Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Attacking this project, schematizing literacy, forced Mandy and I to work through the complexities of this term so that we could represent it as a multidimensional entity. Starting the readings this week, it was no secret to me the massiveness and nuances of literacy. Below I've shared a brief story how literacy is represented in some K-12 classrooms that you might find interesting. Reading the articles this week echoed a question that Dr. Graban asked in class on Tuesday and reminded me of an old-time show, whose line is it anyway? Rather, who determines what literacy is and how we should come to it? Then, how do we do “it” accordingly? I read the articles through that lens and wanted to track who thought what.

Mandy and I decided to use a key with the main theorist from this week so that we could track all the principle concepts of literacy, as well as the authors of each concept. Doing so allowed us to represent literacy as portrayed in our readings and keep track of the authors. Thus we needed to identify the main categories of literacy and the subcategories within. This was surprisingly simple as the authors, in many cases, explicitly stated their stances. For example, Bizzell devotes a whole section to orality, alphabetic literacy, and cultural literacy as massive parts of literacy. Brandt wrote a lot about the situadedness of time in relation to literacy accumulation by looking at three different generations experiences of literacy acquisition. It seemed as if throughout the majority of the readings this week, the social aspect of literacy was represented in all authors. Working through each reading allowed us to schematize how literacy is represented throughout the prescribed readings.

I think Brandt illustrates the complexity and ever-changing nature of literacy best in the following statement, “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-across positions of age, gender, race, class, and language heritage-find themselves having to piece together reading and writing experiences from more and more spheres, creating new and hybrid forms of literacy where once there might have been fewer and more circumscribed forms” (pg. 651). If I could edit this statement, I would add an element of time. The time-period of an individual directly impacts the effects of age, race, gender, technology, etc. Brandt mentions.

Working from Brandt, we chose our large categories to be “Ideologies”, “Multiple Literacies”, and “Context Dependent”. We felt that from the readings, we could postulate three ideologies- literacy accumulation (directly from Brandt and indirectly from Bizzell), technological determinism (directly from Ohmann), and mass culture (directly from Ohmann and Richardson). What these ideologies mean might look different among the authors identified, but they give a starting place for discussion. Multiple literacies was the largest category in our literacy schema. All of the authors this week portrayed the multidimensionalism of literacy. Representing this accurately and sufficiently proved to be challenging, as some authors spoke of the same concept using different terminology (e.g. multiculturalism, authorship). A big “aha” moment came when conceptualizing the dependency of literacy on the context it is situated in. As mentioned before, the time-period has large impacts on the author and literacy accumulator. Within the category of “Context Dependent” we narrowed the sub categories to time, power and control, and social. Personally, I personally think these subcategories are all interrelated with one another.

Returning back to my question, Whose line is it anyway?, I can now use the schema to better understand that perhaps the answer comes from many voices. Perhaps it is the line of the acquirer, the society, the time period, the discipline, the teacher. Maybe, when one becomes literate it is the voice of many, as Bizzell writes “You can’t act alone, perhaps, but you can act with others with whom you make a common cause” (pg. 152)- whatever that cause may be. 

In addition to my critical blog post, I will share an instance that recently occurred with a teacher- somewhere between here and Japan- in order to illustrate how literacy is represented in some classrooms. As many of you know, the push for Common Core has teachers of all content areas (science, social studies, math) implementing "literacy practices" in their classrooms. The unfortunate part about this is, there is little professional development or defining of literacy in the content areas for many of these teachers. We know how complex this term is and we may know what this requires of students, but it has produced quite interesting results in the K-12 classroom. Some time I ago I visited a 25-year veteran educator teaches middle-school Science and is seen by colleagues as a exemplarily educator. While I was preparing to teach RED4335 (Literacy in Content Areas) a few semesters ago I wanted to understand how literacy practices were implemented in the Science classroom. Through email correspondence I asked this teacher if she wouldn’t mind sharing a lesson she used where literacy practices were evident in Science. Excitedly she gave me student work of a skit in which she required her students to write about a science experiment. The teacher told me this was the best one and she really felt that it required students to employ literacy practices. After analyzing the skit, I realized that there were very few Science concepts evident and therefore no content area literacy practices were used. Walking away from reading the skit, I could not tell if the student even knew what an experiment was. The skit was, however, a very cute skit. The teacher had commonly confused literacy practices with English-discipline practices (playwriting). This raised some very interesting questions about the nature of literacy. It seems as if, literacy is not simply the act of reading and writing. There is more. That is why I said in class on Tuesday, that we must look to the discipline to see what practices are in place and identify those as literacy practices in that content area.

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.