The Why & the Wherefore

The blog title—Culture, Literacy, and Education—sounds so ponderous and academic, yet all three terms are rooted in our day-to-day existence. We read, write, and learn and, in doing so, we develop understandings of our selves and everything and everyone around us. Who we are becoming is dependent upon who we have been. What we will experience owes greatly to that which we have already done. The ways we will engage texts tomorrow cannot be separated from how we engaged texts yesterday. How we will construct our selves and others in the coming days, months, and years is connected to how we have constructed self and others in the past.

This blog represents the efforts of one group of learners who, during the short space of one semester, tried to deepen and nuance their understandings of how issues connected to culture and literacy play out in working classrooms. By looking at culture through the lenses of our own experiences, everyday literacies, theory, and teaching, we—preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and doctoral students—have sought to call our own beliefs into question as we also critiqued the many texts we accessed.

This blog is not about having complex issues of race, class, gender, sexual identity and other sociocultural factors rendered superficially or completely figured out. Instead it is about ideas in process. Each of us has thought deeply about what issues of culture and literacy mean for us as learners, teachers, parents, teacher educators, researchers, and citizens in an imperfect, but practicing democracy. We invite you to engage in our thoughts, knowing that what we write here remains in a continual process of becoming.