LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND POWER IN SCHOOLING. Teresa L. McCarty
(Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xxvi + 317. $34.50 paper.
The ways in which macro factors of global socioeconomic power shape
micro language/literacy interactions in education have increasingly
gained attention in applied linguistics research. This volume, which
emerged from an American Anthropological Association symposium in 1999,
sets out to examine this dialectic through the lens of critical
ethnographic research. In her introduction, McCarty draws on the new
literacy studies paradigm to challenge dichotomizing discourses—oral
versus literate, literate versus illiterate, monolingual versus
bilingual—as well as current calls for standardization, homogeneity,
and universalist approaches to language and literacy education. Instead,
the editor situates the volume within a social practices framework, which
emphasizes the multiplicity and variability of literacy practices shaped
by context, power, culture, and purpose.