Making “Makin’ It” Possible:
Developing Critical Literacy
Elizabeth Birr Moje
University of
Michigan
William T. Grant
Scholars Retreat
June 2005
You should write a book, and you
should call your book, On the Streets of
Detroit, no, Underneath the Streets of
Detroit. You should write about what
we, what the people who live here, think
of the city, not the police or the high
society, but the people who really live
here.
[Ramiro, Ethnographic Interview, 2003]
When people go to Hart Plaza for the
Mexican festival or to Cinco de Mayo, the
tourists only come and see the parade or
go to the food booths, but they don’t see
the real meanings underneath it, they
don’t understand it.
Overarching Project Goals
 To document and analyze how youth use and
learn literate practices and various kinds of
texts


to learn content knowledge
to develop and enact identities
 To integrate youth literacy and cultural practices
with in-school literacy learning
 To provide a space for youth voices
Everyday funds of knowledge
and discourse: Youth culture,
popular culture, ethnic culture
Disciplinary knowledge and
discourse: Science and
Language Arts
*content knowledge
Youths
Families
Peers
*literacy and language
practices
*identity development and
strategic enactment
*awareness of oppression
and collective struggle
*opportunities for action
that benefits youth and
communities
Community-Based Organizations
Schools
Research Design and Foci
 Eight-year community ethnography in
predominantly Latino/a community of Detroit
 Basic
•
•
•
•
Research Component
Youth literate practices
Youth cultural, popular cultural, and school texts
Youth national language practices
Youth identity enactments and development
– Developmental and spatial analyses
• Youth literacy motivations and skills
 Intervention
Research Component
• Social action and critical literacy projects
Data Sources & Participants
 School observations: Latino/a middle- and high-
school students observed and informally interviewed
in school classrooms 2-3 times per week, each week,
for 7 years (n = 300)
 In-depth, semi-structured interviews: Latino/a youth
(n = 65), ages 12-20
 Community mapping: 2 formal maps; routine
ethnographic mapping; youth-constructed maps
 Artifact collection (drawings, stickers, books,
clothing)
Data Sources & Participants
 Ethnographic observations and Interviews: Latino/a youth (n
= 15), ages 12-20, followed over 5-7 years
 Informal and formal unstructured interviews: Parents,
teachers, community leaders (n = 18)
 Surveys: 6th, 8th, and 9th grade students at 3 public schools
and 1 private school (n = 350; targeted n = 775)


Latino/a, African American, European American, Native American
Additional samples in Boston, MA & Austin, TX; national sample via NCTE
Analysis Methods
 Constant Comparative Analysis
 Discourse Analyses
 Narrative Analysis
 Hierarchical Linear Modeling
 Cluster Analyses
Findings of the Basic Research Component
 These youth are strategic as they use literacy and
language practices to position themselves and to
enact particular identities.
 Racial/ethnic identities are, by far, the most salient
identities in their everyday lives
 Popular cultural texts (and information
technologies) play a prominent role in youths’
negotiations of ethnic/racial/class and affinity
group identity.
Findings of the Basic Research
Component
 Middle-school aged youth in the study read a wide
number of texts, but have few extended encounters
with print prose (i.e., little book reading)
 As youth have aged, they’ve begun to read more
books (girls) and newspapers/Internet sites (males)

