MacDonald, B., Bert, D. G., Sullivan, L. M., Mutrie, E., Gauthreaux, S. A., Jr., Avery, M. L., Crawford, R. L., Manville II, A. M., Travis, E. R., & Drake, D. (2013). Avian mortality at communication towers in the United States and Canada: Which species, how many, and where? Biological Conservation, 158, 410–19. Merchant, G. H. (2010). 3D virtual worlds as environments for literacy learning. Educational Research, 52(2), 135‒50. Marchant Díaz, N. L. (n. d.). Learning and media. America Learning & Media. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from http:​//www​.amer​icale​arnin​gmedi​a.com​/edic​ion-0​07/89​whit​e-pap​ers/4​32-li​terac​idad-​nuevo​-desa​fio-d​e-la-​globa​lizac​ion-e​-inte​rnet​hacia​-la-l​itera​tura National Institute of Statistics and Geography. (2017). Increased use of internet, smart phones and digital TV: National survey on availability and use of information technologies in homes, 2016. Aguascalientes, Mexico: Author. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from http:​//www​.ineg​i.org​.mx/s​alade​prens​a/bol​etine​s/201​7/esp​ecial​es/ es​pecia​les20​17_03​_02.p​df Nietzsche, F. (1967). The will to power (W. Kaufman, Ed.; W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from http:​//www​.newf​orest​centr​e.inf​o/upl​oads/​7/5/7​/2/75​72906​/niet​zsche​_-_th​e_wil​l_ to_​power​.pdf`​ Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Robertson, A. (2017). Neo-Nazi site moves to dark web after GoDaddy and Google bans. The Verge. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https​://ww​w.the​verge​.com/​2017/​ 8/15/​16150​668/d​aily-​storm​er-al​t-rig​ht-da​rk-we​b-sit​e-god​addy-​googl​e-ban​ Serrano Santoyo, A., & Martínez Martínez, E. (2003). The digital gap: Myths and realities. Mexicali, Mexico: Autonomous University of Baja California. UNESCO. (2008). Etapas hacia las Sociedades del Conocimiento. Montevideo, Uruguay: Author. ISBN 978-92-90-89-121-50.​ UNESCO. (2016). Knowledge societies policy handbook. Paris, FR: Author. Retrieved March 17, 2020 from https​://zh​.unes​co.or​g/sit​es/de​fault​/file​s/kno​wledg​e_soc​ities​_ poli​cy_ha​ndboo​k.pdf​

The Role of Technology in Literacy Teacher Education

221

Vargas Franco, A. (2015). Critical literacy and digital literacies: A necessary relationship? (An approximation to a theoretical framework for the critical reading). Folios Magazine, 139–60. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (R. Rieber & A. Carton, Eds; N. Minick, Trans., vol. 1, pp. 39–285). New York, NY: Plenum. Warschauer, M., & Niiya, M. (2014). Digital media and social inclusion. Peruvian Journal of Educational Research, 9–32.

9

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs César Lozano

A number of technology-related factors have transformed the way people access information and get educated. These include the incorporation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into education, the internet’s progression to web 3.0 and beyond, the internationalization and application of emerging technologies in education such as virtual reality and augmented reality, and other “smart” technologies that now are available for teaching and learning. These significant changes in educational systems, curricula, and teaching practices at almost every level of education have become indispensable in serving emerging technological innovation and the new workforce needs taken up by new generations of students, who will need to innovate and adapt quickly to these technologies and their affordances. These changes are creating a gap between historical methods of education and the needs of students, due to the dynamic and interactive way they engage with information, advertising, games, and much more. Through web-based material, they can learn a specific skill in a short time through videos and welldefined activities. Modern society, including education, is heavily mediated by technology and what it enables in encouraging students to become the protagonists of their own learning. If reinventing teacher education is to succeed in this growing digital environment, it needs to take these shifts into account. Learning ought to be a positive experience, yet schools can alienate students when the materials and means of engagement cannot hold their attention. Technology has the potential to allow students to study at their own pace, dynamically and interactively. Students without access to technology may have diminished prospects in the workforce, in part because of reduced opportunities to expand their learning through digital affordances. They lack the opportunity

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

223

to become “makers”—those who create texts and products of interest to them— particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields (Thomas, 2012). Mexico adjusted its curriculum and promoted the incorporation of technology in classrooms with strategies like @prende 2.0, the Ministry of Public Education's Digital Strategy for promoting the use of ICT to enhance the development of digital skills and computational thinking.1 Mexico presently lags behind technologically advanced nations, but is working to close this gap. Both teachers, and the broader contexts in which they work, need to adapt if Mexico is to become a leader in educational technology. Mexico has been slow to incorporate technology throughout education and needs to build its capacity and train its teachers for device-driven schooling. In this chapter I will attend both to teachers and their education and to broader social factors that constrain what they can achieve. Any effort to integrate technology across the curriculum must start with the school environment, beginning with the disruption of the solitary and individualistic culture of learning and the passive reception of content that have traditionally characterized school instruction. In its place, schools must institute structures promoting collaborative, active, and constructive activity designed to promote literacy serving the interests of the broader culture, which itself must be taken into account when planning for a technological overhaul of the educational system.

Teacher Preparation The Innovative Teacher Schools tend to be self-perpetuating and resistant to change due to a variety of reasons both systemic in school institutions and as a consequence of the sort of person who goes into teaching (Smagorinsky, 2010). Resistance to change has impeded many teachers in implementing technology in their classrooms. Part of the problem originates in teacher education, where hardware and software may be introduced, but the accompanying psychological tools that facilitate understanding beyond the immediate tool are not necessarily emphasized (Kim, 2012). Technology is offered as an innovation without being accompanied by immersion in learning theories, attention to technology-based instructional design, or problems that challenge teachers to think more broadly than what See aprende.edu.mx/

1

224

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

their immediate contexts allow. Teachers thus may feel frustrated because they and their students have electronic devices, but not an understanding of their possibilities for innovation in new sorts of activities. Innovative teachers can adapt to the reality of the classroom, use appropriate tools in specific contexts, and create collaborative learning environments. Teachers benefit from knowing how to adjust existing tools and strategies to their environment. Education needs to provide knowledge that affects the reality of each student and addresses content-area values to promote worldly engagement from a disciplinary perspective. Typically, “motivation” is located as a problem within individual students. However, it is important to consider the motivating potential of environments to tap into the natural curiosity of students and put it to productive use (Järvelä, Volet, & Järvenoja, 2010). Educational innovation requires both curricular changes and accompanying shifts in teacher preparation programs. Many cases of teaching success have involved innovation that followed from a teacher's personal initiative. Yet, relatively few teachers in Mexico carry out a process of action research like that advocated by Correa (Chapter 10), whether it involves technology or not, to investigate either the effects of teaching practices or the conditions that produce challenges for teachers and students. A technological emphasis is thus both necessary and insufficient for preparing teachers in universities. One solution is to focus on literacy research conducted within schools to provide continual understandings of technology, literacy, and the specific contexts of each school and community. Such efforts should be undertaken to shed light on the processes involved in literacy teaching and learning, the evaluation of those processes, and the recognition that the students are the main protagonists of this emerging education scenario, taking an active role in their own learning. For students to engage with their studies, teachers need to construct motivating contexts that help students see the value of schoolwork and its application to their social worlds. University teacher education programs should thus provide opportunities for students to develop new competencies that suit their worldly needs and engage their interests. Teachers need to be prepared to take an active and constructive role in the search for, selection of, and organization of learning content and contexts. This responsibility entails helping students develop cognitive and metacognitive strategies that make autonomous and collaborative learning and self-regulation possible. Students can then potentially integrate the local with the global, often through the affordances of online resources (Pablos Pons & Villaciervos Moreno, 2005). Both the teacher and the student must adapt to these new situations and the social,

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

225

economic, and technological realities associated with the information and knowledge society. Their adaptability will be dependent on how easily they learn to acquire, and reapply in new contexts, the new skills, digital literacies, and competences necessary for active participation in the labor market, education, professional development, and society.

Reconciliation between Mathematics and the Student Learning theories such as constructivism and problem-based learning have become essential elements in the study of mathematics. Students reformulate different ways of approaching a problem, resulting in significant learning through discovery and, above all, promoting the idea that mathematics is accessible to all. The goal of these types of activities is to introduce students to the mathematical concepts and procedures that are needed for solving problems and thinking critically about them. Such work emphasizes the practical application of mathematics for teachers and students. Moreno and Waldegg (2002) advocate for designing activities built around a situation/problem whose elements are designed to: ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Implicitly involve the concepts that are going to be learned. Represent a real, accessible problem for the student. Allow or require the student to use prior knowledge. Offer enough resistance to cause the students to question their knowledge and propose new solutions. Provide means of validation.

In addition, learning should be collaborative and involve technology to work with the so-called mathematics of change: the use of calculations to analyze numerical fluctuations, such as stock market values (Noble, Nemirovsky, Wright, & Tierney, 2001; Tall, 2013). Students need to learn how to analyze the behavior of a mathematical object, manipulate it, observe its properties, and interpret it through appropriate use of ICT (Boers-van Oosterum, 1990; Dunham & Dick, 1994; Rojano, 2003). In this manner, students develop the ability to carry out apprenticeships in a wide variety of situations and circumstances based on metacognitive understandings of learning processes (Coll, 1988). Students manipulate geometric objects and deduce what is happening on their own following scaffolded support, appropriating mathematical definitions and procedures that help build their confidence. Students' attitudes are consciously or unconsciously influenced by the messages transmitted by teachers, society, and their families (Cockcroft, 1985).

226

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Top-down school instruction in mathematical abstractions rather than practical applications creates barriers to students’ learning. The students’ struggles are often reinforced by their belief that they are poor at mathematics, leading to the view of mathematics as a subject to suffer more than use fruitfully. These prior experiences shape both what students know, and thus can learn, and how they feel about undertaking new tasks via meta-experience: the experience of experiences and how they frame new experiences of a similar type (Smagorinsky & Daigle, 2012). When new ideas about attitudes and affective components are integrated properly, the teaching of problem-solving could improve how students feel about their mathematical abilities (Mohammad & Tall, 1999). This improvement can only come about with teaching and learning strategies that allow students to have experiential access to mathematical objects and to break down psychological barriers, allowing them to enjoy what they are doing by learning the whys and wherefores of learning processes and purposes. According to Moreno and Waldegg (2002), students need to deal with problem-solving, not only in the school environment but also in their future workplaces that reward innovation. It is thus crucial to think about a curriculum that is adapted to situated needs. These needs could be addressed through the design of problem-solving activities that are suited to their interests and involve discussions in which they manipulate, experiment with, analyze, and draw conclusions that make sense to them. Technology, where available, could be available for these activities. In Mexico, for example, the EMAT (Teaching Mathematics with Technology) model (Sacristán & Ursini, 2001) incorporates a variety of technology elements (specialized software and graphic calculators) that are closely related to the specific didactics of geometry, algebra, arithmetic, problem-solving, and modeling. Generating a wealth of activities that pursue the principles of literacy in conjunction with STEM learning enables a student-friendly approach that allows for easy access to content.

Motivation: Changes in Mexican Science and Mathematics Classrooms Until recently mathematics was a discipline organized around using formulas to solve abstract problems. The whys and wherefores of these operations did not matter, since the focus was on “doing math” as an activity in and of itself. This approach left out what really did matter: applying mathematics in real contexts.

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

227

This method suggested that math is only for engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and mathematics class, and that it is not necessary in all other areas, leading to a lack of motivation to study it, for many students. Whether or not it’s a function of the teaching method, Mexican students do poorly on standardized tests of mathematics. The Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) and PLANEA (National Plan for the Evaluation of Learning) Evaluation in Higher Secondary Education (2017) revealed that in mathematics, 66 percent of students perform at the lowest level, Level I; 23 percent perform at Level II; 8 percent are at Level III; and 2.5 percent are at Level IV. External variables affect students’ performance, including family life, education, and social status (see Berliner, 2014, for how “exogenous” factors, those outside school, affect US students’ school success). One of the strongest factors affecting performance in this area is anxiety and lack of motivation, which is often attributed to students yet must be viewed relationally, that is, in relation to how contexts and the people within them tap into students’ purposes and goals and enable engagement. According to Escalera-Chávez, Moreno-García, GarcíaSantillán, and Córdova-Rangel (2016), math anxiety has negative consequences, among them the tendency of an anxious person to avoid mathematics, thus depriving them of the opportunity to pursue STEM field jobs. Anxiety can be reduced through collaborative efforts where the workload is distributed, and students support one another’s learning.

Study in Accordance with Literacy: Understanding Mathematics Mathematics permeates life. Its demonstrations, theorems, formulas, rules, models, and theories give meaning and shape to human inventions. Yet, it is often foreign and alienating to students because it has lost its sense of application and has been conducted formulaically, such that it is, in the words of the students themselves, “only for those who study engineering.” The sense of mathematical literacy has been lost along with students' motivation for studying it in school as a practical activity. This problem is well illustrated in a scene from the episode “Lessons” from Season 1 of the HBO series The Wire.2 This scene features Wallace, a sixteenyear-old member of a drug-dealing operation who is raising a group of orphaned See https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=YeP​Ry8KW​C4A

2

228

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

and abandoned children in a small flat in a vacant building. He helps one of the children with a math problem from the school textbook that requires the student to figure out how many passengers are left on a bus after the driver picks up and lets off given numbers of passengers along the route. After the youngster takes several wrong guesses, Wallace rephrases the problem, replacing the bus route context with a drug transaction involving several exchanges, using the same numbers. The child gets the answer right the first time. When Wallace asks why it was easier to solve the drug-dealing problem than the bus-riding problem, the youth responds, “Count be wrong, they’ll fuck you up.” A real-world problem with real-world consequences, unlike much mathematical figuring in school. That lack of urgency in solving school math problems can result in a lack of interest in and motivation for learning how to do mathematical calculations. Widespread mathematical illiteracy and indifference might produce a national security problem if it resulted in a reliance on other countries for technological development and dependency. To avoid this crisis, educational authorities, technology companies, and governments are promoting new educational models that reform disciplines and transcend their traditional boundaries. For example, in the United States, the National Science Foundation and National Research Council are implementing STEM programs, at times integrated with the arts (STEAM), to promote interest in science, foster early research, and motivate students to see more than algorithms in mathematics. Participation in these programs promotes mathematical literacy, defined as an individual’s capacity to formulate, employ, and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. It includes reasoning mathematically and using mathematical concepts, procedures, facts and tools to describe, explain and predict phenomena. It assists individuals to recognise the role that mathematics plays in the world and to make the well-founded judgments and decisions needed by constructive, engaged and reflective citizens. (Programme for International Student Assessment, 2015, p. 5)

Wallace would be pleased. These concepts are included among the competencies of educational programs at all levels, but they are not well developed in many institutions or accepted by all teachers. Achieving mathematical literacy can become available through linking school learning to students’ practical interests, which some traditionalists fear might compromise formal mathematical learning. Yet, emphasizing the use of mathematics outside school potentially allows for bridges to be built across historical, political, conceptual, and practical problems that students find worth solving.

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

229

D’Amore (2008) emphasizes five processes through which students learn and use their mathematical knowledge: Students should value mathematics, trust in their ability to do math, become problem solvers, communicate mathematically, and reason mathematically. Through these processes students develop skills that allow them to build and alternate between various mathematical models through multiple representations: numerical, algebraic, graphic, and verbal (Mathematical Sciences Education Board, 1996). In addition to presenting a mathematical object using multiple representations, it is vital to help the students develop interpretive, troubleshooting, and modeling skills in the activities carried out both inside and outside the classroom. The opportunity to learn mathematics in the context of finding solutions to problems of interest can help develop students’ conceptual thinking, reduce their anxiety, help them see the need for computational ability in their lives, and help them become more open to the study of mathematics. The activities should require the use of mathematical tools that are accessible, have practical and possibly enjoyable application, enable satisfying participation, and require mathematical thinking (Goldin et al., 2001).

Formal Research in the Classroom Emancipatory action research (Chapters 10, 11; Murillo, 2011) is intimately committed to the transformation of educational and social organization and practice. It enables a critical process of practical action, reflection, social change, and an ethical commitment of service to the community. This method, which is linked to the Freirean critical values that permeate Letras para Volar, enables the development of a critically informed action plan for improving the current practice. The plan should be flexible to allow for adaptation to unforeseen events, yet should include the following steps:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Act: to implement the plan, which must be deliberate and controlled. Observe: to collect evidence that makes it possible to evaluate it. Reflect: to think back on the action registered during the observation. Change: to reconstruct the meaning of the social situation and provide the basis for new planning. 5. Repeat: to use this knowledge to continue with another cycle. For example, research may be carried out by teachers in their own classrooms for purposes such as curriculum development, professional self-development,

230

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

or the improvement of educational programs, planning, or policy. These activities should involve generating strategies for action to be implemented and later subjected to observation, reflection, and change. The inquiry serves as a tool that generates social change and educational knowledge of social and/or educational conditions and processes, providing autonomy and giving power to those who use them (Murillo, 2011), including teachers (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988).

Implementation of Literacy: A Case Study The following case study conducted by the University Center of Administrative Economic Sciences of the University of Guadalajara demonstrates how to incorporate teaching and learning strategies based on the STEM model and the concepts of literacy. The research was motivated by low passing rates in departmental examinations and an unfavorable attitude shown by students in many cases toward the study of mathematics, mainly as a result of the cultural, emotional, and scholastic difficulties they had experienced. The model was applied to 2,300 students from 2016 to the present. A survey of students’ attitudes toward learning mathematics with technology was administered before and after the intervention. It showed that students exhibit low motivation toward learning mathematics and that they reject the use of technology in math, with only 10 percent believing that technology helps them in their learning, yet 90 percent reporting that they like technology integration. One activity was called “Morning Coffee,” based on the fact that many students bring coffee to the 7:00 a.m. class. The very practical activity’s objective is to find out how long coffee stays hot in a room at a temperature of 26º C, and to determine if there is a significant difference between cups made of Styrofoam, plastic, or clay in heat retention. The task involves using Newton's law of cooling to understand temperature change. In the previous class session, the students had been posed the following problem: The ASTRA company’s income has a continuous annual rate of 5% of its net worth. At the same time, the obligations of the company’s payroll are paid at a constant rate of 200 million dollars per year. a) Find the solution for initial net values of w0= 3,000, 4,000, and 5,000. b) Trace the graph and determine which of these values would cause the company to go bankrupt and explain why.

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

231

The Morning Coffee activity relied on students’ ability to extrapolate from the ASTRA problem to the heat retention problem. The activity engaged students immediately as it made use of technological tools, using a sensor to take the temperature and solve the differential equation. The students contrasted the plotted data from the sensor in the passage of time and the solution of the differential equation. They collaboratively determined that they could find the solution with a similar approach, since Rate of change w= Rate of income - Rate of outflow. One student said, “It’s the same! The function goes through the points, wow!”; and another observed, “So then if it’s true, the equation does describe the change of true temperature.” The students’ attitudes changed significantly when a problem was posed in a context of this sort as they integrated knowledge and generated new knowledge in a collaborative way that affirmed their own competence in using formulas to solve both hypothetical and concrete problems rather than using mathematics only in abstract ways. A second activity was called “Funds from an Account.” This activity required students to use Torricelli’s Law to determine how long it takes to empty a circular container full of water from a circular hole in its walls, and to compare these results with a monetary account that has no source of income. After making holes in the containers, students measured the height of the container and the diameter of the hole, solved the differential equation, and determined how long it would take to empty. Students contrasted their calculated time with the actual time of draining, then applied the same principles to the problem of a bank account’s depletion. These two activities illustrate the potential of engaging students in problems with concrete applications and seeing how disparate sorts of problems may rely on the same fundamental operations. At the end of the semester, the students responded to a survey, which yielded the finding that 12 percent of students show lack of motivation toward learning mathematics, 5 percent show rejection of the use of technology in math, 95 percent believe that the use of technology helps them in their learning, and 98 percent like using technology. The results show that there is a significant change in the attitude toward the use of technology and toward mathematics, suggesting that the students become more confident by working in collaborative groups and applying mathematics in real and tangible environments. The activities produce a greater understanding of mathematical concepts as the students work on real problems under the guidance of the teacher. The teacher plays a key role by understanding the importance of using, replicating, or creating strategies that provide students with access to mathematics in a meaningful and experiential way. This approach makes it possible to enjoy

232

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

using math to experiment, to work together, and to learn new subjects without the emotional and motivational barriers that often impede new mathematical learning. Teachers need to recognize that students have greater access to information and the dynamic interaction of objects when they work on practical problems and relate mathematics to other subjects in their problem-framing and problem-solving. Ideally, through this process the students become interested in the whys and wherefores of STEM-based problems and develop metacognitive understandings that enable them to enjoy using mathematics for real purposes, often in service of tasks grounded in science, technology, and engineering.

The Importance of Roots: The Colonial Legacy and Ethnomathematics It is important that every society connect and put an emphasis on the formation of its culture as a country, returning to the interests that moved the founders of their own society, and considering the technologies they created. People benefit from understanding cultural skills, practices, and daily experiences that produce the new knowledge society, one that contributes to their cultural identity. Among these understandings is the role of mathematics and science in the arena of ethnomathematics, the study of specific conventions that different cultural or ethnic groups use to mathematize their environment. The term’s etymology is rooted in ethno (cultural context), mathema (to know, to explain, to understand), and tics (the art or technique for investigating the techniques, abilities, and practices of counting, measuring, classifying, sorting, inferring, and calculating). Ethnomathematics has had an influence on the development of critical thinking about the beliefs and cultural behavior surrounding numerical systems, the mystical attributes of numbers, geometry in art, and architecture. Attention to the culture of the region and the cultural dimensions of mathematics is essential in order to study the historical understanding of nature, harvests, astronomy, the calendar, numbering systems, architecture, irrigation systems, medicine, and other areas that form the cultural basis for the present. These ethnic studies in mathematics have been eliminated from Mexico's current programs. Curriculum changes in 2016 removed the only item that involved the Mayans and Aztecs in secondary education: the positional and non-positional numbering systems where the importance of zero and the numbering systems were emphasized.

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

233

It is important to recover the cultural identity sacrificed in this educational “reform” within global interests. The Classic and Postclassic periods3, up to the Colonial Era, have left a valuable legacy in cultural, social, and scientific terms, yet mathematics, physics, and chemistry are minimized in the new curriculum. Understanding the cultural framework that shaped STEM practices for pre-Columbian societies requires understanding the challenges and the advances made by our ancestors. Those challenges demanded highly complex mathematics, physics, and chemistry that are absent from current textbook accounts of that history (see Chapter 2). Some approaches have the potential to promote the necessary skills for existing programs while simultaneously providing a cultural legacy to students who are descendants of the region’s original people (Trabulse, 1985). The creation of numerical systems, for instance, originated with the Olmecs around the year 1200 BCE. They were the first society in the world to develop the concept and symbol of zero (Ortiz-Franco, 2004). This invention came before the proposals of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid and preceded by nearly 1,700 years the invention of zero by the Hindus. According to Ganguli (1932), although the Aztecs adopted this numerical symbol, they modified its original meaning. Approximately 2,500 years separate the Olmecs from the Aztecs, yet they share certain ethnomathematical aspects, despite the fact that there was no direct contact between them during their respective cultural apogees. People who settled near lakes developed hydraulic systems to take advantage of natural resources, to contain the waters, to keep the city from being flooded with unhealthy water, and to supply it with drinking water via aqueducts. The availability and management of water contributed further to the production of food. Students learning this heritage might reproduce an aqueduct in their physics class and analyze the forces that are involved. In mathematics class they might calculate how much food had to be produced for a given number of inhabitants, requiring them to measure the crop fields, the amount of time it would take to run out of food, and the rate at which it could be replaced. They could even add external variables such as droughts, plagues, earthquakes, and other natural events that could disrupt algorithms that rely on historical norms and work only in the absence of real-world disturbances. The region’s eras are divided into the following periods: Paleo-Indian or Lithic (10,000 BCE–3500 BCE), Archaic (3500 BCE–2600 BCE), Preclassic or Formative (2500 BCE–250 CE), Classic (250 CE–900 CE), Postclassic (900 CE–1521 CE), Colonial (1521 CE–1821 CE), and Postcolonial (1821 CE–present).

