Everyday Literacies: Students, Discourse and social practice.

Kerkham, Lyn

Everyday Literacies: Students, Discourse and social practice Michele Knobel Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York 1999, 274pp., $US29.95

Everyday Literacies is a comprehensive exploration of language use and social practices in the everyday lives of four young adolescent primary school students.

In the first two chapters Knobel outlines in careful detail the background and methodology for her study of students, literacies and discourse. She draws on James Gee's D/discourse theory, as well as approaches to sociolinguistic analysis developed by Judith Green, to identify and analyse sets of language and social practices in a range of sites and contexts in which the four students participate.

Beginning with a global comment on `new times', she argues that teachers need to examine closely school reform agendas that link successful literacy learning with entitlements to employment and the economic health of the nation -- a concept which underpins the development of the benchmarks. The `idealized literacy competencies that identify what students should be able to demonstrate' (p. 3), as exemplified in the benchmarks, are evidence of an ever-narrowing and economically motivated definition of what we are currently being asked to construct as literacy in classrooms. Equally implicated is the power of the selective traditions of schooling. By way of foreshadowing questions integral to her investigation, Knobel argues that setting benchmarks, and indeed any standards, begs the questions: Why these competencies? What do students already know and do? What value is their knowledge accorded in their schooling experience? These questions flame the substantive content of the study which explores the relationship between school learning and students' everyday lives and what an effective relationship between them might be.

Designed as an ethnographic multiple case study, Knobel's investigation focusses on the in- and out-of-school lives of two boys and two girls in their final year of primary education. Data were collected over a two-week intensive observation period from as wide a range of sites and contexts as possible through participant observation, field notes, journalistic notes, audiotaping, conversations, semi-structured interviews, case study participant and researcher journals, and personal profile questionnaires (p. 10).

The second chapter is an extensive and readable introduction to sociolinguistics and social constructivism which inform the analysis of the case studies. Making a case for using Gee's theory of D/discourses alongside Green's analytic approach to discourse and ethnographic data, Knobel gives a detailed, representative account of the conceptions and ideas that have shaped her investigation. She elucidates the histories of research endeavours which have brought a focus to theoretical work at the intersection of discourse and language education, and highlights some of the theoretical problems the research leaves unanswered and even unquestioned. For example, she argues (p. 31) that Kress' work `appears to imply direct causal relations between discourse and social practices; that is, if the discourse -- and particularly the linguistic construction of texts -- is changed then (inequitable) social practices will also change (for the better)'.

Knobel is interested in investigating the complexity of interrelationships among discourses, social practices, group membership and social institutions which is unsayable in Kress' theory of Discourse. She argues that Gee's theory enables exploration of multiple social identities and subjectivities in relationship to social practices, language uses and social institutions that promote and constrain them. This helps to interpret what often seems to be contradictory memberships in Discourses enacted by adolescents (such as displays of concurrent membership in academic and street corner Discourses, p. 37).

Considerable attention is given to explicating Gee's conception of Discourse and discourse, primary and secondary Discourse and interrelationships between them, and acquisition and learning. Each of these is important in building the reader's theoretical background for the analysis of the case studies through which dissonances and resonances between school and out-of-school language and social practices, and larger social and historical contexts, are interpreted.

The case studies themselves are presented as brief characterisations of each participant and further detailed `snapshots' of the participants in and out of school and classroom contexts. These snapshots `freeze some of the complexities constituting the various identities' the students take up and highlight the ways in which they lay claim to more than one D/discourse and social identity. For each student there are examples of interactions which identify them as `being a student' in the classroom (the extent to which they take up the Discourse authorised by the teacher and engage in meaningful ways with the content and purpose of teaching and learning), the kinds of relationships and status they enjoy amongst peers in and out of the classroom, and the connections or `disfluency' of social identities they enact in family and community contexts.

Knobel draws attention to the broad range of D/discourses available to students outside the classroom which overlap and often contradict ways of learning, knowing and being in school often unacknowledged by teachers. In fact, `doing school' in some ways seemed to have little relevance to the students: literacy and language learning tended to be associated with instrumental goals or teacher and school purposes.

The complex and dynamic relationships analysed in the case studies emphasise the limited and limiting view of literacy embedded in national literacy standards. Language and literacy competency standards grounded in skills are only a meagre representation of what it means to be literate. Promoting benchmarks as a means of ensuring that all students are able to read, write and spell appropriately by certain ages and directly relating this to their ability to participate fully in society as citizens and workers is `cultural illusion' (p. 198). The cases of Nicholas, Jacques, Layla and Hannah strongly suggest that the relationship between education, employment and citizenship is not so simple nor is it linear.

In her concluding chapter, Knobel includes examples of projects which take into account technological literacy in community-based projects, recommendations for teacher education based on sociocultural theories of language and literacy, and concomitant theories of what that might look like in primary school classrooms.

Everyday Literacies is an outstanding contribution to sociocultural literacy studies and an inspiration to rethink the kind and range of literacy practices promoted in classrooms, and what counts as `being literate'.