Connecting Schools with Out-of-School Worlds

University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons GSE Faculty Research Graduate School of Education January 2002 Connecting Schools with Out-of-School Worlds Glynda Hull University of California Katherine Schultz University of Pennsylvania, kathys@gse.upenn.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs Recommended Citation Hull, G., & Schultz, K. (2002). Connecting Schools with Out-of-School Worlds. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/171 Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz, School's Out! : Bridging Out-ofSchool Literacies with Classroom Practice, New York: Teachers College Press, © 2001 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/171 For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu. Connecting Schools with Out-of-School Worlds Abstract In Chapter 1 we trace the ways in which examinations of literacy in out-of-school settings have provided pivotal moments theoretically, turning the field toward new understandings of "literacies" and into different lines of research. Indeed, we argue that most of the theoretical advances that have been made in the field of literacy studies over the last 25 years have had their origin in discoveries about literacy and learning not in school, but outside it. To talk about literacy these days, both in school and out, is to speak of events, practices, activities, ideologies, discourses, and identities (and at times to do so almost unreflectively, so much a part of our customary academic ways of thinking have these categories and terminology become). Again, we argue that in large part this new theoretical vocabulary sprang from examinations of the uses and functions of literacy in contexts other than school. Comments Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz, School's Out! : Bridging Out-of-School Literacies with Classroom Practice, New York: Teachers College Press, © 2001 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved. This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/171 2 Connecting Schools with Out-of-School Worlds Insights from Recent Research on Literacy in Non-School Settings GLYNDA HULL and KATHERINE SCHULTZ In Chapter 1 we trace the ways in which examinations of literacy in outof-school settings have provided pivotal moments theoretically, turning the field toward new understandings of "literacies" and into different lines of research. Indeed, we argue that most of the theoretical advances that have been made in the field of literacy studies over the last 25 years have had their origin in discoveries about literacy and learning not in school, but outside it. To talk about literacy these days, both in school and out, is to speak of events, practices, activities, ideologies, discourses, and identities (and at times to do so almost unreflectively, so much a part of our customary academic ways of thinking have these categories and terminology become). Again, we argue that in large part this new theoretical vocabulary sprang from examinations of the uses and functions of literacy in contexts other than school. Having outlined a host of conceptual steps and leaps, we begin in this chapter to push at the boundaries between literacy out of school and literacy in school, identifying tensions, complementarity, overlap, and possible divisions of labor. The need is great to marshal the best of our resources in the most powerful combinations toward improving the life chances of those children and adults who have been most poorly served. Surely this can happen most effectively when schools and community organizations, teachers and community activists consciously work together. Schoof's Out!: Bridging Out-ai-School Literacies with Classroom Practice. Copyright © 2002 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved. ISBN 0-8077-4189-2 (pbk.), ISBN 0-8077-4190-6 (cloth). Prior to photocopying items for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Customer SerVice, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923, USA, tel. (508) 750-8400. 32 Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 33 As centerpieces for our following discussion, we offer six vignettes of children, youth, and adults engaged in literate activities outside of school, vignettes adapted from recent reports of research growing out of the theoretical traditions of the ethnography of communication, activity theory, and the New Literacy Studies. One reason for providing these accounts is to foreground representations of real people and their activities after, in Chapter 1, a very theoretical journey. A strength of the research conducted in all three traditions is its ability to bring to life literacy activities through fine-grained ethnographic and qualitative accounts of particular lives, contexts, and historical moments. Through such research we come to know, even to feel we know intimately, a panoply of individuals, families, networks, communities, organizations, and institutions. And we also begin to understand some of the multifaceted ways in which literacy connects with learning, doing, and becoming outside of school. Through the following vignettes, then, we hope to at least hint at this richness. Second, the portraits themselves form a backdrop for thinking through the policy, curricular, and pedagogical insights for schooling and school! non-school partnerships that can be gleaned from recent studies of literacies beyond the schoolhouse door, as well as for raising the questions and problems that still persist for literacy education and research. We begin with a page from Down Under, an account of a cool teenager, reluctant writer, and budding businessman in urban Australia. 1 Jacques: "I'm not a pencil man." Jacques is 13 years old and lives with his parents and siblings in a white, affluent neighborhood of Brisbane. A disengaged student in the classroom, one who often "loses" his homework and would die a thousand deaths before volunteering an answer to a teacher's general query, he nonetheless provides a running sotto voce gloss on classroom activity, waxing in turn ironic, humorous, dramatic. This self-designated joker has "great difficulty with literacy" according to his teacher. But he is quite good at derailing attempts to involve him in the classroom milieu. No "writing process" pedagogy for this young man. Rather than use the Writer's Centre to produce and publish a story, Jacques spends days stapling together a miniature book in which he writes, to his teacher's dismay and his peers' delight, a mere 10 words. Made to repeat first grade, Jacques now patiently measures time until he can leave school for good. Neither professing nor demonstrating an interest in reading and writing, he explains: ''I'm like my dad. I'm not a pencil man" (Knobel, 1999, p. 104). Out of school, Jacques participates in two worlds valued by his family: 34 Framing the Issues work and religion. A member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, he ably takes part in a variety of literacy-related religious activities-scriptural exegesis, the distribution on Saturday rounds of church literature such as The Watchtower, presentations at a weekly Theocratic School. But it is being a working man, with certain specialized ways of interacting and valuing, that offers Jacques a current identity and a future vision of the person he expects-and wants-to become. His father owns a successful business as an excavator, and