Multicultural Perspectives on Literacy Research

My goal in this essay is to convey a sense of the broad territory covered by researchers whose work reflects various multicultural perspectives on literacy. Proponents of multicultural education generally consider the key cultures (also called subcultures or microcultures) to be ethnicity or national origin, class, primary language, gender/sex, religion, age, geographic region, urban-suburban-rural, and exceptionality (Gollnick & Chinn, 1990). In a sense, any study addressing any of the variables listed above, in any combination, could be labeled a multicultural study. However, in my view such a broadly inclusive use of the term would not adequately convey the concerns of most researchers who consider their work to be multicultural. Specifically, most of these researchers are concerned with issues of social justice and with improving conditions in schools for students of diverse backgrounds. From this point of view, most researchers with a multicultural perspective tend to focus on issues related to ethnicity, social class, primary language, and gender. The term students of diverse backgrounds is used here to refer to students within the United States whose ethnicity is African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, or Native American; who come from poor and working-class families; and who speak a primary language other than standard American English (Au, 1993). Students of diverse backgrounds may be contrasted with students of mainstream backgrounds. The latter tend to lead more privileged lives, have greater access to what Delpit (1988) calls the culture of power, and generally achieve higher levels of literacy in school (Au, 1993). An adequate treatment of gender issues and of feminist perspectives on literacy is-beyond the scope of this essay. The use of the term ethnicity here is not based on the suspect biological factors typically associated with the term race (Lieberman, Stevenson, & Reynolds, 1989). Instead, ethnicity refers to groups with shared histories and cultural knowledge, for example, African Americans or Chinese Americans. Anthropologists and other social scientists who work with the concepts of ethnicity and culture acknowledge