ABSTRACT
My consideration of socially situated literacy practices begins by examining the process of social reading of oral narrative texts within an African American hair salon (Majors, 2004).1 Th e rapid change of U.S. demographics is just one of several factors that have politicians, researchers, and educators clamoring to understand the relationship between particular social, cultural, and/or ethnic group membership and school performance (Gee 2000; Darling-Hammond, 2002). Many claims have been made suggesting that there is educational importance in the literate knowledge base that students, in particular minority students, construct through their social and linguistic practices (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Cazden, 1988; Cole, 1996; Delpit, 1995; Gee, 1992; Heath, 1983; Hull & Schultz, 2002; Lee & Majors, 2003). Recent studies, for example, call attention to the “diff erence in the social and academic prestige of written” texts in the home and school lives of ESOL students (Skilton-Sylvester, 2003). It is important to be aware of such diff erences, in value and practice, of home and school literacy across contexts.