it is his potential role in this physically palpable occupation, revolving as it does around machines and action in and upon the world, that captures jacques's attention and his energy. His involvement in and apprenticeship for the adult world of work also includes some home-based literacy activities. There is, for example, the design and publication with a home computer of an advertisement for Jacques's own neighborhood mowing service. This professional-looking flyer promises "efficiency" and "reliability" and even offers "phone quotes" -turns of phrase we all can recognize as ubiquitous in the world of business advertising. Jacques's out-of-school identity as an aspiring businessman and the social practices that support it, so obvious at home, are invisible in school, where he appears unengaged and less than competent. Yet one might wager that he will nonetheless lead a successful adult life, finding a comfortable economic and social niche, given his cooperative immersion in valued adult worlds. The vignette of Jacques is adapted from Michele Knobel's (1999) recent book, Everyday Literacies: Students, Discourse, and Social Practice, an ethnographic case study of four adolescents coming of age in urban Australia. Framing her study with Gee's discourse theory (e.g., 1996) and methodological insights drawn from Green and the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group (e.g., Green & Harker, 1988), Knobel poses what we believe is the central question raised (but not yet answered) by years of research on out-of-schoolliteracy. She asks: "What is the relationship between school learning and students' everyday lives, and what might an effective relationship between them be" (p. 6)? Knobel's study reminds us, as does an important tradition of work in literacy theory and research, of the resources, both personal and community based, that children, adolescents, and adults bring to school. We think, for example, of Moll's work with Latino communities in the Southwest and his generative term funds of knowledge, used to describe the networked expertise woven through community practices (Moll, 1992; Moll & Diaz, 1987; Moll & Greenberg, 1990; see also Vasquez, 1993). The power of Moll's work for us is his convincing demonstration of how funds of knowledge can be used to bridge communities to classrooms by acknowledging the expertise of parents and community members. He has, for example, Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 35 provided examples of lessons in which teachers have brought community members into the schoolroom to share their knowledge and know-how, and he has documented as well the positive effects of such activities on children's interest and investment in the curriculum. Developing a culturally relevant pedagogy for teaching African American youth literary interpretation, Lee (1993) has also looked to cultural funds of knowledge, particularly language forms and discourse structures. In their most recent work, Lee and colleagues (Lee, 2000; Majors, 2000; Rivers, Hutchinson, & Dixon, 2000) have examined language practices across contexts, identifying participation structures of talk in the community, such as African American hair salons, and using these structures to inform ways of conducting classroom discussions about texts. This research shows that teachers can successfully engage students in high levels of reasoning about literary texts by drawing on their tacit knowledge about cultural forms out of school. We think as well of Dyson's (1997, 1999, in press) long-term studies of early writing development in particular, the "resources" that children bring to their writing from their social worlds, including the linguistic and symbolic tools appropriated from popular culture. Dyson has argued for the permeability of the curriculum, where teachers imagine their classrooms in such a way as to continually welcome the diverse resources that children, of necessity, bring to their writing. While Dyson's research is situated physically within classroom walls, we think it noteworthy that her conceptual framework embraces children's out-of-schoollives. We see here two powerful, but distinct, ways to bridge home and school worlds. Moll and Lee literally go into homes, community centers, and other out-of-school contexts to learn about social and cultural resources; they then bring people and linguistic and cultural knowledge back into the classroom. Dyson, on the other hand, is continually alert to the ways in which children themselves bring their outside worlds into the classroom through their writing and the oral performances that encircle literacy events. We admire work in the vein of Moll, Lee and colleagues, and Dyson, and we are captured by the portraits of classrooms, communities, and students that they give us. The question here is what such classrooms and the perspectives that undergird them can hold for students such as Jacques. Disaffected youth, adults, and even children are legion-those individuals and groups for whom alienation from school- based learning seems sadly confirmed. For them, perhaps, community-based opportunities are especially crucial for developing the desire we all share to become more fully human, to borrow Freire's (1970) still-inspirational words. Of course, the possibility of engaging in litency activities in the community does not ex- 36 Framing the Issues cuse school-based teachers or the rest of us from asking how out-of-school identities, social practices, and the literacies they recruit might be leveraged in the classroom. How might teachers incorporate students' out-of-school interests and predilections but also extend the range of the literacies with which they are conversant? And in what ways must our thinking about what constitutes curriculum and pedagogy be modified in order to appeal to students who don't handily fit the common mold? How, to ask the hardest question, do we keep youth involved in school when their adult lives seem to hold little promise of work or civic activity or personal fulftllment that draws strongly on school-based literacy? Marquis, Denlah, and Samson: "You gotta pay." Marquis (age 11), Delilah (age 10), and Samson (age 9) are at an inner-city community center when Ellen arrives, parking ticket in hand. A volunteer at the center and a friend of the children, she asks what to do with this ticket. Marquis asks where she found it, and Ellen answers, "On my windshield." "0000, you got a ticket for parking where you shouldn't have!" Delilah quickly chides, while Samson teases that she'll surely go to jail. Marquis states with the wisdom of his years, "She ain't going to jail for no ticket. She gonna pay somen." And then Marquis and Delilah set about problem-solving, analyzing the ticket and sorting through strategies for dealing with it. Delilah suggests that Ellen will need to go downtown to pay it, but upon examining the ticket again, Samson figures out that it can be mailed and that the ticket itself, once folded over, will serve as an envelope. Marquis recommends simply putting it on someone else's car. "Yeah, on another Mazda," Delilah adds. But once the children deduce that Ellen's license number is recorded on the ticket, that plan seems less than ideal. "They got a copy of the ticket at the office, and if she don't pay, she'll go to jail," a sober child concludes. Marquis and Delilah have the final say: "You gotta pay." And they commiserate over the steep fine of $25. "You got it?" Delilah