HR cluster analysis.ppt
 Youth find books they consider “real” most
appealing; real does not necessarily connote nonfiction
Exemplar: Popular cultural texts
The Homies are a group of tightly knit Chicano
buddies who have grown up in the Mexican
American barrio (neighborhood ) of "Quien Sabe", (
who knows ) located in East Los Angeles. The four
main characters are Hollywood, Smiley, Pelon, and
Bobby Loco.
Their separate and distinct personalities and
characteristics together make up a single, composite
entity that is the "HOMIES." In an inner-city
world plagued by poverty, oppression, violence,
and drugs, the Homies have formed a strong and
binding cultural support system that enables
them to overcome the surrounding negativity and
allows for laughter and good times as an anecdote
for reality. The word "Homies" itself is a popular
street term that refers to someone from your
hometown or, in a broader sense, anyone that you
would acknowledge as your friend. In use in the
West Coast Latino community for decades, the word
"Homies" has crossed over into the now mainstream
Hip-Hop street culture that has taken America's
young people by storm.
-Dave Gonzales [creator of Homies]
Exemplar: Popular cultural texts
I2: So what do they express about being Mexican? What do you
think they express? Is there anything in particular that’s part of
the point?
M: The way Mexicans live . . . . Or things like sometimes these
people become what they are because of problems they face.
So yeah, that’s what they explain why they are the way they
describe them. . . .
I2: So the thing that makes them all what they are is that they tell
you something about—
M: --The background of the people.
I2: The background of the people. But they’re supposed to be
inspiring? They’re supposed to be inspirational? Like people
whose stories, they’ve overcome something difficult?
M: Yeah, because they have graduation or overcoming everything.
They tell you to finish school, and stay cool and all that stuff.
Stay out of drugs. Some of them try to take a message to the
people.
Findings
 Young people’s understandings of ethnic and
racial selves are changing as they encounter
new identity contexts (i.e., physical or
geographic spaces, relationships, and time
periods)
Movement across geographic spaces takes them into
“contact zones”
 Popular cultural texts (i.e., books and mass media)
provide “home fronts”

 You should write a book, and you
should call your book, On the Streets
of Detroit, no, Underneath the Streets
of Detroit. You should write about
what we, what the people who live here,
think of the city, not the police or the
high society, but the people who really
live here.
Underneath the Streets of Detroit:
Youth Social Action
and Critical Literacy Projects
“To tell people what our community is
really like”
 Target Products:
Individual
Photoessays
 Individual Powerpoint
presentations
 Group Video
 Individual book
chapters

 Group Learning Goals:
To learn more about
own community
 To learn how to do
research
 To learn better
literacy skills
 To learn how to work
with a group better

Major Assertion of Intervention Component
 Youth are already capable of critique . . .
What they don’t have is:
Content knowledge and vocabulary
 Comprehension skills and strategies
 Research skills and strategies
 Synthesis skills and strategies
 Communicative skills and strategies
 Models

National Assessment of Educational Progress
(1998)
4th grade
8th grade
12th
grade
Below basic
.38
.26
.23
Basic
.24
.38
.32
Proficient
.31
.33
.40
Advanced
.07
.03
.06
 Disproportionate numbers of ethnic and racial minority
students and children who live in poverty are represented in
the BELOW BASIC and BASIC categories
The “Steps”
 Setting Individual
Learning Goals
 Measuring
Knowledge/Attitudes


External measurement
Self-measurement
 Group Conversations


Learning Goals
Target Products
 Project
Brainstorming
 Project Research
 Project Refinement


Questions
Claims/Conclusions
 Project Presentation
Individual Learning Goals, May 04
 Yolanda:
 I want to learn how to
put a book together
from information that
we get.
 I want to improve my
English and writing.
 I want to improve
more social [build
social skills].
 Ramiro:
 The main things that
I’m trying to get out
of this project is to
see or project our city
in a different way
(good way).
 And to also improve
my moral as well as
how I see things.
 Also learn how to work
as a team and see how
other people see
things.
Individual Learning Goals, May 04
 Pilar




Learn more about my
community
Improve my writing
Improve peoples idea
of Detroit
Improve peoples idea
of me
 Panchito:



I realy want to know why the
pople write on the walls I believe
that the people that due this
thing are people that want
expresar lo que ciente o rayan
because some friends rayan
tambien.
Quiciera saber y descubrir more
people that write y juntarnes
para poder hacer une que
halplara about something good
olgo que le gustara a la gente que
le daria gusto ver, algo que fuera
como una motivaicon; que le diera
gusto y Felizidad a todas las
personas que pudieran ver este
mensage.
Por favor Consume lo q‘ tu
cerebro produce!
Initial Project Brainstorming, May, 04
 Show the struggles we’ve lived through



Police or government don’t do anything about it: Police have
stopped people for drug trafficking, but people who did these
things eventually get on parole
Political leaders aren’t in touch in with the different levels of
the community
• If the government would have the same structure that gangs
or drug syndicates have, they’d be successful because the
leaders know what different levels are doing—the illegal
drug industry is like a beautiful time piece; everything goes
back to the Roman empire, the structure, everything. They
don’t know how to go back, they should learn history.
You can’t show care if you haven’t been taken care of.
 Show school drop-out rates: You’re showing that
schools aren’t doing anything about gang violence.
Project Brainstorming (Sept 04)
 “Get other people to have a different
perspective of Detroit--outside of Detroit, in
the suburbs and in Michigan, to show about
our community”
 To “compare media representations with our
real lives”

