“I have nodes.” The Interconnectedness of Literacy

Sorry, I saw a Pitch Perfect opportunity,
and I had to take it.

Attempting to create a schema for “literacy” seemed like an overwhelming task, even within the parameters of the readings for this week. However, once Mackenzie and I started to plot out key terms and concepts, we realized some of the subtle—and not so subtle—interconnections between each scholar’s conceptions of literacy. We started by identifying what we thought were broader categories: Ideologies, Multiple Literacies, and Context Dependent. Each of these categories could be broken down into nodes to demonstrate specific concepts and terms present in the readings. For instance, Multiple Literacies would include Connects/Relations, Multiculturalism, Notions of “Text,” and Orality. Subsequently, these concepts are split into more specific key ideas. To place Johnson-Eilola, Richardson, Ohmann, Bizzell, and Brandt on our schema, we created a symbol key. It should be noted that the symbols are completely random; they in no way signify anything about the scholars or the texts, besides serving as identification (i.e. We do not necessarily “heart” Richards). The symbols populate on key terms and concepts that we felt represent the scholars’ unique versions of literacy. We chose the format of a mind map for our schema because it seemed best suiting to showing not only the similarities and differences between notions of literacy, but also because it coherently demonstrates the relationships between terms. Such a schema allows us to create a network of literacy.

It was clear to see where each of our scholar’s contributions would fit into the larger categories, but plotting the less apparent nuances proved more challenging. Personally, I was surprised to see some of the ways in which these readings overlapped.  For instance, we decided that a majority of the readings, that is four, explained the issue of literacy as related to power and control.  Richardson, Ohmann, Bizzell, and Brant all discuss how literacy is context dependent, but specifically, how that context includes power structures. For example, Richardson sees “English Only” as enforcing an oppressive power structure over marginalized groups: “language as social construction and contested phenomenon, must be policed by those who want to keep certain power arrangements in place” (99). Furthermore, she writes that language is a medium of power and control; teaching other languages, then, has to align with the government’s interests.  Ohmann, too, discusses power and control, although his argument focuses mainly on class and economic power rather than political power. Ohmann’s point of view on the context of power and control cannot be separated from ideology. He identifies several at work in his article, but points mainly at technological determinism and monopoly capitalism. Ohmann writes, “Thus, our ‘age of technology’ looks to me very much like the age of monopoly capital, with new channels of power through which the few try to control both the labor and the leisure of the many” (684). For Ohmann and Richardson, understanding literacy practices means understanding the underlying power structures at work.

Another point of interconnection we saw was that of literacy being context dependent. Richardson states, “language must be evaluated in the context of use and only makes sense when studied in the context of social and cultural practices of which it is but part” (105). She goes on to explain that literacy is a social practice that is closely related to identity and knowledge making. Ohmann similarly writes, “Technique is less important than context and purpose in the teaching of literacy; and the effects of literacy cannot be isolated from the social relations and processes within which people become literate” (687). In other words, literacy must be taken within the context of the political and class structures at work. For Johnson-Eilola, the context is mainly social. Literacy is a social act, and authorship is often multiple and dynamic outside of the classroom. Johnson-Eilola claims that our literacy practices represent a contradiction: “While we espouse social construction and cultural studies, we continue to position students as lone individuals struggling to bring forth ‘original’ texts” (461). For these scholars, the contexts surrounding literacy are not clean cut and defined. As aforementioned, for Ohmann, political power is inseparable from ideology. For Johnson-Eilola, literacy as a social practice is inherently related to the idea of multiple literacies. For Richardson, channels of power and control inevitably bring up multiple literacies and the concept of cultural literacy. Because of all these interconnections, we felt that linking nodes might be the best way to represent the complex network of literacy.

Overall, the schema was helpful for making connections between the various ideas about literacy that have been circulating. Moreover, I think it allowed me to see, at least some, of the literacy practices and thinking that we have inherited and integrated into our educational system thanks in particular to Ohmann, Richardson and Johnson-Eilola. We did run into some challenges, though. Some of the readings didn’t explicitly mention literacy, and it was up to us to sort of extrapolate how their articles may have arisen from certain literacy concepts or practices. Furthermore, we felt that sometimes our arrangement and selection was reductive. For example, a good sampling of the authors discuss the idea of multiple literacies, but they do so with varying intentions and definitions of multiplicity. We hope that our schema represents this at least somewhat accurately. Finally, I worry that while we may have “schematized” literacy for the scholars represented, the nodes we have chosen may not apply to literacy as discussed by other scholars and theorists.

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. 

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.

The Wheel of Literacy: "Weights, strengths, and directions"

The first step that Travis and I took when trying to create our schema was coming up with a mutual definition for the term, “literacy”.  By establishing a concrete definition of “literacy”, we were able to create multiple connections between literacy and the external factors that support the definition.  Johndan Johnson-Eilola describes the supporting elements of literacy as “social and technological forces of varying weights, strengths, and directions,” and it is this description that grounds our schema and defines the direction that we went in, in terms of our choice of key words and the connections between them (454).  While the overall configuration of our schema was inspired by Elaine Richardson’s application of the center-periphery model, we were able to structure the schema in order to synthesize the texts and demonstrate the main components of literacy (97).

