Advancing a Sociocultural Approach to Decolonizing Literacy Education: Lessons from a Youth in a "Postcolonial" Caribbean Geography.

This article is based on a study in which the authors served as literacy teachers-researchers across 4 months with a group of six youths at a school on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. We present a case of one student-participant, asking, how did the youth respond to an "Inquiry into Literate Lives" unit and an independent reading unit that were guided by a sociocultural approach to literacy instruction? Qualitative data include interviews, classroom observations, and documents and artifacts. Theories of literacy as practice, postcolonialism/decolonization, and globalization guide analysis. Findings include that the youth: (1) engaged in the "Literate Lives" unit in ways that enabled her to author her identity to herself and others in the classroom community as a highly multiliterate person across local and global contexts; (2) used the instructional units to generate an identity shift to herself, her peers, and teachers as a "serious person," which included being seen as a serious student; and (3) began her own process of decolonization by exercising choice, agency, and resistance pertaining to the literacy instruction we implemented. We conclude by conceptualizing how decolonizing literacy pedagogies may strengthen student agency and identity, thus advancing the goals of sociocultural approaches to literacy instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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