3

234

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Geometry is fundamental to architecture. The arrangement of shapes is dependent on construction methods, availability and durability of materials, aesthetics, topographical landscape, weather elements, purposes, and other factors that put geometric decisions in dialogue with matters of physics, measurement, materials science, cultural practices, and many other considerations. Doing geometry only as a mathematical problem isolated from other considerations thus makes it more likely that worldly designs will fail under the stress of contextual forces that affect material constructions. These illustrations demonstrate the possibilities for STEM instruction in schools. It is important that the teacher becomes conversant with both literacy and ethnomathematics. Incorporating activities in the classroom that are grounded in Mexican history and culture could enable students to compare and contrast ancient technologies with those that are current such that they engage with their legacies and consider how technology might change to suit the world as it evolves, moving forward. Such activities could easily incorporate a variety of sign systems, with symbols used as blueprints, narratives, and other texts through which complex ideas may be shared and developed.

The Role of Technology in Communities without Electricity If teachers assume the role of literacy researcher, they will have two social responsibilities. They need to work within their context to promote a vision in their students that enables them to understand the problems of others, use science to improve the lives of the most vulnerable and not just themselves and their kind, and produce innovations that benefit those who need it most. When students understand that they are responsible for helping to provide electricity and drinking water to people in need, they see the importance of inclusive technology and alternative energies in a future where people’s real needs are understood and served. This disposition would help to produce generations that are more concerned about implementing this work, both as individual teachers and as a part of broader systems that include governmental obligations to provide services to the whole population. The second responsibility involves analyzing how these curricular changes can be adapted, including how to address technology issues for communities without electricity. The Enciclomedia program in Mexico, for instance, was a technology initiative undertaken with Microsoft to enhance education through the availability of e-texts and related resources. It ran aground, however, when

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

235

teams arrived at schools that had no electricity or satellite signal, and the program could not be implemented. Researchers and educators thus must take into account how new educational programs can be implemented in communities without basic services and utilities. What will the social impact be when the educational gap is widened between those with technological tools and those without them? There are a great many research and practical questions that must be considered to analyze, understand, and develop proposals that benefit people who are excluded from technological environments so that they can take part in technological benefits, a major challenge when the national infrastructure does not enable technologies to be used in remote rural areas. Bulletin No. 1343 of the LXIII Legislature, the 2016 Study by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad— IMCO) indicates that there are more than 500,000 homes in Mexico without electricity, primarily in communities in rural areas and populated by people from the region’s original societies. Even with the launch of the Energy Reform, the electrification of more than 43,000 localities in the country is still pending. These sites are home to over 2,200,000 people. The National Population Council (CONAPO) determined that the state of Chiapas includes 1,106,000 citizens in a condition of geographic isolation, Oaxaca has 1,073,000 people in isolation, and Veracruz has 959,000. Providing STEM education for modern living is a great challenge when people live beyond the range of a technological infrastructure. This lack of access to electricity has an impact on all educational institutions. In Zacatecas there are eighteen secondary schools with distance learning programs that do not have electricity, yet that depend on communication systems and multimedia content. It is essential that the government establish the constitutional right of access to basic services in an equitable and sustainable manner to ensure that around 6,900,000 Mexicans have access to the well-being and development available through connectivity. This imperative depends on the educational system to ensure that the technological gap does not totally exclude entire populations from the new opportunities for progress that innovation brings. This dilemma suggests the importance of emancipatory action research in schools and universities that do have these services to educate their students to look out for those who are needier. In every project developed by students at any educational level, there need to be proposals that pursue the provision of electricity, activate the economy, improve planting processes, and bring rural areas the services they need for

236

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

a modern quality of life. In some communities in Chiapas, people are taught how to manage resources and care for the environment in order to activate the economy through tourism. In other areas the villagers themselves build and maintain the infrastructure they require and consider alternative energies, often with corporate support from technology giants. These initiatives help reduce the education and economic gap between those in remote areas and their compatriots in more densely populated regions with technology infrastructures. Such initiatives are well beyond the scope of what teachers can provide and require a national will and effort to enable a whole nation’s population equal opportunity to participate in the technologically driven world of communication and possibility.

Original Peoples and Educational Changes People whose ancestors first occupied the continent, assuming they aspire to a life that includes electronic technologies, are among the most affected of Mexico’s population when it comes to digital deprivation. Their communities often experience scarce educational opportunities and shortages in services related to health, housing, work, and inclusion. These conditions are present in spite of the Bilingual Intercultural Education initiative, which recognizes and attends to cultural and linguistic diversity, promotes respect for differences, and seeks the formation of national unity based on favoring the strengthening of local, regional, and national identity. Together these goals aspire to produce attitudes and practices designed to ensure freedom and justice for all. Unfortunately for the region’s original people, Mexico falls short of achieving these idealistic goals, in part because decolonizing oneself requires extensive undoing of a lifetime’s socialization. A systematic rural school expansion in the 1920s worked in service of an effort to build national unity following the Mexican Revolution. Toward this end, rural education for people descended from original societies was Hispanicized, a goal consistent with colonial history in which Spanish-descendant leaders patronizingly assumed that they were making life better for people from original societies by shifting their culture and language to meet Iberian standards. Yet, even after four decades, communities composed of the area’s original people remained dedicated to their ways. They were still largely monolingual in their ethnic languages, with Nolasco (1997) reporting their high rates of illiteracy in Spanish, their limited educational attainment, and their view that school had

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

237

little significance in their lives. The colonial assumptions behind this conclusion are evident in the deficit view of original people in relation to Spanish culture and language, again demonstrating the persistence of colonial socialization in constructing people from nondominant cultures as inferior, a tendency that Letras para Volar is seeking to change through its inquiry-oriented approach into inequity. One of the problems with this intervention followed from this colonial perspective: Multiculturalism was not conceived as being reciprocal. Education was not oriented to the perspective of original people, but focused on what they should know from a colonial perspective. It did not cultivate the continent’s ancient knowledge or extend it to Spanish Mexico and its dominant presence in the country, in spite of the laws that decree multiculturalism as inclusive and culturally respectful. The very concept of “indigenous education” comes from the colonial era when the Spaniards attempted to culturally and religiously transform the original inhabitants of the country through the Catholic religion and accompanying values. Globalization has accelerated the exclusion of these peoples and has likewise increased the risk to their cultural continuity and identity, a problem that extends to education (Schmelkes, 2013). Two-thirds of Mexican children aged between six and fourteen who are not in school have heritages in the region’s original people. Twenty-eight percent of the population speaking an original language, fifteen years of age or older, have not completed primary education (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, 2006). According to conventional means of measuring literacy, the Thirteenth Population and Housing Census in 2010 reports that the total Mexican population fifteen years of age or older was 78,423,336. Of this number, the illiterate population was 5,393,665, equivalent to 6.9 percent of the total national population fifteen years of age or older. Only 22,513,355 had completed primary school, corresponding to 28.7 percent. The total population of those fifteen years of age or older who speak an original language was registered at 5,363,997, of whom 1,463,116 are illiterate, a percentage of 27.27. The total number of women fifteen years of age or older who speak original languages, according to data from the Thirteenth Population and Housing Census, is 2,727,461; of that total, the female illiterate population is 944,827, equivalent to 34.64 percent. In the same age range, the total number of men who speak original languages is 2,603,525, of which the total number of illiterate people amounts to 518,289, which represents 19.9 percent. Of the total number of original language speakers, 80.46 percent are bilingual, 15.86 percent are monolingual, and 3.67 percent were recorded as not specified.

238

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

According to data from the General Directorate of Indigenous Education (Dirección General de Educación Indígena—DIGE), Schools of Indigenous Education in Mexico amount to a total of 21,663: 2,150 in initial education, 9,547 in preschool education, and 9,966 in primary education. These measures are undoubtedly problematic, especially if original peoples are largely rural and might represent rurality as much as ethnicity; if original peoples measured according to their Spanish fluency are literate in other sign systems; if original peoples reject colonial influences as the Mexican constitution allows them to; if original peoples’ cultural goals are not met by learning Spanish and passing tests in it; and other factors. Much of what appears pathologizing in these reports might be a problem of who is doing the measuring, and whose values are built into the evaluations, a persistent problem of colonial societies. All of these matters are exacerbated by factors well out of the control of these communities. There is a delay in the publication of books for the education of speakers of original languages or their dialectal variants. Of the dozens of original languages, only thirty-three have this material, and of the dialectal variants only fifty-five have specialized books (see Notes on the Editorial Process for varied estimates of the number of original languages now spoken in Mexico). The supplies available for schools serving people descended from original societies doubtlessly explain part of the disparity in their measures of literacy. Their primary schools are the worst equipped with infrastructure (InterAgency Network for Education in Emergencies, 2007). Although the figures appear alarming, there are groups, institutions, and researchers committed to respecting, understanding, and linking their culture with the education that is required today; the medium is the literacy of culture and respect for their language. Yet this advocacy has had a limited effect on the problems reviewed here. The state of Jalisco includes two important original groups, the Wixarika or Huichol and the Nahuatl peoples, in addition to a large migrant population of original people in urban areas. Youth from these cultures have been attending the University of Guadalajara to study secondary and higher education. A Bachelor's Degree in distance learning is promoted by the Virtual University System (Sistema de Universidad Virtual—SUV) and the Support Unit for Indigenous Communities (Unidad de Apoyo a Comunidades Indígenas— UACIS), the department of the University Network responsible for ●●

Proposing policies and priorities for the formulation and implementation of programs in support of communities populated by original people;

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs ●●

239

Promoting projects, programs, policies, and actions that support communities of original people for social development in the departments of the University Network and coordinating the general programs that support communities of original people in the state of Jalisco. These include the Solidarity Economy, medium-higher intercultural education degree, Higher Degree Intercultural Education, Indigenous Resident Migrants, Justice and Culture, Legal Counsel, Public Health, and Traditional Medicine.

Several hundred students from original societies have enrolled in the University of Guadalajara through these initiatives, suggesting what a colonial perspective would consider to be progress in integrating their cultures into the mainstream population via education, assuming that that is what they wish for and that is what is best for their home communities. The specter of colonialism is always present in beliefs about the efficacy of assimilating people from original societies into the dominant, colonial culture, and the possibility of paternalism should always be present in any considerations of what is best for the presumably downtrodden and deprived. If the initiatives reported here are considered a success, then authorities, teachers, and researchers might look to them as exemplars for their own institutions. Within any such efforts, there should be attempts to provide technological alternatives that are accessible to these communities and to undergird all actions with respect for original peoples and their cultures and languages, a great challenge if literacy is measured in terms of Spanish fluency. Quality of life is always a central concern, and all educators and researchers must be able to take multiple perspectives on what that means to the people who are the subject of interventions designed to improve their lives.

Conclusion Guadalajara is in a privileged position right now, thanks to its being in the process of becoming a “Smart City” with a growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, a large presence of industry in information technology sectors, and the creation of new technology startups. Larios Rosillo (2015) defines a Smart City as one that makes investments in social and human capital as well as in traditional infrastructures such as transport and new ones such as ICTs; that experiences sustainable economic growth and a high level of quality of life; that is managed with the intelligent deployment of natural resources; and that is

240

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

operated through a participatory government. This “smart” character allows for conducting systematic and well-defined changes in the educational system of the state of Jalisco, not only in order to work at the level required by technology companies and to encourage the creation of projects necessary for maintaining this designation but also to take advantage of momentum so that our students can have access to the job market and the support of government programs for the implementation of social innovation projects. Most importantly, from an educational perspective, these affordances rely on schools that can provide students with the tools necessary to be inhabitants of a Smart City. The task of literacy researchers, including those operating from a STEM perspective, will not be easy. But it will be gratifying to realize that school is making sense for students again. By recognizing the limitations of institutions and the needs of the inhabitants of the future, educators and researchers will gain an understanding of the evolution of education in the interests of innovation. And congratulations if you are determined to become a literacy researcher, because now you are a consultant for the future.

References Berliner, D. C. (2014). Exogenous variables and value-added assessments: A fatal flaw. Teachers College Record, 116(1), 1–31. Boers-van Oosterum, M. (1990). Understanding of variables and their uses acquired by students in traditional and computer-intensive algebra. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland. Dissertation Abstracts International, 51, 1538A. Cockcroft, W. H. (1985). Las matemáticas sí cuentan: Informe Cockcroft (vol. 20). Madrid, Spain: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Coll, C. (1988). Significado y sentido en el aprendizaje escolar. Reflexiones en torno al concepto de aprendizaje significativo. Infancia y aprendizaje, 11(41), 131–42. D’Amore, B. (2003). Le basi filosofiche, pedagogiche, epistemologiche e concettuali della didattica della matematica. Bologna: Pitagora. Portuguese edition (Sao Pãolo: Escrituras, 2005) and Spanish edition (Barcelona-México: Reverté, 2005). Dunham, P. H., & Dick, T. P. (1994). Research on graphing calculators. The Mathematics Teacher, 87(6), 440. Escalera-Chávez, M. E., Moreno-García, E., García-Santillán, A., & Córdova-Rangel, A. (2016). Factores que propician el nivel de ansiedad hacia la matemática en estudiantes de nivel medio superior en la region de rioverde san luis potosí [Some factors that generate anxiety toward mathematics in superior middle level students. Empirical study in the region of rioverde, san luis potosi México]. European Journal of Education Studies, 1(4), 8–22.

Building a STEM Infrastructure for Mexico’s Future Needs

241

Ganguli, S. (1932, May). The Indian origin of the modern place-value arithmetical notation. The American Mathematical Monthly, 39, 251–56. Goldin, G. A., Epstein, Y. M., Schorr, R. Y., & Warner, L. B. (2011). Beliefs and engagement structures: Behind the affective dimension of mathematical learning. ZDM Mathematics Education, 43, 547–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-011-0348-z Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. (2006). Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica 2006. Retrieved June 16, 2018, from http:​//www​.beta​.ineg​i.org​.mx/p​ royec​tos/e​nchog​ares/​espec​iales​/enad​id/20​06/ Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies. (2007). Factores escolares y aprendizaje en México: El caso de la educación básica. México City, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa. Järvelä, S., Volet, S., & Järvenoja, H. (2010). Research on motivation in collaborative learning: Moving beyond the cognitive–situative divide and combining individual and social processes. Educational Psychologist, 45(1), 15–27. Kemmis, S., & MacTaggart, R. (1988). Cómo planificar la investigación-acción. Barcelona, Spain: Laertes, D.L. España. Kim, M. S. (2012). Cultural-historical activity theory perspectives on the construction of ICT-mediated teaching metaphors. European Journal of Teacher Education, 35(4), 435–48. Larios Rosillo, V. M. (2015). Los retos de innovación a través de las tecnologías de información en las Smart Cities. Bit & Byte. Revista Institucional de la Facultad de Informática de la UNLP, 1(2), 30–35. Mathematical Sciences Education Board. (1996–2017). Retrieved June 16, 2018, from https​://ww​w.nap​.edu/​autho​r/MSE​B/div​ision​-of-b​ehavi​oral-​and-s​ocial​-scie​nces-​ and-e​ducat​ion/m​athem​atica​l-sci​ences​-educ​ation​-boar​d Moreno Armella, L., & Waldegg, G. (2002). Fundamentación cognitiva del currículo de matemáticas. In Ministerio de Educación de Colombia (Ed.), Seminario Nacional de Formación de docentes en el uso de nuevas tecnologías en el aula de matemáticas (pp. 40–66). Bogotá, Colombia: Ministerio de Educación de Colombia. Murillo, F. (2011). Las comunidades profesionales de aprendizaje: Una estrategia de mejora para una nueva concepción de escuela. Revista Electrónica Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación, 9(1), 65–83. Noble, T., Nemirovsky, R., Wright, T., & Tierney, C. (2001). Experiencing change: The mathematics of change in multiple environments. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 32(1), 85–108. Nolasco, M. (1997). Educación bilingüe: La experiencia en México. In M. Bertely Busquets & A. Robles Valle (Eds.), Indígenas en la escuela: Investigación educativa 1993–1995 (pp. 35–51). México City, Mexico: Consejo Mexicano de Investigación Educativa. Ortiz-Franco, L. (2004). Testimonios sobre cultura matemática en países latinoamericanos. Revista Latinoamericana de Investigación en Matemática Educativa, 7(2), 171–85.

242

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Pablos Pons, J. D., & Villaciervos Moreno, P. (2005). El Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior y las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación. Percepciones y demandas del profesorado. Revista de Educación, (337), 99–124. https​://id​us.us​.es/ b​itstr​eam/h​andle​/1144​1/690​00/EL​%20ES​PACIO​%20EU​ROPEO​%20DE​%20ED​ UCACI​%D3N%​20SUP​ERIOR​%20Y%​20LAS​%20TE​CNOLO​G%CDA​S%20D​E%20L​ A%20I​NFORM​ACI%D​3N%20​Y%20L​A%20C​OMUNI​CACI%​D3N.%​20PER​CEPCI​ ONES%​20Y%2​0DEMA​NDAS%​20DEL​%20PR​OFESO​RADO.​pdf?s​equen​ce=1&​isAll​ owed=​y Programme for International Student Assessment. (2015). PISA 2015 draft mathematics framework. Paris, France: Author. Retrieved June 11, 2018, from https​://ww​w.oec​ d.org​/pisa​/pisa​produ​cts/D​raft%​20PIS​A%202​015%2​0Math​emati​cs%20​Frame​work%​ 20.pd​f Rojano, T. (2003). Incorporación de entornos tecnológicos de aprendizaje a la cultura escolar: proyecto de innovación educativa en matemáticas y ciencias en escuelas secundarias públicas de México. Revista iberoamericana de Educación, 33(3), 135–65. Sacristán, A. I., & Ursini, S. (2001). Incorporating new technologies to the Mexican school culture: The EMAT Project and its logo extension. In Futschek (Ed.), Eurologo 2001: A turtle odyssey: Proceedings of the 8th European Logo Conference, Linz, Austria (pp. 237–244). Vienna, Austria: Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft. Schmelkes, S. (2013). Educación y pueblos indígenas: problemas de medición. Realidad Datos y Espacio. Revista Internacional de Estadística y Geografía, 4(1), 5–13. Smagorinsky, P. (2010). The culture of learning to teach: The self-perpetuating cycle of conservative schooling. Teacher Education Quarterly, 37(2), 19–32. Smagorinsky, P., & Daigle, E. A. (2012). The role of affect in students’ writing for school. In E. L. Grigorenko, E. Mambrino, & D. D. Preiss (Eds.), Writing: A mosaic of new perspectives (pp. 293–307). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Tall, D. (2013). The evolution of technology and the mathematics of change and variation: Using human perceptions and emotions to make sense of powerful ideas. In S. J. Hegedus & J. Roschelle (Eds.), The SimCalc vision and contributions: Democratizing access to important mathematics (pp. 449–61). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Retrieved June 11, 2018, from https​://pd​fs.se​manti​cscho​lar.o​ rg/2b​16/e1​4a1f6​e7ebd​a7e56​390e4​57bc4​dce9f​5e2d.​pdf Thomas, A. (2012, September 7). Engaging students in the STEM classroom through “Making.” Edutopia. Retrieved June 10, 2018, from https​://ww​w.edu​topia​.org/​blog/​ stem-​engag​ement​-make​r-mov​ement​-annm​arie-​thoma​s Trabulse, E. (1985). Historia de la ciencia en México: Estudios y textos, siglo XIX. México City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica y Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología.

Part 4

Research and Evaluation

244

10

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education in Rural Normal Schools in Mexico César Correa Arias

El error de un arquitecto se cae, el error de un doctor se muere, el error de un maestro sigue vivo y es la sociedad. [The mistake of an architect falls down, the mistake of a doctor dies, the mistake of a teacher remains alive and is the society.] ~ from a wall at the Rural Normal School in Atequiza, Mexico  This chapter reviews how Action Research (AR), and its cousins Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Critical Action Research (CAR), figure into the reinvention of literacy teacher education in rural Normal schools in Mexico. This set of related methodologies will hereafter be referred to collectively as AR. Their role in Letras para Volar’s programs, including the master’s degree in literacy education, is designed to improve the quality of teachers’ critical literacy practice and inquiries. I report the historical background of the Normal schools from their origins in the global sphere and the role these schools played in the Mexican Revolution, and then more specifically look at AR as a methodological tool in the education of teachers at the Rural Normal School “Miguel Hidalgo”1 in Atequiza, the last rural university in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Our use of AR in this setting involves ethnographic and biographical methods, in-depth phenomenological-based interviews, and focus groups during the development of workshops, class sessions, and meetings. These methods are designed to recover eloquent fragments of the students’ and teachers’ scholarly and life experiences during the process of teacher education. I use a Freirean Miguel Hidalgo (1753-1811) was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest and heroic leader in the Mexican War of Independence whose execution made him a national martyr.

1

246

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Figure 10.1  Rural Normal School, “Miguel Hidalgo,” in Atequiza, Jalisco. (Photo from the personal collection of César Correa Arias. A color image is available at https:// tinyurl.com/y5gau4z6)

critical literacy framework—one conceived to deconstruct and question power relations embedded in texts, institutions, and social action—to consider how AR can improve teacher education in rural Normal schools in Mexico, and why it is a central dimension of innovative teacher education in contexts characterized by historical inequity produced and sustained by the dominant culture. In this sense, our work in this local, specific context illuminates a process for teacher educators and their students that may be adapted to other national and regional settings in which social injustice is endemic to life, that is, most, if not all, places in the world, especially those with legacies of European colonial domination.

Origins and Context of the Normal Schools The history of Normal school education—that is, university education programs designed to prepare people for careers as teachers—has received modest attention from educational historians in recent years, with some exceptions (e.g., Allison, 1998; Civera Cerecedo, 2008; Herbst, 1989; Lucas, 1997; Monroe, 1952; Ortiz Jiménez, 1991; Salvatori, 1996). These few studies document the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions of the last century that produced their

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

247

genesis and decline. The following sections review the development of Normal schools in global teacher education efforts.

