ABSTRACT
Unable to see her, I speak in a kind of blindness, not knowing what dance is being made of me, what puns of the thumb, tough similes of the fi ngers, how I translate into bone. (Atwood, 1995)
Our responsibility as literacy educators and researchers is to bring literacy to life. We see inquiry into literacy as a process of changing an abstract concept into a transformative verb. Coming to an understanding of the cultures of the home, the school, and the academy as sites of struggle and hope, encoded and inscribed with politically charged values, expectations, and assumptions, we begin to see inquiry and research in literacy as partial, limited, shifting, and actively constructed. We see literacy as not merely an intellectual activity, but a way we are in the world. (Neilsen, 1989)
And, the way we are in the world is embodied. Our literacies and our inquiries are not limited to our head; they are also of the heart and of the body. We are beings who make sense, in all the many meanings of that term. As Abram (1996) suggested, the fl esh of language and experience are mutually constitutive; the ground of our human and material lives shapes us as our language shapes us, and the process is unending. Inquiry is a stance to the world that knows interpretation to be an ecological process, a project of integrating and furthering sustainable growth. We are connected, and we are responsible-please keep response-able . . . it’s an intentional play on the word, it’s not a misspelling .
