Constellations of Literacy: Mapping Meaning, Materiality, and Technology

In schematizing literacy, Netty and I resisted the urge to flatten this “turn” by mapping the various constellations or variants of literacy we see circulated within Rhet/Comp scholarship. The four major categories we chose to map were “Academic Literacies,” “Cultural Literacies, “Cognitive Literacies,” and “Literacies, Technology, and Materiality.” “Literacy” as a broad category is centered on the map to indicate how these different subcategories grow out of one concept. The authors from our readings are mapped in green, while miscellaneous scholars we see as integral to this conversation are mapped in tan. While our efforts center mostly upon our urge to locate this week’s readings in relation to these different types of literacy, we also wanted to provide a larger backdrop for the discussion to further prevent the term from being flattened and to indicate that our mapping is not entirely exhaustive. We realized from the outset that categorizing these theorists was somewhat reductive, even in instances where we show them connected to various types of literacy. However, we still seek to emphasize the overarching focus of each theorist’s exigence, although we realize that this effort of connection might, simultaneously, manifest itself as a cessation of sorts.

To further explicate our categories, we chose Academic Literacies to serve as a broad marker for a debate that we see paralleling discussions of English Only and Students Rights to Their Own Language. Bizzell establishes academic literacy as “more pluralistic than that enforced at the turn of the century,” yet we still think this term is useful for establishing the standards of academic discourse as it is still understood within the field. We position both Bizzell and Richardson as our representatives of this category, out of all the other theorists from this week, because they most clearly illustrate the hegemonic nature of language, but also illuminate the ideologies that undergird these standardizing means of knowledge-making. Richardson writes, for instance, “The standardized language ideologies underlying English Only run counter to the spirit of cultural, linguistic, and human diversity and reveal a preference for a certain type of ‘naturalization’ of immigrants and an ideal type of assimilated African American and other ‘minority’ American groups” (97).This issue of academic literacy, its attendant standardizing and flattening effects, clearly provides impetus for our other subcategory of cultural literacies. Therefore, including this particular offshoot of academic literacy on our map better illustrates the need of the other categories, which arise within scholarship as either a reaction to or a variant of pre-existing ones.

We also connect Bizzell and Richardson topically to Cultural Literacy for these reasons, but we also include Ohmann and Brandt within this category, because we see them taking up the issue of cultural literacy in ways that seemed different than Bizzell and Richardson. While it’s true that Richardson discusses the agentive nature of literacy (particularly its hegemonic function within society), Ohmann describes this agency as socially networked, cooperative, and conflictive – a much richer and dynamic way of viewing literacy. He writes, for example, “Like every other human activity or product, [literacy] embeds social relations within it. And these relations always include conflict as well as cooperation. Like language itself, literacy is an exchange between classes, races, the sexes, and so on” (685). Placing the concept of literacy within a cultural framework, for Ohmann, means acknowledging its dialectical and recursive nature. Similarly, Brandt’s theory of accumulating and residual literacy echoes Ohmann’s spatial and cyclical discussion of literacy. While Ohmann speaks of the top-down effect (677), Brandt also provides us with a spatial representation of literacy through her rendering of horizontal and vertical effects (652). We also hear echoes of Richardson’s focus on ideology in Brandt’s discussion of cultural literacy: “However, because changes in the twentieth century have become so much more rapid, the ideological texture of literacy has become more complex as more layers of earlier forms of literacy exist simultaneously within the society and within the experiences of individuals” (652). But what cements Brandt more solidly to this category is her acknowledgment that these residual cultural constructions inherent in literacy represent barriers and resources for learners. In addition, her discussion of literacy as culturally situated opens up spaces to discuss more micro subcategories of literacies that always operate concurrently but separately: home-based and school-based literacies.

Our toughest challenge in constructing our schema was determining which title we would give to “Literacies, Technology, and Materials.” The title in this final revision is supposed to reflect these particular theorists’ focus on the material accessibility of literacy. Ohmann, Brandt, and Johnson-Eilola most clearly fell into this category, for us, because their arguments forward a line of argumentation that poises materiality at its center of the literacy discussion. Brandt writes that “It is through such material channels that literacy traditions of previous times appear in the present and that formal education accumulates as a resource in middle-class and working-class households” (660). We also see this idea of materiality in Ohmann’s discussion of technological determinism and symptomatic technology (681). And we can see Ohmann’s connection between these two categories in his claim that “Technology, one might say, is itself a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually reshaped according to some people’s intentions” (681). In this way, Ohmann most distinctly moves us between these two categories of “Cultural Literacy” and “Literacies, Technology, and Materials,” because he emphasizes the need for accessibility of material technologies, which contributes to circulating discussions of how ideology and politics work together to forward a hegemonic function of language. His article also focuses more exclusively upon issues of literacy with material modes. While we see Ohmann as discussing literacy with material modes, we see Johnson-Eiola as discussing literacy with multiple relationships with texts, as well as modes. We see this through his discussion of connection: “Viewing connection as creative act places emphasis on selection and arrangement. Traditional ideas of text, to which we still cling, identify writing with positive objects: this text as distinguished from all others. The relations between texts are taken to indicate both similarity and difference […]” (462). Furthermore, Johnson-Eilola extends this discussion of space and materiality into the social, writing that this view of literacy can “help us transform our notions of space from something owned to something that is shared by a community; thus texts become social (ethical) responsibilities” (462).

Finally, we wanted to at least acknowledge the cognitivist approach to literacy, although it isn’t proffered as a guiding light within this week’s readings. We clustered a few theorists around this category to continue with our efforts of unflattening literacy as a concept, as well as highlighting what a malleable and all-encompassing term “literacy” is. We can see Bizzell most directly taking up the cognitivist debate, though she certainly doesn’t align herself with its tenets. She writes of Hirsch’s position, “His argument for the cognitive superiority of a clear, concise style of Standard English, like the humanists’ argument for the cognitive characteristics of literate style, fails to notice that this style is socially situated” (145). Therefore, by including cognitive literacy on our schema, we hope to draw attention to how these other theories of literacy which we see circulating are all located in conversation with one another and grow out of one another in response to the limitations and reductions of a monolithic conception of literacy.

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-153.

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-667.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.” Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Sidler, Michelle, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English 47.7 (1985): 675-688.

Richardson, Elaine. “’English Only,’ African American Contributions to Standardized Communication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Eds. Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Southern Illinois Press, 2010. 97-110.