French Origins The origins of the École Normales sprang from the ideas of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, a French priest, theologian, and pedagogue. Normal in this context refers to societal norms to be reinforced in teacher education. These norms were aligned with the values of those who sought a united Europe in the eighteenth century with shared understandings of faith, moral authority, politics, and science. After receiving his doctorate in theology in 1680, La Salle started to teach in schools in economically disadvantaged communities in and around Rheims. He believed that education could allow people to conduct their lives with dignity, justice, and freedom. Toward that end, he founded the Institute of Brothers of the Christian Schools (alternatively, The La Salle Brothers), the first Roman Catholic teaching institute that did not include any priests. La Salle’s educational work departed from that of the rigid ecclesiastical authorities, who rejected the creation of a new form of religious-secular life. The educational establishment disliked La Salle’s innovative methods, even as he helped to create a full network of quality schools throughout France, and eventually around the world in secular settings. La Salle’s academies promoted the knowledge of vernacular culture, the grouping of students according to ability and achievement, the integration of religious and secular instruction, and the engagement of teachers with students’ social and economic situations (Calcutt, 1993).

The Normal Schools in Mexico The Schools of Mutual Teaching, established by Joseph Lancaster’s Lancaster Company in 1818, provided a new form of public education in Mexico. The Lancasterian schools oriented their work toward peer tutoring to reduce the costs of hiring more teachers. These schools followed the ideas and objectives of the Normal Écoles. Lancaster began operating public schools in the last years of the Spanish colonial regime in Mexico, which ran from 1550 to 1810. In 1843 the Lancaster Company influenced the General Direction of Primary Instruction of Mexico to address the challenge of providing initial teacher training at low cost and with short-term results, profoundly influencing educational policies in Mexico (Larroyo, 1986). This philosophy, in conjunction with the Federal

248

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Direction of Public Instruction, governed Mexican public schools until 1890, when a series of educational reforms replaced it with the Objective Education established by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. The Mexican government recognized teacher education as a valid undergraduate degree in 1887, and the Secretary of Education founded relevant Normal schools, totaling forty-five schools by 1900. Nevertheless, the crisis created by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) interrupted these initiatives, and many of these Normal schools closed their doors due to the lack of economic resources. The Mexican Revolution was launched following the nation’s failure to determine a pathway to succession following the thirty-year dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, producing a political crisis among competing elites and opening the door to insurrection among the agrarian proletariat and its revolutionary heroes, including the legendary Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The Mexican Revolution morphed from a revolt against the established order under Porfirio Díaz to a multisided civil war in specific regions, with recurrently shifting power struggles among different groups. The Mexican constitution of 1917 ended the conflict and generated improved social and economic conditions, thanks to the new revolutionary policies, although power struggles continued for decades following the revolution (Krauze, 1997). The new government created the position of Secretary of Public Education under the leadership of José Vasconcelos, one of the most influential personalities in the development of modern Mexico and founder of the Mexican Normal School system in 1921. He encouraged rural educators to address the fact that at the start of the twentieth century, the Mexican population lived mostly in the rural areas. Vasconcelos saw education as the primary strategy to raise the peasant masses from poverty and illiteracy, organizing the first national literacy campaign to support a massive rural education program. (See Chapter 2 for the colonial intentions of his reforms, vestiges of which provide the dominant culture that AR is often designed to interrogate, deconstruct, and dismantle.) At that time, there were few teachers prepared to teach in rural communities. Vasconcelos, inspired by the Catholic friars’ community work of the sixteenth century, appointed missionary teachers (non-specialists) to educate these new teachers in rural areas, where few people had attained so much as a sixth-grade education. The missionary teachers either located schools in existing structures or built new, if modest, facilities for classrooms. For instruction, they provided secular teacher training to neophytes, who then were paid low monthly salaries to instruct rural students in literacy, mathematics, and other essential areas.

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

249

Rural Normal schools lacked plans and specific programs. Each teacher had to imagine possibilities concerning what the community required, within the possibilities constrained by very limited resources, a practice later incorporated into AR’s emphasis on critical inquiry. Rural people considered their Normal schools to be the house of the community and a school for life, reinforcing how the basis of everything was the community, and the heart of the community was the local school. Teachers helped build a sustainable community with a curriculum that covered both core subjects and agricultural and occupational studies such as plumbing and construction. Women were expected to work in the home, a limitation on women’s choices persisting into the present (United Nations, 2002) and an area of interrogation through AR in the master’s program and its critical literacy emphasis. Tacámbaro, in the state of Michoacán, was the first village to have a rural Normal school in 1922. By 1931 there were sixteen Normal schools, and by 1939 there were thirty-six. The rural Normal schools’ charge was “to bring education to the poor rural population, but also to combat social injustice and maintain the dignity of the poor” (Civera Cerecedo, 2008, p. 38), a goal possibly complicated by missionary and colonial assumptions. Rural Normal schools impressed on their teacher candidates the importance of community engagement and the central ideas of the Mexican Revolution of emancipation, freedom, and social justice. Teachers from these rural institutions promoted social projects intended to change the situation of deprived communities in alignment with the Agrarian Reform of the mid-1900s. However, from the beginning, the great landowners and the Catholic Church threatened rural Normal schools and promised to excommunicate the families of the students who registered in them, discrediting them by spreading rumors of immoral practices carried out within these secularized institutions. Until 1940, rural Normal schools in Mexico were supported by the government and community members. Nevertheless, from the beginning of their operation, they were underfunded, with 55 percent shutting down since the mid-1900s. After 1940, the Mexican government abandoned and betrayed rural Normal schools by reestablishing relationships with the landowners and the privileged, who saw these institutions as a threat to private interests. The government referred to the students as Normalists, as stateless communists; and characterized the schools as undesirable places dedicated to training reckless and revolutionary communist leaders. These actions were part of the Mexican Dirty War, in which the US-backed government used its forces to suppress political opposition in the 1960s and 1970s undertaken by left-wing student and guerrilla

250

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

groups. The weapons of the Dirty War included “disappearances,” torture, and executions to beat down what they saw as communist opposition in this arena of the Cold War, a phenomenon exacerbated by the long shadow cast by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and its encouragement of revolutionary activity (Calderon & Cedillo, 2012). The Tlatelolco massacre just prior to the Mexico City Olympics of 1968—in which military and police forces killed a mass of students and civilians in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City—was a critical event that begat a social protest movement against government repression. In 1969 President Díaz Ordaz closed fifteen of Mexico’s twenty-nine rural Normal schools as part of the crackdown against presumably secular, communistinspired challenges to the social order’s privileged class. The new educational policies adopted by the Mexican government in the 1980s and 1990s weakened the position and stability of the rural Normal schools. Today, the nineteen surviving rural Normal schools in Mexico are facing a difficult situation related to budget cuttings and the increasing violence from the government toward Normalists who resisted the powerful economic elites of the nation. The climax of this conflict occurred with the disappearance of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College on September 26, 2015, in Iguala, Guerrero, at the hands of the local police and paramilitary groups, with the support of Mexican authorities. The deadly attack came when the students commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre. Figure 10.2 provides a Guadalajaran street artist’s depiction of this event, with a blue (typical police color) pig-like figure laughingly smoking a human figure from a pack whose label indicates a content of forty-three cigarillos in a box exhibiting the brand name Ayotzinapa.

Summary This historical review of Normal schools for teacher education in rural Mexico sets the stage for the project described next. Mexico’s perpetuation of its economic and political power structure through oppressive means helps establish the need for a critical approach to societal injustice so that rural people—often positioned outside the authority structure and prone to abuse by officials—develop tools for identifying how texts, institutions, and policies work to maintain the status quo, and devise strategies for actions designed to address the inequities identified through critical inquiry and AR.

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

251

Figure 10.2  Street artist’s rendering of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College. (Photo from the personal collection of Peter Smagorinsky. A color image is available at https://tinyurl.com/y5gau4z6)

Action Research from an Educational Perspective: Learning from the Community The rural village of Atequiza in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, barely resembles the nearby busy and modern city of Guadalajara and its population of roughly 1.5 million residents, with over 5 million people in the metropolitan area encompassing seven additional neighboring cities. Atequiza hosted an academic panel with scholars from Spain, Colombia, and Mexico on critical literacy and teacher education at the beginning of 2018. We had been visiting the rural Normal school in Atequiza for twelve years. The school walls were covered with beautiful paintings that embodied both the Mexican muralism of the first half of the twentieth century and symbolic modernism, depicting images of Lenin, Marx, and Engels accompanied by phrases that recall the socialist and Marxist– Leninist revolutionary spirit of the school, such as “Teacher: oppressed and exploited children you will educate, and you will be a guide. Freedom.” These schools threatened the authorities and their vested interest in protecting the security of the wealthy elites and the dominant Catholic culture during the Mexican Dirty War and thereafter. The rural education effort was explicitly

252

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

designed to challenge these oppressive forces, whose leaders were intent on maintaining the status quo and crushing any opposition to it. We planned three workshops after the academic panel: (a) critical literacy in action; (b) language instruction and communication; and (c) development of skills for theoretical and epistemic construction. AR was the most appropriate way to understand the problems, limitations, and expectations of this educational community. This process included inquiry, exploration, awareness, and legitimation oriented to understanding obstacles to communitybased education designed to improve the life prospects of people from diverse working-class backgrounds. The school dormitories lodge 400 students from different zones of Jalisco, providing an unusual opportunity for genuine crosscultural discussions with both other students and with community members, an essential constituent in AR approaches. We hoped to move beyond the conventional academic seminars we had offered in the past, and instead base the discussions in AR and its inquiries leading to a sociocritical teaching stance. We saw AR as the means through which to develop a critical community of students and teachers as agents of social change in rural areas in Mexico.

Origins and Evolution of Action Research I next detail how the methodologies emerging from AR came into being and what they entail. The approach has been attributed to both Karl Lewin and John Collier, according to Tripp (2005): It is not certain who invented action research. The creation of the process is often attributed to Lewin (1946), and whilst he appears to have been the first to publish his work using the term, he may have earlier encountered it in Germany from work performed in Vienna in 1913 (Altrichter & Gestettner, 1992) [sic].2 Alternatively, Deshler and Ewart (1995) suggest that action research was first used by John Collier to improve race relations at the community level when he was the Commissioner of Indian Affairs [in the United States] prior to and during the Second World War, and Cooke (undated) appears to provide strong support for this. (n. p.)

Neilsen (2006) argues that “Lewin’s version of action research was more science oriented, while Collier’s was more exclusively focused on democratic collaboration in the treatment of important social issues” (p. 389). Although Tripp’s reference is inconsistent with the actual publication, which has been corrected in this chapter’s references as Altrichter, Posch, & Somekh, 1993.

2

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

253

Lewin is often credited as the methodology’s architect, Neilsen argues that Collier deserves greater recognition for his role in the development of action research. This chapter draws primarily on Lewin as the original source; Chapter 11 is more indebted to Collier. Lewin’s Foundational Work. Kurt Lewin (1958) was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a social psychologist. He developed the field theory of behavior, which positions human conduct as a function of the psychological environment. Lewin has become influential in a variety of social sciences that focus on the effects of contexts on rational thinking and action. His students undertook AR in factories and in neighborhoods to study how democratic participation affects human productivity. Lewin (1946) investigated human exploitation and colonization, employing AR to help disenfranchised people develop autonomy, equality, and social justice (Marrow, 1969). Three key points of his approach were: a) the selection of groups of people according to shared interests; b) the use of open dialogue to explore and discuss the difficulties each group of employees endured; and c) the motivated participation of employees in reasoning and decision-making. To Argyris, Putnam, and Smith (1985), Lewin’s approach relies on “the mutually reinforcing values of science, democracy and education and the benefits of combining science and social practice” (p. 83) to effect changes toward a more equitable society. AR and Pluralistic Equity. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, a postcolonial term that does not always describe a global hemispheric location, although its regions tend to be south of the equator. It refers to countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean that the World Bank considers to be developing industrially and composed of people of low income. Western scholars have often disdained new and reconfigured social categories proposed by social scientists from the Global South, denying the possibility of epistemological pluralism in their seminars by excluding their perspectives. Yet, expanding the canon of thought does not require the abandonment of the scholarly and intellectual threads that have been historically valued in the Eurocentric Global North (Tung-Yi, 2009). Instead, this pluralism may produce critical multisided communication, reconfiguring categories and theories according to socially specific conditions (Mignolo, 1999; Quijano, 1964, 2000). AR allows Jaliscan teachers and researchers an opportunity to liberate themselves from Eurocentric values that do not explain their own circumstances, and enables them to produce “a universal and contextualised knowledge [responsive to their] unique and complex realities” (Fals Borda, 2013, p. 200).

254

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

AR Components and Definitions AR requires listening to the community and being aware of their particular creation of sense and meanings about the experiences in their lifeworld. The investigator can then build critical dialogue and act within and with the community according to its own priorities. Lewin believed that “No action without research, no research without action” (Adelman, 1993, p. 49), suggesting that communities should have the agency to determine their own circumstances. Proponents include Fals Borda (1977) in Colombia and Freire (1968) in Brazil, who criticized the hegemonic forces driving social science theories, practices, and pedagogies proceeding from European traditions. AR has influenced and been influenced by social movements such as anticolonialism, decolonialism, anti-racism, feminism, and rural movements; has employed hermeneutics, phenomenology, pragmatism, liberalism, critical theory, and social representations; and has been applied to such disciplines as social anthropology, sociology of engagement, critical pedagogy, political philosophy, education, and social psychology. AR is based on a set of fundamental concepts derived from the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and other philosophers whose relevant constructs are reviewed next. These concepts include intentional consciousness, Dasein (existence), biographic synthesis, conscientization, and social justice. Intentional Consciousness. Intentional consciousness refers to one’s awareness and comprehension of the lifeworld: the dynamic, available world that people may experience and inhabit together by attending to both personal beliefs and culturally or socially established understandings. This notion is grounded in Husserl’s (1900/1901, 1913) transcendental phenomenology, which asserts the possibility of abandoning bias to imaginatively explore the rational interconnections between perception and experience, between lifeworld and material world, to arrive at a transcendental consciousness (Bernet, Kern, & Marbach, 1993). This consciousness is situated within an existing world, filled with socially, culturally, and historically constituted meanings and values that provide the contextual contours that help to shape its development. From the standpoint of AR, the construct of intentional consciousness suggests that people from oppressed social classes need not accept their circumstances, but instead may transcend them by liberating their minds from shackled perspectives and reshaping their social and material worlds through deliberate action. Instead, then, of enabling the abandonment of bias, a revised version of this construct provides for a shift to biases that are enabling and agentive (Cummins & Nistico, 2002).

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

255

Dasein, or Existence. Heidegger’s (1927) concept of dasein assumes that a person becomes a human being when immersed in a social world (Warnock, 1970). Heidegger asserted that within this social context, people create the worlds in which they live. These constructed worlds include possibilities for plurality, diversity, and meaning that lead to understanding, orientation, and legitimation in the quest for truth, ethics, and authenticity (Muñoz Pérez, 2014). Heidegger’s philosophy of transcendence recognizes individuals as agents of the configuration of this world of meaning such that they may transcend their own subjectivity to perceive and reach a horizon of freedom, a central tenet of AR. Attention to broader contexts suggests that all such efforts are necessarily constrained by social traditions, institutions, laws, prejudices, wealth inequities, and other factors that may limit unfettered freedom, while also acknowledging that actions are available to undermine the hegemonic effects of environments that maintain status quo social hierarchies. Biographic Synthesis. AR is concerned with achieving a comprehensive synthesis of the world using biographic methods to reconfigure social knowledge, particularly any perceptions that suggest the naturalness of inequitable structures and practices (Correa Arias, 2017a, 2017b). The lifeworld available through the process of experiential narrative may be realized through the conduct of AR and its potential for promoting change-oriented reflection (Ricoeur, 1984). This reflection allows people to perceive two essential components of reasoning, understanding, and action: narrative identity as an ontological and linguistic approach to being-in-the-world, and narrative imagination (Nussbaum, 2010) as a means to build the lifeworld through engagement in critical literacy, an underlying value associated with AR. Ricoeur (1984) sees the availability of a storyteller’s personal identity emerging through a narrative process that reveals something about the broader community. Narrative identity is concerned with Who?: Who is this? Who said that? Who did that? Who is that? Who are we? Ricoeur’s (1987) hermeneutic phenomenology begins “when not satisfied to belong to the historical world in the way of the transmitted tradition, we interrupt the relation of belonging to signify it” (p. 60). AR is designed to provide a means of interruption to inherited social worlds. Nussbaum (2010) sees the narrative imagination as potentially allowing readers of other people’s stories to become more worldly than parochial, more understanding and accepting than tribal, through love, hospitality, and compassion. This critical approach to received knowledge and empathic stance in relation to “the other” makes AR compatible with Letras para Volar’s pedagogical effort to disrupt hierarchical norms and undertake social action to effect change toward an equitable distribution of capital and authority.

256

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Conscientization. Freire’s (1968, 1981) notion of conscientization has to do with global issues that can influence the persistent problems in a community of the sort investigated through AR and its role in promoting critical literacy designed to revitalize social groups. Freire offered conscientization as a fundamental aspect of literacy teaching and learning oriented to the learner’s meaningful cultural actions in response to subjugation. Critical dialogue, narration, and argumentation are central to enabling oppressed people to author their emancipation and reconfigure their worlds and possibilities. Conscientization does not mean learning about the nature of our and others’ worlds as detached analysis. Rather, it refers to seeking ways to learn in and with others in these worlds in order to build communities. Critical literacy and conscientization constitute a symbiotic relationship. Critical literacy requires a lifelong social process of learning in service of awareness; conscientization requires critical literacy to develop political engagement while learning. To Freire (1968), conscientization emanates from a democratic, distributed dialogue structured by cycles of reflection-actionreflection of the sort that produces AR designs, conduct, and interpretation. Dialogue involves listening to understand multiple perspectives to question and dissolve social hierarchies that may follow in part from the segregation of people from one another’s perspectives. Social Justice. Social justice serves as the nexus of AR, which is fundamentally concerned with how critical literacy can inform understandings of power, knowledge, justice, respect, and the social distribution of social, cultural, and economic capital.

Features of AR Incorporating these five dimensions, AR potentially: 1) represents plural epistemic thinking that links theoretical developments with practical social knowledge; 2) fosters the awareness of the lifeworld through being-in and with-theworld of others; 3) orients communities to overcoming adverse situations through transcendental phenomenology; 4) requires conscientization of the lifeworld through critical literacy, which involves engaging in continual narrative processes, critical dialogue, and cycles of reflection and action leading to emancipation;

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

257

5) relies on the Aristotelian concept of phrónesis or practical wisdom that connects an ethical dimension with political engagement; 6) entails the development of pedagogical intuition, intention, and imagination to foster social knowledge and justice; 7) enhances the capacity of a community to express their culture through their own language and accompanying ideology; 8) facilitates both individuals’ and the community’s agency in their planning and decision-making processes through encouraging active participation in the political process, assuming that all actions are political and ideological; and 9) respects local knowledge, sense-making, consensus-based understandings, and cultural orientations and does not yield to hegemonic Eurocentric traditions that impose a singular notion of rationalism on addressing situated community life. These tenets are designed to empower disenfranchised people by involving them in the dialogues that produce a community’s practices and purpose through a formal process of inquiry, critique, and the generation of alternative visions to transform lived realities into equitable relationships (Rahman, 2013). AR benefits communities and not necessarily researchers’ careers, emphasizing an authentic, emic understanding of a community’s needs and goals, and is activist by design. It eschews the Eurocentric value on detached outside observation and replaces it with the insights available to insiders and their perspectives and experiences. Gustavsen, Hansson, and Qvale (2007) assert that the major advantage of AR compared to the production of academic publications is the creation of practices. AR aims to build participatory and situated knowledge, deep reflection, and conscientization to guide actions to transform adverse, hegemonic, anachronistic, and invasive conditions affecting communities. In a literacy education program undertaken amid social inequity, these methods consider literacy to be more than reading texts literally. Literacy education must be ideological and activist to use textual engagement as a means to constructing dialogues that produce social change and more equitable communities and societies.

Critical Literacy and Action Research in the Process of Teachers’ Education Literacy content has a polysemous nature, involving more than decoding words on a page and producing linguistic codes faithfully in texts. Its etymology,

258

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

from the Latin term littera (letter), refers to the appropriate use of writing and reading, and the construction and comprehension of diverse texts. If, as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2004), asserts, literacy “involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and broader society” (p. 13), it is a human right that enables people to develop agency in living a more satisfying life (see Chapter 11). Freire focused on these political and critical dimensions of literacy, making his approach and AR highly compatible. He developed a method for teaching literacy in service of relevant cultural action via conscientization, encouraging learners to question why things are the way they are, and providing tools of interrogation to seek ways to change them for the better. Literacy and AR are related through their emphasis on politically active participation in social and economic transformation. Literacy in this sense is fundamentally social in that it contributes to identity, status, and social position and helps generate knowledge and conceptions through which people construct visions of their communities and the broader world, particularly in contrast with inequitable conditions experienced within oppressed communities (Cassany, 2009; López, Tinajero, & Pérez, 2006). New Literacy Studies (NLS) scholars have emphasized literacy’s political and ideological dimensions, especially those that are implicated in technology-based communication. They define literacy as knowledge that enables a person to produce, manage, edit, receive, and analyze information in a determined context to transform it into functional knowledge. These studies focus on understanding literacy from a global, sociocultural perspective that includes attention to individuals’ lives and their relation to literacy practices (Aguilar, Ramírez, & López, 2014). As Figure 10.2 demonstrates, this sensibility is not solely available through technology. It has been a part of the Mexican artistic tradition traced to First Literacies for millennia. Literacy thus incorporates all human activities promoting common, academic, and scientific knowledge, including arts, literature, sciences, disciplines, daily practical knowledge, and practical wisdom oriented to living a dignified life. Multimodal theories postulate that, since communication occurs through different yet related modes of texts, images, symbols, music, and other sign systems, literacy must be viewed as a concerted whole and not in terms of components (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001).

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

259

Literacy-Related AR in Innovative Teacher Education AR-related fields are compatible with this conception of literacy in their capacity to help people inquire into the identities that follow from living within hegemonic social relations. Literacy in this sense comprises a human right, one that has an agentive potential to enable people to become architects of their own social environments. In Latin America, literacy education started as a massive government program of alphabetization (that is, decoding practices leading to functional literacy) for communities in displaced urban spaces and rural environments. It has since evolved to embrace principles of conscientization to become a vehicle for social change, using such means as AR to conduct inquiries into inequity. Ancient Greek notions of literacy resemble NLS in that they both seek the achievement of citizenship and aspire to contribute to the Aristotelian concept of dignified life. However, these approaches have little rapport with the academic capitalism motivating educational institutions globally. This neoliberal emphasis on business models for operating schools and universities has produced a heartless education driven by economics, the commodification of knowledge, an absence of critical consciousness, and an abiding interest in institutional prestige via global rankings based on limited indicators of productivity such as grant activity (Correa Arias, 2011; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Emancipatory education, however, seeks to both improve individual lives and build communities in which individuals can live dignified, just, and sustainable lives. Conducting AR as part of teachers’ education has been a massive challenge for the Rural Normal School of Atequiza, yet has the potential to contribute powerfully to reconceiving literacy and literacy education. In our project, as future teachers were recounting their life and educational stories, we noticed the importance of critical dialogue, the exchange of knowledge, and the interest in educational and political agency. One of our undergraduate preschool education students wrote as follows to characterize the experience: The purpose of the courses is to invite students to put into practice the process of analysis-reflection to make systematizations of the actions put into practice within the classroom. In these courses, teachers in training share experiences, which enrich and help us understand conflicts among all the educational process. As an example, I can mention the frequent meetings of the 5th semester, designed to expose issues detected in the first day of our teaching practice. The

260

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

process has two guidelines: The first one involves the different experiences lived in the classroom with teachers and students, to generate the most significant number of experiences and from that, offer opinions and ideas regarding particular issues. After this, we discuss individual and collective information to identify the problems generated in our teaching practice. As a group of students, we noticed the interest and motivation of all future teachers when we presented them the particular issues we have while doing our teaching practice. At the end of each contribution, the group listened to some collective opinions and questions, and we offered possible solutions to reach a consensus. It has been significant experiences with the presence of critical thinking at all times, which was possible to develop from problematization.

