Waypoints for literacy researchers: boundary tracing, historicizing, and enacting critical equity literacies

ABSTRACT

Critical literacy-focused messaging is already propelling place-based meaning-making in communities and streets. Literacy researchers must be part of this public development and revelation. Authors share learning from two longitudinal, publicly-engaged ethnographic projects in different Midwestern United States communities to offer waypoints key to understanding communities’ social and spatial processes in highly segregated (by social class and race) locales. Building on key understandings around precarity and responsibility, place in research, and community-based critical equity literacy, these studies reinforce relentlessly examining places people live, grow up, and attend schools bound by values-laden and material geographic touchpoints that mobilize and produce inequities. These acts of placemaking position literacy research and researchers' role as imperative in informing future policy decisions and advocacy for equity with a “precariat” public and offer the layered approaches and multiple perspectives necessary for justice-based work where findings produced will resonate and matter for the publics we serve.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical literacy
• equity
• geography
• qualitative methodology
• postcritical ethnography
• collaborative ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

Human Subjects Office of Research Compliance, Indiana University (#1603124771F001) Purdue University Human Research Protection Program, Purdue University (#1,812,021,480 and #1,812,021,479)

Additional information

Funding

Purdue University

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Panos

Alexandra Panos is an assistant professor of Literacy Studies and affiliate faculty in Measurement and Research at the University of South Florida. A former middle grades English Language Arts teacher, Dr. Panos takes an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach in her research on the spatial and critical dimensions of literacy and qualitative inquiry methodologies.

Christy Wessel-Powell

Christy Wessel-Powell is an assistant professor of Literacy & Language Education in the department of Curriculum & Instruction at Purdue University. Her research focuses on literacy and equity in schools and across communities, through collaborative and often unavoidably political work. Dr. Wessel-Powell is also a former K-2 teacher.

Regina Weir

Regina Weir earned her Ph.D. in special education from Indiana University Bloomington and currently serves as the director of an alternative education program in Martinsville, Indiana. Regina engages in community-based research that focuses on school equity and family/community well-being.

Casey Pennington

Casey Pennington is a PhD Candidate in the Literacy, Culture & Language Education Department at Indiana University. Her research is focused on community-based interests and needs emphasizing youth’s outside of school embodied and spatialized literacy practices.