asks. The problem-solving moment ends with a story. Marquis tells how his little brother once gave him a ticket for parking his big wheel in front of the house, a ticket for $100. "Said I had to give it to him, too, or I was going to jail!" Everyone joins in the laughter. And so we see a group of African American inner-city children turning a parking ticket this way and that, holding it up to the light, both literally and metaphorically. They draw on various literate and discursive strategies to find a way to obviate its influence-trying out scenarios, studying the artifact for information and directives, enumerating and questioning op- Connecting Schools with Out-of-School Worlds 37 tions. In other words, the children employ their developing language and reasoning skills to solve a material problem in their resource-scarce community. Their negotiation of a traffic ticket thus lays bare a host of literate and problem-solving practices and reveals as well the ways in which urban youth learn to hone their abilities to understand, function within, and circumvent the powers that be. We are introduced to these children in Ellen Cushman's (1998) recent ethnography, The Struggle and the Tools, a book that documents and celebrates inner-city residents' "institutional" language-those oral and literate skills crucial for daily negotiations with gatekeeping institutions. Taking issue with critical scholars who too qUickly resort to notions of hegemony and false consciousness when they theorize about the "underclass" or the "marginalized," Cushman takes as her project redefining critical consciousness. She demonstrates, and pays homage to, the ways in which the individuals she came to know as part of her research navigate the social structures that constrain them, both accommodating and resisting and even undermining such constraints through everyday language and literacy activities. In so doing, Cushman adopts what she calls an "activist methodology," one that lays bare her role as a participant in the research and the community (notice her presence in the vignette above) and that makes possible reciprocally beneficial relationships with the people from her study. Cushman's study stands out for us first because of its insistence on acknowledging the communicative competence displayed by people in their everyday lives. She examines kids' conversations and finds, for example, not just chit-chat, but the use of a particular kind of strategic oral language to analyze that most common of local literacy artifacts, the dreaded parking ticket. Much of the work on out-of-schoolliteracy has as its starting place a respect for and acknowledgment of people's abilities. As McDermott (1993) has noted, the stance that people are OK, that they are competent within their cultural milieu, is common within the field of anthropologybut expecting people to fail is more commonly an artifact of schooling. Nowhere in the out-of-school research is an expectation for success more evident than in Heath's long-term work in a multitude of out-of-school youth organizations around the United States (e.g., Heath, 1994, 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Heath & Mclaughlin, 1993). She has been especially impressed by young people's participation in arts-based organizations and offers this description of their important features: Within the organizations that host these arts programs, opportunities for young people to learn derive primarily from an ethos that actively considers them to be resources for themselves, their peers, families and communities. These programs thus engage the young in learning, both for themselves and for oth- 38 Framing the Issues ers, through highly participatory projects that encompass listening, writing and reading, as well as mathematical, scientific and social skills and strategies. (Heath, 1998a, p. 2) To be sure, one of the most important lessons to be gleaned from research on literacy and out-of-school contexts is the benefits that accrue from achieving competence. As Griffm and Cole (1987; see also Cole & Traupmann, 1981; McDermott, 1993) have discovered in their exemplary work with after-school programs, such competence becomes most apparent when we allow many starting points for learning and many paths to progress. We wonder, as we admire Cushman's study and her activist stance: What we must do to cultivate such attitudes about children and adults' competence in formal classrooms? And having done so, how might teachers build on people's abilities as strategic language users in school? What, as a matter of fact, does "building on" entail? Terribly important, too, what special skills are required of teachers in order to nurture students whose critical consciousness as members of oppressed groups is fmely honed (and rightly so)? Further, how can teachers and researchers learn about and participate in communities apart from school in a respectful and reciprocal manner? The metaphor of a journey is often invoked as part of much research on out-of-schoolliteracy, as researchers voyage into less familiar communities and cultures to retrieve collectibles for their scholarship and the classroom. Such studies have been valuable as ways of unveiling and foregrounding language and literacy practices that differ from those of the mainstream. But it is time, we think, to fmd a different metaphor and another reason for traveling, one that facilitates the sharing of projects with participants and that directs research toward the amelioration of problems that community members, along with researchers and teachers, find compelling. The work of Flower and colleagues in Pittsburgh (Flower, 1997, in preparation; Flower, Long, & Higgins, 2000; Peck, Flower, & Higgins, 1995; see also Chapter 5, this volume) and that of Engestrom (1987, 1993, 1998) and colleagues in Finland stands out in this regard. Mr. San: Of Mice and Managers In a high-tech workplace in northern California's Silicon Valley, frontline workers, most of them recent immigrants, participate in numerous literacyrich activities, activities that accompany their participation in "self-directed" work teams, their documentation of their own productivity and quality scores, and the oral presentation of problem-solving data. Literacy is every- Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 39 where in this factory, serving some 80 different functions and ranging from simple copying and decoding to marshaling reading and writing skills to argue certain points of view. Managers and supervisors have quite definite ideas about the purposes that literacy activities should serve. Yet the most carefully scripted plans of mice and managers do often go awry. Here is Mr. San, one of several frontline workers at this factory who has been directed to take his turn in front of supervisors and co-workers to practice the computation and reporting of quality and productivity numbers. He begins innocently enough: OK. (puts transparency on the overhead projector) Our team name is uh Turbo, Team number 31, and the area is First Mechanical and Handload. Shift day, and my coach is Engineer Kartano. But it soon becomes apparent that Mr. San is about to seize the moment, having chosen not merely to participate in a practice exercise on oral reporting. Instead, he demonstrates that it is actually impossible to calculate productivity scores correctly because workers have been given incorrect "standard times." In a dramatic "voila!" moment, Mr. San