As this testimony suggests, the students and teachers of Atequiza considered their teacher education as a site for critical literacy involving continual cycles of reflection, dialogue, and relevant actions as structural components of both literacy action and AR. Part of the role of teacher educators is finding ways to sustain these processes so that disruptions do not short-circuit the benefits that accrue to teachers using AR to inquire into their social environments in systematic, sustainable ways. These measures include the deliberate provision of: 1. spaces of critical reflection fostered by the institution that link teachers’ education and practices; 2. opportunities to analyze experiences in order to identify mistakes and misjudgments, thus allowing for reflection and critical and constructive dialogue that leads to consensus and new reflections regarding teachers’ education; 3. reflexive participation as a pragmatic link between literacy and AR; 4. the use of constitutive elements of literacy (resources, sources and practices of literacy, and sociocognitive experiences) and the critical dialogue of AR; 5. an ethical dimension connecting literacy and AR; 6. an epistemic plurality that enables reflecting deeply on educational issues to eliminate the use of hegemonic categories that universalize contexts based on dominant cultural values and diminish the stature of local knowledge and wisdom; and 7. use of phrónesis or practical wisdom from an Aristotelian perspective. The symbiosis between literacy and AR occurs through the synthesis of critical dialogue, intentional and participatory reflection around particular and common issues, and engagement through action to transform the adverse conditions

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

261

that exist in a particular community of practice. Literacy and AR foster the construction of students’ subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In conventional teacher education, however, such ideological work is rare, as one preschool teacher education candidate stated: While developing the course of Citizenship Education, we were analyzing in groups today’s definition and purpose of education. After an exchange of ideas between teachers and several of my classmates, a couple of important issues came to light reinforcing and modifying the perspective and vision of what I understood as education and its purposes. A key point was the urgent necessity of training teachers in the normal schools. The way teachers teach us in the Rural Normal School of Atequiza is inadequate; they do not have proper didactic strategies, and they teach us things that are useless once we find ourselves in front of a group.

This critique about the lack of relevance of teacher education conducted in traditional fashion, especially that which packages pedagogies developed for other contexts and presents them to teachers as authoritative and of universal effectiveness (see Smagorinsky, 2018), resembles much international discourse about the quality of teacher education. Including an AR dimension that positions teachers as inquirers rather than receivers, and that validates the understandings of local conditions through their investigations as authoritative and legitimate, helps to make teacher education innovative and relevant and responsive to teachers’ emerging needs. The tools of critical inquiry are especially useful in that they may guide the teachers’ career-long stance as learners about students and their inquiries into inequity. Including AR projects in teacher education in the Rural Normal School of Atequiza has allowed researchers, teachers, and students to visualize different strategies for improving the teacher education program, generating learning environments that support critical dialogue between teachers and students. Although the political and ideological inheritance of the rural Normal schools originated in the Mexican Revolution of a century ago, it may serve to foment a new revolution in teacher education that is less oriented to mastering established knowledge and more driven by the need to inquire into and find solutions to social inequity. Through such a stance, educators in Mexican rural schools and teacher education programs can claim their own ideology and educational and political discourse responsive to established and emerging social situations, the presence of competing for ideological discourses, the possibilities of new technologies, and the reconfiguration and development of new social categories.

262

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Conclusion Teachers’ education requires the development of sociocognitive and emotional capacities, but more importantly, the creation of spaces for the construction of subjectivity—one’s subject position in interpreting the world—and intersubjectivity, the manner in which social situations are interpreted in more or less the same way by different people. Narrative processes allow people to know the nature of the experiences in interacting with others in a community of practice. Rather than a collection of life stories, narrative processes represent a dense description of individuals’ lifeworld through telling, writing, reading, and building meaningful experiences. These texts, images, sounds, and social situations in the lifeworld represent the collective and individual beliefs and the cultural expressions of a particular community. The concept of conscientization allows teachers and teacher educators to discover the worlds of others and transcend the boundaries of their received positions in society, and enables a capacity to build a political community of practice. Conscientization includes a cycle of reflection-action-reflection that relies on the development of critical literacy through critical dialogue. However, critical literacy is not an end or an achievement, but a continual process of building language and communicative capacities and political engagement to transform the individuals’ lifeworld. Critical literacy—understood as a life inquiry, rather than a methodology or strategy—has a strong similarity to what the Greeks built around the concept of polis. Hellenic culture worked in service of building the polis and the accompanying panoply of eupraxis or “good or ideal practices” that contribute to the development of a dignified life (see Smagorinsky, Shelton, & Moore, 2015). Conscientization represents the link between critical literacy and AR such that AR serves not merely as a research method but also as an exercise of democracy that allows the construction of identities, discourses, and political agency in communities. Critical literacy invites people to interact with others in the lifeworld, while AR enables them to recover through narrative analysis the processes and practices of literacy in a particular community. Teacher education has the potential to affirm the importance of working in the students’ lifeworlds toward conscientization via AR. Although the students of the Rural Normal School of Atequiza have inherited a historical tradition of political commitment and the acquisition of their political language from the Mexican Revolution, the language of this new generation of

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

263

students should not be that of this inherited tradition. In the words of Audre Lorde (1984), “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” It is necessary that these teachers and teacher educators relate to experiences of their lifeworld to include new social categories and to critique new means of social injustice. Critical literacy, in which conscientization remains focused not only on the construction of a community of practices but also on the reconfiguration of their narrative identity, is available when teacher education is reinvented to incorporate inquiries into inequities via AR that empowers both the investigator and those whom the inquiries are designed to help liberate from oppression.

References Adelman, C. (1993). Kurt Lewin and the origins of action research. Educational Action Research, 1(1), 35–49. Aguilar, L., Ramírez, A, & López, R. (2014). Literacidad digital académica de los estudiantes universitarios: Un estudio de caso. Revista Electrónica de Investigación y Docencia, 1(11), 123–46. Allison, C. B. (1998). Teachers for the south: Pedagogy and educationists in the University of Tennessee, 1844–1995. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Altrichter, H., Posch, P., & Somekh, B. (1993). Teachers investigate their work: An introduction to the methods of action research. London, UK: Routledge. Retrieved August 11, 2019, from http:​//www​.cad.​unam.​mx/pr​ogram​as/ac​tuale​s/mae​stria​s/ mae​stria​_form​_cn_e​c_SEI​EM_20​11/00​/02_m​ateri​al/02​_tolu​ca/mo​d1/ar​chivo​s/20_​ Teach​ers_i​nvest​igate​_thei​r_wor​k.pdf​ Argyris, C., Putnam, R., & Smith, D. M. (1985). Action science. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Bernet, R., Kern, I., & Marbach, E. (1993). An introduction to Husserlian phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Calcutt, A. G. D. (1993). De La Salle Brother (1664–1733). Oxford, UK: De La Salle Publications. Calderon, F. H., & Cedillo, A. (2012). Challenging authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982. New York, NY: Routledge. Cassany, D. (2009). Para ser letrados: Voces y miradas sobre la lectura. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós Educador. Civera Cerecedo, A. (2008). Escuela, ciudadanía y democracia: La formación de maestros rurales y técnicos agrícolas, 1920–1946. Documentos de Investigación. México City, Mexico: El Colegio Mexiquense. Cooke, W. (n. d.). A foundation correspondence on action research: Ronald Lippit and John Collier. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester.

264

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Correa Arias, C. (2011). Public policies on higher education: Rhetoric and grammar of modernity and the limits of social recognition. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 5(9), 177–90. Correa Arias, C. (2017a). Justicia social e instituciones educativas en América Latina: Hacia una imaginación pedagógica transformadora. In S. P. López González & A. Cuevas Peña (Eds.), Justicia (pp. 75–118). Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Correa Arias, C. (2017b). El giro pedagógico en la construcción de instituciones educativas justas e inclusivas en América Latina. In C. Correa Arias, J. I. Rosas, & A. Luzón Trujillo (Eds.), Justicia, ética y reconocimiento social (pp. 85–110). Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara, Prometeo Editores. Cummins, R. A., & Nistico, H. (2002). Maintaining life satisfaction: The role of positive cognitive bias. Journal of Happiness Studies, 3, 37–69. Deshler, D., & Ewert, M. (1995). Participatory action research: Tradition and major assumptions. PARnet. Fals Borda, O. (1977). For praxis: The problem of how to investigate reality in order to transform it. Paper presented at the Cartagena Symposium on Action Research and Scientific Analysis, 78–112, Cartagena, CO. Fals Borda, O. (2013). Socialismo raizal y ordenamiento territorial. Bogotá, Colombia: Desde Abajo. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogía do oprimido. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Paz e Terra. Freire, P. (1981). La ideología y la educación: Reflexiones sobre la no neutralidad de la educación. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Continuum. Gustavsen, B., Hansson, A., & Qvale, T. U. (2007). Action research and the challenge of scope. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of action research (2nd ed., pp. 63–76). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Heidegger, M. (1978). The metaphysical foundations of logic (M. Heim, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Herbst, J. H. (1989). And sadly teach: Teacher education and professionalization in American culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Husserl, E. (1900/1). Logical investigations (J. N. Findlay, Trans., 2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Husserl, E. (1913). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Krauze, E. (1997). Mexico: Biography of power: A history of modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (H. Heifetz, Trans.). New York, NY: HarperCollins. Kress, G. R., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Larroyo, F. (1986). Historia comparada de la educación en México. México City, Mexico: Librería Porrúa Hermanos y Compañía. Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. In G. W. Lewin (Ed.), Resolving social conflicts (pp. 201–16). New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Action Research, Literacy, and Teacher Education

265

Lewin, K. (1958). Resolving social conflicts: Selected papers on group dynamics (1936– 1946). New York, NY: Harper & Row. López, G., Tinajero G., & Pérez, C. (2006). Jóvenes, currículo y competencia literaria. Investigación Educativa, 8(2), 1–24. Lorde, A. (1984). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 110–114). Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https​://ww​w.muh​lenbe​rg.ed​u/med​ia/co​ntent​asset​s/pdf​/camp​uslif​ e/SDP​%20Re​ading​%20Lo​rde.p​df Lucas, C. J. (1997). Teacher education in America. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Marrow, A. J. (1969). The practical theorist: The life and work of Kurt Lewin. New York, NY: Basic Books. Mignolo, W. (1999). Colonialidad del poder y diferencia colonial. Anuario Mariateguiano, 9(10), 39–48. Monroe, W. S. (1952). Teacher-learning theory and teacher education, 1890–1950. New York, NY: Greenwood. Muñoz Pérez, E. (2014). Trascendencia, mundo y libertad en el entorno de ser y tiempo de Martín Heidegger. Veritas, 1(32), 76–91. Neilsen, E. H. (2006). But let us not forget John Collier: Commentary on David Bargal’s “Personal and intellectual influences leading to Lewin’s paradigm on action research.” Action Research, 4(4), 389–99. Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ortiz Jiménez, M. (1991). La formación de maestros rurales en el Estado de México, 1927–1940. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Escuela Normal Rural Lázaro Cárdenas, México City, MX. Quijano, A. (1964). La emergencia del grupo cholo y sus implicaciones en la sociedad peruana (esquema de enfoque aproximativo). Unpublished doctoral dissertation, National University of San Marcos, Lima, PE. Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Ed.), La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas (pp. 201–46). Buenos Aires, Argentina: CLACSO-UNESCO. Rahman, A. (2013). Some trends in the praxis of participatory action research. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice (2nd ed., pp. 9–42). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Temps et récit 2, La configuration du temps dans le récit. Paris, France: Seuil. Ricoeur, P. (1987). Hermeneutics and the human sciences (J. B. Thompson, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Salvatori, M. R. (1996). Pedagogy: Disturbing history, 1819–1929. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

266

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Slaughter S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Literacy in teacher education: “It’s the context, stupid.” Journal of Literacy Research, 50(3), 281–303. Smagorinsky, P., Shelton, S. A., & Moore, C. (2015). The role of reflection in developing eupraxis in learning to teach English. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 10(4), 285–308. Tripp, D. (2005). Action research: A methodological introduction. Educação e Pesquisa, 31(3). http:​//dx.​doi.o​rg/10​.1590​/S151​7-970​22005​00030​0009. Retrieved August 11, 2019, from http:​//www​.scie​lo.br​/scie​lo.ph​p?pid​=s151​7-970​22005​00030​0009&​scrip​ t=sci​_artt​ext&t​lng=e​n Tung-Yi, K. (2009). Eurocentrism, modernity, and the postcolonial predicament in East Asia. In R. K. Kanth (Ed.), The challenge of Eurocentrism: Global perspectives, policy, and prospects (pp. 121–43). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations. (August 6, 2002). Mexican women still face discrimination, despite significant steps, committee told. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https​://ww​w.un.​org/p​ ress/​en/20​02/wo​m1352​.doc.​htm United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2004). The plurality of literacy and its implications for policies and programs. Paris, France: Author. Warnock, M. (1970). Existentialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

11

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices Martha Vergara Fregoso and José Antonio Méndez Sanz

In this chapter we analyze theoretical and methodological perspectives for investigating the practices of conventional literacy in the form of reading and writing, and review research on literacy. We propose narration (narrative, action research, ethnography) for inquiring into and at the same time building on literacy. We describe methods that provide elements for differentiating between social and cultural aspects of narration to produce a conception of what might be considered contemporary literacy research, based on the assumption that the social world is not only the object of interpretation by social scientists. It is also interpreted by those who populate it. We conduct these reviews to introduce the means of evaluating the impact of Letras para Volar, the Guadalajaran literacy education program featured in this volume. This program’s assessment requires attention to a wide range of impact factors, from conventional reading and writing fluency to the social factors that provide the contexts in which people undertake literacy practices. We argue that multiple methods of assessment are appropriate for evaluating the program’s complexity and its various components. If teacher education is to be reinvented, then assessing its effects is a critical aspect of its reconception, implementation, and ongoing revision and development. Impressionistic claims are insufficient and often gloss over areas needing improvement. This chapter reviews the issues addressed in the program and thus subject to assessment, and the methods by which we have studied them, both for assessment purposes and for broader research into literacy and literacy education as social and educational phenomena. Letras para Volar was a pioneering program to promote reading among children and young people. It emerged in 2010 as an initiative of academics from

268

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

the University of Guadalajara and the Fielding Graduate University of California in response to problems such as low scores in reading performance (see Chapter 2), in spite of acknowledged problems with international test comparisons (Pizmony-Levy et al., 2014). The program has produced printed and multimedia resources for the promotion of reading, and offers a free access website that provides electronic books, including some on the ancestral traditions related through Mexican legends. The site adapts its activities to meet the diverse needs of those who participate in the program. It invites young social service providers, teachers, parents, and volunteers to promote reading in schools in marginalized areas of the municipalities of the state of Jalisco, particularly in the Guadalajara metropolitan area. The program provides training to all interested parties, with constructivist theoretical foundations. The critical pedagogy of Freire (1970) and Illich (1971) give the program its theoretical principles. The initial model was enriched in praxis by the sociocultural theory proposed by Smagorinsky (2001), the theory of appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987), and Foucault’s (1982) outline of power relationships in society. The facilitation and interaction of students, content, and teachers relies on a model of nonauthoritarian social interaction that considers the learner’s context. Too often, schools and the different agents involved have failed to fulfill their social function, and have become structured spaces dedicated to social assimilation and replication rather than social change (Illich, 1971).

Reading and Writing This chapter will build on two major assumptions. First, since ancient times reading has been considered a source of information and understanding that has supported knowledge, recognition, and the development of culture. Reading in this conception is considered the most economical way to travel to the past, to the present, and to the future. It enables people to learn about places, cultures, and persons; to search and access written information in order to acquaint themselves with the world and its relationships; and to imagine possible worlds, reflect, share, discuss, and awaken feelings of joy, sadness, anger, and other emotions that provide the lens through which the world is interpreted and understood. Second, reading and writing go beyond text comprehension. They may be used as tools for social change when individuals, groups, or cultures use literacy practices in service of critical, emancipatory, and proactive action

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 269

to produce a more equitable society (Johnson, Chisam, Smagorinsky, & Wargo, 2018). However, reading and writing are not inborn practices; they are learned. They provide the means for people to know, transform, and create. They afford critical skills that open possibilities for those privy to their processes and possibilities to realize their human personal and social potential. The availability of digital literacies has created new forms of access to literacy, which, in turn, have produced new challenges to literacy educators and people aspiring to engage with the world textually. The vast cultural diversity of Mexico, including people descended from original cultures speaking scores of languages (see Notes on the Editorial Process for confusion about precise numbers), means that a unitary notion of being literate is insufficient. Literacy, instead, must be understood as a range of practices covering abundant cultures and peoples, always situated in the needs and daily practices of community life (Scribner & Cole, 1981). These new expansive horizons obligate us to delve systematically into the general meaning of literacy. Our inquiries aim at forming public educational programs to promote citizenship through school curricula, modes of learning (training, interaction, and expression), recognition of the symbolic capital of marginalized social groups, active insertions into politics, motivation of personal and social creativity, and other aspects of human development in social contexts. We next describe the concepts that serve as the basis for the development of literacy and literacy education.

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching the Practices of Reading and Writing Literacy at its most basic is a process in which people change from nonreaders of alphabetic texts into readers, a conception that omits writing the symbols that others read. It involves a continual process of acquisition and production of knowledge, and the pivotal point between them. Regardless of variation in reading fluency, literacy is the engine of knowledge and written culture. A writing culture is one that enables people to read and write effectively, not only to copy phrases but also to learn and then use and incorporate what they have learned through reading and writing in their daily lives. Readers have achieved functional literacy when they develop the ability to discover contradictions that may appear in a text, ascertain the position that the

270

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

author assumed when writing it and the context in which it was developed, and establish their personal position by writing something that is understandable to those who read it. Literacy is thus the continual process through which a text is read, understood, analyzed, and reconstructed in a new text, perhaps imagined and perhaps produced in textual form (Smagorinsky, 2001). The Spanish translation of the English literacy (alfabetización) concerns the teaching of alphabetic reading and writing as decoding skills. But literacy in expanded conceptions involves more, encompassing “everything related to the use of the alphabet: from the correspondence between sound and letter to the reasoning capabilities associated with writing” (Cassany, 2009, p. 38). It includes written codes, discursive genres, roles of author and reader, forms of thought, identity and status for individuals and communities, values, and cultural representations. These elements govern the interaction of a critical subject with respect to different discursive practices that are not only the product of knowledge embedded in a community of practice but that have a sociocultural character, where knowledge itself is affected by the context in which it appears. Contemporary literacy is replete with creativity. It requires an understanding of symbol systems that are simultaneously inclusive and emancipatory so that literate people may capitalize on subjects, societies, and cultures. The construct implies, therefore, a transformative expansion of the synthesis enabled by “basic” literacy, both of the individual literate person and of the society that the individual learns how to critique and change toward equity. People are not only socialized in general; they become citizenized as active and creative sociocultural individuals. Contemporary literacy is concerned with practice, with pragmatic universes of action. It goes beyond theoretical understanding, the decoding of signs, syntactic interpretation, and syntactic/semantic intuition. It is concerned with processes more than mechanical understandings of language. It seeks connections across the many aspects of engagement at the individual, societal, and cultural spheres and their communicative practices, both literal and creative or symbolic. Literacy is a code, a way of incorporating, a way of simultaneously creating open and nonalienated psyches. It is not something that people possess in the traditional sense, but it is part of the process of subjectivation, people’s ability to shape their own conduct and personality and the process that produces it (Foucault, 2005). This emphasis suggests the importance of social action as a component of literacy education. As other authors in this collection argue, the teacher education program at the University of Guadalajara is not simply about reading

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 271

and writing. It includes a strong critical dimension through which society may be transformed. Political and economic inequity have long held back Mexico’s advancement. Improving reading test scores focused on decoding will not change that inequity. Rather, forthcoming generations of Mexicans must learn to read and write for conscientization, the development of a critical consciousness that allows a deep understanding of the world through which social and political contradictions are lain bare and are subject to productive critique and transformation through informed and principled social action (Freire, 1970).

Narrative Inquiry Literacy includes attention to narrativity, the practice of thinking through and representing understanding via stories. Narratives enable people’s identities to take shape as they creatively and symbolically manage the signs that make up their social and cultural horizon. From a Freirean perspective, these narratives may serve an emancipatory role in the life of the storyteller. By narrating, the storytellers constitute themselves and their experiences as a unit of meaning, as a story unit. Narrative subjectivity resides between the materially exterior forces of society and culture and the individual’s subjective experience and representation of them. These two dimensions are complementary and work in dialectic unity in shaping a storyteller’s identity. Narrativity allows an understanding of the constitutive processes of the social, the cultural, and the individual. It allows us to understand ourselves (the “I”) as a narration, and society and culture as the nexus of stories. Narrativity provides an epistemological benefit as well as this ontological benefit in the form of narrative inquiry as a research method (Daiute, 2013). This method is simultaneously performative and emancipatory, allowing an expansion of what is thought to be “reality.” Narrativity renders experience imaginatively. It involves a constitutive creativity (social, cultural, individual) that expands on and reconstructs experience to make points and depict the human condition. The storytelling process relies on the past to project possibilities for the future, enabling a complex intersubjective, intersocial, and intercultural convergence on which it pivots to render past, present, and future into a unified narrative whole. Narrativity suggests the need for methodologies that link the descriptive/explanatory and the creative or transformative. It allows researchers and other listeners to access others’ experiences and their own, and is thus procedural and potentially emancipatory. It is an ontology; its territory oscillates, paradoxically, between

272

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

definition and indefinability. Storytellers and their listeners reside in the story, defining themselves in the narrative and narratively. Narrative inquiry provides a means of investigation that does more than describe, clarify, or make conscious. Rather, it acts creatively in the construction of the human community. To investigate literacy, researchers need to position themselves in relation to the participants and their practices, the theory, the method, and themselves as researchers. Literacy potentially serves to empower individuals, societies, and cultures through which emancipation and empowerment become possible. Narrative inquiry provides an important method for conducting research on literacy in education. Through narrative/biographical evidence it is possible to reveal identity, self-image, self-esteem, and self-perception in the development of teaching tasks, professional motivation, perspectives of future development, and the training needs of the participants. The task then becomes to creatively inscribe them as essential capital in the life of the community. Narrative has a contextual perspective. It is developed in a specific universe, it is explained through the cultural relations of groups in a fully identified place, and it offers a mutually influential integral perspective (personality development, affective/family life, and social/professional life) that makes up the individual structure of the life of the storyteller. Narrative works at least at two levels: sociocultural as a source of common signs, and individual as an element of incorporation/establishment of subjectivity that is constituted and empowered. Narrativity as a meta-method allows for circulation on both levels, producing a synthesis oriented to growth, organically deployed inclusiveness, open symbolic capitalization/identification, and empowerment. Bolívar (2002) emphasizes three uses of narrative: the narrative itself, narrative research, and narrative for promoting change in practice. The first two inform research on literacy; the third is a social action that might be studied as a consequence of literacy. The narrative itself is available when people tell their stories and oral histories and thus suggest their discursive and textual practices. Narrative inquiry enables researchers to construct and reconstruct these stories in constant interchange with the storytellers. People use narrative to make sense of their world (Bruner, 1989). This sense is individual as people express meanings for personal understandings. Yet, these personal narratives always occur in a social and historical/cultural setting. Stories make sense within the social structures in which they occur and in which the storyteller relates them. The social structure and individuality itself are not systems of closed signs or closed determinations. Rather, they are open with respect to themselves and in relation to social contexts.

