English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Volume 10, Number 3 (September 2011): Focus: Literacy(ies) and the Body
Co-editors: Kerryn Dixon (University of Witwatersrand) and Stephanie Jones (University of Georgia) and James Albright (University of Newcastle, School of Education)
Rationale:
Performing
literacy(ies), being regulated through literacies, and perceiving others'
literacies undoubtedly shapes one's embodied experiences of the world.
Concurrently, embodied experiences of the world undoubtedly shape one's
literacy performances, perceptions of literacies, and how one becomes regulated
through literacies. Thus literacies ' ways of perceiving and acting in the
world ' are intimately tied to bodies and bodily performances.
For this
issue, we called for generative, theoretical, narrative, empirical and
practical explorations of the interconnected nature of literacy and the body.
We encouraged submissions drawing on and extending theorists who explicitly
link literacy and the body (for example, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Butler, Foucaut) as well
as submissions making innovative links not yet apparent in the literature. We
recommended that authors avoid overviews of models and theories and how these
might apply to language, literacy and education, but rather work toward new
combinations or applications of theory to expand readers' imaginations around literacy
and the body.
For
example, In 'Systems of education and systems of thought', first published in
1967, Bourdieu (1971, p. 201) outlined his view of the relationship of pedagogy
and linguistic habitus:
'¦all teaching practices implicitly furnish a model of the 'right' mode of intellectual activity; for example, the very nature of the tests set (ranging from the composition, based on the technique of 'development', which is the predominant form in most arts examination, to the 'brief account' required in advanced science examinations), the type of rhetorical and linguistic qualities required and the value attached to these qualities, the relative importance given to written papers and oral examinations, and the qualities required in both instances, tend to encourage a certain attitude towards the use of language ' sparing or prodigal, casual or ceremonious, complacent or restrained. In this way the canons governing school work proper, in composition or exposition, may continue to govern writings apparently freed from the disciplines of the school ' newspaper articles, public lectures, summary reports and works of scholarship.
The
following exemplified our call: Fleckenstein's Embodied
Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching (2003) enlarges the purview
of literacy to include imagery in its many modalities and various facets and
asserts that all meaning, linguistic or otherwise, is a result of the
transaction between image and word. And Phillips and Larson (2009) in 'Embodied
discourses of literacy in the lives of two preservice teachers' examine the
emerging teacher literacy identities of Ian and AJ, two preservice teachers in
a graduate teacher education program in the United States. Using a
poststructural feminisms theoretical framework, this study illustrates the
embodiment of literacy pedagogy discourses in relation to the literacy courses'
discourse of comprehensive literacy and the literacy biographical discourses.
The Editorial Board expresses its gratitude to the guest editors of this issue.