unveils on the overhead projector a virtually unreadable chart, densely packed with numbers. Despite the fact that its details are obscured, the import of this chart is as clear as can be: Mr. San has managed to requisition a new set of standard times, or the times allotted for accomplishing the multitude of assembly tasks required throughout the workday: This is, now I just got this, that's why we are delayed in entering our data (puts a new transparency up on the overhead projector), here is the standard time. Wow! [laughter] . ... They they're trying to modify the standard time because I complained all the datas that we got on the actual uh time that we finish one board doesn't count in the standard time. The issue of speed at work is of course a theme that runs throughout the history of labor relations; how fast work gets done, or the "standard time" as it's called in Mr. San's factory, has been contested over and over again. In this most recent example of that long history, Mr. San appropriates a company meeting at which workers were expected just to practice, merely to get their feet wet, with public presentations of data by reading off their responses to pre-fab questions in rote fashion. Yet Mr. San chose not to be part ofthe dog-and-pony show, just as he had refused, even before this meeting took place, to complete elaborate graphs and charts and to provide a discursive rationale for his team's quality and productivity goals. 40 Framing the Issues "How can we write goals," he had argued, "if our standard times are incorrect!" Pressing his point with an engineer, he eventually succeeded in having the company's time-study experts recalculate the standard times. Only after all of this did Mr. San consent to learn how to perform-and to encourage his team members to do so as well-the often burdensome, even daunting tasks of ftlling out multitudes of forms and completing the elaborate new documentation associated with productivity and quality measurements. In this case, it seems that Mr. San's willingness to participate in literacy-related activities was linked to the identity he was constructing for himself as a worker, an identity most aptly described as advocate for his team-"my people," as he liked to call them. Hull (2000) provides our Silicon Valley vignette from her ethnographic examination of two companies in the circuit board assembly industry. She and her research team asked what kinds of workers the companies were looking to hire or to fashion, and what kinds of literacies the new forms of work, such as self-directed work teams, seemed to privilege. Frameworks drawn from the New Literacy Studies (e.g., Gee, 1996; Street, 1993) and sociocultural perspectives on writing (e.g., Freedman, Dyson, Flower, & Chafe, 1987) positioned Hull to link literacy and identity, focusing on how particular work identities can lead to acceptance or rejection of certain literacy practices. Constructing new work identities is not, of course, unproblematic. As Gee, Hull, and Lankshear (996) illustrate in their analysis of the rhetoric of "fast capitalist" texts, the new work order calls on even frontline workers to invest themselves completely in their jobs, taking on the company's notions of the flexible, multiskilled problem-solver and worker cum manager. Yet doing so, and excelling at literate activities and developing a working identity that involves a sense of oneself as a proficient user of multiple semiotic systems, doesn't necessarily, or even often, lead to full-time work with benefits, let alone advancement. Such work makes urgent the need to rethink standard curricular fare for non-college-bound youth. But just as insistently, it asks us to acknowledge the contradictions that exist in even the most progressive high-performance work environments, where workers are directed to develop literate identities, but identities that are circumscribed. We are prompted, then, to ask: How should we think about school in relation to students' future work. Other researchers who have examined the literacy demands of entrylevel work include Gowen (1992), in her account of hospital workers; Darrah (996), in his analysis of the electronics industry; and Hart-Landsberg and Reder (997), in their look at auto-accessory manufacturers. However, the vast majority of studies have focused on the work and writing lives of college graduates who enter managerial or technical positions in which Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 41 writing mediates work in quite visible and powerful ways. (For a review of the particular tradition of such work that draws on activity theory approaches, see Russell, 1997.) These studies help us look critically at how college writing courses, writing across the curriculum programs, and training in technical communication do and don't prepare students for professionallives in which the mastery of written genres is central. They also give us detailed understandings of the literacy requirements and literacy-related social practices of a variety of workplaces, often making the case that writing at school and at work are "worlds apart" (Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Pare, 1999). This body of research has provided, finally, compelling portraits of the struggles of competent writers engaged in high-stakes, realworld activity through which they become professional wordsmiths (Beaufort, 1999). It of course makes intuitive sense for writing researchers to focus their attention on professionals in the work world for whom the production of written language is a prime activity. But such a gaze, when it does not also include entry-level workers at least in peripheral vision, can obscure the ways in which literacy has become part and parcel of most working lives. Even more importantly, if we ignore entry-level work, we will also ignore, if we are not vigilant, the ways in which literacy is implicated in the sustenance of traditional relations of power in the workplace, including career ladders and other means of advancement, making the gulf that separates occupational hierarchies too broad to span (Hull & Schultz, 2001). There are other great divides that deserve the attention of researchers and educators if we are to rethink the school-to-work relationship and the roles of literacy within it. There is worry about a growing digital divide, one associated with schools (where access to technology and its meaningful use is unequal), with disparate technology and other resources, and also with workplaces in which low-income people of color are shut out of hightech, well-paying jobs. How can teachers, researchers, and other educators join forces to bridge such divides? What models really have a chance of interrupting long-standing patterns of poverty and miseducation? Kalantzis and Cope (2000) argue persuasively for pluralism as an organizing concept for education in new times; similarly, they suggest that in imagining new work orders, we must work toward "productive diversity," whereby people are valued for their difference and expertise at work centers on the ability to engage and negotiate difference. Gee (2000) wonders whether new capitalist rhetoric and practice-flexibility, teamwork, communities of practice-can be reclaimed for more radical social and educational ends. For our own part, we see practical promise in new coalitions of community organizations, schools, and universities that are attempting to sponsor tech- 42 Framing the Issues nology-rich