Completed Cross-Case Analyses

These cross-case analyses have been completed using data from the CPLS Database. More information about each analysis, including links to Working Papers associated with each case, can be found by clicking on the links within each case description.

Resistance and Appropriation: Literacy Practices as Agency within Hegemonic Contexts

Principal Investigators: Kristen H. Perry & Victoria Purcell-Gates, Michigan State University This early analysis of the nascent CPLS database offers a more complex view of hegemony by exploring issues of agency within hegemonic contexts.  Language and literacy scholars have increasingly recognized the ways in which issues of power relate to language and literacy practices.  However, the current conception of hegemony is problematic; it views hegemony as singular, views subjects as “mystified”, and leads to ideological determinism.  The concept of agency, on the other hand, suggests that actors have an awareness of power relationships and that they are able to act in ways that can challenge or even weaken hegemonic systems.  In this analysis, we explored three research questions: (1) What evidence is there that dominated groups exhibit agency through their language and literacy practices?, (2) What types of agency do these practices reflect?, and (3) What do these literacy practices suggest about the construct of hegemony? About the relationship between hegemony and agency?  The methodology for this study involved a cross-case study of 7 ethnographic case studies from the Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) (Purcell-Gates, 2007).  The methods involved inferring agentive practices from a variety of data sources and coding those acts by category of agentive practice.  Analysis revealed two agentive responses to hegemony: (1) overt or covert resistance, where agents somehow reject or resist hegemonic discourses, practices, and ideologies; and (2) appropriation, where agents transform hegemonic practices for their own purposes.  Overt resistance occurred largely in cases where hegemonic structures were indirect and allowed for resistance; covert resistance occurred in cases where that structure was direct, apparent, and strong.  Appropriation, the highest proportion of agentive acts, often was driven by political purposes.  These patterns suggest that hegemonies are either direct or diffuse.  Direct hegemonies have an apparent power structure, and easily identifiable subjugated groups.  These hegemonies do not allow room for overt resistance, thus rendering resistance covert, and there are relatively few appropriations.  Diffuse hegemonies have a less apparent power structure.  They allow more room for overt resistance, and exhibit relatively high amounts of appropriation.  Hegemony and agency, therefore, seem to be mutually constitutive aspects of an overall system

Functional Literacy Practices among People with Limited or No Formal Schooling

Principal Investigators: Kristen H. Perry & Annie Homan, University of Kentucky This project represents a cross-case analysis of the CPLS database, with a focus on the literacy practices of participants with little, if any, experience of formal schooling. We investigated two questions: (1) In what literacy practices do adults with limited or no schooling engage for personal fulfillment? and (2) What do these practices reveal about the nature of literacy for individuals who are often characterized as illiterate? Data came from 92 participants across 13 case studies from Africa and the Americas in the CPLS database.  We queried the database to identify (a) the social activity domains in which participants read or wrote, and (b) their purposes for doing so, then narrowed our analysis to practices related to personal fulfillment (i.e., practices that were clearly for themselves and/or for personal expression, self-understanding, and/or identity).  We categorized purposes into themes, contextualized the practices within the original ethnographic data, identified participants representing “rich cases”, compiled participant portraits, and developed coding schemes to examine data for patterns.  Participants across worldwide contexts read and wrote for a variety of personal purposes, including coping with life, facing problems, or escaping their daily realities, or for entertainment.  Practices often connected with spiritual or religious life domains or with participants’ attempts to make sense of their lives.  An important theme across practices and contexts was participants’ marginalized status, reflecting the ways in which practices connected with other aspects of context.  Our findings challenge current understandings of the ways in which those assumed to be illiterate or low-literate practice literacy, suggesting implications for redefining functional literacy and for adult literacy instruction.

“To learn about science”: Real life scientific literacy across multicultural communities

Principal Investigators: Adriana Briseño-Garzón, Kristen Perry, & Victoria Purcell-Gates Much of the current research on scientific literacy focuses on particular text genres read by students within the classroom context. We offer a cross-case analysis of literacy as social practice in multicultural communities around the world, through which we reveal that individuals with no formal education at all, as well as people with varied levels of schooling completed, customarily and actively engage in scientific literacy events as part of their everyday lives. We argue that these outcomes substantiate the notion that multiple ways of being scientifically literate actually exist, and that scientific literacy in its most fundamental sense is crucial in science education, despite the fact that definitions and notions of scientific literacy have predominantly considered its derived sense (Norris & Phillips, 2003).