by Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico
Last week I attended the Literacy Research Association conference. I came home empowered and inspired to reflect on, “what now?” Conference presentations titles that I perused and thought about attending all focused in some way on “voice.” For example, providing conceptual tools for educators to sensitively engage with transnational parents in the United States, well meaning “global” teachers’ describing their classroom’s journey in global literature, a biography writer describing the vulnerability experienced while writing about a historically great man in Taiwan (Chiang Kai-Shek), exploring teacher candidates’ resistance to understanding textual code-switching in books dealing with immigration issues, etc. As a result, my own, new personal goal can best be described as “reading to listen.” Allow me explain that term. On the way home after the conference, I pondered various new and recycled ideas about literacy. I tentatively named these after-conference-reflections as “literacy in unheard voices”. Within that are two voices types that I invite you to think about. One set are those voices we never hear because they reside well outside of our own personal experience. The others are own internal ones of discomfort that we resist despite their screaming for our attention. Those resisting voices beg for us to find the courage to engage with them where indifference, intended or unintended, exists. These indifferences emanate from our inherent political, cultural, and historical interests and biases. “Reading to listen” comes from the experience we have as readers when we encounter those unheard voices we frequently miss. They ruffle multiple layers of resistance that keeps them buried because of unableness due to unfamiliarity as well as disassociation rising from unawareness, unnaturalness (i.e. textual foreign language code-switching), and unrelatedness.
My meaningful epiphany this time arose because I began to engage more fully with the stories of others who had evaded my scrutiny until now. As a teacher-educator who teaches and studies literacy in multicultural and international contexts in a university, my focus had been on anything but the mainstream. I tended to zero-in on the marginalized young who struggle with bicultural identities, immigration, linguistic challenges, etc. The conference this time seemed to address understanding multicultural and global contexts as an important asset to be acquired and mastered in order to be a good teacher and even a good parent. However, developing the recognition of what it takes to learn and even develop these new interests was not sufficiently addressed in the context of a person heavily situated in a majority perspective. We need to engage those internal voices that spring up from the uncomfortable unfamiliar as we encounter all of the “uns” in our reading. These voices need to be heard. There are vulnerabilities in our human nature when we encounter new knowledge and grapple with what that actually means in our lives. Without accepting that, genuinely “reading to listen” may be an elusive goal.
This month, I want to explore three layers of unheard voices in various global contexts.
1) New Mexico cultures and children’s literature.
I will examine the lack of voices in contemporary childhood focusing on five-F oriented cultural representations (Food, Festival, Folklore, Festival, and Famous People) of New Mexico to bridge how local literature can be approached critically when paired with issues in multicultural children’s literature.
2) The voice of children forced into maturity who lose the universal experience of childhood through various catastrophic global events.
3) Otherness in South Korea.
I will introduce various layers of different young voices found in Korean children’s books. I will look at the struggle of those voices as they seek to be accepted in Korean society despite current social attitudes ingrained from its thousand-year old history and national ideology and explore how they seek to expand the rapid changes and broaden the challenges South Korea faces as it finds new ways of defining diversity.
Journey through Worlds of Words during our open reading hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. To view our complete offerings of WOW Currents, please visit archival stream.
- Themes: Yoo Kyung Sung
- Descriptors: Debates & Trends, WOW Currents