after-school programs for children, job training for older youth and young adults, and technology access for the wider community (Hull, 2000). Whatever our imaginings or our concrete efforts, we ignore at our students' peril the close connections that exist among economic change, the material conditions of people's lives, and literacy and literacy learning. Brandt (1999) warns us well: Downsizing, migrations, welfare cutbacks, commercial development, transportation, consolidation, or technological innovations do not merely form the background buzz of contemporary life. These changes, where they occur, can wipe out as well as create access to supports for literacy learning. They also can inflate or deflate the value of existing forms of literacy in the lives of students. Any of these changes can have implications for the status of literacy practices in school and for the ways students might interact with literacy lessons. (p. 391) If we take Brandt's concerns seriously, we will move a historical awareness of the relationship among literacy, the economy, and work to center stage in our theorizing, and we will be especially interested in determining "what enhances or impedes literacy learning under conditions of change" (Brandt, 1999, p. 391). Mary TaUMountain: Creating "something true" In the heart of San Francisco's Tenderloin, a down-and-out district associ- ated mostly with drugs and crime, women file into the Herald, a residential hotel and meeting place for the Tenderloin Women Writers Workshop. Seated with pens and notebooks in their laps, they settle in to listen to Mary TallMountain. A Native American born close to the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Mary came to San Francisco in 1945 as a recent widow; she worked first as a legal secretary and later opened her own business as a stenographer. A bout with cancer without medical insurance left her bankrupt and homeless; it was then that she moved into a small room in the Tenderloin and began to write. Mary announces that she has finished a poem entitled "Soogha Dancing" (soogha being the Athabaskan word for "brother"). In Mary's poem her brother is honored by being asked to dance before his tribe. Here are the first, second, and last stanzas: Soogha eldest brother I never knew, The people gave you new clothes. In spring they honored men Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 43 Outstanding in Kaltag village. At potlatch after giveaway Those honored danced alone. Your arms flying Ermine parka whirling Beaver hood like brown velvet Lynx-trimmed mukluks Furs trapped by your friends The women stitched in winter. You dance bright behind my eyes. Soogha brother, I see you In that spirit-given spring Dancing for the people, Arms open like furry wings. The women in the workshop deeply appreciate this poem, and they are proud, too, of their own role in its creation: Nikki: Oh, that was a wonderful last line. Anita: I always liked that line. Mary: All the help you gave me, you know, here. (She leafs back through her papers.) It's back here, all the different things you suggested. Martha: It's a wonderful poem. And it's a pleasure, I think, for us to hear it after, you know, we critiqued it, to hear the suggestions in it. Mary (looking around the group): You consider it finished, then, do you? Clara: That turned out beautiful, Mary. That turned out beautiful. Martha: Yeah, it's like you took some of the suggestions-other ones didn't work-and it turned into something true to you. (Heller, 1997, p. 4) Thus Caroline Heller begins her book Until We Are Strong Together: Women Writers in the Tenderloin. This is an account of the power of literacy for members of an unlikely writing group who met weekly to share their experiences, poetry, and prose. Writing and conversing together served several important social, political, and educational functions for this group of "marginalized" women-among them, sharing life histories, rais- 44 Framing the Issues ing political awareness, and building skills as writers through critique. The meetings also served as a point of integration for the emotional and the intellectual, the mind and the spirit. By providing a rich enactment of how literacy and community can intersect to nurture common needs, Heller builds from and extends Freirian and liberatory approaches to critical literacy. Readers of Heller's work are sometimes surprised by the intensely literate activity of the Tenderloin women, noting that Heller found literacy where we might least expect it-in a distressed urban community facing the many problems that accompany poverty and neglect. Yet as our understanding of what counts as literacy has broadened, researchers from around the world have documented literacy practices in the lives of children and adults everywhere: taxi drivers in South Mrica (Breier, Taetsane, & Sait, 1996); cattle auctioneers in Wales Oones, 2000); scribes in Mexico City (Kalman, 1999); members of a youth basketball league (Mahiri, 1998); middle school girls with their teen 'zines in the North American Midwest (Finders, 1997); diary keepers and racing fans in Lancaster, England (Barton & Hamilton, 1998); and a 5-year-old Australian boy with his own Web site, "Alex's Scribbles-Koala Trouble" (Lankshear & Knobel, 1997). This work illustrates in glorious detail Geertz's observation long ago that "man's [sic] mental processes indeed take place at the scholar's desk or the football field, in the studio or lorry-driver's seat, on the platform, the chessboard, or the judge's bench" (quoted in Cole, Engestrom, & Vasquez, 1997, p. 13). And it denotes as well the enlivened interest of current researchers from a range of fields in everyday practical activity (see Cole et al., 1997). Evidence of the abundant, diverse forms of out-of-school literacycrossing class, race, gender, culture, and nationality-certainly enrich our definitions of literacy. In an interesting way, juxtaposed to Heller's portraits, this work makes us think again of school-based, "academic" literacy and ask: What is or might be the value of essayist texts? The Tenderloin women described by Heller were empowered by what we usually consider traditional genres generally introduced in school-essays, poems, short stories, other fiction and imaginative writing. These longer texts contrast with the lists, forms, letters, and advertisements that make up everyday reading and writing. They also remind us of the permeability between in-school and outof-school borders. In our efforts to document and validate the plethora of personal and local literacy practices, we don't want to abandon the opportunities that school could provide in developing valued forms of text-based expertise. But we might want to reexamine the way in which those opportunities are provided, taking care, with Heller (997) and the Tenderloin Women Writers Workshop, not to "create false oppositions between the Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 45 emotions and the intellect, the spirit and mind, the person and the community" (p. 160). Others worry that, in honoring out-of-school capabilities, we also romanticize them. While readily noting that "children will adapt intelligently to their worlds" (p. 34), Damon (1990) acknowledges the tension between youth's perceptions of what about the world is useful to know and adults' understandings. Noting the tendency to valorize out-of-school skills and to put them on equal footing with schooled knowledge-perhaps, he