Literacy Seen (Anew?): Navigation and Negotiation

In our construction of a schema of literacy, Anna and I looked to bring our authors not only into conversation with one another, but also into conversation with those speaking on the subject of literacy and looking to navigate and negotiate the same channels they were/are. We first sought to examine the correlations of our authors and offer several key concepts or nodes that we believed could organize our authors' assertions and overall contributions to the discussion of literacy. In order to create these nodes, Anna and I discussed some of the key congruities that we found within our authors' texts, settling on four in particular. These four organizational concepts were not created with the intention of becoming concrete and non-negotiable points of reference to examine the discussions being held about literacy, but we believed that they were sufficient starting points to serve as an inlet into the conversation. For us, in our authors' discussions of literacy, we believed that our authors situated their concepts and assertions about literacy particularly in these four ways: in matters of accumulation, discussions of power or power relationships, economics (influenced by or from), and when speaking about culture.

For matter of accumulation, we first looked to Brandt, who offered the theory explicitly.  For Brandt, one accumulated literacy by way of piling up and spreading out. Brandt asserted that literacy could be influenced by previous generations, from the home, from early education environments, and residual materials (652; 659; 664; 665; 666). Literacy also was spread out in that it must be used to navigate various channels throughout one's life (653). Richardson, while not explicitly mentioning accumulation theory, made several assertions that could fall under the theory. In her advocation to include the contributions made by African American authors and offering insight to students the examples of literacy acquisition and literacy practice, Richardson may be giving a practical application of Brandt's theory of accumulation. Most of our theorists situated or discussed literacy in terms of power or power relationships. Ohman examined the usage of literacy as a way to "keep the lower orders docile," and what he saw as an "inextricable part" of social and class relations (677; 687). Bizell acknowledged the power of literacy in her own conception of the composition classroom. Even in a classroom where literacy in constantly negotiated by professor and student, the professor has unequal power inherently by the position they hold (150). Richardson explicitly states that language serves as "medium for power and control" (99). Literacy is, for some of our authors, is almost inevitably shares some relationship with economics. Ohman believes that literacy has been used to measure quantities and modify people, and that computer literacy can be utilized to separate the elite from the poor because it can be used to "expand the minds and the freedom of the elite meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce" (683). Johnson-Eilola says that the process movement reshaped how we understand writing and helped us include production and power structures (457). The most prevalent construct that is utilized as grounding for our authors' arguments is the power of culture and its connectedness to literacy. Richardson asserts that language learning should build on the vernacular strategies of students and their ways of displaying knowledge and the historical or philosophical underpinnings of that knowledge, something that is overtly culture based (104). Bizzel includes cultural literacy to ground her theories and suggest that students have their own valid literacies that they bring into the classroom. Because of the prevalence of these grounding concepts, we felt that they were very sufficient for our organization and schematizing of literacy.

While these were settled on by our discussions about our authors, we do not believe that these are the only ways in which to situate or ground discussions of literacy. It is for this reason that we looked to include in our schema the conversations held about literacy at large. For Anna and I, we believed it to be key the matters, assertions, conversations, beliefs, and/or contributions made by other theorists and participants in the discourse about literacy in order for a more thorough examination of our authors' own contributions. In order to understand our authors' texts more thoroughly, we needed to examine the discourse community at large. We looked to identify both who and what our authors were engaging with in their texts. This helped us to better navigate the contours of this discussion in order to build a more nuanced schema. For Bizzel, "foundationalist" arguments that sought to to draw attention away from the social class basis of academic literacy were problematic (142). Bizzel took issue with the assumptions of the Great Cognitive Divid theory and looked to find a more useful way to examine literacy acquisition. From Walter Ong's offering of a theory that posited technology's ability to enable men to communicate knowledge in all new ways, Ohman found an excellent point for extension (681). Richardson looked to combat the ways of thinking about literacy constituted by English-Only and grounded her theory in what seemed to be identity politics. For us, in order to properly assess our authors' contributions, we felt it necessary to examine the conversations that may have influenced or help guide them to their theories and assertions.

From an examination of these conversations, we were able to better conceptualize and make sense of our authors' own assertions. By making sense of the surrounding conversations, we felt we were able to better understand both our authors' own assertions and what they believed could be brought into practice and what that practice may look like in the classroom. In order to schematize literacy, we needed to examine the discourse about literacy from the outside in. It is from this examination that were able to construct our schema in the way that we did.


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 TwentiethCentury.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-667.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection inComposition.” 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 StandardizedCommunication 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.