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 273

Personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone, including ourselves, our own life; these are the means through which identities can be shaped (Bolívar et al., 2001; Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992). The contributions of Antonio Bolívar (2001) show how the plot restructures and organizes the different dimensions in a story. In the center, the point and the story itself are positioned, and toward it converge dispersed elements that, when merged and organized, acquire meaning and comprise a coherent event. In this restructuring process, the story, the narrator, the listener, the subject of study, and the researcher intervene. Narratives in social science research can have different forms and uses. Various moments of a life are inserted into a personal chronology, or several biographical interviews are intertwined to produce stories about the trajectory of family and professional life. To Bolívar et al. (2001), “Each model of the story shows a perspective of the ‘I,’ gathering different types from one reality that is personal, social, ideal, hidden and real; so that by having them face one another, a new reconstructed ‘I’ appears” (p. 38). According to Pineau and Le Grand (1993; cited by Bolívar et al., 2001), exploration of a life story can be carried out in three ways: a. The biographical model: story of a life by a third party. b. The autobiographical model: story of a life by the storytellers themselves, giving a researcher access to how a storyteller constructs reality from their own perspective, including how they conceive of how they have grown. c. The dialogical model: story in which the speakers distance themselves from their lives while allowing the interlocutor, in this case the researcher, to engage with the narrative. Narrative provides a researcher with the raw material of experience in the form of discourse that suggests what the storyteller finds relevant. The narrative in qualitative research serves to focus on the phenomenon (the story) as the primary source of information. The intention is to use narrative as a method. The conversational interview provides the instrument that elicits the story for analysis (Van Manen, 2003). The individual’s story will make sense when contextualized socially and culturally, taking into account the affordances and constraints of the setting of the story and the conditions of its elicitation. These factors allow the researcher to learn about the trajectories of the storytellers and find meanings from a historical perspective, one that interrelates the past and the present and implies a future, and that validates the storyteller’s perspective.

274

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

The storytellers’ experiences are embodied in these research narratives, and their voice and structure suggest its circumstances, cause, effect, and motive to produce a meaningful plot that includes a temporal sequence, character(s), and situation (Ricoeur, cited in Bolívar et al., 2001). Bruner (1989) cautions that We do not know and never will know if we learn narrative through life or life through narrations; it’s probably both. . . . the narration about ourselves that we tell another person is, in fact, a “double narration.” As a personal development project, personal analysis changes the main issues that one formulates in the narration of one’s own life and the lives of other people who are important to us. The challenge facing the analyst and the analyzed therefore becomes: “Let’s see how we can retell it in a way that allows you to understand the origins, meanings and importance of your current difficulties in a way that makes the change conceivable and achievable,” and during this process, the analyst and the analyzed concentrate not only on the narration’s content but also on its form. (p. 112)

Van Manen (2003) points out that when people investigate the possible structures of their lived experiences, they come to understand more completely what it means to be in the world, "always bearing in mind the sociocultural and historical traditions that have given meaning to our ways of being in the world" (p. 30). To Bruner (1999), when the “I” narrates, the speaker does not just tell, but also justifies; when the “I” is the protagonist, the speaker is always pointing toward the future: “When someone says, as a summation of their childhood, ‘I was a charming rebellious child,’ it can generally be taken as a prophecy as well as a summary” (p. 119). Biographical life stories that presumably are a reflection on life are not necessarily individualistic. The autobiography allows the researcher to hear how storytellers organize their experiences within the contexts of community and culture. From this perspective, research on literacy incorporates the contributions of disciplines such as Heideggerian/Gadamerian hermeneutics, where to exist is to interpret the conditions of possibility of one’s own life. These conditions situate and surround life’s experiences and position a person’s trajectory as an authentic project that is not oriented by a “final” purpose but is, instead, an appropriation of the sign/symbolic systems of one’s own tradition, with enablement the goal rather than closure, truth, or authenticity. To exist, Heidegger (1993) insists, is to interpret the being of and in one’s existence. In literacy research, the process of self-interpretation becomes possible when participants narrate their life stories. Open-ended research methods are suitable for these purposes. We next review action research and ethnography, which “open” the observer beyond

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 275

preconceptions and allow for empathic ways of listening and seeing the world through the experiences and eyes of another.

Action Research The term action research has been described by Collier (1945) (see Chapter 10 for attributions to Lewin) as a collaborative, participatory research effort designed to improve the quality of life of descendants of original people in the United States. Collier served as the US Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945 and, in the wake of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, developed the “Indian New Deal.” This plan included the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, conceived to challenge policies of cultural assimilation affecting original societies and return their autonomy to them through a new policy of tribal self-rule. Kemmis and McTaggart (1988) built on Collier’s social conception of education and further proposed that it should involve a cyclical process of research–action, action–research. Action research as a method in the field of education has its antecedents in Fals Borda (e.g., Fals Borda & Anisur Rahman, 1991; Fals Borda & Rodríguez Brandao, 1987) and others. This strategy has been developed in rural communities in Latin America in which self-managed community initiatives aim to produce emancipation conditions and awareness of social responsibility. Through action research people play an active role in improving the conditions of their own existence to allow the democratic control of social life. Its focus is on the perspective of the community from an emic or insider’s viewpoint to provide ecological validity to its findings and make real changes in the lives of the inquirers. In the case of literacy, action research sheds light on practice and aspires to solve immediate problems through the ResearchAction spiral cycle proposed by Kemis and McTaggart (1988), consisting of a social action plan or steps of action to solve a problem. This action involves planning, identifying facts, executing a plan, and analyzing processes and outcomes. This cycle can, in turn, set the stage for further cycles of inquiry and action. Through this process the people affected by the research participate in decisions and actions and have agency in modifying and learning from the practice. The production and use of knowledge are dedicated to improving practice. The goals include autonomy, emancipation, and democracy, achieved when classroom situations are addressed and resolved in the context of the community. Its validity thus depends on its application in the material and

276

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

practical world of the participants’ experiences and the organization of their social lives. Action research can be an integral method of literacy research. Its purpose is to achieve the transformation of concrete reality, where participants take on an important role because the relationships between them come about under person-to-person conditions of equality. Sentipensantes—those who think without divorcing the head from the heart, reason from emotion—are considered to be participants and actors, and emancipation is achieved by living in intersubjectivity. The European Enlightenment’s detached rationality is rarely if ever the driver of action research, which assumes, instead, that people are moved by passions that must be taken into account when working for social and educational change.

Ethnography Ethnography is a method of social research that works with a wide range of information sources. The ethnographer participates, openly or covertly, in people’s daily lives over a period lasting an annual cycle or more (Heath & Street, 2008). In this immersive experience the ethnographer observes what happens, listens to what is said, and asks about social processes in order to understand phenomena underlying situated community life (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994). In Mexico ethnographic research has been carried out by Paradise (1979), Rockwell (1982), and Ezpeleta (1983), whose anthropological studies have served as the basis for research on school culture. Ideas and anthropological instruments have been adapted for the collection of empirical data about school culture, making it possible to introduce them into epistemological, theoretical, and methodological debates, so as to build better ways of investigating and understanding school culture. Educational ethnography has more to do with the epistemological orientation of researchers’ perspectives than with their specific methods of data collection. Epistemological reconstruction, a critical consideration in this work, is configured on three levels (Bertely, 2000). The first is significant social action. People are constructed and constituted by their social interactions such that they integrate themselves with others through significant experiences. Reality is a social construction that is built on context and is multiple. The importance of this level of reconstruction lies in recognizing the intersubjective processes in and through which people shape and understand their worlds. The second level

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 277

is in cultural networks. Bertely (2000; cf. Rockwell, 1980) asserts that educational ethnography, in addition to documenting daily life in schools and classrooms, should study the historical and structural processes that have produced them, thus making cultural networks essential areas to investigate. The third level is linked to hegemony, consensus, and instruments of meaning. This focus on power structures and processes enables the study of linkages across school classrooms, significant action, culture, and political hegemony. Bertely (2000) references Comaroff ’s (1985) insight that class struggle always involves the competition for control of the instruments of meaning. Meaningful action and school culture are related, therefore, to the exercise of political power and hegemony. In an attempt to articulate the levels of epistemological reconstruction, Bertely (2000) emphasizes that the inscription and interpretation of meaningful social action as the first level of epistemological reconstruction represents the foundation of the work done by the educational ethnographer. He further argues that permanent reconstruction is required for ethnographers and the work they do in synthesizing, articulating, and reconstructing interpretations. Relying on Gadamer and Ricoeur, Bertely assumes that any researcher interested in the world of meanings begins with a question or assumption anchored in the interpreter’s horizon of meaning. The production of an ethnographic text constitutes, in this sense, a fusion of horizons: that of the interpreted and that of the interpreter. The use of ethnography opens up an important spectrum for research in the field of literacy. Those inclined toward this perspective assume that one of its central purposes is to document the culture of the Other and produce a text of a perceived reality that has not been fully documented. A good part of the work that ethnographic researchers need to do in literacy would involve detailing the cultures of students, classrooms, and communities. This task requires both research skill and the appropriate identification of research sites. Engaging in ethnography requires discrimination beyond producing keen observation records. The researcher’s perspective and familiarity with the phenomena investigated are key dimensions of ethnographic research, helping position the investigator as a trustworthy informant in a field in which colonial points of view have often depicted “exotic” cultures in misrepresentative and distorted ways (Said, 1978). All of the methodologies related to narrativity in the framework of literacy follow a common emancipatory pattern, and there is a great advantage over other liberatory approaches. The symbolic capitalization available through narrativity-inspired methodologies enriches and empowers all human actors:

278

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

societies, cultures, and individuals. Moreover, in some way, this circumscribed creativity, interwoven but not closed, allows researchers methodologically to implement an ontology that should not exploit others. This challenge to conduct respectful inquiries is one of the themes of our times, one that, far from any condescension or paternalism, is a critical imperative for the future of humanity.

Research on Letras para Volar We have advocated for conducting studies using the individual as the starting point in order to understand how they live, feel, and speak about their everyday life experiences, which gives meaning and form to their existence. Bárcena Orbe, Larrosa Bondía, and Mèlich Sangrá (2006) have contrasted “those who speak (or write) for no one or [use] strange abstractions as specialists” with “the student, the expert, the professional, or the public opinion,” whose thoughts are expressed “with someone and for someone” (p. 257). This speech, writing, or other mode of signification adds social and cultural dimensions from outside the goals and scope of educational systems, suggesting the need for research from outside the institution itself and into the lives of the people who populate it. We believe that understanding the everyday lives of Mexican people is essential in order to understand their literacy practices beyond the often-reductive reliance on tests conducted for international comparisons. Such research can take several years to conduct. In the interim, the initial research on the effects of Letras para Volar has employed experimental designs (control and experimental groups, using numeric measurements), which produced interesting results and has supported decision-making in some educational programs. These methods have been useful in looking at broad impacts that the program has had on the early participants. The research conducted in these initial assessments therefore emerges from different traditions from those that we believe will be important in evaluating the program over time. These preliminary reports are necessary to meet institutional demands for accountability, and for a general understanding of whether or not Letras para Volar has begun to meet its goals of promoting greater interest in and fluency with literacy practices. We believe that no single paradigm can pose or answer all questions, suggesting the appropriateness of both the individual-oriented approaches we have outlined and the whole-program dynamics and effects we report next.

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 279

Cobián Pozos (2013) evaluated the level of reading appropriation of electronic and printed media of a group of fifth-grade children from a school in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara after the implementation of the Letras para Volar program. Her study evaluated students’ level of reading facility before and after the implementation of the program. She further evaluated the influence of the school context on reading facility and analyzed the factors (techniques, tools, electronic or printed media) that may or may not benefit the reading development of the children in the Letras para Volar program. She employed mixed methods, including action research, participant observation, and interventions including reading circles, the right-to-speak cane, volcanoes, creating your own book, the little duck lottery, appreciation of art in books, Venn diagrams, and critical thinking. Reading involves both cognitive and social processes and has sociocultural implications (Freire, 1970; Vygotsky, 1987). Readers rely on processes such as attention and concentration, the identification of ideas and main characters, the identification of the message, and the recognition of the author’s message or intention. These acts take place in settings that include the relation between the text and the immediate context of the reader, the usefulness of the contents of the text in the real world, the collaborative construction of meaning, and other social factors. The study found a set of influences on children’s reading development: the medium and/or context of reading, interactions with the textual medium (digital, printed, or persons), and interactions with an adult. Sociocultural theory provides a useful framework for studying reading. When the role of the mediator and the social contexts are taken into account, the child may be evaluated both individually and with support (see Vygotsky’s 1978 notion of assisted performance). Critical pedagogy provides tools through which people will be able to transform their environments. Reading plays an important role in becoming an informed and active citizen because it provides a tool that sharpens communication and dialogue that help to foster a critical perspective. The research further suggests the importance of generating more techniques and managing resources so that digital reading can be developed through activities that go hand in hand with online and technological resources. It additionally enables learners to develop information management skills, learn to navigate the internet, learn how to read web pages, and develop other digital skills. The study demonstrates the success of these methods, grounded in sociocultural theory and method: generating collaborative solutions through language, dialogue, and communication; promoting interaction as a basis

280

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

for learning; recognizing the influence of the environment on the individual; contextualizing the teaching/learning process; focusing learning on real problems; and promoting appreciation for cultural traditions. Fijalkow, Fijalkow, and Franco (2017) evaluated the program, focusing on the children’s enjoyment and pleasure while reading and writing and on the students’ pursuit of their interests through literacy practices, a panel of students from which is described in Smagorinsky (2016). The researchers analyzed the reading landscape in Mexico, including the Programme for International Student Assessment (2015) evaluation, the national reading survey (The National Council for Culture and Arts, 2015), and a socioeconomic analysis of children and youth in Jalisco (Crowley, 2016). The researchers identified eight variables—housing, food, poverty, health, education, communication technologies, work, and violence—and studied them in conjunction with the results of the 2014 ENLACE (National Evaluation of Academic Achievement in Schools) test administered in the country’s primary and secondary schools. They concluded that when parents or adults who make up the child’s environment have a higher level of education, there is an increase both in the fondness for reading and in reading and writing fluency. Further, having books in the home contributes to reading access and enjoyment. Schools, however, can’t help homes become more supportive reading environments and must rely on improvement in the economic and social situation of the majority of the population for these seemingly requisite conditions. From the launch of the Letras para Volar program in 2010 until 2016, the year in which the evaluation was carried out, 194,592 children and young people were served in different public spaces such as civil hospitals, homes, cultural and book fairs, community brigades, and primary and secondary schools. The program was conceived to work with a four-stage pyramidal strategy. The first stage covered 2010–2011, when the educational method was planned, promoters were trained, and the program was instituted in public places and selected public schools. In the following years the same actions were carried out, but in 2011– 2012 it was implemented in secondary schools, in 2012–2013 in upper secondary education, and in 2013–2014 in bachelor’s degree programs, when reading clubs were formed in each of the University of Guadalajara’s educational programs. The research divided the students into two groups: an experimental group that followed the Letras para Volar program and a control group that did not follow it. Three forms of written language were considered: reading, writing, and social writing. Results were positive to different degrees, depending on the evaluations used when the researchers investigated whether the Letras para

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 281

Volar program produced greater interest in the written word among primary school students. The results showed a marked increase in interest in written text for students in the Letras para Volar program compared to those in the control group, according to six different measures. The researchers caution that the encouraging results of the one-year intervention do not necessarily mean that the effects will be sustainable over time. The researchers concluded that in order to know if the Letras para Volar program not only helps to cultivate interest in writing and other affective aspects of literacy but also in the development of literacy, research on the cognitive aspects of written language would be indispensable. To determine if there are also cognitive benefits, a new evaluation would be necessary, centered on the cognitive aspects that concern adults. In primary education there is a great need for strategies aimed at promoting reading to address the general problem of low literacy rates in Mexico. The Ministry of Public Education has begun building classroom and school libraries. Yet, the burden of complying with curricular content leads many teachers to overlook the affective dimension of literacy and the tools and strategies available for encouraging it. Even without longitudinal data on program effects, our experiences in teaching its principles at different educational levels in Mexico and Spain suggest that primary school children are motivated through its activities both immediately and in the long term. It helps that young people work with them as peers at school or in other spaces outside the institution. Research that focuses on the cognitive benefits that this program produces will, we hope, find that motivation and cognition affect each other in reciprocal ways: Motivation and interest develop the cognitive aspects of literacy, which, in turn, increases motivation and interest.

Conclusion: Narrativity and Cultural Literacy at the Techno-Scientific Crossroads We have undertaken these assessments because we see them as addressing the questions that motivated the Letras para Volar program’s activities. We do not suggest that they can be replicated to study any program. Rather, we offer them as an example of how to investigate the effects of the practices that have been conceived and developed to serve the goals of the program. We model a process for self-assessment that is suitable to our needs for accountability within our program and to any outside auditor.

282

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Literacy and narrativity potentially promote educational inquiries that are both descriptive, and active and creative, enabling advocacy that may produce emancipatory possibilities. The “I” is narrative from the neurobiological (Damasio, 2018) and existential (Heidegger, 1993) point of view. Society is also constructed narratively; it closes with a story (Marx & Engels, 2004). Culture is also articulated through stories, in the classical sense of mythos, or in the Lyotardian postmodern sense of discovery/farewell. The reasons for inquiry into educational research are not, therefore, solely biological (Piagetian) or social (Vygotskian or Freirean). Literacy opens us up to a new dimension of research, analysis, and action, of living logic, to a new turn of the appropriation axis of signs​/empo​werme​nt/in​clusi​venes​s/cre​ativi​ty. This turn signals a new complexity. The old literality is linear; it is procedural and complicated, but linear. It follows the deep structure of historically established Western thought and thought-action. Knowledge of cognitive techniques and the systems of signs that make them up lead to empowerment, inclusion, awareness, and freedom in life and in action. The process is linear, clear, progressive, and absolute, like the very structure of Piagetian reasoning. Its clarification and reformulation (as shown by Vygotsky and Freire, for example) can be an arduous process of unraveling and appropriating the social element in which it occurs. Cognitive reason and social reason provide a unity. Social literacy, even in its most advanced lines, suggests a unitary, universal logic. It is the child of modernity: It emancipates and empowers. Fundamentally, although in different ways, all narratives tell the same story. When people become aware, they access an exciting but monotonous truth, invariant even in its creativity. Literacy and its research, promotion, and institutional performance in the Mexican environment must face the challenge of interculturality and its difference. This plurality provides the point of departure for narratives: They are not variants of a common logos but worlds that speak from their own logic, suggesting points of inquiry: a. Intercultural liter​ality​/narr​ativi​ty/in​clusi​venes​s/cre​ativi​ty must be sought/ specified/defended in its difference from the social and its equalization. b. Liter​ality​/narr​ativi​ty/in​clusi​venes​s/cre​ativi​ty and literality/social narrativity are becoming reconstituted by digital literality, and this new medium requires understanding and educational attention. Current action/research in literacy involves descriptive or analytical work, but also must be concerned with cultivating the critical skills and awareness that

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 283

lead to empowering and projective action. Narratives provide ways of growing creatively and of elaborating codes and public procedures of recognition, establishment, separation, collaboration, and creation, all of which are necessary to understand in order to produce a literate citizenry that has agency in controlling its own present and future. The literacy landscape of these cultural narratives is being reshaped for many with the introduction and development of digital tools, and these tools need to be harnessed and employed for emancipatory purposes in the years ahead. Research into literacy should be concerned with the recovery, establishment, maintenance, and creation of narratives; the pluralization of their logics; the promotion of their multiple circulation through bodies and institutions; and living as learning, living together, differing, and creating. Ultimately, literacy means that words and other textual codes are not dead letters, but living signs. Undertaking research and assessment into how these processes unfold is a complex and multifaceted quest that benefits from multiple approaches inquiring into different yet related questions. For that reason we see roles for action research designed to produce change; various methods that investigate the affective dimension of literacy; ethnographic efforts to create portraits of the role of literacy in daily life; comparative studies of literacy skills to study the impact of interventions like those in Letras para Volar; studies that tease out cultural differences between ethnic groups from original societies in their response to literacy instruction; and much more. The challenges are too complex to entrust to a single paradigm or research method. All insights are welcome in this venture, all possibilities remain open, and all children stand to benefit from principled research and assessment of educational efforts to understand and cultivate high rates of literacy to help bring the “New Mexico” into being and sustain it into the future.

References Atkinson, P., & Hammersley, M. (1994). Ethnography and participant observation. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 248–61). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bárcena Orbe, F., Larrosa Bondía, J., & Mèlich Sangrá, J.-C. (2006). Pensar la educación desde la experiencia [Thinking about education from experience]. Revista Portuguesa de Pedagogía, 40(1), 233–59. Bertely, M. (2000). Conociendo nuestras escuelas. Un acercamiento etnográfico a la cultura escolar [Knowing our schools: An ethnographic approach to school culture].

284

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

México City, México: Paidós. https​://se​minar​iomen​te.fi​les.w​ordpr​ess.c​om/20​14/03​/ inic​io-ca​p-1-y​-2_li​c-cam​pillo​.pdf Bolívar, A. (2002). “¿De nobis ipsis silemus?”: Epistemología de la investigación biográfico-narrativa en educación [Epistemology of biographical-narrative research in education]. Revista Electrónica de Investigación Educativa, 4(1). Retrieved March 3, 2018, from http:​//red​ie.ua​bc.ua​bc.mx​/vol4​no1/c​onten​ido-B​ olíva​r.htm​l Bolívar, A., Domingo, J., & Fernández, M. (2001). La investigación biográfico-narración. Enfoque y metodología [Biographical-narrative research: Approach and methodology]. Madrid, ES: Editorial La Muralla. Bruner, J. (1989). Acción, pensamiento y lenguaje [Action, thought and language]. Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial. Bruner, J. (1999). La educación: Puerta de la cultura [Education: Culture’s door]. Madrid, Spain: Editorial Visor DIS S.A. Cassany, D. (2009). Para ser letrados: Voces y miradas sobre la lectura [Being literate: Voices and perspectives on reading]. Barcelona, Spain: Paidós. Cobián Pozos, S. E. (2013). Apropiación de lectura en medios electrónicos e impresos de niños del programa Letras para Volar, que cursan el 5to. Grado de una escuela pública de la Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara [Reading appropriation in electronic and printed media of 5th grade children in the Letras para Volar program in a public school in the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Universidad de Guadalajara, MX. Collier, J. (1945). United States Indian Administration as a laboratory of ethnic relations. Social Research, 12, 275–76. Comaroff, J. (1985). Body of power, spirit of resistance: The culture and history of a South African people. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cooperrider, D. L., & Srivastva, S. (1987). Appreciative inquiry in organizational life. In R. W. Woodman & W. A. Pasmore (Eds.), Research in organizational change and development (vol. 1, pp. 129–69). Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Crowley, I. (2016). Los derechos de la infancia y la adolescencia en Jalisco [The rights of children and adolescents in Jalisco]. México City, Mexico: En Fondo de las Naciones Unidas para la Infancia en México [UNICEF México]. Retrieved July 14, 2018, from http:​//www​.unic​ef.or​g/mex​ico/s​panis​h/MX_​UNICE​F_SIT​AN_Ja​ lisco​.pdf Daiute, C. (2013). Narrative inquiry: A dynamic approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Damasio, A. (2018). El extraño orden de las cosas [The strange order of things]. Barcelona, Spain: Destino. Fals Borda, O., & Anisur Rahman, M. (1991). Acción y conocimiento: Rompiendo el monopolio con la IAP [Action and knowledge: Breaking the monopoly with the IAP]. Bogota, Colombia: Rahman. Fals Borda, O., & Rodríguez Brandao, C. (1987). Investigación participativa [Participatory research]. Montevideo, Uruguay: La Banda Oriental.