speculates, in reaction to the long-standing tendency among academics to denigrate the nonacademic-he asserts: [I]t serves no useful purpose to imbue unschooled forms of knowledge with a sentimental gloss. Just as we should not lose sight of the remarkable adaptiveness of some unschooled abilities, we also must guard against expecting more from them than they can deliver. (p. 38) These are strong words that run counter to the ideologies of much recent and useful literacy research. But perhaps they are a helpful reminder to give school-based literacies their due, and all children access to their power, while simultaneously honoring and building on everyday literacies (see Delpit, 1995). At the end of her book, Heller (1997) asks how we might reconceive our relationships with the most marginalized. We ask, with her, how those who have "been excluded from the mainstream, or who have chosen to live and/or learn apart from it" (p. 160) can help us rethink in fundamental ways our theories and our work in formal classrooms. Martha: "Yo no sabia que era bilingue." A third-grade bilingual Latina, Martha likes to tell jokes and show her wit when she interacts with people she knows and trusts, such as friends at Las Redes. During this after-school program, children not only collaborate with each other and UCLA undergraduates as they play and master a variety of computer-related games and puzzles, they venture into cyberspace as well. A centerpiece of the children's activities is an e-mail exchange with a mysterious entity called "El Maga," whose identity and gender are objects of great speculation, but ultimately remain unknown. Children recount to El Maga their progress in completing the various computer games and related activities and report any difficulties they encounter. El Maga, for his or her part, is known to ask a lot of questions, as well as to initiate personal dia- 46 Framing the Issues logues with individual children. The intent of these e-mail exchanges is to foster children's participation in and affiliation with Las Redes, socializing them, if you will, into the culture of an after-school activity system. Martha begins her correspondence with EI Maga by mentioning the sometimes frustrating experiences she has had playing a computer game that has as its central character a frog. Martha writes in one early message: dear EI Maga, are are you? The pond was little bit harder. I couldn't understand the game and Christina [UCLA undergrad] helped me figure it out. In the end, I passed the first level and I was surprised. thanks for writing to me. El Maga responds: Dear Martha, I am doing pretty good, thank you for asking!!! How are you?? I hope you still have that big smile!!! The pond was difficult to figure out, huh? That frog causes many of us problems. It has a mind of its own and sometimes it does not want to do what we program it to do. Que ranita [That mischievous little frog] .... El Maga The next time Martha writes an e-mail message to El Maga, she does so in Spanish. She professes her surprise that EI Maga is bilingual, presses El Maga for information on his or her gender, and reports her recent computer game activities. In so doing, Martha demonstrates certain Spanish literacy skills, such as knowledge about a formal register, and she also indicates, through her more familiar salutation and closing, that she is ready to establish a more intimate relationship with El Maga: Querido/a Yo no sabia que era bilingue. Usted es mujer or hombre? Haora juque boggle, y un rompe cabesas de batman, y Bertha nos ayudo armario. Adios, Martha [Dear I did not know that you were bilingual. Are you a man or a woman? Today I played boggle and a batman puzzle. And Bertha helped us put it together. Goodbye, Martha] Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 47 Soon Martha's correspondence with El Maga exhibits not only her proficiency in Spanish but also her "bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate knowledge and skills" (Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, Alvarez, & Chiu, 1999, p. 91), including an interest in cross-cultural language play. Over the next weeks, Martha continues to demonstrate, by means of her e-mail exchanges with El Maga, her fluency in both English and Spanish and a certain sophistication in her choices of language and register. Codeswitching words and clauses, she also draws playfully on assumed shared cultural knowledge, alluding to the well-known Mexican American boxer Oscar de la Hoya as well as to elements of children's popular culture, such as cartoons. A happy, outgoing, playful child at Las Redes, Martha soon begins, in collaboration with the undergraduates and El Maga, to use an array of written language skills to represent these facets of herself in print as well as speech. Martha's story comes from Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, Alvarez, and Chiu (999), who bring activity theory to bear on the study of children's language and literacy development. Their after-school club, Las Redes, operates out of an urban elementary school located near the Los Angeles International Airport and represents one instantiation of Cole's Fifth Dimension project (e.g., Cole, 1996; see also Chapter 6, this volume). Combining play and learning, Las Redes provides a context in which collaboration is the order of the day and in which the children and their undergraduate amigos/as from UCLA can mix languages, registers, and genres-or in Gutierrez and colleagues' terms, engage in hybrid language and literacy practices (see Chapter 7, this volume). Gutierrez and colleagues argue the importance of creating such learning contexts where hybridity can flourish, "particularly in a time when English-only, anti-immigrant, and anti-affirmative action sentiments influence, if not dominate, educational policy and practice" (p. 92). We feature Gutierrez and colleagues' work (see also Gutierrez, Baquedana-Lopez, & Tejeda, 1999; Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, & Turner, 1997) to call attention to after-school programs that support children's and youth's intellectual and social development by providing supplementary instruction and, as in this and other instantiations of Cole's 5th Dimension project, constructing new, theoretically motivated learning environments or "activity systems." Such programs can serve a range of important functions, including helping us reimagine classrooms and students. As Gutierrez and others have shown, children often interact and learn in very competent ways after school, despite poor records and reputations in traditional classrooms (Gutierrez et aI., 1997). And as Cole points out, after-school programs can reorganize learning such that typical student- teacher relationships and participant structures are turned on their heads. He writes: "This unusually heterogeneous distribution of knowledge and skill is a great re- 48 Framing the Issues source for reordering everyday power relations, thereby creating interesting changes in the typical division of labor" (Cole, 1996, p. 298). He emphasizes as well the importance of choice-children participate voluntarily-but choice balanced by discipline and learning infused with play and imagination. We agree with Cole (1996) and with Underwood, Welsh, Gauvain, and Duffy (2000) when they caution that early on such after-school programs must confront issues of sustainability. If after-school programs are to last, to become viable community