Introduction

For these four women, religion plays a significant role in their experiences and practices of literacy. However, these religious dimensions of their experiences can often be very challenging to address in a composition classroom setting. As a discipline, composition studies has historically had a hard time figuring out how to address religious topics in classroom contexts, and perhaps with good reason—religion is something that is very deeply personal on many levels, and something around which strong feelings can be generated, and it’s not something to be thrown around lightly. At the same time, literacy studies has helped to provide us with frameworks for addressing culturally situated literacies, especially through storytelling, and especially those related to deeply held diverse personal identities/voices. Moreover, digital media and embodied approaches to composition (combined with vernacular religion frames) can help us to account for embodied/lived experiences/material/culturally situated dimensions of religion in ways that the discipline has in the past deliberately effaced in favor of more abstract discussions of spirituality (without regarding the historical/material conditions that frequently significantly influence an individual’s experiences, understandings of, and approach to spirituality).

In this project/chapter, I offer a theoretical framework for an assignment sequence using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives to engage religious dimensions of literacy in the composition/composing classroom using [adaptive remediation/vernacular religion]. I also consider the ethical dimensions and challenges of such an assignment. I then perform this framework by applying it to four case studies that remediate the four narratives introduced at the beginning, as examples for potential ways in which this assignment might actually be carried out. [[I close with a series of questions exploring/opening up pathways for how [a vernacular/material approach to] religion can help us shed light on our understandings of literacy that take into account multiple media forms]] Ultimately, my hope and goal is to offer a vocabulary for addressing religious topics in composition classroom settings in a way that embraces both dimensions of multiliteracies (multiple media and multiple cultures) in order to open up space in our classrooms for a richly diverse array of voices from which we [as composition and literacy instructors] have much to learn.