Brian Street

Brian Street in 2013

Brian Vincent Street (born 1943) is a professor emeritus of language education at King's College London and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education in University of Pennsylvania. He has mainly worked on literacy in both theoretical and applied perspectives, and is perhaps best known for his book Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984).

Biography

Street taught social and cultural anthropology for more than twenty years at the University of Sussex, and for the past fifteen years he has supervised doctoral students and taught graduate workshops on ethnography, student writing in higher education and language and literacy.[1] In 2009 he was elected Vice-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and has been Chair of the Education Committee of the RAI since 2006. He is currently involved in development projects in South Asia and Africa using ethnographic perspectives in training literacy and numeracy teachers in a programme known as LETTER (Learning Empowerment through Training in Ethnographic Research).[2] He has also been working with colleagues in Brazil with particular interest in ethnographic and academic literacies perspectives. A collection of papers (coedited with Judy Kalman) concerning Latin America was published in 2012.

Academic work

Street is one of the leading theoreticians within what has come to be known as New Literacy Studies (NLS), in which literacy is seen not just as a set of technical skills, but as a social practice that is embedded in power relations. Street developed his theory in opposition to leading literacy scholars at the time, including Jack Goody and Walter J. Ong. These, and other scholars, represented what Street called an "autonomous view of literacy", in which literacy is as a set of autonomous skills that can be learnt independently of the social context. The alternative view Street called "ideological", since it acknowledges literacy's context-dependent and power-laden nature.

Central to Street's conceptualisation of literacy is the distinction between literacy events and literacy practices. The term literacy events was coined by Shirley Brice Heath to refer to situations in which people engage with reading or writing.[3] While literacy events refers to discrete situations, literacy practices refers to the larger systems which these events create within a community. Literacy practices are the patterns of literacy events in a society; different domains may have different literacy practices, as literacy has different functions within a society, across domains. Street defines literacy practices as the “broader cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts.”[4]

The notion of literacy practices stems from Street’s fieldwork in an Iranian village, where he realised that people used literacy in different ways in different contexts, and for different purposes: maktab, schooled and commercial literacy practices. The uses and meanings of these were different: maktab literacy was associated with Koranic schools, schooled literacy with secularisation and modernisation, and commercial literacy with the fruit trade. The commercial literacy sprang out of the Koranic literacy practices, rather than schooled literacy practices as the dominant view of Literacy might expect and Street explains this by the status and authority the latter practice had within the village. Schooled literacy, on the other hand, although more technically developed, was oriented away from the village towards the cities. It was not the literacy skills as such, but the social functions associated with particular literacies, that influenced the development of commercial literacy in this village.

Later in his career Street worked on academic literacy and numeracy, and both areas can be said to reflect and build on his view of literacy. In several articles on academic literacy (most coauthored with Mary R. Lea) Street critiques the notion of academic literacy as a set of skills to give writings structure, content and clarity, and argues that this varies across disciplines, and that what is seen as "appropriate writing" is more closely tied to epistemologies and the underlying assumptions of different disciplines. The perspective of academic literacies acknowledges and takes into account the power and discourses within institutions and institutional production and representation of meaning.

Like literacy, Street (and his coauthors Dave Baker and Alison Tomlin) sees numeracy as a social practice that cannot be reduced to a set of technical skills. Rather, they turn the focus to social factors, particularly the similarities or differences between school and home numeracy practices, and the implications of these, including ideology, power relations, values, and social institutions. Street (and his coauthors) argues that some maths practices are privileged over others, and this has to do with the control and status associated with social institutions and procedures. In that sense we can adopt a similar approach to numeracy practices as social and ideological that has been developed with regard to literacy.

Awards

Street was awarded the National Reading Conference's Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.[5]

Selected books

Selected articles and book chapters

References

  1. ↑ "Professor Brian Street". kcl.ac.uk. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
  2. ↑ "LETTER". balid.org.uk. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
  3. ↑ Heath, S. B. (1982). "What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school". Language in society. 11(1), 49–76.
  4. ↑ Street, Brian V. 2000 Literacy events and literacy practices: Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies. In K. Jones & M. Martin-Jones (Eds.), Multilingual Literacies. Reading and writing different worlds (pp. 17–29). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company
  5. ↑ "Brian Street". africanbookscollective.com. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
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