institutions that exist past their founder's interest, then they must be accompanied by structural changes within both community institutions-such as YMCAs, Boys' and Girls' Clubs, and churches-and university partners. A further tension that after-school programs must continually address is the extent to which they become school-like organizations-serving essentially as arms of classrooms that extend the schoolday, providing assistance with homework and safe spaces for youth after school-and the extent to which they define themselves apart from schools as alternative sites for learning (see Chapter 8, this volume). The push, we predict, will be toward the former, given the current availability of federal and local funding for after-school programs and given the tendency of textbook publishers and other vendors to proVide standardized materials and prepackaged materials. The danger, of course, is that we will lose a currently available creative space for doing academics differently. When researchers such as Dyson first began to document "unofficial" literacy practices in school-such as passing notes-there was worry that bringing these forms of writing into the official curriculum would take away the interest and delight students found in them. In a similar vein, there is sometimes concern about attempts to import new literacy practices that flourish in after-school programs and other after-school settings to school. This topic sometimes comes up in discussions of new technologies, such as multimedia composition, Web-based authoring, and chat rooms and other sites for identity construction and playful writing, as documented by Lankshear and Knobel (1997). The concern is that, if school appropriates these potentially subversive forms, there is the chance that they will be domesticated and lose their vigor, appeal, and edge. On the other hand, an important opportunity to address the digital divide comes with preparing teachers to think differently about what counts as literacy and with equipping schools with technology, making opportunities to engage with new technologies available to more students. We need examples, then, of the integration of new media and Internet use into schools in ways that allow youth culture and its varied literacies to flourish alongside, as well as to influence, academic genres. Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 49 Denise: "This world is a world of fear and hate. That is what led me to be a writer." Denise attends a multi-racial, comprehensive high school set in an urban West Coast community, one caught in the cross-currents of long-standing, systemic problems of poverty, crime, and malaise. As her classmates sit together and write their arguments for a constitutional convention, arguing loudly with each other and alternatively focusing on the task at hand, Denise is off to the side working on her homework and staring into space. She has refused to participate in this exciting set of activities that draw in even the most reluctant students. In fact, she has made clear her decision not to engage in any public performances, and even accepted an "F" as a consequence for this strongly held view. At home Denise writes poetry about her grandmother and a play for a favorite middle school teacher. The play, titled "Gangsta Lean" after a rap popular at that time, is based on actual events in her own life-the shooting death of her cousin in a drug-related incident at a dice game. One day Denise shows the script to her drama teacher who produces it in the only drama class in the school. Yet Denise keeps her distance from this performance in its initial stages and only reluctantly steps forward to receive flowers at the evening performance of the play. After the performance of her play, Denise seems to link her writing of poetry and plays at home to her identity as a writer at school. After her teachers point out that she can use her playas her senior project, she reluctantly begins work on this step toward graduation. On an audio-tape that accompanied this fmal project of her high school career, she speaks these words which describe the role of writing in her life: Growing up in [our city.] Me, my mother and my brothers. It wasn't easy. It's not easy. And it ain't going to be easy. Every time I walk home from school, I don't feel safe. Not at all. I start to think of my family and all the friends I have seen killed, that have been killed. And I also think about the one that might be killed. When a car goes past me, my neck shrugs as if I am going to be shot. It's a terrible, terrible feeling.... This world is a world of fear and hate. That is what led me to be a writer ... While writing I don't feel nothing.... All I think about is writing. If I don't write, all I think about is the deaths in the world today. So to keep my mind off of that, I write. It's not easy to be a writer. You have to have your mind set on being a writer.... When writing a play popped into my mind, all I thought about was the painful things that I see in the world today.... So, I started to write. 50 Framing the Issues And I couldn't stop. It felt like I was being trapped. I was being held captive. And believe me, I know what that feels like. (Senior project tape, June 1994) Denise's out-of-school speaking and writing is a stunning reminder of her daily experience. Her teachers found a way for her to bring this writing into the school curriculum on her own terms. While she attended school, Denise continued to resist the official school curriculum and continued to write at home. Once she graduated, she stopped writing all together. Katherine Schultz introduces us to Denise and a few of her classmates in her study of writing in the lives of urban adolescents (Schultz, in press). She describes the writing that seemed to flourish outside of school from students who were reluctant writers inside their classrooms. Student writing took many forms: primarily they wrote poems, letters, and journals, although some of them wrote plays and a variety of fiction and non-fiction prose. For the most part, they did not share their writing with their peers. Schultz describes the ways that youths like Denise tentatively constructed literate identities while in school by writing at home, and how, once they graduated, they seemed to stop writing. She poses the question: How can we construct pedagogy and curriculum that support students to construct and hold on to enduring literate identities and to become powerful speakers, readers, and writers while they are in school and beyond? Schultz's study on personal out-of-school writing is unusual in being longitudinal: she stayed in touch with the young people for several years after they graduated from high school, documenting their writing across home and school contexts rather than focusing on one context or the other. We suggest that it would be useful to explore what it is about being in school, even if students are reluctantly biding time in classrooms, that allows them to find these alternative spaces to write. We recognize that for all of us, writing may be more or less important at various times in our lives; for a virtual non-writer in early adulthood, the written word may become central later on. This leads us to ask: How are time and space organized in adolescents' lives while they are in school in such a way as to allow them to develop identities as writers? Is the personal writing students engage in connected to a particular time in their