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Researching Literacy Practices 285 Fijalkow, F., Fijalkow, E., & Franco, M. (2017). ¿Leer es un placer? Una evaluación del programa Letras para Volar. Guadalajara, Mexico: University of Guadalajara. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–95. Foucault, M. (2005). The hermeneutics of the self. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Ramos, Trans.). London, UK: Continuum. Heath, S. B., & Street, B. V. (2008). On ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press and National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy. Heidegger, M. (1993). Martin Heidegger: Basic writings (D. F. Krell, Ed.; J. Sallis, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge. Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Johnson, L. L., Chisam, J., Smagorinsky, P., & Wargo, K. (2018). Beyond publication: Social action as the ultimate stage of a writing process. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 18, 1–21. Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (1988). Cómo planificar la investigación-acción [How to plan action research]. Barcelona, Spain: Laertes. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2004). Collected works of Marx and Engels in 50 volumes. London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart. Pizmony-Levy, O., Harvey, J., Schmidt, W. H., Noonan, R., Engel, L., Feuer, M. J., Braun, H., Santorno, C., Rotberg, I. C., Ashm, P., Chatterji, M., & Torney-Purta, J. (2014). On the merits of, and myths about, international assessments. Quality Assurance in Education, 22(4), 319–38. Programme for International Student Assessment. (2015). Results in focus. Paris, France: Author. Retrieved July 14, 2018, from https​://ww​w.oec​d.org​/pisa​/pisa​-2015​-resu​lts-i​ n-foc​us.pd​f Ricoeur, P. (1985/2016). Dialogue sur l’histoire et l’imaginaire social [Dialogue on history and the social imaginary]. París, France: Ecole des hautes études. Rockwell, E. (1980). “Etnografia y teoria en la Investigacion Educativa.” In Revista Dialogando. Red Escolar Latinoamericana de Investigaciones Cualitativas de la realidada escolar (pp. 2945). Mexico City: National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico Network of Qualitative Research on School Reality (RINCUARE). Retrieved March 3, 2020, from https://cazembes.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/elsie-rockwelletnografc3ada-y-teorc3ada-de-la-investigacic3b3n-educativa6.pdf Rosenwald, G. C., & Ochberg, R. L. (Eds.). (1992). Storied lives: The cultural politics of self-understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon. Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smagorinsky, P. (2001). If meaning is constructed, what is it made from?: Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational Research, 71, 133–69.

286

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Smagorinsky, P. (2016, November 29). Common Core turns students into literary critics. Does it turn them into lifelong readers? Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved July 14, 2018, from http:​//www​.pete​rsmag​orins​ky.ne​t/Abo​ut/PD​F/Op-​Ed/ Gu​adala​jara.​html The National Council for Culture and Arts. (2015). Encuesta National de Lectura. México City, Mexico: Author. Retrieved July 14, 2018, from https​://ob​serva​torio​.libr​ osmex​ico.m​x/fil​es/en​cuest​a_nac​ional​_2015​.pdf Van Manen M., (2003). Investigación educativa y experiencia vivida. Ciencias humanas para una pedagogía de la acción y la sensibilidad [Educational research and lived experience: Human sciences for a pedagogy of action and sensitivity]. Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Idea Books, S.A. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In L. S. Vygotsky, Collected works (R. Rieber & A. Carton, Eds.; N. Minick, Trans., vol. 1, pp. 39–285). New York, NY: Plenum.

Part 5

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

288

12

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education Rita Alejandra Gracián Flores and Ericka Graciela Staufert Reyes

To expand alternatives for teachers and students in the development of communication skills outlined in national educational programs, the University of Guadalajara developed the Master’s Degree in Literacy Studies through the Center for Art, Architecture and Design. This initiative came from Dr. Patricia Rosas Chávez, a principal architect, visionary, and administrator for the Letras para Volar program at the university featured throughout this volume. A group of secondary and high school teachers from different regions and contexts in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, enrolled in this new program, which is taught by a heterogeneous faculty of professors from various fields: Pedagogy, Literature, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, and the Arts, among others. Specialized seminars are taught by international literacy experts, including Dr. Enrico Bocciolesi, Dr. Gerald Campano, Dr. Yolanda Gayol, Dr. María Paula Ghiso, and Dr. Peter Smagorinsky. We enrolled in the program’s first cohort of students. Our first challenge was learning about literacy and appropriating the term. We delved deeper into the new studies that have transformed the concept, which has evolved to include a commitment to language and its different meanings, along with other symbol systems required to create a “New Mexico.” This process led to deep reflection that recognized literacy as a human right. This perspective assumes that all people are entitled to access to the prerogatives enshrined in legal standards. To achieve the goal of improving educational practices, participants and advisers in the graduate program reimagined their classroom practice. New teaching and learning approaches, as well as international papers, resulted from inquiry into pedagogical trends and their development, which relate science and art as indispensable for understanding languages. The educational model

290

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

proposed in the implementation of the master’s program led us to adopt a holistic academic approach in which teachers consider the students’ context as the starting point for the achievement of the literacy skills required by today’s and tomorrow’s worlds.

Appropriation of the Concept of Literacy The first issue we faced in our training as literacy professionals was to learn about the concept of literacy and probe into it more, since it is a budding topic of discussion and research in Latin America. In Mexico it has yet to be absorbed in the educational system and, consequently, it is not apparent in teaching practices. Although research on reading and writing in Spanish has gained ground in the last forty years (Londoño, 2010), the panorama of literacy—a novel construct in Mexican education (see Chapter 2) that is complex and in constant transformation—is so broad that consensus on its definition does not yet exist. It has been important therefore to adopt a perspective of complete open-mindedness in our process of approaching the term in order to analyze the theoretical contributions that academics have made to this subject. We specifically focus on the meanings of the concept of literacy that have emerged in Spanish. Research by Emilia Ferreiro, Paula Carlino, Daniel Cassany, and Giovanni Parodi provides the background in this field of knowledge and has guided the different proposals in Latin America (Londoño, 2010) that draw on the work of Virginia Zavala (2004) and Patricia Ames (2002) in Peru and Daniel Cassany (2006) in Spain.

Literacy and Its Challenges According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language (Diccionario de la Lengua Española), literacy is an action related to the teaching of reading and writing (Real Academia Española, 2014). This definition generates an initial problem because the concept is posed in relation to the teacher, not the learners, positioning students as receivers of knowledge that has already been constructed, and not participants in that construction. UNESCO’s (2006) definition of literacy originated in the Sixth General Conference held in 1958, according to which “a literate person is one who can,

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education

291

with understanding, both read and write a short simple statement on his or her1 everyday life” (p. 153). The changes that this concept has undergone have made it possible to understand literacy as a set of aptitudes or technical skills that are used for economic or social development. In 1978, UNESCO (2006) adopted the following definition of functional literacy: A person is functionally literate who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his2 group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his own and the community’s development. (p. 22)

Later, in the framework of the International Literacy Symposium held in 1975, influenced by the revolution caused by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, literacy was understood as the means by which people can create the conditions for acquiring and developing a critical awareness of the inequities the world imposes on people. In this sense, literacy was established as a fundamental human right. Later, as communication technologies developed, literacy took on aspects that were distinct from reading and writing, creating concepts such as digital literacy, electronic literacy, and information literacy (Riquelme & Quintero, 2017). Even though this definition has varied, it is still the foundation of current census measurements with which illiteracy rates in each country are established (UNESCO, 2013). The thoughtful work we developed during the first sessions, specifically from the seminar led by Dr. Paula Ghiso and Dr. Gerald Campano, led us to conclude that literacy (the teaching of reading and writing) entails fundamental problems that have an impact on educational practice. This conception does not provide sufficient elements for approaching and engaging students, mainly because it creates a literate/illiterate dichotomy. In this binary, the universe of people can be divided between those who are educated and useful because they can express themselves in writing, and those who cannot because they cannot read or write. This distinction is insufficient for building human relationships. For example, there are migrants who do not know how to write or read in the language of the host country, but who nonetheless have learned to express themselves orally in that language and still make use of reading and writing in their first language (Campano, 2007). Both here and in subsequent quotations, we retain the gender binary of the original text, which was appropriate to the era, while recognizing that gender exists along a broad spectrum of identities. 2 As we have throughout this volume, we retain the language of the original, even when changes in phrasing, in keeping with broader social trends, have moved away from using masculine pronouns to represent all of humanity. 1

292

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Literacy defined solely as the teaching of reading and writing restricts communication to written verbal language. Arnold, Yapita, Alvarado, López, and Pimentel (2000) argue that this limited understanding prevents other communicative practices from being observed and developed in school. These practices have oral, tactile, pictorial, and choreographic bases, among other elements, and are fundamental in certain communities, such as among South American Andean peoples and the Rarámuri and Wixarika cultures in Mexico. According to Arnold et al., graphical symbols, paper, and ink can be considered cultural artifacts with which people construct the world. These tools find their place alongside textiles, the handmade jewelry of people from original societies, music, quipus, videos, choreography, and other textual forms.

Literacy: Emergence and Implications The research of Scribner and Cole (1981) and Street (2012) expanded the understanding of literacy as a phenomenon that operates within a social and cultural context. This shift involved abandoning the conception of the process of learning to read and write as a neutral, simple, technical act—centered solely on deciphering codes—that was carried out only at school. These researchers emphasized how people read and write outside school, such that literacy may be studied in the private and social spheres of family, work, church, community, and other nonacademic spheres. Further, since “the written word is generally not dissociated from the political, historical and cultural aspects of the society in which it is produced, acquired or consumed” (Ames, 2002, p. 66), it is necessary to investigate the ideologies and power relations that underlie the contexts in which reading and writing develop. This innovative conception of literacy was called New Literacy Studies (NLS) and produced the literacy construct in Latin America. This conception allows us to understand that the phenomenon of reading and writing is not a universal skill that may be replicated or constructed in the same way everywhere. Rather, it is a process that people perform within the limits of their sociocultural conditions (Zavala, 2004). The literate/illiterate dichotomy is insufficient for understanding a person’s development and—in our specific case as education professionals— helping our students learn. Thus, the perspective provided by NLS allows teachers to conceive of their students in terms of the ways in which they acquire verbal language (the higher cognitive processes, contextual dimensions) and the ways in which they use and develop it (Riquelme & Quintero, 2017).

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education

293

For Zavala (2004), literacy involves the practice and concrete uses that people give to all languages, not only the teaching of strictly verbal reading and writing. This conception allows teachers to establish their teaching practices based on the dignity of their students. People are capable of participating in the world in ways as varied as the uses they give to languages. This broad conception enables a more comprehensive, equitable, and supportive society that requires an educational system focused on students’ development. When literacy is only understood as verbal inscription, meanings are restricted to this type of language. Cassany (2006) allows teachers to approach their students from a new variety of paths, which have their cornerstone in the use of the word. These approaches allow for analyzing the discursive genres with which meanings are expressed, the cognitive processes that develop in order to acquire and use grammar, and the ways of thinking that reveal particular linguistic practices. These possibilities are as diverse as the discipline of knowledge that we want to employ with literacy. Literacy implies, therefore, a critical and deep access to language in any of its expressions. Unlike the teaching of reading and writing, it allows and accommodates inclusion in plural and diverse academic and social practices so that teachers and students can expand their references, thereby transcending the understanding of the multiple ways we communicate. This new approach—emphasizing the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which writing and reading are used, as well as the higher mental processes involved in these activities—opens up a broad agenda for research in the social sciences (Ames, 2002). Sita and Taylor (2015) used eye-tracking techniques to identify differences among the cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes carried out by adults when reading and writing isolated words and then words within a sentence. They found that the processes involved in the reading and writing of isolated words are more complicated. Aram, Korat, and HassunahArafat (2013) investigated the role of literacy activities in the home in Arabicspeaking children, from the last grade of kindergarten to the end of the first year of primary school. They concluded that, independent of their socioeconomic level, children who read and write in the company of their mothers before starting their primary education find it easier to acquire vocabulary and recognize letters. Mexican adolescents have specific reading habits on the internet. Gasca (2010) proposes that because the internet presents a great diversity of texts, formats, and new languages, it is necessary for the school to develop critical literacy as part of a set of more comprehensive communicative competences. Gasca found that students can decipher the grammatical and semantic sense of the text as

294

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

they decode the written system, construct meanings, and understand what they read. Yet, they do not have pragmatic or critical competence, since they do not assume the role of a critical user or analyst of the text. In other words, they do not distinguish what is useful to them in the information, nor do they look for reliable sources of information. Literacy education thus must involve far more than decoding. It requires attention to how texts are constructed, what informs their meaning potential, and how they are ideologically situated. Literacy can be accessed across multiple fields. These include ethnography (what people and communities do with what they read and write); anthropology (the means and processes by which people participate in shaping the world); cognitive neurosciences (the mental and physical processes involved in the use of language); semiology (how people interpret and create the signs that make up the social and cultural world); pedagogy (the strategies employed so that people, based on their uniqueness, can learn better); pragmatics and linguistics (how people create themselves through their verbal expressions); and discourse analysis (what people say with their language and their silences, and what the texts they produce say about them). Thus, we observe that there are distinct and multiple meanings of the term literacy, which together suggest an integral vision of human language in its diverse expressions. There is a permanent effort among those dedicated to specializing in the subject to articulate a concept that incorporates plurality and the recognition of the multicultural mosaic that comprises the evolution of language. As a class, we adopted the definition presented by Ames (2002), to whom literacy refers to the ability people have to use languages “to express [themselves], communicate, obtain and produce information” (p. 68). For education professionals, literacy must also signify a commitment to the fair and equitable development of society through language and its diverse representations.

Access to Literacy as a Human Right As a result of the debates that arose in the seminars conducted by Dr. Peter Smagorinsky, the pressing need to fight for the recognition of access to literacy as a human right became evident. In previous decades this right was recognized in international standards (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2006), yet was limited to the teaching of reading and writing without including the complex aspects covered by NLS and by literacy as understood today. In our seminars we explored how people interact

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education

295

with the world and reconstruct it from their own cognitive types (Eco, 1981). People come from particular contexts that define their cultural heritages, as well as the way they interact with the world and with society. These competencies inform people and their identities. Therefore, literacy, as a human right, consists of people being able to deploy their particular skills to use languages and thus expand their opportunities for development. This conception is different from having these opportunities imposed by others. People learn literacies that come about from their contexts, histories, and values. Illiterate people are not inferior to literate people in their abilities, even if they lack the same array of literate practices. The members of this first graduating class of the Master’s Degree in Literacy Studies signed the document called Manifesto for the Recognition of Literacy as a Human Right, whose principles establish the following: 1. Literacy broadens the horizons of immediate reality while developing the capacity of society to recognize itself and seek its own progress. 2. Education is an investment. It increases the level of economic and cultural development. 3. Language belongs to everyone. It must be used for understanding between individuals and peoples and not as a means of exerting oppressive power. 4. Texts must be accessible to all, not only to privileged groups. 5. Thanks to literacy, the world community can be recognized through a dialogue that fosters peace and development. 6. Training of the authorities is necessary for the enforcement of full observance of human rights and the fight against discrimination. 7. The right and the obligation to promote reading pertains not only to the state but also to society as a whole. 8. Freedom is accompanied by legal equality and solidarity, and also takes groups in vulnerable situations into account. 9. Public spending must be increased to guarantee the promotion of literacy. 10. It is necessary to build a pedagogical model that guarantees quality education that is inclusive and equitable. 11. Human beings are at the center of development, not the economy. 12. We must understand rights by reading society where we are. 13. The right to culture and art includes accessibility that ensures their enjoyment and appreciation. 14. Knowledge is the space par excellence where the freedom of the human being is assured.

296

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

This manifesto suggests a set of values and actions: 1. That the development of literacy be recognized as a powerful means to promote the quality of life of individuals and peoples, and that therefore it be recognized as a fundamental human right. 2. That the spirit of Article 3 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States (see Appendix) be recovered in public policies, which in its definition of education establishes that it will be democratic, democracy being understood as a system of life based on peoples’ constant economic, social, and cultural improvement. 3. That public policies be implemented that contemplate the validity of human rights, including the right to literacy, in all their programs. 4. That all levels of the education sector promote policies of equality and inclusion, including the promotion of literacy in their programs as a means of promoting understanding and strengthening the full exercise of human rights. 5. That civil society make a serious and determined commitment to the education of our children and young people in freedom, solidarity, and justice, as well as to the promotion and respect of human rights through their permanent study. 6. That from the public, social, university, and private spaces, language become an instrument of liberation and openness toward a more just, supportive, and all-inclusive society, using literacy as a cultural tool. 7. That the existence be recognized of the various social groups that are formed from the multifaceted influences of cultures, despite their differences, histories, and own traditions. 8. That the equality of rights of individuals be promoted through literacy, pluralism, and diversity of identities, to favor integration and harmonious coexistence leading to the culture of peace. 9. That the crosscutting nature of literacy be recognized as a quality that allows the exercise of the other rights and guarantees their sustainability and adaptation, thus allowing the adaptation of their observance to the progress of societies. 10. That the state and society promote a new empowerment of parents as active subjects in the integral development of their children through education and training, reclaiming their responsibility in shaping social structures. Once the concept of literacy becomes available and is appropriated socially, individuals who enjoy this right should have access to the rest of the prerogatives

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education

297

enshrined in the law, becoming, in turn, custodians of a commitment to their society and its environment to provide access to literacy for the rest of the population.

Transformation of Educational Practice As the team of teachers participating in the graduate program explored the terminology and its scope, our studies developed a holistic approach to our students. We developed tools to understand them as the result of their own context, and abandoned models that define learners as passive subjects in their academic formation. A contextual framework must be adopted to develop an educational approach that represents individual and social transformation. In this way, the group made a commitment to transform its teaching practices through the insertion of innovative classroom activities distinguished by the diversity and heterogeneity that were characteristic of the first graduating class. Irma Jiménez, one of the participating teachers, stated in a personal interview that this master’s program has contributed to her professional practice: [I value] acquiring a commitment to my students, more than at another time in my career as a teacher, because now, thanks to the contributions of cognitive neuroscience, I understand the importance of establishing empathy with them, connecting with their emotions in order to achieve meaningful learning. I likewise understand the importance of knowing the language and its various representations in order to expand reading/writing, because literacy is a social practice that goes beyond reading and writing; it is about getting my students to be critical, using the texts to transform their environment and be better individuals.

Édgar Martínez, also a member of this graduating class, has indicated that Pursuing the Master’s Degree in Literacy Studies has been of great value in promoting my growth as a teacher, since it has not only provided me with educational tools, but, above all, with greater knowledge to better serve my students, while finding fun and interesting ways to promote knowledge through reading/writing, understanding that literacy allows us to know ourselves and others in their various dimensions.

These testimonials distill the academic experience of our class. With the mentoring by the faculty of experts, as well as by the directors of the research projects, our educational work has been enriched to benefit the students in our schools. These understandings allow for the design and implementation

298

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

of inclusive, heterogeneous, and democratic educational practices dedicated to theoretical and practical detailing aimed at the acquisition of tools that guarantee teachers and students access to literacy. These tools and activities include participation in congresses, forums, symposia, and international residences, among other activities, with experts in the field from institutions in other parts of Mexico and the world. These activities offer increasing participation for students, teachers, and management personnel in determining the future of Mexican education. Finally, and as a concrete strategy, the editorial proposals authored by the participants in the master’s program now have a theoretical/conceptual basis that supports the instruction in manuals and textbooks, since they inform broad pedagogical trends. The Leo y escribo (I read and write) and Expreso (Express) collections published by Editorial Aulativa3, for instance, provide textbooks for vocational high school and general high school. Rita Gracián is among the contributors to these volumes used in the national study programs of the New Educational Model. Reading, writing, speaking, and listening signify the development and enablement of literacy skills. Adopting this perspective on literacy has changed our teaching practices. Now we approach our students with a critical attitude with regard to the school curriculum. We consciously give space to the discursive practices of our students, including alternatives to the hegemonic genres, so that they can freely develop their conceptions of the world (Zavala, 2004). We understand learning as a process and not a result, where our students are active and responsible agents of their own educational training; and we create comprehension strategies that allow them to become autonomous readers, which in the words of Martos (2013) implies that they are able to deal intelligently with texts of very different natures, distinct most of the time from those used in their instruction. Generating autonomous readers also means making readers capable of learning from the texts. For this, the reader must be able to question his or her own understanding, establish relationships between what they read and what is part of their own knowledge and experience, question their knowledge and modify it, establish generalizations, and so on. Such mechanisms should allow the student to plan the general reading task and their own disposition towards it (motivation, availability); they should also facilitate the verification, review and control of what they read and the Editorial refers to a publisher. Aulativa is a publishing house established by Creative Industries of Mexico whose books are designed to promote students’ verbal-logical reasoning.

3

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education

299

appropriate decision-making according to the objectives that are being pursued. More than establishing a list or protocol of strategies, it is important that students know how to use the appropriate strategies for the case. (p. 357)

This commitment allows us to be maestras and maestros who bring about structural changes in the educational process of the people we are responsible for, in order to help them become adults who are committed to education throughout their entire lives, attentive to and responsible for the changes that their society needs to be more equitable.

Conclusion Through immersion in NLS, this group of teachers has carried out continual reflection on the literacy practices that constitute their people, both those carried out in the domestic realm and those that constitute the domain of their academic and professional work. We concluded that classroom sessions serve as literate events, in which all members—students and teachers, in their dimension of human and cultural products of a society—participate according to their ideologies, which are delineated by their social context and personal life histories. We then may carry out the work of teaching in a more humanistic way, taking account of students’ dignity and respecting it. In this context, the perspective we have presented of literacy as a human right is fundamental to directing our teaching efforts. Conceptualizing language as a tool for individual and social group liberation, understanding, and social solidarity allows us to collaborate in the training of our students so that they become people who can use their particular skills, create a vision of the world that is their own, and develop their personalities on their own terms. When we have stopped understanding reading and writing as mere skills for deciphering signs and memorizing words and meanings, and understand them, instead, as a set of practices that inform individuals, pedagogical horizons expand in the search for understanding the features that make each of our students unique. We understand education as a process that the school must carry out in conjunction with society and families. As a result of the personal internalization and introspection assumed by each participant of this master's program, the conceptual and theoretical background provided in Letras para Volar will help convert the classroom into a space where students can get to know each other and establish themselves. NLS entail the

300

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

understanding of this construct as a scenario that enhances the capabilities for analysis and criticism, in both students and teachers, in the varied expressions of language and other cultural texts.

