Re-mediating Literacy: Culture, Difference, and Learning for Students From Nondominant Communities

Abstract

this chapter, we examine notions of educational risk in the context of theories and research. Deficit notions about the cognitive potential of individuals from nondominant1 communities have persisted in social science inquiry, particularly where is concerned. The intellectual trails of current conflicting ideas about can be traced in part to theories about the role of in society. For example, the great divide theories of literacy, sustained by a view of culture as social evolution and progress (Cole, 2005), attributed significant differences to the cognitive and cultural development of literate and nonliterate people and their communities (Goody, 1977, 1986, 1987; Goody & Watt, 1963; Havelock, 1963; Ong, 1982).2 This thesis held that there were categorical differences in cognition and as consequences of (Reder & Davila, 2005, p. 171) differences marked by stark dualities used to characterize literate and nonliterate communities: writing versus orality, modern versus traditional, and educated versus uneducated, for example (Collins, 1995, p. 75). As Reder and Davila (2005) have noted, literacy was presumed to have broad and ubiquitous consequences in such areas as: abstract versus context-dependent uses and genre of language; logical, critical, and scientific versus irrational modes of thought; analytical history versus myth; and so forth (p. 171). These theories of were challenged for their wideranging dichotomies that perpetuated the hierarchical differences between types of societies, modes of thought, and uses of language (p. 171) and reductive notions of culture and thought (Cole & Scribner, 1974, 1977).