Triangulating Literacy: Negotiation, Agency, and Technology

The schema that Erik and I constructed has many layers and nuances that will take a much more extended reflection to give justice to all the aspects, but for my blog post, I want to focus on the relationship between the negotiation of literacy practices and a person’s agency in our schema of literacy.

I want to begin with Brandt who discusses “accumulating literacy” and the “material and ideological surplus” that people in the 21^st century are now confronting in that accumulation and literacy; she writes,

The piling up and extending out of literacy and its technologies give a complex flavor even to elementary acts of reading and writing today. Contemporary literacy learners…find themselves having to piece together reading and writing experiences from more and more spheres, creating new hybrid forms of literacy where once there might have been fewer and more circumscribed. (emphasis mine, 651)

So, here I want to focus on two aspects that will begin my discussion negotiation and agency. First, her discussion of emerging technologies (particularly, we might assume, digital technologies) can connect us to Ohmann’s warning (if we might call it that) to pay attention to how technologies, such as the computer. And second, the idea I’ve emphasized which may get us to agency: the act of piecing together seems like the important point of negotiation. This may also connect us to Johnson-Eiola’s discussion of the composing process as assemblage of texts.

To the first point, Ohmann gives us a warning that some writing technologies (he discusses the computer) are commoditized by a corporation who attach practices to the technology that enforce a dominant ideology—a top-down model of building literacy practices; or what I would call the global writing the local (I’m getting this language from David Barton). In other words, when the global literacy practices—or the broadcasting of dominant ideals worthy of broadcasting—are emerging from the home via personal writing technologies, we cannot allow them to flatten our community literacy practices. Ohmann might say that the local should write the global—or, that the local should preserve its literacy practices alongside a dominant global literacy. I have two examples I want to discuss: first, in Brandt, I’m interested in how one of her interviewees was using the radio (I cite in length):

So to listen to those stories of “The Shadow” or “Orson Welles Theatre” or “Mercury Theatre.” God, you could get right in. I mean, you could picture this whole thing going on and it was done with words. In our neighborhood plays we would try to reconstruct that… Or if you got a little poem that your mother wants you to read in front of them, a dozen relatives, because they think it’s good and you want to show off. And you read this dumb thing and you realize how really limited you are compared to Orson Welles. You were always comparing yourself to Orson Welles (emphasis mine, 657)

Here, I want to raise the question over negotiation, agency, and technology. Here is an a example, very clearly, of how the global is writing the local: Mr. May, the interviewee, is describing how the radio brought several dominant literacy practices to the home via Orson Welles. But what’s important here is that instead of seeing the literacy practices as of a different kind, he thought of it as a difference in degree: that his literacy practices were limited when compared to Orson. May, in fact, tried to emulate these Orson-Wellian practices. And I’m sorry to say, May doesn’t seem to be an active agent in this “negotiation” (if we want to call it negotiation) because of his passive (and almost defeatist) surrender to those other literacy practices. If we look to the schema that Erik and I made, we may say that the large arrow of dominant practices takes complete precedence over the smaller arrows derived from his home-grown practices. The top-down takes precedence over the bottom-up; the global is writing his local.

The second example is not from our readings so I’ll be brief. In Shane Borrowman’s On the Blunt Edge, Shawn Fullmer writes in his chapter "'The Next Takes the Machine': Typewriter Technology and the Transformation of Teaching” about how the personal typewriter—the kind that goes into the home—was embraced by formalists as standardizing users (students, citizens, etc) into the “proper” form. Initially, I would be under the assumption that the typewriter, one that enters the home, would offer users more agency because the home literacy practices would take precedence (at least be equal to) the practices attached to it. But from the formalist perspective (according to Fullmer), if students are socialized to use the typewriter in the way that aligns itself with a formalist ideology, then their practices will invade their home life.

I would argue that a successful negotiation happens when a person embodies agency by acknowledging and recognizing that they are negotiating between dominant and vernacular practices: that there are different literacy practices by kind rather than by degree. Mr. May, if given a typewriter and socialized with a formalist ideology, might fully surrender to those values—to which I would say, that doesn’t look like negotiation to me. (Bizzell discusses this question of negotiation in teacher-student relationships).

This discussion then connects us to my last point: when confronted with a surplus of different kinds of literacy practices, how do we sift through and choose which ones to attach ourselves to (or align ourselves with)?  In class, we discussed how students are conscious of this piecing together of literacy practices—it may be naïve to think otherwise. However, I would disagree: if a person is socialized to believe that the dominant is the ultimate and proper kind of literacy, then that person is not so much piecing together literacy practices themselves, but mirroring the dominant.  Richardson would call this miseducation—“a form of training or socialization designed for the uplift of the dominant society, which inadvertently works to the demise of the oppressed people in the society” (98). In other words, I’m not convinced that a person—such as a student—automatically has agency simply because they’ve made a choice—that choice may not be a choice at all, but a trained response. Per Burke (qua Enoch), critical reflection allows us to bring visible those aspects of our literacy practices and language that often operate under our radar, but dangerously impact our lives.

We can’t enter a classroom with the assumption that students automatically have agency—we, instructors, may need to prompt our students to see literacies as being different in kinds rather than degrees. In my experiences, students are more willing to sacrifice a bottom-up model of building literacy practices, but through critical reflection (Burke) we might get them to see it differently.

Who I mention (Thanks to Julianna who I copy-and-pasted from):

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.

Enoch, Jessica. "Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke's Pedagogy of Critical Reflection." CCC 56.2 (2004): 272-296.

Fullmer, Shawn. “The Next Takes the Machine”: Typewriter Technology and the Transformation of Teaching” On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition's History and Pedagogy. Ed. Shane Borrowman. Anderson, S.C.: Parlor Press. 2012. Print.

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.