Response to Moll and Gonzalez's research

I found Moll and Gonzalez's techniques for influential research to be rather groundbreaking. I think that LeMar Murton's concerns about the violations of privacy which this type of interdisciplinary research may imply stem from a dominant American tendency to focus on individuals rather than the society as a community. Her concern regarding "intruding upon the students' lives" and her statement about how "the idea of this seems a bit unsettling" reflects a common mindset in our country which values personal privacy over a social society. I happen to believe that the extent to which the country at large has implemented this practice of privacy is itself "a bit unsettling." It has contributed to the isolation of small subgroups of society and especially in urban neighborhoods, the tendency for people to not even know their neighbor's names. There is certainly a necessity for some decent level of privacy, but if members of a community are willing to interact with eachother and expand their own funds of knowledge, as these researchers and research subjects were, I think that is an admirable goal that can allow for new avenues for not only connecting students and teachers to texts, but expanding their literacies. As Gee's second theorem in Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction tells us, "For a literacy to be liberating it must contain both the Discourse it is going to critique and a set of meta-elements (language, words, attitudes, values) in terms of which an analysis and criticism can be carried out." This type of interactive research offers all those involved the opportunity to expand their own collections of meta-elements, liberating them to analyze their own lives with a broader sense of knowledge regarding the world around them.

Moll and Gonzalez's research methods may not be as scientifically detached as a pure research essay would require, but that does not seem to have been their primary goal anyway. Their focus was more on the documentation of community interactions and the results of having people relate to one another "outside the box" of status quo social structure. I agree with Johnny Magic in that this country's education system "doesn't openly welcome any type [of] diversity." As the country considered the world's "melting pot," this contradiction in our own educational system is a major hindrance to "non-mainstream children" (Gee). Moll and Gonzalez's attempts to find better ways of connecting to these students and "challeng[ing] the status quo (168) should be applauded, not feared.