Running Head: INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Interdisciplinarity Essay:

Formal Schooling, Criticality, and Centering Our Students’ Knowledge

Piper Pugh

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Alesha Gayle

EDUC 606: Literacy Theory, Research, and Practice

April 10, 2022

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Introduction

In the 1956 publication of American Anthropology, Horace Mitchell Miner published an

article on a little-known and “poorly understood” tribe living on the North American continent.

In his article, Miner, a purported outsider of the culture, cites key practices and rituals specific to

the tribe, whom he calls the “Nacirema.” In particular, he offers a critical lens of their “magic-

ridden” ways, which include reliance on medicine men and a fascination with rituals to modify,

clean, and purify the human body.

However, the “Nacirema,” the word American spelled backwards, are not a real people;

the practices–intended to bewilder and befuddle a Western reader–are actually representative of

U.S. American culture and values. The rituals–such as going to the doctor, grooming, or

applying make-up–are described from an imaginary outsider’s perspective in order to estrange us

from our routine habits and behaviors. A seminal text in the study of anthropology and

sociology, the article has been used didactically in college classrooms to demonstrate differences

between etic and emic perspectives, to highlight the importance of cultural relativism in the

study of human beings, and to expose our own subjectivity and the deeply embedded cultural

values and worldviews we bring with us to any ethnographic study.

The study of literacy, as researchers and educators, is supplemented by these tenets of

social science. Central to the study of both sociology and anthropology is an attempted

estrangement from self and society–a willingness to adopt a critical lens, both towards society,

and towards the socially and culturally situated selves which filter our realities. These fields, in

addition to linguistics, teach us to adopt a critical lens on that which might otherwise be

considered “fact,” to illuminate the socially produced and constantly manufactured structures of

power that impact how literacy is conceptualized in theory and in sites of learning. In particular,
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the scholarship from these fields allows us to interrogate the centrality of formal education and

schooling in the study of literacy in order to establish and elevate the importance of students’ and

communities’ nonschool literacy practices, knowledge, and methods of learning.

Where Does Learning Take Place?

In the US, we generally accept that to become “educated” or “literate” is tied to going to

school. Our society situates school as the central site of learning, and it is therefore endowed

with significant power (Levinson & Holland, 1996). Williams (1985) uses etymology to

complicate this association. In outlining the history of the word “educate,” Williams considers

how the word, one strongly associated with the teaching profession, previously existed

separately from outright, organized education, instruction, or teaching. He traces “to educate”

back to the Latin root “educare,” meaning to “rear, “to foster,” or “to bring up children.” The act

of “educating” was not specialized or classroom-specific; education was not seen as mediated by

the school. Instead, it was understood as embedded in the family, and in the community, too.

Investigating this root is crucial to my understanding of what counts as literacy and what counts

as “literate.” It compels me to look reflexively upon our field and wonder: Where do we, as

educators, believe that meaningful literacy education and practices happen? What type of

learning and literacy do we understand as valid? What histories of power are implicated?

Learning from the Social Sciences

Anthropologists and sociologists of education reiterate the claim that learning is not

only mediated by classroom involvement or formal school environments. Educational

anthropologist Bourgois (1996) criticized his field’s “arbitrary focus on a single institution–the
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school” and its tendency to conflate formal schooling with education and learning. Levinson

(1999) echoes a similar claim, suggesting that peer-driven learning, and “the kind of incidental

learning” that occurs in and outside of schools, is not often regarded as significant, both in

scholarship and in practice. This occurs–and is especially dangerous–because “schools privilege

certain forms of symbolic capital,” so not everyone’s knowledge or literacy practices are seen

as equally important or valid within educational spaces, especially nonwhite and minoritized

students. Levinson and Holland (1996) poignantly argue that schools “are given the mandate to

culturally produce an ‘educated person’ according to power-laden criteria of knowledge,” criteria

that privileges White, middle-class norms and students. This assertion illuminates both the

centrality of school institutions in assigning “educatedness” or literacy status, and the ineffability

and malleability of these definitions, which can be mobilized to perpetuate oppression and

control when the “knowledge” deemed valuable is restricted or more relevant to certain,

dominant groups (Nieto, 1999; Levinson, 1999).

Through this lens, we as literacy scholars can critique the central role of formal schooling

in our conceptualization of literacy education. Institutionalized education is granted the authority

to catalyze a person’s distinction as “literate,” or as a good or bad student (McDermott, 2007).

Without criticizing the power granted to school, we as educators and literacy scholars will not be

able to take up the work of noticing our students’ funds of knowledge, centralizing student and

community literacy practices, and elevating these practices with formal, sanctioned ones (Moll

et al., 1992). Because “most learning happens in homes, in neighborhoods, and at jobs,” we can

assume that the majority of literacy learning and engagement occurs outside the walls of school

(McDermott & Raley, 2005). This suggests a need for a heightened emphasis on the

ethnographic study of community literacy practices, and centralizing them in our classroom.
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In literacy, just as anthropology, we need to actively conduct scholarship that complicates

schooling’s status as the dominant site of learning. This work supports the dismantling of deficit

perspectives and helps build a school space in which students’ full selves and range of literate

practices can exist and be fostered in the classroom. Moll et al. (1992; 2006) argue that “the

educational process can be greatly enhanced when teachers learn about their students’ everyday

lives.” Their seminal argument, based on large-scale ethnographic research into students’ lives,

households, and communities, they argue that students possess large “funds of knowledge,” and

that educators must centralize the role of students’ lives in daily classroom learning, to validate

children and adolescents’ at-home literacy practices, and to disprove deficit thinking. Campano

and Vasudevan (2009) mobilized this theory in opposition to emergent bilingual learners’

“nonschool languages and literacies” being treated as “deficits to be corrected.” Their research

interrogates how power and privilege operate within schools–and arbitrarily privilege certain

kinds of knowledge; their practice seeks to disrupt this power by centralizing students’

experiences and knowledge.

Sharing the tools of other disciplines is integral for understanding how literacy practices

and events are situated in historical, social, and cultural contexts. Tools like reflexivity enable us

to understand how education, which we hope and imagine to be a pathway for hope, can also be

a conduit of control, an institution that can preserve and reproduce power structures. It is through

being critical of the role of these institutions–as well as the role of literacy–that will enable us to

imagine and reimagine environments that foster learning and honor and hone our students’

unique literacy practices.

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References

Bourgois, Philippe (1996). Confronting Anthropology, Education, and Inner-City Apartheid.

American Anthropologist, 98(2):249.

Collins, James, and Richard Blot. Literacy and Literacies : Texts, Power, and Identity,

Cambridge University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central,

http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=217835.

González, N., Moll, L. C., and Amanti, C. (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in

households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge.

Lave, Jean (1996). Teaching, as Learning. Practice, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3:3, 149-164.

Levinson, Bradley A., (1999). Resituating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology.

American Anthropologist, 101(3): 594-604.

Levinson, Bradley A., and Dorothy C. Holland (1996). The Cultural Production of the Educated

Person: An Introduction. The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical

Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice. Pp. 1-54. Albany: State University of

New York Press.

McDermott, R & Raley, D. (2007). Teachers College Record, Volume 109, Number 7, 2007, p.

1820-1835.

Miner, Horace (1956). Body Ritual among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist, 58 (3). pp.

503-507.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching:

Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31,

132-141.
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Nieto, Sonia. (1999). The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. New

York: Teachers College Press.

Vasudevan, Lalitha, and Campano, Gerald (2009). The Social Production of Adolescent Risk and

the Promise of Adolescent Literacies. Review of Research in Education, 33:310.

Williams, Raymond (1985). Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford

University Press.