Abstract

This article examines students’ literacy practices during Mass and other Catholic religious services in a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It discusses three dimensions of their literacy practice: (a) how parents, teachers, and priests draw on the tradition of Catholic schooling and ritual to structure what constitutes literacy during Mass; (b) how students use body posture and performative orientations to the text of the liturgy to engage in these structured practices; and (c) how students strategically use these performative literacy practices for advantage and social positioning. These results invite complicating what literacy practices are valued in contemporary urban Catholic school and how opportunities to draw on these literacy practices are unequally distributed among students for unequal gain.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2015-07-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088315587904
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. Written Communication
  2. Technical Communication Quarterly

References (74) · 5 in this index

  1. The ethnography of reading
  2. The dialogic imagination
  3. The natural history of discourse
  4. 10.1515/TEXT.2009.014
  5. 10.1017/CBO9780511845307
Show all 74 →
  1. 10.2307/747928
  2. 10.1017/CBO9780511812507
  3. 10.1515/9781503621558
  4. 10.1515/9781503615427
  5. Pascalian meditations
  6. An invitation to reflexive sociology
  7. 10.7208/chicago/9780226122144.001.0001
  8. The contemporary Catholic school: Context, identity, and diversity
  9. Research in the Teaching of English
  10. 10.58680/la201323569
    Language Arts  
  11. 10.1016/S0898-5898(00)00032-2
  12. High school achievement: Public, Catholic, and private schools compared
  13. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology
  14. On the case
  15. 10.1598/RRQ.42.4.3
  16. Religion and the new immigrants: Continuities and adaptation in immigrant congregations
  17. 10.1017/CBO9781107049963
  18. 10.1525/aeq.2004.35.4.486
  19. Language in action: New studies of language in society
  20. 10.1075/dapsac.20.03fis
  21. 10.1111/j.1548-1492.2010.01084.x
  22. Forms of talk
  23. New York Times
  24. Reshaping ethnic and racial relations in Philadelphia: Immigrants in a divided city
  25. Ethnography and language in educational contexts
  26. Bourdieu and education: Acts of practical theory
  27. 10.17763/haer.65.3.r16146n25h4mh384
  28. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  29. 10.1007/BF00128461
  30. 10.1017/CBO9780511841057
  31. On ethnography
  32. Identity and agency in cultural worlds
  33. Urban Catholic education: Tales of twelve American cities
  34. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice
  35. Written Communication
  36. 10.1075/swll.2
  37. Recent immigration to Philadelphia
  38. 10.1177/016146811011200906
    Teachers College Record  
  39. 10.1111/aeq.12015
  40. The cultural production of the educated person
  41. Written Communication
  42. 10.1177/016146810911100302
    Teachers College Record  
  43. 10.1016/0898-5898(92)90021-N
  44. Constructing critical literacies
  45. MacGregor C. A. (2012). School’s out forever: The decline of Catholic education in the United States (Unpubli…
  46. Literacy, economy, and power
  47. 10.4159/harvard.9780674420106
  48. 10.1515/TEXT.2008.033
  49. Anthropology of learning in childhood
  50. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies
  51. 10.1080/01419870.2012.664279
  52. US Catholic elementary and secondary schools, 2013-2014: Annual statistical report on sch…
  53. Translating childhoods: Immigration, youth, language, and culture
  54. 10.1017/CBO9780511486722
  55. Methodological foundations in linguistic ethnography
  56. The spirit of the liturgy
  57. 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00542.x
  58. 10.1017/S0047404513000250
  59. Classroom discourse analysis
  60. 10.1002/rrq.65
  61. 10.1016/j.linged.2007.04.001
  62. Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques
  63. Literacy in theory and in practice
  64. Global Philadelphia: Immigrant communities, old and new
  65. Best practices for shared parishes
  66. Urban Catholic education: The best of times, the worst of times
  67. Written Communication
  68. Literacy, culture, and development: Becoming literate in Morocco
  69. Learning and identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning