The Wheel of Literacy, Pt. 2: Remediating the Gate

This exploratory gave Charise and I some trouble on two interrelated fronts. First, rather than visualizing a concept in relation to one reading, we were visualizing a concept as articulated by a handful of theorists, which led us to seek out a number of different threads that run through most of these readings. Second, once we had articulated some of these threads, we struggled with choosing the best visual metaphor to encapsulate them. We considered a spectrum of different views of literacy, where something like Foundationalism would be one extreme and socially situated views of literacy in the center; however, we couldn’t really discern what the other extreme of literacy might be from our readings, since literacy context(s) is so important to each of the articles. We also discussed the possibility of making a network or web of ideas, showing how key terms are configured and reconfigured by the authors. In grappling how we would unify these readings in a network, we were drawn to Johnson-Eilola’s quotation positioning us as composers at “the nexus connecting an apparently infinite number of social and technological forces…” (454). In a moment of inspiration, we decided to center our schema around this quotation.

Although Johnson-Eilola is only talking about a single literate practice—writing—we felt that it encapsulates the views of literacy, or literacies, in the articles. As such, we placed this quotation at the literal nexus of our circular schema, with each wedge of this circle representing the social and technological forces that contribute to literacy. We designed the borders separating each of these wedges to be dotted rather than solid to show the permeability of these sections, illustrating how these factors often collude and contribute to one another. In each of these sections, we placed smaller sub-terms we felt helps illustrate some of this permeability. For example, Bizzel’s treatment of foundationalism and Richardson’s critique of English-Only illustrate how certain literacies can be wielded as power of entry into a particular discourse community. Closely related to this, literacy may be a resource that is granted or denied to demographic groups in order to keep them docile, or the primary commodity of an information economy, giving rise to symbolic-analytic work, as seen in Ohmann and Johnson-Eilola. And of course, as our culture develop new forms of literate practice, we see them both accumulate and draw upon the residual forms that came before them. These brief examples of overlap helped us see how these aspects of literacy are intertwined and create an intertext among our materials this week.

I’m really glad that we discussed the idea of gatekeeping in class on Tuesday because it presented literacy in a way that I’m familiar with but with a different frame of reference. I had often thought about literacy in a Marxist/cultural studies/multicultural kind of way—focusing on literacy as power or denigrating to groups through dominant representations—but had never explicitly made the connection to the legitimizing powers of institutions like academic discourse. I responded to Dr. Graban’s comment in particular that a type of literacy must be legitimized in some form or fashion, and it made me think of the interaction between literacy technologies and FYC. Since rhet/comp has continued to produce knowledge related to multimodality and digital composing, we are part of that legitimizing structure as we bring assignments like remediation into our classrooms, allowing our students to use literacies they already have for new purposes, primarily academic ones. Its very interesting to me how we are beginning to capitalize on our students’ accumulated literacies in order to foster new ones in the classroom through something like remediation, because literacy almost always relies on a fluidity between accumulated and residual literacies, much in the way Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation posits that residual and “new” media appropriate one another in their processes of development. The fluid dialectic between forms of literacy, students, cultures, and technology exemplifies how literacy is dependent on a number of different factors, as we tried to illustrate in our schema.