As challenging as it was to establish the connections among all five texts, it became evident that there are five key terms that are responsible for creating Johnson-Eilola’s explanation of “literacy”.  Deborah Brandt lends the idea of accumulating literacy as “piling up” and “spreading out” of text and information, which integrates technology and acts as a mobile channel for distribution of literacy (652).   The social influence of literacy, mainly coined as “Identity”, encompasses Elaine Richardson’s argument that “language is structure and use…used systematically by human beings and are governed by our culture, social practices, and conditions under which we are communicating” (101). Concurrently, the term “identity” is integrated by Richard Ohmann’s description of literacy as “an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization” (685). 

A common thread between the readings was the discussion of the introduction of technology in composition and how technology is altering the definition of literacy from a former belief that is rooted in a more traditional viewpoint.  We wanted to demonstrate this significance by pairing the implementation of technology with “symbolic-analysis,” as introduced by Johnson-Eilola (459).  Patricia Bizzell discusses “foundationalism” and the lengths one must take to avoid the “foundationalism of humanist literacy work,” which is represented by the “Gatekeeping” category (148).  The influence of the changing definition of “literacy” is also in response to Ohmann’s integration of market forces, such as mass media and public education. He connects this concept with technology and cultural identity when asking, “Isn’t the functional literacy rate just about what you’d expect, given how schooling relates to the needs and life chances of the working class? Shouldn’t we expect similar results in computer literacy?” (686). 

Demonstrating the relationship that these terms have with the evolving definition of literacy assist in creating a conversation between Johnson-Eilola, Bizzell, Ohmann, Richardson, and Brandt.  Representing equal importance and influence that these terms have on defining “literacy” was vital in the creation of our schema, thus allowing us to expand on the existing notion that literacy is an ever-changing concept.


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.

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English 47.7 (1985): 675-89.

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.

Walking away from the “build-a-tool” assignment, I think it helped me to expand the preconceptions I had about cognitivism coming into the course. I would still position myself far away from Flower and Hays’ 1981 article, but I was at least able to understand a little better what was at stake in the process/cognitive debate; in doing so, I can now see some value in what Flower and Hays offered the field in ’81 and how cognitivism can be used to build toward a pedagogy when put in dialogue with other theories (a la Carter). Upon re-reading Flower and Hays this week, I realized there were three different kinds of “processes” at play: the stage theory “process” like tagmemics, Flower and Hays’ recusive cognitive “process(es),” and the third provided my me: my conception of “process” as we know it in the field: composition as recursive stages, influenced by the interplay between internalized past experiences and external social forces. It was my own fault that I came to the readings this week with this notion because I assumed “process” had come to use pre-formed in the way I (we?) use it today; but now I’m seeing this process/cognition debate as somewhat of a Kuhnian pre-paradigm debate, in which we had two camps presenting their theories of writing and learning and each was trying to gain adherents through the journals. What we have now is a synthesis of the two—at the very least that while we might think of writing as coming in “stages,” we recognize recursivity, and we don’t think that writing comes soley from the individual writer and a “monitor”—a synthesis attempted by Carter in his “The Idea of Expertise.”

           

Carter attempted to give us the best of both words, as it were. On the one hand, he acknowledges that we do need some starting principles to work with, his idea of general knowledge, on the other he pairs it with context-centered experiential learning that allows students to become specifically trained in a discipline through a “cognitive apprenticeship.” I like this idea, and I think its remarkably similar to what we do with WAC/WID, but I found a fault with the apprenticeship being four years—meaning, while Carter acknowledges we need some general knowledge in FYC, he doesn’t do much to point us in the direction of what that general knowledge might be. I’m absolutely for a student becoming accustomed to a discipline through his/her college career; that’s kind of the point. We see an advocating for heuristics, but what kind of heuristics? Looking at it from 2014, I can’t help but think about how Writing about Writing might be the answer Carter was looking for. As so many WAW advocates ask, why shouldn’t we be teaching the materials of our discipline, the ways we understand composition today? We saw that in Irmscher’s article for this week, where his department dropped classes that didn’t teach the material of the field, giving so many antagonists grounds to dismiss FYC and Rhet/Comp broadly (240). Were we to adapt the cognitive apprenticeship model (and I think we have), we need to start students off with a grounded knowledge of not only how to write, but also what writing is. Introducing students to writing processes, genre, and digital composing spaces gives them a way to see their future writing tasks through these lenses, which can be accomplished by giving our students some theory to work with. However, I think we might be hampered by some tinges of expressivism here; I get the sense we feel like we can’t give our first-year students our theory unless severely watered down and we moreso need to focus on skills-based or voice-based writing. Not only would such a course introduce students to an apprenticeship in R/C, but it will prepare them to take on the cognitive apprenticeship of their choosing.