Abstract of

Literacy Spaces of a Christian Faith-Based School

A. Jonathan Eakle, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

The purposes of this investigation were to explore power and literacies in and surrounding local, Christian fundamentalist faith-based education space and to show how empirical data can be used to assemble literacies in a manner that is outside typical research frames and ways to display research. This qualitative space study addresses the conditions of possibilities that faith-based education theories, texts, and spaces made available, and how participants accommodated, resisted, and transformed those conditions of possibilities afforded in and by the school in classrooms, in a school assembly, and in field trips to an African American art museum and to a popular motion picture with religious themes. Foucault's, Deleuze's, and Guattari's concepts guided the investigation. The analysis involved space methodologies to explore distances, or ruptures, between content and expressions that occurred in data-collection sites. Through these ruptures, lines of power relations were mapped. Through use of a dramatization, the study shows connections among experiences of adolescent students, teachers, and other participants, illustrating how the strategic uses of literacies enabled certain things to be seen and said in these education spaces while other things were not seen or said. In addition to providing evidence of how Christian literacies were enacted in the school, the article is intended to stimulate discussions about faith-based literacy education and about how space methodologies might be useful for the literacy field.

Abstract from Eakle, A. (2007, October/November/December). Literacy Spaces of a Christian Faith-Based School. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(4), 472–510. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.42.4.3