Community Literacy: Commodifying Children's Spaces

Across families of many cultures, literacy is used in a wide variety of ways.Literacy is described as a set of social and cultural practices, not simply a skill learned through formal schooling and detached from other social constructs (Street, 1984(Street, , 1995)).Family life is a distinct domain for literacy that is intricately woven into the everyday stream of activities where the purposes, values, and the roles families take may differ from the cultural capital required by the formal literacy that children need for success in schooling (Gates, 1997;Heath, 1983; Hicks, 2000; Purcell-Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988;Valdés, 1996;Wason-Ellam, 2001), a space outside of the private, vernacular literacies of family and the community.Although literacy learning occurs in the family's immediate environment, it cannot be considered apart from the community spaces that connect the family across boundaries or the overlapping social world of relationships and texts that are embedded within the community (Moje, 2000).Community literacy appears to be a complex and dynamic dimension comprising a family's social, geographical, and economic spaces and the extent to which those spaces may be affected by the family members' access to services, resources, and information.Other researchers expand the notion of literacy in community spaces as focusing on the social and cultural capital that literacy affords (Bourdieu, 1986), the funds of knowledge that families possess (Moll, 1992), the community influences, (Neuman & Celano, 2001) or the vernacular literacies, that is, the household-centered social networks across which families share resources, skills, and local knowledge that are articulated in the community (Barton & Hamilton, 1998).In this sense, c.Language and Literacy.2004.6(1).www.educ.queensu.ca/~landl 2 community literacies are the local and the globally situated practices that become the building blocks of learning as they underpin and support the more valued literacies that schools teach.Often, community literacy is described as reading documents such as signs, notices, posters, advertisements, letters, or schedules of recreational activities.Or it may be the reading practice associated with participation in neighborhood activities or cultural events in libraries, book stores, and childcare centers.Embedded within these intersecting practices are opportunities for children to learn and develop through observation and apprenticeship (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as they see others within the community use reading and writing in their daily lives for a variety of purposes.At present, what community literacy research may not make explicit is changing layers of literacy located in the "kid networks" (Nespor, 1997) or child-centred spaces.These layers of literacy and layers of community serve as a powerful role in children's learning and are articulated through a variety of interactive linkages.The layers flourish in the decontextualized spaces found in representations (books, games, leisure activities) and the virtual spaces transmitted through technologies (television, films, computers, and videos).Whether shopping in the community or watching television, children access layers of literacy globally from media spaces often embodied with inanimate elements.Sometimes it may be a book linked to a television show such as Dora the Explorer, a media character toy from the Disney movie, Finding Nemo, or a Nintendo game, Super Mario that connects the child to a virtual reality.From this perspective, the question to ask about community literacy practices is how do children engage in social and cultural activities that involve texts that are spread across mass distributed images or representational spaces (Nespor, 1997, p. 169) within virtual communities and readily become integral to home literacy practices?c.Language and Literacy.2004.6(1).www.educ.queensu.ca/~landl

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