Faith in action: heritage literacy as a synchronisation of belief, word and deed

Abstract

The concept that literacies are best understood when examined in their context has been promoted for decades by socio-cultural literacy researchers such as Brian Street and Shirley Brice Heath. Street's term ‘literacy practice’ is a combination of the actual ‘events of literacy’ and the cultural, social and political underpinnings that surround the event. Further, others in literacy studies have explored literacy in church settings. In this article, I explore the concept of faith as a heritage literacy practice. The combination of empirical literacy artefacts, such as biblical scripture used on everyday objects, the literacy events of acting out one's faith, and the ‘folk models’ or ways of conceptualising these events together make faith a literacy practice. Further, the ways that people adopt, adapt or alienate themselves from faith mark it as a heritage literacy practice. The following article examines the synchronisation of faith and action, specifically as it was exemplified in one northern Indiana Amish community and one multigenerational family.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.