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Literacy in Community Settings

What kinds of literacy practices do students use in home and community settings?
How can knowledge of community literacy practices be used to improve school literacy instruction?

• Transnational Literacy Researchers Project: This project brings together faculty and graduate students from Vanderbilt University with those at the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico. Professor Bob Jiménez and his colleagues are examining the language and literacy practices found within a central Mexican community, with a specific focus on five schools and their surroundings. The research team is especially interested in how indigenous, colonial, and globalizing influences affect contemporary Mexican attitudes towards literacy and its uses. They are working to determine how dominant groups benefit from such taken-for-granted factors such as the instructional methods used for literacy and language interaction patterns, as well as less visible phenomena, such as the values, attitudes, and social relationships surrounding the enterprise of school-based literacy. An important goal of the project is documenting how these influences manifest themselves in everyday linguistic and literate interaction patterns.