lives? If so, will these students hold on to the knowledge that writing was important to them at one time and return to it later on? How can educators reconceptualize classroom practices to account for the writing students engage in outside of school, and how can practitioners teach in such a way that adolescents acquire and hold onto literate identities past their time in classrooms? More broadly, how can we conceptualize education, and literacy within it, as a system of second chances, one that allows multiple entry Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 51 points across the life span, and that provides support for individuals who wish or need to return to a focus on writing or literacy after a time away? "The notion of a second chance," wrote Dan Inbar, "is derived from the basic belief that everyone has the right to attempt success and mobility, and the right to try again, to choose a different way, and that failures should not be regarded as final" (1990, p. 1). We might think of literacy the very same way. Conclusion When researchers have looked at out-of-school literacy, they have done so with several goals in mind, including a desire to decouple the effects of literacy from the effects of schooling. They have asked questions such as: What are the cognitive consequences of literacy separate from the mediating impact of formal schooling? How are our conceptions of literacy constrained by one version of literacy, that is, schooled literacy? Researchers have also sought to develop the notion of literacy as multiple, asking questions such as: How do language and literacy practices in homes and communities differ from those valued in school? What new forms of and technologies for literacy exist out of school? An early goal in research on out-of-school literacy was to account for school failure and out-of-school success through questions such as: What are the resources that children and youth from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and socioeconomic groups bring to the classroom? What are the differences among contexts, conceptions of knowledge, and performance for successful learners out of school and unsuccessful learners in school? In addition, researchers hoped to identify additional support mechanisms for children, youth, and adults. They wondered, for example: What institutions in addition to our beleaguered schools can support learning? How can outof-school learning environments serve as stimuli for rethinking schools and classrooms? Researchers have looked to out-of school settings to push notions of learning and development. They have posed questions such as: What understandings of mature versions of social practices can be found in out-ofschool settings that we can connect to child or adult learning? How might we document the intersection of literacy with social identity or study the connection of ways of reading and writing to ways of talking, acting, interacting, valuing, and being in the world? How might we cultivate a long and broad view of learning, one that focuses on "human lives seen as trajectories through multiple social practices in various social institutions" (Gee et al., 1996, p. 4)? 52 Framing the Issues What has been accomplished through the body of research we have reviewed in this chapter is more than impressive. Yet despite dazzling theoretical advances in how we conceive of literacy, despite provocative research on out-of-schoolliteracies in an array of interesting settings, a depressing fact remains: We still have not succeeded in improving the educational experiences and life chances of the vast majority of children, adolescents, and adults. Indeed, the gap between those deemed literate and those labeled poor readers and writers and performers at academic tasks has widened and widened and widened some more. To make this situation sadder still, the educational pendulum in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain has taken a big swing to the right of late, in effect halting and reversing many of the conceptual and practical steps forward that have been made in conceptualizing and teaching reading and writing. Taylor offers this portrait: "In the UK children sit each day and do their phonics, and in the USA there are cities in which every child in a particular grade is supposed to be working on the same page, in the same way, at the same time, on any given day" (2000, p. xiii). What counts as appropriate literacy in school is being narrowed and narrowed and narrowed still more. Countless school-based educators teach their hearts out and do so with intelligence and energy and commitment, working their magic in their classrooms day in, day out. Indeed, many of the current educational reforms that we and others believe take us backward, not forward, are handed down to teachers for implementation, not debate or consideration. Thus the unflattering portraits of schools and teachers and academic literacy that sometimes accompany the literature on out-of-school learning are, we believe, overly harsh. We wince when we read the sweeping claims-in-school learning is top-down with teachers doing most of the thinking; schooled literacy is based on a universal model that reduces other literacies to deficits; schools are hostile, demeaning places where young people aren't heard nor their interests considered. Out of school, these accounts sometimes go on to claim, learning is participatory and democratic, literacies are multiple and satisfying, and programs so appeal to children and young people that participants have to be turned away. It must be more complicated than that. In a discussion of the last decade's impressive body of research on "situated" learning, some of which we reviewed earlier, Rose (1999) gives this work its due, noting its worth to both theory-building and educational practice. But he also observes that the sometimes stated, sometimes implied critique of traditional schooling that is a part of this work "tends to be quickly executed, a single-hued portrait of mainstream classrooms that has the unintended effect of stripping instruction from its setting" (p. 155). We share his concern. Connecting Schools with Out-oj-School Worlds 53 The fulfillment of the promise of equity through education is in important ways at the heart of each of the theoretical positions we reviewed earlier and the raison d'etre, at least implicitly, for much of the research on out-of-school literacy and learning. And it is also the goal of progressive educators everywhere. Given the vast gulfs that separate, there is no better time for literacy theorists and researchers, now practiced in detailing the successful literate practices that occur out of school, to put their energies toward investigating potential relationships, collaborations, and helpful divisions of labor between schools and formal classrooms and the informal learning that flourishes in a range of settings. Note 1. Most of our vignettes are written in the ethnographic present. We are aware of the dangers of representing people as static, and their situations as perpetual, but have chosen to write in present tense in an effort to make our vignettes more engaging. References Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge. Beaufort, A. (999). Writing in the real world: Making the transition from school to work. New York: Teachers College Press. Brandt, D. (999). Literacy learning and economic change. 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