Exploring One Colombian Adolescent’s Diverse Literacies in his Rural Community

A deficit view of rural language learners’ out-of-school literacy practices has permeated formal educational and language policy globally. Intergovernmental organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for instance, have often portrayed rural learners in Global South countries as having literacy deficits if their language skills are not in alignment with the practices valued in school contexts. These deficit representations are often instrumentalized as a tactic to oppress and exclude rural students’ literacies and language traditions from educational policy and curricula. Throughout this article, the authors – both language educators researching young people’s diverse literacy practices – aim to address and combat such problematic omissions. Following a sociocultural, multiliteracies framework, we analyzed two semi-structured interviews and accompanying artifacts to feature the literacies that a 14-year-old rural Colombian youth engages with daily. Results illuminate the myriad language practices honed outside of formal learning contexts, including family-based literacies, oral and embodied forms of communication, analyzing and composing with multimodal texts, and developing critical skills with digital texts to question national power relations and forge activist identities. The authors discussed the benefits of an expanded view of literacy – particularly for educators – in hopes of contributing to equity-based research advocating the recognition and inclusion of rural students’ vernacular literacies across formal learning spaces.