Family Heritage

My research has been a journey of self-discovery and deep introspection in which I have embarked on a process for developing an understanding of my identity as a member of a minority culture and appreciating how it influences both my learning and teaching practices. Although I was eager to answer my research questions and to better understand low-income families and the diverse ways that literacy is perceived and embedded in their lives, I began my excursion by acknowledging my subjectivity and positionality with respect to poverty, education and marginalized others. I felt it was incumbent on me first to make sense of my family heritage and life experiences and then to speculate about their influence on my construction of knowledge.

I spent the majority of my childhood in a predominantly mainstream white middle class suburban neighbourhood with limited exposure to non-mainstream minority cultures. As I reflect back to that time, I recognize that contextual factors, like the silenced voices of my eastern European Jewish immigrant grandparents and other relatives, affect my understanding of oppression in general and more specifically, racial and religious discrimination. My enculturation, undoubtedly influenced by an awareness of the atrocities that were committed against my family members of only a generation or two back, involved an appreciation of Jewish values such as social justice and compassion (Schwartz, 2001). My cultural heritage has become embodied in my values and beliefs, while my life experiences have further shaped my identity and influenced my social practices. This knowledge has been advantageous in my research journey by helping me at the outset to recognize more readily situations where there is domination and marginalization of vulnerable groups.

My research on literacy in low-income homes has also been fueled by the wonderment of how my father, the eldest child of poor immigrant parents learned to read before school entry and how my mother as a young child fulfilled her responsibility to do paperwork for her immigrant parents who could neither read nor write in English. I recall my mother explaining how her father depended so heavily on his memory in his work, similar to some of the adult immigrants cited by Klassen and Burnaby (1993) in their study of new users of English. Reportedly, my grandfather was able to conduct business for an entire day and then return home and recite the details of his transactions for my mother to record. Thus, my definition of literacy and choice of conceptual context lead me to look at how language and literacy are bound in economic and political systems and to a sense of family and community (Key, 1998).