Scaling as a Literacy Activity

Mobility and Educational Inequality in an Age of Global Connectivity

Datos Bibliográficos

ID13683090
AutoresAmy Stornaiuolo (0000-0003-0633-7117, University of Pennsylvania, autor de correspondencia), Robert J Leblanc (0000-0001-7551-9286, University of Pennsylvania)
Año2017
Volumen50
Número3
Páginas263-287
Fecha de publicación2017-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaResearch in the Teaching of English (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0034-527X • E-ISSN: 1943-2348
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.58680/rte201728160
OpenAlexW2623361546
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas23
Referencias citadas16

This article takes up an area of central concern for educators in an era of global connectivity: howto account for the mobility of people, texts, and practices while simultaneously addressing persistent educational inequalities. In attending to the ways people participate in unequal globalized contexts,even educational contexts constructed to bring students and teachers together, we examine how resources such as time, space, materials, national identity, genre, and language are all unequally distributed and unequally ordered in various hierarchies. We propose the notion of scale to offer literacy researchers a flexible conceptual tool with which to examine educational inequities by capturing how movement and mobility are not simple processes of relocation; rather, literacies and texts are always dynamically constructed in relation to hierarchical orders of varying spatial and temporal dimensions. Through multisited ethnography, we engage in a scalar analysis of teachers’ cross-cultural collaborations to illustrate how they produced various categories of space and time (e.g., local, national, global) through routine literacy engagements. In explaining how different scales are invoked, implicated, and constructed in interaction, we find that participants engaged in six scalar moves-upscaling, downscaling, aligning, contesting, anchoring, and embedding-and offer these in response to the pressing need to develop sensitive analytical toolsthat can bring to the surface the ways inequalities are inscribed in literacy practices and texts.Implications of conceptualizing scaling as literacy activity include disrupting smooth narratives of global connectedness in educational collaborations and highlighting the multiscalar nature of all literacy practice

Critical literacy · Inequality · Linguistics · Literacy · Narrative · Pedagogy · Social connectedness · Sociology · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Literacy, Media, and Education · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology · Social Psychology