The Literacy Curriculum & Bilingual Education - Karen Cadiero-Kaplan

Cadiero-Kaplan, Karen. The Literacy Curriculum & Bilingual Education: A Critical Examination. New York: Peterlang, 2004.

This book puts bilingual education and literacy pedgagogy into conversation within a historical perspective on practices within the US over time.  Cadiero-Kaplan shows that education policy related to literacy decisions are tied to political and economic structures and identifies four types of ideologies that were prominent (and remain so to different degrees) at the time of her book's publication.  These ideologies include the following:

• Functional Literacy: Literacy is taught as skills to participate productively in school and society.  Education fits a school-as-factory model and includes basal readers, skill & drill activities, and a back-to-basics approach.  Students primarily de-code texts, and many students are tracked into such classes according to evaluations that corresponds to linguistic and ethnic backgrounds.
• Cultural Literacy: Literacy is taught as core cultural beliefs, morality, and common values through focus on cannonical text classics and rote memorization.  The focus is on providing cultural knowledge necessary for success (likely Bourdieu's notion cultural capital), but often serves to replicate elite privilege based on student background since they are taught as advanced courses.  It focuses on analyzing and understanding texts.
• Progressive Literacy: Literacy is taught as a process of personal discovery through a constructivist and whole language approach.  It takes student interests and backgrounds into consideration, but doesn't explicitly invite students to evaluate or challenge texts.
• Critical Literacy: Literacy practices are student-centered and focus on personal discovery, but both students and teachers deconstruct texts and engage in sociocultural realities within and outside the classroom.  It is often seen as a threat to the structures of public education because it questions underlying hegemony built into education.

 She also identifies two fundamentally different models related to bilingual education that impact multicultural students and intersect with these ideologies of literacy.  These are listed below:

• Compensatory Education: Students are taught English in order to access educational content and use a subtractive approach to bilingual education, so the focus is on the best models for teaching English and educating in English.
• Quality Education: Students are taught educational content using the most effective language and culture, schools respond to advances in education, and students can integrate socioculturally while gaining English proficiency and maintaining proficiency in other background languages. 

The following image shows overlapping time periods for literacy ideology & bilingual education in the US in relation public policy.

As a way to mitigate the stark contrast of teaching literacy practices that separate reading 'the word' from reading 'the world' (following Freire's conception of literacy), Cadiero-Kaplan suggests teaching students according to a model of critical literacy to identify hegemony in school texts as well as the historicity of knowledge since the stakes of these literacy ideologies are heightened for multilingual students.