References Ames, P. (2002). Para ser iguales, para ser distintos. Educación, escritura y poder en el Perú. Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Aram, D., Korat, O., & Hassunah-Arafat, S. (2013). The contribution of early home literacy activities to first grade reading and writing achievements in Arabic. Reading and Writing, 26(9), 1517–36. DOI:10.1007/s11145-013-9430-y. Arnold, D. Y., de D. Yapita, J., Alvarado, L., López, R., & Pimentel, N. D. (2000). El rincón de las cabezas: Luchas textuales, educación y tierras en los Andes (3rd ed., digital  version). La Paz, Bolivia: Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara. Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: Reading, writing and remembering. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Cassany, D. (2006). Tras las líneas. Sobre lectura contemporánea. Barcelona, Spain: Anagrama. Eco, U. (1981). Kant and the platypus: Essays on language and cognition. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Gasca, M. A. (2010). Desarrollo de la literacidad en Internet en estudiantes mexicanos de Bachillerato. Paper presented at the Euro-Iberoamerican Congress, ATEI Media literacy and digital cultures. Seville, ES: University of Seville. Retrieved August 17, 2018, from https​://id​us.us​.es/x​mlui/​handl​e/114​41/57​006 Londoño, D. (2010). De la lectura y la escritura a la literacidad: Una revisión del estado del arte. Anagramas, 14(26), 197–220. Martos, E. (2013). Lector ingenuo frente a lector experto. Leer entre líneas. In E. Martos & M. Campos (Eds.), Diccionario de nuevas formas de lectura y escritura (pp. 356–59). Badajoz, Spain: International Network of Reading Universities. Real Academia Española. (2014). Diccionario de la lengua Española (23rd ed.). Madrid, Spain: Espasa. Riquelme, A., &. Quintero, J. (2017). La literacidad, conceptualizaciones y perspectivas: Hacia un estado del arte. Reflexiones, 96(2), 93–105. DOI: 10.15517/rr.v96i2.32084 Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sita, J., & Taylor, K. (2015). Eye movements during the handwriting of words: Individually and within sentences. Human Movement Science, 43, 229–38. Retrieved August 17, 2018, from http://dx.doi.org /10.1016/j.humov.2015.01.011. Street, B. (2012). New literacy studies. In M. Grenfell, D. Bloome, C. Hardy, K. Pahl, J. Rowsell, & B. Street (Eds.), Language, ethnography, and education: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu (pp. 27–49). New York, NY: Routledge.

Literacy as a Human Right in Mexican Education

301

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2006). Literacy for life. Paris, FR: UNESCO. Retrieved August 17, 2018, from http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images /0014/001416/141639e.pdf United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2013). Alfabetización y educación. lecciones desde la práctica innovadora en américa latina y el caribe. Santiago, Chile: Author. Retrieved August 17, 2018, from http:​//une​sdoc.​ unesc​o.org​/imag​es/00​21/00​2191/​21915​7s.pd​f Zavala, V. (2004). Literacidad y desarrollo: Los discursos del Programa Nacional de Alfabetización en el Perú. In V. Zavala, M. Niño-Murcia, & P. Ames (Eds.), Escritura y sociedad: Nuevas perspectivas teóricas y etnográficas (pp. 437–59). Lima, Peru: Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú.

Conclusion Networking Letras para Volar into the Future Yolanda Gayol and Peter Smagorinsky

The Bloomsbury Reinventing Teacher Education series in which this volume is published aspires to have a global impact. We have argued at the outset (see Chapter Introduction) that what we offer is not so much a model program as a method for developing a literacy education program that takes into account, and builds from, the cultural-historical foundations of the region that the program is designed to serve. We thus have avoided the language of transferability, replicability, and taking-to-scale that might be implied by its fit with the series’ broader international aspirations. We believe, instead, that teacher educators from outside Mexico can adapt a process of building a program that serves national interests. The process we have outlined might be particularly germane for developing programs in areas whose histories include both descendants of original people and colonial histories that require sensitive and careful meshing. This effort to move forward from a historically conflicted basis requires a respectful integration of a nation’s people into greater cultural unity as it envisions a prosperous future, built on the foundation of literacy, enabled by a literacy education that is informed by multiple perspectives. Doing so while concurrently recognizing the distinctive cultural values of the various national constituents remains a central challenge. To give one potentially vexing example: We must both strive toward greater technological integration in the practice and pedagogy of literacy in order to help build a strong socioeconomic structure; and simultaneously dignify the values of original people and others who reject the Western techno-industrial belief system, one that values high-speed productivity and the accumulation of wealth, instead of seeking harmony with the natural world that becomes virtual in a technological society (see Four Arrows, 2013). Even with this local Guadalajaran emphasis, the graduate program housed within Letras para Volar is experiencing an expansion to other nations across

Conclusion

303

Mesoamerica and South America. This networking initiative suggests that even if the specific program we have detailed is not replicable in other contexts, it can provide the hub for a growing collective of Latin American teacher educators to collaborate on extending its priorities and processes to other regions. Further, by involving international literacy researchers in the conception and offering of the program, including those from nations that have experienced colonial domination, the Guadalajaran initiative can potentially have an impact beyond the bounds of its Jaliscan context. We next detail the ways in which this effort has begun, albeit in nascent ways that are sure to develop more specifically and fruitfully in the years ahead.1

International Collaboration We have already reviewed the roles of Italian e-educator Enrico Bocciolesi, US-based literacy researchers Gerald Campano, Maria Paulo Ghiso, and Peter Smagorinsky, and others in the conception, design, development, and offering of the master’s degree program. The success of these collaborations has motivated the inclusion of others from international sites, including ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Charles Bazerman, from the University of Santa Barbara in the United States, an internationally recognized composition researcher who is among the architects of the Writing Research Across Borders initiative; Hilary Janks, from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, whose distinguished career has included work as a literary scholar and an applied linguist, and whose expertise includes language education and literacy, particularly critical literacy with a social justice emphasis; Manuel S. Gonzalez Canche, originally from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who specializes in network analytics, including qualitative research seeking to explore inequalities; Guilherme Veiga Rios, from Brazil’s University of Brasília, who specializes in sociocultural approaches to literacy, areas of expertise that enable Letras para Volar to link teaching and research in Brazil (whose language is Portuguese) with that of Spanish-speaking countries; Jorge Ivan Correa Alzate, from the Tecnológico de Antioquia—University Institute in Colombia, who works on equity and inclusiveness for people with physical or cognitive challenges.

This volume is being produced in early 2020 as the coronavirus threatens world health, thus compromising the activities we outline in this chapter in the immediate future.

1

304

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

The international sites that these collaborators represent are bound together by a shared concern for inequity that follows from colonial dominance of original people and other forms of oppression. They also share an interest in the roles of both symbolic literacy and critical literacy in producing social change toward universal opportunity for prosperity. Significantly, “prosperity” is defined locally on each site’s own terms, rather than according to conceptions imposed by dominant political, cultural, ideological, and economic forces. This broader pressure tends to rely on neoliberal conceptions of prosperity that value capital and numeric evaluations of progress over human concerns. The work of Paulo Freire in Brazil had stimulated the notions of critical literacy and critical pedagogy that are central to the concerns of the network we are developing. These emphases provide tools for inquiry into social structures that produce inequity, and identify pathways to change them toward more democratic and participatory social organizations and processes. Variation in national histories suggests that there is no single route to achieving an equitable society. The collaboration we are undertaking seeks to enable dialogue across cultural borders to understand how different locations call for specific sorts of responses, such as Letras para Volar’s attention to Mexican history and how it has shaped the present, and to how Mexico’s complex trajectory might be shifted through a literacy education program. These conversations have only just begun through meetings held in conjunction with Letras para Volar’s programs, conferences, coursework, and other events described in this volume. The foundation has thus been laid to expand the discussion to include educators and researchers dedicated to our shared values, among both the current participants and those recruited to include more perspectives in addressing continental and more global needs. These discussions have been built around inquiries into emerging notions of literacy that are theoretically robust and grounded in local needs and knowledge, all in the context of building an educational infrastructure for addressing them systematically and with growth potential. The Guadalajaran site provides specific forms of expertise in relation to particular local challenges, driven by the expertise of its faculty, the socialization of its teachers, the circumstances of its residents, and other factors. Other international sites have housed literacy initiatives in other academic departments with faculty offering other forms of expertise. This distribution of knowledge and paradigm has great value in providing multiple perspectives on literacy as conceived and practiced in different settings, all of which have the potential to enrich one another through these conversations. We find it very stimulating to

Conclusion

305

learn about one another’s settings and how literacy initiatives might inform our own understandings, and believe that they will grow increasingly sophisticated as they develop over time. Building a coalition of like-minded educators addressing common concerns is among the processes that we believe may be adapted to other settings and initiatives.

Networks as Programmatic Infrastructures We presently are at the stage of discussing how to develop more formal networks that systematize our work across borders. We do so with the awareness that centralization and overadministration can lead to a false sense of homogenization that overlooks nuance and variation in sites and silences dissenting voices. We are also alert to the ways in which organizations can begin with democratic processes, yet over time become the site of power struggles and battles driven by ego and ambition rather than the greater good. Finally, we are aware that the creation of new settings, such as both Letras par Volar and the expanded network of participants, often involves infatuation with glossy ideals that lead to the neglect of problems (Sarason, 1997). We thus need to retain the rhizomatic nature of this work, that is, the distributed nature of expertise and the need for each site to grow independently while also being part of a greater whole (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and be attentive to the processes and problems that develop over the course of building this network. The goal of global extension has begun with a nascent Latin American network that has included participation from the United States, Europe, and South Africa. It seeks a transdisciplinary, transnational perspective that benefits from formal meetings and relationships, with an open-ended structure that invites increasingly broader participation. This network also might benefit from relationships with other networks with shared interests. For instance, the International Critical Literacy Network is a new, developing association of educators concerned with the issues that have motivated Letras para Volar. It presently communicates in English, with possibilities for adding Spanish and Portuguese dimensions. Even these forums and translations neglect the original languages of the continent and the needs of their speakers, making the effort at inclusion quite challenging. The International Critical Literacy Network’s initial activities include the formative stages of a critical literacies handbook and development of a website that invites more collaborators. This effort suggests the possibilities for developing other networks, such as a Network for

306

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

the Preservation and Sustainment of Indigenous Languages or a Participatory Action Research Network. Through these collaboratives, international educators would have the opportunity and medium to share experiences and coordinate pedagogies, teacher education, and community practices seeking to improve literacy, These initiatives could both help promote specific efforts and, in turn, produce trans-network associations through which each could enrich the work of the others. They might require the leadership of dynamic individuals with the vision and workspace to create, recruit, build, and sustain their efforts, as Patricia Rosas has done with Letras para Volar. We believe that transnational work sharing a common cause, however, will greatly benefit from the coordination of work through formal organizational structures and processes. This networking could also produce such initiatives as more translations of critical texts into Spanish and Portuguese from other languages. These texts would provide our participants with greater access to ideas from across the globe, ideas that would enrich the experiences of Guadalajaran faculty and students, along with others from other areas who speak these languages. Developing a critical mass of local and international literacy experts who can build Letras para Volar’s programs, including the master’s degree, is underway and in the process of extending its work to areas sharing similar needs and interests.

Specific Programmatic Relationships with Other International Sites The extension of Letras para Volar has benefited from the work of its allies in international sites. The Penn Graduate School of Education, for instance, has partnered with the Aquinas Center in Philadelphia, PA, which serves speakers of English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. The Center’s mission is to “build unity and diversity, support learning, and inspire thoughtful action.” It has been the research site of Letras para Volar collaborators Gerald Campano and María Paula Ghiso (2017), whose investigations are undertaken in accordance with what Campano calls “equitable, ethical, and professional” research standards involving trust [built] over time. We believe that high quality research requires many perspectives, particularly from those who are most directly impacted by educational inequities. We do research alongside community members to

Conclusion

307

investigate together the topics that are most important to them, including what it takes for all youth to have a high quality, culturally relevant education. When we get to know families and communities, it is incredible to see the advocacy and organizing that goes on to provide their children with a high-quality education. We try to be a part of that effort. We’ve been working across multiple boundaries of class, culture, and language. I think one of the most powerful pieces of the work is the care and sense of mutuality people feel for one another. (Penn GSE Newsroom, 2017)

The program’s research-practice partnership focuses on multiple vulnerable populations, is housed in a community site that provides a refuge for disenfranchised social groups, links education to other social factors, engages families and youth in participatory research, and is designed for coalitional activity that pools ideas and resources for collective gain. It has also benefited from Spencer Foundation funding through which the Community Literacies Project has the opportunity to promote research as a fundamental human right, fund program coordination and training, sustain participatory research with community members, make its research practices and findings widely available, and make the production of knowledge democratic by involving community members in inquiries. This effort is well aligned with Letras para Volar’s values and practices, and is led by its associated designers and practitioners. It has enabled Penn and Guadalajaran teachers and faculty to visit one another’s sites and participate in one another’s programs. This cross-fertilization is the most ambitious and detailed of the international collaborations produced thus far, and sets the stage for future developments of this sort to be undertaken. It is consistent with the manner in which the Guadalajaran and Penn graduate students have undertaken teaching and research projects and theses designed to investigate social change in local settings (see Chapter 12). Although its specific activities cannot be taken to scale, it can model for others how to use collaborations to link efforts to promote equity in sites that share common concerns.

Fulbright Language Specialist Awards and Possibilities Following a series of talks in South Africa supported by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and World Learning, collaborator Peter Smagorinsky applied for, and was awarded, status as a Fulbright

308

Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Language Specialist. This award has provided the opportunity to conceive of expanding Letras para Volar throughout the state of Jalisco, and perhaps other areas in Mexico and throughout the expanding network of participating nations, to provide workshops for teachers seeking to join the effort to promote equity and literacy education. Although this work has not yet been developed, it serves as an avenue through which members of the collaborative might seek to expand the program more broadly throughout the immediate region and beyond.

Expansion of Local Programs This international focus should not obscure the primary task of Letras para Volar to serve its local communities. The program continues to expand, with educators selecting and publishing book collections for children and adolescents, in printed and digital media. As of 2019, Letras para Volar had given away 758,200 books; trained thousands of reading facilitators; served schools; interacted with communities through urban-literacy practices, hospitals, and orphanages; developed hundreds of reading dynamics and literacy games; trained teachers to improve their everyday classroom practices; established the Master Program in Literacy Studies; and provided online education for many. We are donating all royalties from this volume to support these initiatives. These activities have been consistent with the values outlined throughout this volume and have been carefully documented and subjected to research and evaluation for the purposes of both internal and public accountability.

Conclusion Our conclusion avoids reiterating points or congratulating ourselves on our work to date. We have too far to go to believe we have arrived. Instead, we aspire to suggest the open-ended possibilities afforded by the foundation our efforts to this point have provided, and to emphasize the processes we have engaged in more than the specific program we have developed, even as the theory and research we have reviewed may serve other sites well. We hope that others involved in teacher education see possibilities for their own work available from our account of our program’s development and expansion, and see the potential for adapting our principles to undertake culturally, historically, and socially

Conclusion

309

responsible teacher education programs that serve the needs of the communities and schools in their own regions.

References Campano, G., & Ghiso, M. P. (2017). Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Four Arrows. (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Penn GSE Newsroom. (2017, December 4). Penn GSE team fosters truly collaborative community-based research in south Philly. Philadelphia, PA: Author. Retrieved July 8, 2019, from https​://ww​w.gse​.upen​n.edu​/news​/penn​-gse-​team-​foste​rs-tr​uly-c​ollab​ orati​ve-co​mmuni​ty-ba​sed-r​esear​ch-so​uth-p​hilly​ Sarason, S. B. (1997). Revisiting the creating of settings. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 4(3), 175–82.

310

Appendix Chapter 2 Master’s Degree in Literacy Education level: Masters Area of knowledge: Art, Architecture and Design Locations: University Center for Art, Architecture and Design Modality: Schoolized Variants: Professionalist Website: http://www.mil.udg.mx Level: master’s degree The lines of generation and application of knowledge, related to the development of the educational program, include: ●●

●●

Literacy in the social field. Approaches in literacy.

Objective: To contribute to literacy training of education professionals to promote the development of discursive meaning skills.

Particular Objectives ●●

●●

●●

To certify that the graduate student of this degree program knows and applies theories and methodologies related to literacy; To ensure that the graduate student understands in depth the processes of meaning and communication of thought and language; To enable the graduate student intervene in educational practice through the design, operation, and evaluation of projects in different areas of literacy.

Admission Profile ●●

●●

Be an active teacher; Express interest defined by language, literacy, communication and the various possibilities that contribute to the development of thought and learning;

312 ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Appendix

Demonstrate an interest in communication, reading, and writing, regardless of the type of subjects taught, and to apply these skills in the educational relationship; Have knowledge to develop research projects; Enroll in one of the research lines proposed by the master’s degree; Demonstrate knowledge of the English language or some other foreign language; and Have skills in writing and using ICT.

The Entry Requirements ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Have the title or certificate of undergraduate degree in areas related to literacy; Have achieved a minimum grade point average of eighty or its equivalent; Present a project or essay that reflects an interest and aspiration to attend the program; Produce a statement of purpose in pursuing the master’s degree; State a commitment to complete the degree, keeping a minimum of 80 points as the average rating; Demonstrate sufficiency of the English language equivalent to level B1 of the common European framework of reference, which could be accredited by PROULEX level 12 certificate or its equivalent in the Cambridge ICFE / VANTAGE tests: IELTS or TOEFL, and so on; Have an interview with two members of the Academic Board; Obtain a passing grade for the EXANI III of CENEVAL; Pay the corresponding fee; Commit in writing the availability to make mobility and academic visits to national and international sites; Agree to additional requirements called for through enrollment in the program.

Graduate Profile ●●

●●

●●

Identify the different theories and models of literacy, and the methodologies of social and pedagogical intervention in literacy; Know and apply methods and techniques of reading comprehension and reading and writing that facilitate the development of higher-order skills, thinking, and language in students; and Develop literacy intervention programs to improve cognitive performance.

Appendix

313

Curriculum The academic program of the Master’s Degree in Literacy is a professional program, of scholarly modality and bases its training areas on the following four axes: 1. State of the Art It refers to the review and study of contemporary authors and researchers on the evolution of the Literacy concept, its implications in education, and the problems it addresses. 2. Methodologies It is a revision of paradigms that explain and study Literacy. Qualitative and quantitative methods are studied in order to intervene in social groups. 3. Language It refers to the study and promotion of the use of Spanish, especially in the writing and communication of academic, scientific, and cultural texts. 4 Selective specialists in: • Literacy in elementary school (aimed at primary school teachers and educational managers at that level) • Literacy in the middle and upper secondary school (aimed at middle and upper secondary level teachers, as well as educational managers at that level) • Literacy in higher education and postgraduate courses (directed to higher and postgraduate professors, as well as educational managers of that level) • Literacy for priority populations (aimed at teachers of different educational levels who are interested in intervening in priority populations) • Management of literacy programs (aimed at educational managers and interested teachers and intervene with populations to stimulate higherorder skills through reading and writing)

Compulsory Common Basic Education Area ●●

●●

Territory of knowledge and literacy. Cognitive neuroscience and literacy.

314 ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Appendix

Pedagogy of literacy across the curriculum. Evolution of language, technology, and literacies. Methods of quantitative and mixed research in literacy. Methods of qualitative and mixed research methods in literacy. Literacy in everyday life.

Mandatory Brivate Basic Training Area ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Inclusive pedagogical models. Linguistics. Language and literature: text genres. Language and literature: text production. Literacy, neuroeducation in processes related to the media. Speech analysis. Graduation seminar I. Graduation seminar II. Graduation seminar III. Graduation seminar IV.

Selective Specialized Training Area ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Digital literacies. Literacy in the cinema. Literacy in art. Pedagogy of early literacy and elementary school (design of curricular models for these literacies). Neurophysical development of the child. Pedagogy of mathematical literacy in elementary school. Pedagogy of the literacy of science in elementary school. Pedagogy of literacy for the adolescent (design of curricular models for these literacies). Psychology and sociology of the adolescent.

Optional Open Training Area ●●

●●

Selected topics I. Selected topics II.

Appendix

315

Specialization in Multimedia Literacies ●●

●●

●●

Digital literacies. Literacy in the cinema. Literacy in art.

Early Education and Basic Level ●●

●●

●●

●●

Pedagogy of early literacy and elementary school (Design of curricular models for these literacies). Neurophysical development of the child. Pedagogy of mathematical literacy in elementary school. Pedagogy of the literacy of science in elementary school.

Middle and Upper Secondary Education ●●

●●

●●

●●

Pedagogy of literacy for the adolescent (Design of curricular models for these literacies). Psychology and sociology of the adolescent. Pedagogy of mathematical literacy in the middle and upper secondary school. Pedagogy of the literacy of science in the middle and upper secondary school.

Higher Education ●●

●●

●●

●●

Pedagogy of literacy for higher education (Design of curricular models for these literacies). Psychology and sociology of the young adult. Pedagogy of mathematical literacy in higher education and postgraduate studies. Pedagogy of the literacy of science in higher education and postgraduate studies.

Assessment of Literacy Programs ●●

●●

Analysis of educational and cultural policies. Design and implementation of projects and literacy programs.

Appendix

316 ●●

●●

Project evaluation and literacy programs. Assessment of literacy learning.

Inclusive Pedagogies ●●

●●

●●

Pedagogy of literacy for priority populations (Design of curricular models for these literacies). Pedagogy of literacy for population with cognitive challenges. Pedagogy of literacy for the population with visual, auditory, and motor challenges.

Duration of the Program: The curriculum of the master’s degree in literacy has a duration of 4 school cycles, which will be counted from the moment of enrollment. Costs and Opening: The cost of the propaedeutic course is 1 unit of measurement and update, general monthly in force in this same area.

Related Information http:​//udg​.mx/s​ites/​defau​lt/fi​les/m​aestr​ia_en​_lite​racid​ad-cu​aad_0​.pdf http://www.mil.udg.mx/

Chapter 12 Article 3 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States Article 3. (1) The education imparted by the Federal State shall be designed to develop harmoniously all the faculties of the human being and shall foster in him at the same time a love of country and a consciousness of international solidarity, in independence and justice. I. Freedom of religious beliefs being guaranteed by Article 24, the standard which shall guide such education shall be maintained entirely apart from any religious doctrine and, based on the results of scientific progress, shall strive against ignorance and its effects, servitudes, fanaticism, and prejudices. Moreover,

Appendix

317

a. It shall be democratic, considering democracy not only as a legal structure and a political regimen, but as a system of life founded on a constant economic, social, and cultural betterment of the people; b. It shall be national insofar as—without hostility or exclusiveness—it shall achieve the understanding of our problems, the utilization of our resources, the defense of our political independence, the assurance of our economic independence, and the continuity and growth of our culture; and c. It shall contribute to better human relationships, not only with the elements which it contributes toward strengthening and at the same time inculcating, together with respect for the dignity of the person and the integrity of the family, the conviction of the general interest of society, but also by the care which it devotes to the ideals of brotherhood and equality of rights of all men, avoiding privileges of race, creed, class, sex, or persons. II. Private persons may engage in education of all kinds and grades. But as regards elementary, secondary, and normal education (and that of any kind or grade designed for laborers and farm workers) they must previously obtain, in every case, the express authorization of the public power. Such authorization may be refused or revoked by decisions against which there can be no judicial proceedings or recourse. III. Private institutions devoted to education of the kinds and grades specified in the preceding section must be without exception in conformity with the provisions of sections I and II of the first paragraph of this article and must also be in harmony with official plans and programs. IV. Religious corporations, ministers of religion, stock companies which exclusively or predominantly engage in educational activities, and associations or companies devoted to propagation of any religious creed shall not in any way participate in institutions giving elementary, secondary and normal education and education for laborers or field workers. V. The State may in its discretion withdraw at any time the recognition of official validity of studies conducted in private institutions. VI. Elementary education shall be compulsory. VII. All education given by the State shall be free.