Media representations of Detroit are skewed “because there
are more minorities in Detroit”
Project Brainstorming (Sept 04)
 “To learn about our community”

Y: “Like the Freedom Festival, everything on
the news, it was showing only part of the
problem, we need broader perspectives on the
problems”
 To explore issues of discrimination:
racial/ethnic and socioeconomic:
Background, when it started, and how it
continues in the US
Project Brainstorming (Sept. 04)
 To “see how other communities live and how
they take care of their people”

R: “’cuz like White people, man, are cold-blooded;
they leave their old people and parents in the
retirement homes.”
Youth Data Collection Methods
 Independence festival photos; Cinco de
Mayo
 Census data and crime rate data for cities
across the world
 Media representations of different cities
across the world
 “Experiments where we test theories of
discrimination”
 Interviews/Surveys
 Reading studies about discrimination







Are Chicanos the Same as Mexicans?
Here are some reasons why many U.S. citizens of Mexican extraction feel that it is important to make
the distinction:
• Not "Americans" by choice
A scant 150 years ago, approximately 50% of what was then Mexico was appropriated by the U.S. as
spoils of war, and in a series of land "sales" that were coerced capitalizing on the U.S. victory in that
war and Mexico’s weak political and economic status. A sizeable number of Mexican citizens became
citizens of the United States from one day to the next as a result, and the treaty declaring the peace
between the two countries recognized the rights of such people to their private properties (as deeded
by Mexican or Spanish colonial authorities), their own religion (Roman Catholicism) and the right to
speak and receive education in their own tongue (for the majority, Spanish) [refer to the text of the
treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo]. Therefore, the descendants of this population continue to press for
such rights, and many hold that theirs is a colonized land and people in view of the fact that their
territory and population was taken over by military force.
• Mexicans first, "Americans" second?
Another and more numerous class of U.S. citizens of Mexican extraction are either descendants of,
or are themselves, people who conceive of themselves as temporarily displaced from Mexico by
economic circumstances. As opposed to the waves of European migrants who willingly left their
countries due to class and religious discrimination, and sought to make their lives anew in the "new
world" and never to return to the "old land," these displaced Mexicans typically maintain strong family
ties in Mexico (by visiting periodically, and by investing their incomes in homes or kin in Mexico), and
usually intend to return to Mexico provided they can become economically secure. Therefore these
people maintain and nurture their children in their language, religion and customs.
However, There is great tension within this population between those of Mexican birth who conceive
of themselves as temporary guests in the U.S., and their descendants who are born in the U.S., are
acculturated with the norms of broader U.S. society in public schools, and are not motivated by the
same ties that bind a migrant generation of Mexicans. This creates a classic "niche" of descendants
of immigrants who are full-fledged U.S. citizens, but who typically do not have access to all the rights
and privileges of citizenship because of the strong cultural identity imbued in them by their upbringing
and the discriminatory reaction of the majority population against a non-assimilated and easily
identified subclass. This group of people feels a great need to distinguish itself from both its U.S.
milieu and its Mexican "Mother Culture," which does not typically welcome or accept "prodigals." This
is truly a unique set of people, therefore, in that it endures both strong ties and strong discrimination
from both U.S. and Mexican mainstream parent cultures. The result has been the creation of a
remarkable new culture that needs its own name and identity.
One In-process Project
 BothSidesOfTheCoin.ppt
Thank you, W. T., for
 The cash
 A broad-based, longitudinal program of research


New grants
Development of an interdisciplinary and ethnically
diverse research team
 Capacity building of future scholars
 Opportunities to learn new methods
 New partnerships and friendships
 Attention to youth, families, and communities
Acknowledgements
 Research Colleagues

Ruth Athan, Rosario Carrillo, Kathryn
Ciechanowski, Tanya Cleveland, Tehani Collazo,
Lindsay Ellis, Jacque Eccles, Jeanne Freidel,
Katherine Kramer, Ritu Radhakrishnan, Paul
Richardson, LeeAnn Sutherland, Laura
VanDerPloeg, Helen Watt
 Mentors
Shirley Brice Heath
 Paul Pintrich
