Introduction | Sequence | Religion in Composition Classrooms | Sharing Others' Stories | Multiple Media | Multiple Cultures | Case Studies | Anonymous | Lauren Goldstein | Charissa Coleman Muhammad | Elizabeth Jones | Final Thoughts
The second dimension of a multiliteracies pedagogical framework embraces multiple cultural perspectives and contexts. Literacy studies has provided a rich array of sources for investigating diverse literacies and voices both inside and outside the classroom (Brandt, Cintron, Gee, Gere, Heath, Kinloch, Moss, Peck et al., Selfe and Hawisher 2004, Smitherman, Street, Timbur). Scholars in this area have especially provided models for using stories to encounter diverse voices and marked identities (Miller) in pedagogical contexts: to engage students on multiple cognitive and affective levels (Schneider 921); to foreground real people’s stories in ways that challenge preconceived beliefs (Delpit 1313); to identify gaps in and add nuance to the narratives of powerful discourses (Webb-Sunderhaus 1601); and to “unmask truth” through deceptively simple narrative forms (Royster 1122). As Selfe [STSTU] et al. note, stories are not only “powerful ways of telling our literate selves into being” but also “a potent means of conveying information about the historical and cultural contexts of literate activities and values” (“Cultural 1”) –and thus potentially key tools for examining a culturally situated phenomenon such as religion through the lens of one individual’s literate experiences.
In examining the materially situated, culturally contextualized facets of religion (Vasquez) this assignment sequence draws on a “vernacular religious literacy” approach. Such a frame is strongly inspired by Primiano’s approach to “vernacular religion” as a methodology within folklore studies, which places the emphasis strongly on individual creativity and agency in responding to and deploying the resources of a religious tradition in their everyday practice [cite both Primiano articles]. I seek to draw attention to the source narrators’ diverse, self-defined experiences, understandings, and practices of religion as part of their everyday literate practices, rather than necessarily on questions of institutional orthodoxy or held beliefs. A vernacular religious literacy approach has already been implemented within literacy studies by George and Salvatori to explore religious literacy approaches in extracurricular contexts [expand as needed], and I hope this current project will serve as a way of adapting “vernacular religion” as a useful framework for addressing religion in pedagogical contexts such as the composition classroom. Though religion has received less attention than other identity categories such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation (Deans 422), I hope that the vernacular approach to religious literacy outlined here (highlighting religion as a lived, creative, material, embodied phenomenon) opens up new possibilities for exploring religious identity as part of a web of complex material factors (Wysocki 2004a, p. 2) that influence literate practices.