Writing for their lives: The non-school literacy of California's urban African American youth

Journal of Negro Education, The, Spring 1996 by Jabari Mahiri, Soraya Sablo

Mahiri (1994b) asserts that some African American youth have both intensive engagements and significant competencies in a variety of literacy practices in out-of-school settings, specifically settings within their home communities. He argues, however, that "a better link must be made between what schools hold as important and meaningful and what. . . youths find meaningful in their daily lives" (p. 144).

Purpose of the Study

This article discusses and analyzes the voluntary writings of two urban African American high school students whose work we-the researchers and our cooperating focal teachers-believe reflect significant types and uses of non-school literacy. This study was initiated because, in our overall quest to look at ways that African American and youth culture could be used as a bridge to writing development, we wanted to learn more about the kinds of writing these students do for their own purposes outside of school. Thus, one of the key objectives of this research was to explore aspects of the motivations, functions, genres, and themes of these students' voluntary writing and of the knowledge they bring to it.

Five questions guided this research. Two of these questions came directly from Street's (1993) discussion of considerations that much previous research on literacy acquisition has failed to take into account. First, it "has failed to take account of how the people themselves 'actually think about literacy"'; and second, Street maintains, it has failed to consider "how they apply their literacy skills in their day-to-day lives" (p. 3). Although Street was addressing research on literacy acquisition in previously nonliterate cultures, critical questions for the present research study were what the two focal students actually thought about their productions and performances of various kinds of texts, and how these literacy events actually functioned in their daily lives. Additionally, we wanted to know what specific genres and themes patterned their literacy practices and what kinds of oral/written connections were revealed in their choices of genres and themes (i.e., the nature of the "mix" of oral and written texts). Finally, we sought to assess the implications these voluntary, out-of-school literacy practices could have for instruction and schooling in the classroom setting.

RESEARCHING WRITING BEYOND SCHOOL

Our basic lens for looking at out-of-school literacy production was Heath's (1982) concept of "literacy events" as "any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants' interactions and their interpretive processes" (p. 350). Street's (1993) concept of "literacy practices" widened our focus to include "both behaviour and conceptualisations related to the use of reading and/or writing" (p. 12). According to Street, "'Literacy practices' incorporate not only 'literacy events' as empirical occasions to which literacy is integral, but also 'folk models' of those events and the ideological preconceptions that underpin them" (p. 12-13). Therefore, our focus on the out-of-school production of written texts attempts to account for literacy skills and literate behaviors associated with those productions as well as the value, conceptions, and functions of those productions inside specific sociocultural contexts. Augmenting this focus, we suggest a conception of literacy in sociocultural contexts as skills applied to the production of meaning in or from text in a context. In this conception, the nature and function of skill, production, meaning, and text may vary significantly within different contexts.