Genders Cultures And Literacies

This volume brings together leading scholars in their fields who offer much needed and wide-ranging perspectives on the intersections of genders, cultures, and literacies. As incidents of racial and gender aggression grow in number and in global attention, it is essential to understand how racial and gender identities and their expressions interplay and influence literacy development and practice. Contributors examine how social identities intersect and are expressed in literacy practices across an array of school and out-of-school settings and discuss how gender and race are represented in individuals’ multimodal practices. Chapters address such topics as the literacy practices of incarcerated fathers of color, Black girls’ literacies, Indigenous students’ cultural literacies, the writing practices of Latinx women for identity representation, and more. Ideal for scholars in literacy studies, gender studies, and cultural studies, this volume is a necessary and original update to the ways cultural, racial, and gender identities are viewed in current educational and sociocultural climates.

Offering diverse and wide-ranging perspectives on gender, sexualities, and literacies, this volume examines the intersection of these topics from preschool to adulthood. With a focus on current events, race, and the complex role of identity, this text starts with an overview of the current research on gender and sexualities in literacies and interrogates them from a range of multimodal contexts. Not restricted to any gender identity or age group, these chapters provide a much-needed and original update to the ways representations and performances of gender and sexualities through literacy practices are viewed in educational and sociocultural contexts. Scholars share their insights and transformative visions that respect and embrace difference while creating space for new and deeper understandings of contemporary issues.

Literacy as Social Exchange examines the intersection of culture and literacy education. In particular, it explores the roles that class, race, ethnicity, and gender play in students' learning to negotiate the conventions of academic discourse. It argues that recent literacy scholarship has tended to isolate class, gender, and culture as discrete, marginalizing factors, but such isolation may unintentionally silence voices from non-Western, non-mainstream cultures. Writing program administrators and writing teachers who are interested in constructing programs that address the needs of all students in increasingly multicultural classrooms, will need to examine how cultural factors influence the way students learn to read, write, and think critically. The author points out that some of the most influential scholars writing about the plight of underprivileged writers teach at some of the most exclusive institutions in the nation. These "basic writers" are not nearly so disadvantaged as many of the student writers most writing teachers encounter every day. The author explores enrollment trends in higher education that indicate conclusively that writing classrooms will soon be filled with students from non-Western, non-mainstream cuiltures. Because these students' rhetorical and literacy traditions will be unlike both those of their teachers and of the "basic writers" upon which so much literacy scholarship focuses, educators and literacy scholars need to increasingly conceptualize literacy in its larger political, social, and economic contexts.

Today’s youth live in the interface of the local and the global. Research is documenting how a world youth culture is developing, how global migration is impacting youth, how global capitalism is changing their economic and vocational futures, and how computer-mediated communication with the world is changing the literacy needs and identities of students. This book explores the dynamic range of literacy practices that are reconstructing gender identities in both empowering and disempowering ways and the implications for local literacy classrooms. As gendered identities become less essentialist, are more often created in virtual settings, and are increasingly globalized, literacy educators need to understand these changes in order to effectively educate their students. The volume is organized around three themes: gender influences and identities in literacy and literature; gender influences and identities in new literacies practices; and gender and literacy issues and policies. The contributing authors, from North America, Europe, and Australia offer an international perspective on literacy issues and practices. This volume is an important contribution to understanding the impact of the local and the global on how today’s youth are represented and positioned in literacy practices and polices within the context of 21st century global/cosmopolitan life.

This is the first in-depth study of gender issues in early literacy learning. It provides vivid portraits of the difficulties that both boys and girls experience in learning to read and write at home and in classrooms due to gendered divisions of labor in families and schools. The portraits are based on data from a three-year ethnographic study, in which learning biographies were constructed for thirteen children from their entry into kindergarten until the completion of second grade. The biographies show that in learning to read and write, children construct gendered identities and negotiate their social relations with parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. Even in supportive families and progressive classrooms, children face difficulties in literacy learning as a result of family and classroom practices organizing literacy on the dimensions of male/female and work/play. The result is often the unwitting perpetuation of traditional gender roles in families, schools, and the larger society. This account of early literacy learning links the personal and social meaning of literacy in children's everyday lives with the larger cultural and political significance of gender. The theoretical arguments and questions raised in the book challenge prevailing psychological and sociocultural models of literacy learning and set the agenda for future research on literacy and gender.

In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power. Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.

Path-breaking research on women and literacy in the past decade established conventions and advanced innovative methods that push the making of knowledge into new spheres of inquiry. Taking these accomplishments as a point of departure, this volume emphasizes the diversity—of approaches and subjects—that characterizes the next generation of research on women and literacy. It builds on and critiques scholarship in literacy studies, composition studies, rhetorical theory, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies to open new venues for future research. Contributors discuss what literacy is—more precisely, what literacies are—but their strongest interest is in documenting and theorizing women’s lived experience of these literacies, with particular attention to: the diversity of women’s literacies within the U.S., including but not limited to the varying relations that exist among women, literacy, economic position, class, race, sexuality, and education; relations among women, literacy, and economic contexts in the U.S. and abroad, including but not limited to changes in women’s private and domestic literacies, the evolution of technologies of literacy, and women’s experience of the commodification of literacies; and emergent roles of women and literacy in a globally interdependent world. This broad, significant work is a must-read for researchers and graduate students across the fields of literacy studies, composition studies, rhetorical theory, and gender studies.

A must-read for parents and teachers, this major bestseller reveals how cultural literacy is the hidden key to effective education and presents 5000 facts that every literate American should know. In this forceful manifesto Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues that children in the United States are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy: a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has. Even if a student has a basic competence in the English language, he or she has little chance of entering the American mainstream without knowing what a silicon chip is, or when the Civil War was fought. An important work that has engendered a nationwide debate on our educational standards, Cultural Literacy is a required reading for anyone concerned with our future as a literate nation.

The cuneiform script, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, was witness to one of the world's oldest literate cultures. For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.