As we shift from an industry to an information-based economy, headlines proclaiming a skilled worker shortage abound. In response, workplace literacy programs are hastily sprouting up at community colleges and in the backrooms of corporations. In order to respond ethically to the literacy crisis at hand, however, this project argues that we must first understand the communities, the history of crises, and the contexts for which literate skills are to be applied. In that vein, this project looks back at history to see how people before responded to similar literacy crises and uses their responses to help us ethically proceed during this current climate of educational and economic crisis.
Through ethnography, this project tells the stories of Italian immigrants who sought entry into the United States booming industrial economy and who were falsely told that English-language literacy was a necessity for employment and cultural acceptance. By exploring Italys history, educational structure, and the impact of WWII on the participants literacy practices, the first part of the dissertation focuses on the education these immigrants brought with them, showing that literacy sponsorship is not always economically determined nor sought for social mobility. Analyzing popular rhetoric regarding the arrival of Italian immigrants, the second section focuses on the creation and perpetuation of the literacy myth and its ethnocentric underpinnings. The third section compares the adult education programs created for immigrants within Cleveland, OH with the participants accounts of their development of literacy skills and strategies within the same city, revealing that most of the immigrants' learning took place within their own community, rather than in the schools. Further, it illustrates that the participants limited use of the English language did not exempt them from social mobility nor stem from ignorance or false consciousness, but was an act of cultural resistance. The final section uses the conclusions drawn in previous chapters to call for composition and rhetoric scholars to engage in working class issues through activist ethnographic research, rhetorical analyses of claims of literacy crises and portrayals of the working class as illiterate, and the development of ethical pedagogical strategies for adult learners.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-07192007-094231 |
| Date | 19 July 2007 |
| Creators | Parente, Cassandra Marie |
| Contributors | Charlotte Hogg |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-07192007-094231/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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