What Does Empowerment in Literacy Education Look Like? An Analysis of a Family Literacy Program for Guatemalan Maya Families

Abstract

Educators in the field of family literacy have identified multiple approaches to family literacy programs (FLPs), and have underscored the need to identify and make explicit the philosophical orientations of their own programs. This was the task undertaken in this article, which focused on a FLP in south Florida that served the needs of Guatemalan Maya families where the adults were unable to read or write in any language upon program entry. This study analyzed the educational practices of the FLP to ascertain its ideological underpinnings, according to a tripartite typology derived from scholarship in literacy, multicultural, and immigrant education. This article addresses the complexity of identifying such ideological situatedness including the need to examine diverse program elements, the manner in which a program could have multiple ideological strands, and the ambiguity that sometimes emerges in such “readings” of programs in “real-world” contexts.

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