318

Appendix

VIII. The Congress of the Union, with a view to unifying and coordinating education throughout the Republic, shall issue the necessary laws for dividing the social function of education among the Federation, the States and the Municipalities, for fixing the appropriate financial allocations for this public service and for establishing the penalties applicable to officials who do not comply with or enforce the pertinent provisions, as well as the penalties applicable to all those who infringe such provisions.

Index @prende 2.0  223 5 E’s (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate)  101, 102 absolute illiteracy  206 academic capitalism  259, 265, 266 Academic Model of Letras para Volar  74, 79 Academic Week  105 action research  7, 22, 23, 108, 109, 116, 224, 229, 235, 245, 251–3, 257, 263–7, 274–6, 279, 282, 283, 285, 306 adult literacy programs  189 affinity spaces  147 African-Mexicans  4 Agenda for Sustainable Development  72 age of emptiness  134 Agrarian Reform  47, 249 Alfabetización  77, 218, 270, 301 Amoxtli  66, 104, 116 ancestral traditions  1, 18, 95, 97, 268 anthropocene  62 Antonio de Nebrija, Elio  67 applied linguistics  19, 26, 119 appreciative inquiry  101, 114, 268 architecture  21, 28, 33, 36, 47, 60, 93, 105, 110, 121, 142, 182, 188, 232, 234, 289, 311 Army of the Three Guarantees  44 arts  39, 47, 51, 66, 95, 98, 103, 105, 109, 111, 113, 140, 153, 208, 210, 228, 258, 280, 289 Asperger’s Advantage  192 assessment  6, 13, 20, 23, 25, 33, 50, 60, 72, 73, 75, 82, 85, 110, 139–40, 155, 192, 228, 240, 267, 278, 280, 281, 283, 285, 315–16 Atequiza  245, 246, 251, 259–62 autonomous notions of literacy  77 Autumn Reading Festival  113 Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College  250, 251

Aztec  xvii, 3, 4, 8, 14, 16, 25–7, 31, 33, 38–42, 56, 63, 65–8, 93, 97–9, 116, 138, 162, 232, 233 Aztec Templo Mayor  40, 42, 55 banking model  150 Battle of the Alamo  44 best practices  3 bilingual bicultural education  162 Bilingual Intercultural Education initiative  236 biliteracy  77, 209 biodiversity  32, 48, 55 biographic synthesis  254, 255 biological architecture  188 blame game  61 Book Fair in Spanish  113 Bourbon Reforms  42 braille  185, 188 brain  179–82, 184, 185, 188, 189, 191–7 Cacaxtla  14 Calendar Round  36 calladitos y sentaditos se ven más bonitos  76, 78 Calmecac  38, 65 Caminante literature collection  112 Cascajal Block  35 castes  4, 100 Castilianization  161 Catholic religion  3, 4, 9, 16, 17, 35, 37, 42, 44, 47, 67, 68, 164, 237, 245, 247–9, 251 Center for Art, Architecture and Design  60, 289, 311 cerebral cortex  180–2, 186, 195, 196 Chibchan  xvii, 67 Chinglish  14 Christianization  161 Cinteotl  38 Classic period  233 class size  7, 155 coalitional literacies  60

320

Index

Coatlicue  39 code-meshing  10–13, 28, 33 codes of power  124, 171 code-switching  11, 12, 28, 124 cognition  81, 121, 136, 180, 182–4, 186, 189–92, 281, 300 cognitive impairment  192 cognitive psychology  75, 186 cognitive uncertainty  128 Cold War  250 collective survival  182 Collier, John  252, 253, 263, 265, 275, 284 colonial history  8, 159, 218, 236 colonialism  4, 59, 63, 239, 254 colonization  44, 64, 160, 161, 163, 253 Columbus, Christopher  xviii, 67 communicative code  186 communicative competence  11, 15, 127, 131, 214, 293 Community Literacies Project  307 Conquistadors  xvii, 8, 37, 41 conscientization  78, 254, 256–9, 262, 263, 271 Conservative Party  45 corn  34, 35, 38, 97, 173, 293 corruption  31, 48, 50, 51, 57 Cortés, Hernán  xviii, 8, 26, 34, 37, 40, 41, 65, 67, 68 creation of new settings  305 The Creative Organization of Knowledge  205 creativity  61, 113, 145, 180, 183–5, 190–2, 196, 197, 269–71, 278, 282 Creoles  4 Criollo  43 Critical Action Research  245 critical dialogue  78, 254, 256, 259–62 critical literacy  22, 23, 51, 62, 77, 78, 85, 102, 107, 114, 146, 190, 210, 211, 220, 245, 246, 249, 251, 252, 255–7, 260, 262, 263, 293, 303–5 critical pedagogy  148, 149, 254, 268, 279, 304 critical reading  52, 81, 94, 97, 146, 151, 220 critical theory  23, 24, 78, 147, 254 critical thinking  21, 51, 73, 109, 134, 183, 185, 190, 215, 217, 232, 260, 279 Cuban Revolution  250 cuicatlamilitzi  65

Cultural and Educational Festival Papirolas  113 cultural capital  76, 217 cultural diversity  xviii, 2, 14, 49, 269 cultural heritage  166, 295 cultural networks  277 curricular map  84–5 Dakar Framework for Action  71 dark web sites  209, 220 Darwin, Charles  182, 196, 197 dasein (existence) decolonialism  xix, 63, 254 deepfake videos  131, 204 de La Salle, Jean-Baptiste  247, 263 dialects  xvii, xviii, 11, 12, 124, 127, 131, 132, 185 Díaz, Porfirio  46, 47, 248 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal  8, 26, 41, 53 digital device  142, 201, 204, 205 digital divide  22, 146, 202, 205, 210–16, 218, 219 Digital Gap University Veracruzana project  201 digital illiteracy  206 digital literacy  109, 201, 205, 214, 216, 218, 291 digital technologies  141, 142, 202, 204, 206, 208 digital texts  134, 135, 201 diglossia  162 discourse analysis  83, 133, 135, 137, 294 Disinformation Age  130 dominant culture  162, 173, 177, 237, 246, 248 Editorial Aulativa  298 E-language  12, 13 electricity  22, 234, 235 electronic literacy  77, 210, 291 emancipatory action research  229, 235 emancipatory education  259 emotions  12, 16, 17, 62, 65, 75, 76, 95, 132, 134, 148, 180, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 242, 268, 297 empathy  61, 62, 96, 99, 177, 180, 184, 187, 190, 196, 297 Enciclomedia program  234 Energy Reform  235 epigenetic processes  179, 191

Index epistemological reconstruction  276, 277 Espanca inscription  164 ethnography  157, 267, 274, 276, 277, 283, 285, 294, 300 ethnomathematics  232, 234 eupraxis  262, 266 eurocentrism  xviii, xix, 8–10, 20, 37, 70, 164, 194, 253, 257, 265, 266 European Enlightenment  16, 42, 75, 276 evolution  36, 84, 94, 137, 179, 180, 182, 185, 189, 190, 192, 196, 203, 218, 240, 242, 252, 294, 313, 314 executive functions  21, 184, 294 exogenous factors  227, 240 fake news  130, 134, 201, 202 Federal Direction of Public Instruction  248 Festival of Books  105 Fielding Graduate University of California  103, 104, 107, 108, 268 field theory of behavior  253 First Literacies  16, 36, 40, 51, 65, 85, 135, 258 forensic linguistics  127 Franciscan friars  67 Freire, Pablo  23, 40, 53, 78, 93, 94, 99–101, 103, 105, 107, 115, 135, 139, 147–51, 156, 157, 190, 210, 219, 229, 245, 254, 256, 258, 264, 268, 271, 279, 282, 285, 291, 304 Friends of Letras para Volar collection  112 Fulbright specialist program  307 functional illiteracy  206 functional literacy  72, 96, 259, 269, 291 Funds from an Account activity  231 funds of knowledge  76, 146 Gachupines  4 Gadsden Purchase  45 gamification  58, 147 General Direction of Primary Instruction of Mexico  247 General Directorate of Indigenous Education  238 geometry  153, 154, 170, 226, 232, 234 globalization  72, 197, 237 Global North  253 Global South  253

321

glossematics  126 grammar  67, 79, 120, 121, 125, 135, 162–4, 174, 186, 264, 293 Grit Scale  75 Guadalajara International Book Fair  60, 105 Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty  45 Guzmán Loera, Joaquín Archivaldo  49 Haab  36 haciendas  43 hallucinogens  192 hermeneutic phenomenology  255 hermeneutics  254, 265, 274, 285 Hidalgo, Miguel  37, 146, 245, 246 hieroglyphs  65 Higher Degree Intercultural Education  239 higher mental functions  121 high-leverage practices  3 Hispanization  161 Houston, Samuel  44 Hueuheteotl  38 Hugo Gutiérrez Vega poetry collection  112 Huichol  33, 36, 55, 57, 162, 164, 168–70, 172–5, 177, 238 Huitzilopochtli  4, 38, 39 hypertext  150, 151, 205 iconic memory  15, 26 Ideal Worlds  110 ideology  70, 133, 134, 157, 210, 257, 261 I-language  12, 13, 15 imitation  180, 191, 202 inclusion  52, 61, 62, 64, 77, 79, 84–5, 105, 159, 177, 221, 236, 282, 293, 296, 305 inclusive education  20, 177 Indian New Deal  275 Indian Reorganization Act  275 Indians  xviii, 4, 41, 68 indigenous education  237, 238 Indigenous Resident Migrants  239 inequity  6, 7, 23, 40, 48, 75, 78, 81, 237, 246, 257, 259, 261, 271, 304 Information Age  21, 130, 201, 204, 215 Information and Communications Technologies  210 information processing  187

322 information society  211 inner speech  121 innovation  x, 6, 18, 26, 58, 59, 107, 208, 212, 222–4, 226, 234, 235, 240 Institute of Brothers of the Christian Schools  247 intentional consciousness  254 intercontext  79 intercultural bilingual education  162 international collaboration  17, 106, 303, 307 International Critical Literacy Network  305 International Literacy Year  71 internet  xxii, 74, 78, 134, 146, 162, 202–7, 209–17, 219, 220, 222, 279, 293, 300 intersubjectivity  122, 132, 133, 138, 261, 262, 276 intertext  79, 150 invisible simple  121 Jackson, Andrew  44 jaguar  35, 98, 99 Juarez, Benito  46 juego de pelota Maya  34 knowledge societies  157, 187, 211–14, 216, 218–20, 225, 232 kultur  191 La Gacetita  112, 113 La Malinche  42 Lancaster Company  247 language extinction  63 Latinx  xx Law of Indigenous Peoples’ Linguistic Rights  160 Legal Counsel  239 Letras para Volar  1, 2, 17–21, 23, 24, 31, 32, 36, 40, 51, 52, 58–60, 62–4, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77–80, 82–5, 93–6, 99–115, 120, 147, 213, 229, 237, 245, 255, 267, 278–81, 283–5, 289, 299, 302–8 lettered event  143 lettered practice  143, 144 Lewin, Karl  252–4, 263–5, 275 liberation theology  78 linguistic awareness  128, 171 linguistic hybridity  11, 26

Index linguistics  12, 19, 26, 75, 83, 84, 119, 120, 122, 125, 127, 128, 135, 184, 289, 294, 314 linguistic variety  32, 136 liquid modernity  134 literacies  9, 15, 16, 28, 65, 75, 77, 80, 82–5, 139, 142, 143, 145, 156, 157, 185, 205, 206, 209, 212, 216, 225, 269, 295, 313–16 literacy as human right  24, 71, 258, 259, 289, 291, 294–6, 299, 307 literacy rates  2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 18, 20, 58, 59, 65, 70, 71, 75, 86, 215, 281, 291 literature  7, 18, 28, 35, 51, 63, 66, 70, 84, 95, 99, 105, 106, 111–14, 146, 172, 191, 258, 289, 314 localization  xvii ludic dynamics  58, 60, 81 Madero, Francisco I.   47, 48 Magical Realism  37 makers  223 Manifesto for the Recognition of Literacy as a Human Right  xi, 295 marginalization  69, 172, 173 mariachi  98 mathematics  1, 21, 39, 65, 66, 140, 174, 191, 199, 223, 225–34, 240–2, 248 mathematics of change  225, 241, 242 Maximilian of Habsburg  46, 53 Mayan  xvii, 14, 16, 17, 35, 36, 65, 67, 69, 232 meaningful learning  145, 147–9, 152, 297 memory  15, 26, 51, 145, 155, 168, 180, 182, 184, 186, 192, 193 Mercado San Juan de Dios  15 Mesoamerica  xvii, xx, 9, 14, 24, 34, 36, 62, 66, 67, 98, 303 mestizaje ideology  25, 70, 178 mestizas/mestizos  xx, 4, 25, 43, 70, 93 metacognition  183 meta-experience  226 Mexican Americans  7, 27, 28, 127 Mexican Constitution  33, 43, 47, 60, 96, 159, 160, 238, 248, 296, 316 Mexican Dirty War  249, 251 Mexican Institute for Competitiveness  235 Mexican Ministry of Education  72, 165 Mexican Miracle  47

Index Mexican national flag  3, 4 Mexican Revolution  5, 44, 47, 69, 70, 236, 245, 248, 249, 261, 262 Mexican War of Independence  3, 5, 38, 43, 245 Mexico City  4, 26, 32, 38, 40, 46, 106, 250 Ministry of Public Education  223, 281 missionary conversion  161 missionary teachers  248 Mixe–Zoque  xvii, 67 Mixtec  33 monolingual orientation  10 Montezuma  8, 41, 42 moral emotions  187 Morning Coffee activity  230, 231 mother tongue  10–12, 14 motivation  51, 60, 75, 80, 85, 109, 190, 224, 226–8, 230–2, 241, 260, 269, 272, 281, 298 motor functions  181, 184 multiculturalism  143, 237 multiliteracies  25, 62, 77, 103, 130, 204 multimodality  81 multiple intelligences  183, 196, 198 multisensory language  15, 17, 194 murals  16, 17, 98, 131, 135, 251 music  15, 16, 49, 65, 66, 69, 98, 99, 103, 183, 186, 191, 192, 258, 292 Nahuas  38, 93 Nahuatl  14, 31, 33, 34, 38, 53, 55, 66, 68, 69, 93, 97, 104, 161, 238 narrative identity  255, 263 narrative imagination  255 narrativity  271, 272, 277, 281, 282 National Evaluation of Academic Achievement in Schools  280 National Program of Reading  72 National Tests for the Evaluation of Learning  50 nature  1, 33–5, 51, 62, 97, 114, 162, 172, 173, 175, 232 nature versus nurture  185 neoliberalism  17, 60, 72, 79, 177, 259, 304 networking  24, 106, 206, 302, 303, 306 neural flexibility  188 neurobiological mechanisms  179 neurocognitive science  83 neurodevelopment  180, 181, 188 neurodiversity  21, 191, 192

323

neuroeducation  84, 180, 189, 314 neuroscience  84, 179, 189–91, 194–7, 289, 294, 297, 313 New Literacies  16, 28, 65, 157, 205 New Literacy Studies  24, 77, 83, 85, 258, 292, 300 “New Mexico”  2, 3, 18, 20, 23, 31, 32, 52, 58, 80, 84, 93, 99, 102, 107, 177, 213, 283 New Spain  26, 42, 43, 67 Nezahualcóyotl  31, 97 Nezahualpitzintli  41 normalists  249, 250 normal schools  245–51, 259, 261, 262 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)  72 objective education  248 October Festivals of Guadalajara  113 Olmec  25, 33–5, 233 Ometéotl  39 ontogeny  180 oral culture  172, 176 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development  50 Orozco, Pascual  47 Oto-Mangue  xvii, 67 Otomi  42, 164 Paleo-Indian or Lithic period  233 paralinguistic codes  129 participatory action research  108, 245, 264, 265, 306 participatory inquiry  81 pencil  201, 208, 218 Penn Graduate School of Education  306 Persépolis Declaration  71 personal computer  203, 208 perspectivism  207, 212 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich  248 Philip II  68 philosophy of transcendence  255 phonemes  125, 126, 128 phronesis  257, 260 phylogeny  16, 171, 175, 181 Piaget, Jean  75, 282 Plan de Iguala  44 Plan of Ayutla  45 Plan of San Luis de Potosí  47 Plan of Tacubaya  45 Podemos Leer y Escribir  72

324 polis  262 polylingualism  11 polytheism  34, 39 Postclassic period  233 Postcolonial period  233 poststructuralism  134 post-Truth era  207 poverty  5, 48, 49, 72, 74, 82, 100, 173, 213, 217, 248, 280 Preclassic or Formative period  233 principle of unlearning  149, 153 print literacy  9, 16, 130, 135, 142, 159, 173, 174, 185, 193, 204, 214 problem-solving  51, 71, 95, 101, 109, 182, 184, 190, 215, 226, 232 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)  6, 50, 72, 73, 228, 242, 280, 285 Prussian model of education  202 psycho-emotional elements or functions  179, 184, 187, 191, 194 psychological tools  81, 202, 206, 211, 213, 215, 217, 223 public health  239 pyramids  16, 65, 76, 280 Queen Isabella of Castile  67 Quetzalcóatl  8, 39, 41, 98, 99 racial profiling  127 racism  7, 70, 191, 254 Rarámuri  292 Reading, Writing, Listening and Expressiveness Encounter in Higher Education  105 reading habits in Mexico  5, 293 Reading Promotion collection  112 Readings to Color  113 Regional Center to Promote the Book in Latin America  72 reinventing teacher education  xi, 1, 3, 6, 18, 23, 25, 31, 40, 58, 102, 139, 142, 155, 177, 205, 217–18, 222, 245, 263, 267, 302 research-action spiral cycle  275 rhizomatic relationships  152, 305 rote learning  19, 24, 58, 69, 109, 139, 145, 149, 153, 155, 192 rural education  236, 248, 251

Index rural normal school  245, 246, 249–51, 259, 261, 262 Santa Anna, Antonio López de  45, 55 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  13 savant syndrome  191 Schools of Indigenous Education in Mexico  238 Schools of Mutual Teaching  248 Secretary of Public Education  248 semiotics  9, 12, 13, 15, 28, 36, 38, 51, 103, 130, 131, 134, 135, 144, 171, 175, 185, 186, 206, 210, 216 sensory functions  184 sentipensantes  276 Sequoyah  163 sermons in stone  16 service-learning  82 Sierra Méndez, Justo  4 skeptical dispositions and skills  130, 189 Small Walkers Collection  113 smart city  239, 240 smart phones  200, 220 social justice  6, 18, 19, 22–4, 82, 93, 95, 99, 100, 108, 120, 127, 249, 253, 254, 256, 303 social mediation  179, 182, 188 sociocultural theory  268, 279 sociolinguistics  27, 119, 122, 137 solidarity  1, 18, 24, 60, 73, 81, 95, 96, 99–101, 180, 187, 190, 212, 239, 295, 296, 299, 316 solidarity economy  239 Solidarity Reading Brigades  106 Spanglish  14, 125, 128 Spanish colonial legacy  7 Spanish Conquest  xviii, 8, 32, 33, 40, 41, 64, 99, 159, 177 special education  188 speech genres  124, 185 Spencer Foundation  307 status errors  123, 124 status markers  120, 129 Statute of the Empire  46 stelas  17, 65 STEM/STEAM education  xi, 1, 18, 21, 22, 39, 199, 222, 223, 226–8, 230, 232–5, 240, 242 structural limping  129

Index student-centered teaching  20, 24, 139 subversive education  149 superdiversity  14 Support Unit for Indigenous Communities  238 symbolic annihilation  69, 101 symbolic violence  69, 76 Teachers Day  60 Teaching Mathematics with Technology  226 technical society  194 technology  1, 6, 9, 15, 16, 21, 22, 26, 74, 78, 81, 83, 84, 113, 141, 142, 157, 159, 164, 171, 172, 174, 199, 201–6, 208–18, 220, 222–6, 228, 230–2, 234, 236, 239, 240, 242, 258, 314 technology infrastructure  212, 215, 216, 236 Telpochcalli  38, 65 Tenochtitlan  3, 4, 8, 38, 41, 55, 65 Ten Tragic Days  47 Teotihuacan  14 test-based assessments of achievement  139 Texas  44, 45 Tezcatlipoca  39 Thirteenth Population and Housing Census  237 Thoreau, Henry David  45, 57 Tláloc  38, 39 Tlapanec  164 Tlatelolco massacre  250 Tlaxcaltec  42 Toltec  33, 37, 38 Tonalpohualli  39 Tonantzin  93 Torquemada  34 Totonacan  xvii, 67 traditional medicine  239 transcendental consciousness  254 transcendental phenomenology  254, 256 translanguaging  10–15, 26, 27, 33, 63, 81, 125, 145, 157, 162 translation  11, 81, 160, 169, 270, 305, 306 translingual literacy  15, 25 transliteration  81 Trump, Donald J.   68, 124 Tzeltal  33 Tzolkin  36

325

United Mexican States  32, 296, 316 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)  5, 37, 70–2, 76, 141, 189, 258, 266, 294 United Nations Literacy Decade  71 United States  3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 17, 32, 44, 45, 49, 61, 68, 72, 106, 107, 122, 123, 127, 161, 163, 203, 228, 252, 253, 275, 303, 305 universal grammar  120 urbaliteracy  110 Uto-Aztecan  xvii, 66, 67, 162 Vasconcelos, José  27, 70, 248 verbal waste  134 vernacular literacies  80, 145 Vespucci, Amerigo  xviii Villa, Francisco “Pancho”  47, 248 Virtual University System  102, 238 Vygotsky, L. S.   56, 62, 79, 83, 121, 130, 138, 168, 170, 178, 188, 191, 192, 197, 198, 211, 221, 279, 282, 286 War of Reform  45 web 3.0  222 Western techno-industrial belief system  302 whiteness standard  7, 70 The Wire  227, 228 Wixaritari  33, 36 World Book Day  105 World Declaration of Education for All  71 World Education Forum  71 World Network of Natural Sacred Sites  37 Writing Research Across Borders  56, 197, 303 Xiuhpohualli  39 Xochicalco  14 Year of Indigenous Language  68 Yoda  126 Yucatan International Reading Fair  113 Zapata, Emiliano  47, 146, 248 Zapotec  164 Zaragoza, Ignacio  46 zero  232, 233

326

327

328