ABSTRACT
As part of my review for this chapter, I surveyed close to 2,000 articles, books, and chapters focused on urban literacy at the P-12 and/or postsecondary levels. This available literature is complex, focusing on issues that range from traditional language and literacy practices to more vernacular forms of literacy that embrace the spirit of the social turn in literacy research. The literature also suggests that some of the complexity surrounding literacy in urban literacy studies stems from the nature of literacy itself. While there are many competing defi nitions of literacy, scholarship on urban literacies suggests that there can be no single, “autonomous” defi nition of literacy (Street, 1995), for “what counts as literacy at a particular time and place depends on who has the power to defi ne it” (Bloome, 1997, p. 107).
