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The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Literacy Studies
... Another interesting aspect of this model is that it draws attention to the status and power traditionally ascribed to certain literacy practices over others in educational institutions. In this way, practices associated with the majority or dominant culture have traditionally been regarded as more relevant in the school context and therefore used as mechanisms to establish and perpetuate power asymmetries between literacy practices and cultures, turning teaching into a colonising enterprise [33]. In this regard, prior research has shown that colonising practices imposed on students from marginalised groups "often reinforced the broader societal patterns of exclusion and discrimination" [24] (p. ...
... Furthermore, this study shows that the English language classroom becomes a perfect site for the exploration of the different literacy cultures in which learners are immersed and to establish connections between the out-of-school and the classroom contexts. This is so because the FL classroom occupies a sort of in-betweenness, a space that has been claimed to be advantageous for the construction of biliterate identities [33]: it is a pluricultural and plurilingual space [50] where at least two cultures and two languages come into contact and contribute to the construction of learners' pluricultural and plurilingual identity [51]. As such, it should be a space constructed on the adequate diagnosis of the literacy languages and cultures that are involved, the tensions that may arise between them and the ways in which these can be negotiated through the activation of learners' literacy reservoirs. ...
Despite efforts on the part of institutions, professionals and social agents, the Roma population in Europe still lacks equal access to education. Difficulties in literacy development are at the root of this: Roma learners present lower literacy rates than non-Roma learners and learners in non-segregated schools, preventing them from transitioning to secondary education. This article presents the results of ethnographic research with a group of Roma primary learners in Southern Spain. The aim was to analyse the contexts, interactional spaces, contents and practices of learners’ engagement with literacy in and outside the classroom. Data analysis was carried out using an adaptation of the continua model of biliteracy, useful for analysing literacy practices in contexts with different literacy cultures. Results show that communicative practices that challenged skills-based literacy models helped activate learners’ literacy reservoirs, enhancing their literacy engagement and allowing them to renegotiate their position as Roma learners in a non-Roma institution and as text creators in the classroom. Conclusions point to the need to decolonise classroom practice by identifying learners’ literacy reservoirs and ways to activate these, contributing to a more inclusive and sustainable model of literacy education consistent with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal for quality education.
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