It Does Matter! or, They Do Matter: Confluence of Multiple Literacies and a Theory for Navigation within/between Them

            Joe and I created our schema after discussing our interpretations of the readings. We went through several iterations before arriving at the final model. In order to consider how the different literacy theories that we read for this week would fit into the model, we first discussed several intertextual relationships in our discussion. After recreating the schema several times (i.e., using a whiteboard in the Johnston building’s Digital Studio) and arriving at our final model, we sought to locate the theorists in the schema, deemed them to be present, and so we proceeded to build the model using a free online service called Canva. I will briefly discuss some of the more salient connections as I describe the schema in this post. First, to provide some impression of the evolution of the schema, I would like to emphasize that one common thread or element within our different models was the relationship between the dominant literacy ideology--the capital “L” Literacy--and the myriad language communities that use language variants of the dominant language complex and thus have local literacy ideologies. This relationship is still at the center of our final model. The language communities, which may be bound together by language practices, can be variously defined, and so we imagined a nearly infinite number of language communities existing subordinately to the dominant language ideology. In our model, the relationship between the dominant literacy and the many community literacies is represented by the large arrow that passes temporally through all community spheres. This temporal element was heavily informed both by Brandt’s notion of the piling up or accumulation of literacy practices and also Johnson-Eilola’s discussion of the hypertextual or intertextual relationships within texts as products. Within the schema, this simple two dimensional image belies a complex four dimensional relationship. That is, the dominant literacy ideology flows through the many communities across time, encapsulating the ideological shifts in the dominant and community literacies. The community literacies include speech, writing and reading, as well as other literate behaviors or practices. Beside the series of green circles representing a language community’s core literacy ideology across time, there is another group overlapping circles that represent the overlapping spheres of different language communities. Of course, there can be overlap between multiple language communities, in terms of the experiences of a single individual or group or individuals. There can also be communities that do not overlap with other communities. While it might be difficult in the real world to identify communities that share no overlap with other communities in terms of the characteristics of the language users within the communities, we allowed for such mutual exclusivity in our model because then such communities could interact and share literacy practices within contact zones. Over time, such contact zones could conceivably bring the communities together inexorably in terms of shared language features and literacy ideologies. Contact zones also occur between individual language communities and the interaction between other community ideologies with the dominant ideology.

            Now, to move back or up (i.e., within the related concepts in the schema, towards the top of the image) we envisioned that the large arrow flowing from the dominant Literacy ideologies would contain the interaction between dominant and community literacies in the form of normative socialization such as schooling, professional development, etc. As communities undergo socialization, some dominant literacy practices may be retained and some language practices associated with the language communities can interact or push back against the dominant literacy as described by Richardson. We did not have the space in the image to depict the arrows that move in the opposite direction to the other errors, emanating from the communities towards the dominant ideology. According to Richardson, and as we intended to be implicit in our schema, the local literacy ideologies can impact the dominant ideology, but the disparity in force or influence might always be imbalanced in favor of the dominant ideology. Such bidirectionality happens in the interaction space of our schema, but also, perhaps more effectively, in the space for negotiation depicted near the bottom of the image where many of the arrows converge. One critical assumption on our part affects interpretation of the negotiation that occurs because of the many points of contact between/within communities and the dominant Literacy ideology. We assumed that this negotiation space could navigated by individuals who are deemed successful in that they have agency from navigating multiple ideologies. Success is defined in terms of being literate within a community according to the local normative standards that define that ideology, AND the ability to critically interact with or within the dominant Literacy ideology. In Bizzell’s terms, these individuals would have the rhetorical ability to understand multiple audiences, with critical insights that come from the awareness of the power imbalance between the dominant ideology and the myriad local ideologies. Our negotiation space describes an ideal form of the possibilities for negotiation, where success and agency are complex terms that are determined in part by those competing ideologies. A specific literate individual would likely be literate within his or her own language community and as a result capable of pursuing literacy in other communities or by performing the literate practices sanctioned by the dominant ideology. We speculated that the “successful” navigation of the negotiation space, which is a confluence of contact zones, might be apparent in such an individual’s composition of texts in the form of agency.

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-53.

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57 (1995): 649-68.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.” Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.17-33. Rptd. in Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.

Richardson, Elaine. “‘English-Only,’ African American Contributions to Standardized Communication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition, eds. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 97-112.