Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Search Results Tag: literacy

Bizzell, P. “Arguing About Literacy.”

by Rachael

Published on: November 29, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1988, e. d. hirsh, jack goody, literacy, patricia bizzell, rhetoric of literacy, thomas farrell

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Bizzell, P. “Arguing About Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141–153. Print.

Summary

In this 1988 essay, Bizzell offers a rhetorical analysis of the foundationalist arguments about the nature of language and academic literacy, purported by those who wish to silence questions about the politically repressive nature of academic literacies as they are currently defined in order to preserve the status quo. She looks to those who describe the literacy problem from the humanist and social science perspectives, and critiques their dichotomies and their inability to see their own ideological defining of all literacy based on the academic literacy they value–including Farrell (143-4). She then turns to those like E. D. Hirsh who recognize the cultural nature of literacy, but respond in ways that still conceal political consequences thereof. Finally, she argues for an understanding of literacy that attends to its historically and rhetorically constructed nature, while acknowledging the impact of that construction. This is in part based on her assessment that what we know is establish rhetorically from that which has been persuasive (149).

Understanding literacy as rhetorically constructed, Bizzell sees room for teachers and students to take agency in shaping and defining academic literacy, though this task is complicated by the unequal power among the collaborators (150). Ultimately, while the resistance needs to happen out of the individual will of the students (to avoid the power of change being “granted” to students, and thus bypassing their agency), Bizzell warns against falling back into the foundationalist or determinist traps. Rather, she concludes, we need to recognize “that this process constitutes ‘normal’ intellectual life. The crucial moment in the inculcation of cultural literacy will be finding ways to persuade our students to participate in this life with us” (152).

Quotes

Humanists argue that the single set of changes they see as characteristic of all literacy is always attendant upon the acquisition of literacy and is independent of social variables. They assert that the change from oral thinking to literate think- ing can be achieved only through acquisition of alphabetic literacy, and that it is always achieved when alphabetic literacy has been acquired. These two assertions, however, have not been confirmed among variously literate contemporary peoples. [...] Typically, however, humanist literacy scholars do not acknowledge their conflation of literacy and academic literacy. Thus not only do they reduce all possible cognitive gains attendant upon literacy acquired in various social circumstances to the narrow set of abilities associated with academic literacy, but they also foster arguments that any cognitive gains to be had from any kind of literacy are available only from mastery of academic literacy. (143-4)

Hirsch adopts a determinist view of the power of history. He seems to say that both the content of the academic canon and our attitudes about the rightness of its dominance have been fixed by the past life of the society that has formed us. We may be able to make minor changes, but basically, we must submit. If one believes this, then there is no objection to teaching in the most indoctrinating fashion possible. What students lack is canonical knowledge: let’s give it to them. (148)

If we see the production of literacy as a collaborative effort-if we adopt a rhetorical perspective on literacy, which dialectically relates means of persuasion to audience’s canonical knowledge-then we need a pedagogy much less prescriptive than Hirsch’s or Farrell’s. Teaching academic literacy becomes a process of constructing academic literacy, creating it anew in each class through the interaction of the professor’s and the students’ cultural resources. I would argue that this is in fact what happens, very slowly-hence the increasing pluralism in academic literacy noted earlier. (150)

We have to be careful here not to fall back into a “foundationalist” way of arguing about change. If the power of an individual to effect change is qualified, if opportunities for oppositionally motivated change are contingent upon historical circumstances “erupting” into the academic community, this does not mean that change is now out of human hands. Rather, we should understand that change is always immanent but becomes evident when the time is right-and when those who wish to effect change are willing and able to engage in the rhetorical processes that make change happen. That is, those who support change must persuade other members of the academic community that the prevailing notion of academic literacy needs revision. We should not expect those with a critical perspective on prevailing notions to be any more able to transcend historical circumstances than the supporters of the dominant culture are-to wish for this power is to fantasize avoiding the rhetorical process. (151-2)

Greenberg, Karen, Patrick Hartwell, Margaret Himley and R. E. Stratton. “Responses to Thomas Farrell, ‘IQ and Standard English.”

by Rachael

Published on: September 24, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1984, karen greenberg, literacy, margaret himley, orality, patrick hartwell, politics of discourse, politics of education, r. e. stratton, racism, thomas farrell, walter ong, william lubov

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Greenberg, Karen, Patrick Hartwell, Margaret Himley and R. E. Stratton. “Responses to Thomas Farrell, ‘IQ and Standard English.” College Composition and Communication 35.4 (1984): 455-469. Print.

Summary

In this collection of responses to Thomas Farrell’s unfortunate articles, the four contributors dispute Farrell’s reasoning, intention, and effect in his claim that African American children come from an oral culture whose lack of the copulative verb deprives them of the abstract thinking latent in those from a literate (white) culture.

Quotes

Greenberg:

Logic and rhetorical ability are aracial. Regardless of their di- alects, all remedial writers use both hypotactic and paratactic constructions in their writing and all of them need practice and instruction in elaborating their ideas with specific and appropriate details. (458)

Farrell repeatedly asserts that he does not believe the hypothesis of genetic differences in intelligence between black and white children; however, his own hypothesis is just as wrongheaded and just as harmful. And just as racist. My Webster’s II defines “racism” as “program or practice of racial discrimination based on racial differences.” Advocating a separate pedagogy for students be- cause of differences in their genes or in their language is racist. (460)

Hartwell:

Of course, many of Farrell’s observations are sound. Black American culture does place a high value on oral performance; basic writers do turn naturally to narrative modes; becoming literate does involve massive changes in one’s in- ternal grammar and in one’s awareness of language as language. And Farrell is
particularly right to stress that the basic writing course needs to concentrate on developing abstract thought through written language. There are a number of suggestions about how to develop such thought, however, and few place much emphasis on “full standard deployment of the verb ‘to be.”‘ (463-4)

Himley:

Farrell raises complex issues about language, learning, and thought, but re- duces them to a series of global, dichotomous, and mutually-exclusive propo- sitions or variables. (466)

The point is that Farrell’s premises simplify highly complex and interrelated issues of language, learn- ing, and thought. (467)

Language, learning, and thought may be far more complex than Professor Farrell’s disjunctive premises and argument suggest. He grapples with these issues in a simplistic way, struggling to fit a squirming octopus into a tight pair of pants. (468)

Stratton:

The article is offensive in that it fails to examine the moral issues involved in the proliferation of standard English, and it is offensive to whites as well as to blacks: a passive nation so programmed might be a great deal easier to con- trol politically than one less dominated by so vicious a stance of cultural supe- riority. (469)

Young, Morris. “Narratives of Identity: Theorizing the Writer and the Nation.”

by Rachael

Published on: June 29, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1995, citizenship, deborah brandt, identity, literacy, morris young, narrating the nation

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Young, Morris. “Narratives of Identity: Theorizing the Writer and the Nation.” Journal of Basic Writing 15.2 (1996): 50- 75. Print.

Summary

In this potent article, Young does similar work to that in his Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as Rhetoric of Citizenship. He describes and theorizes a writing class in which he offers Hawai’ian students the critical pedagogical opportunity to investigate themselves as writers in a particular cultural context. Literacy is not just a cultural narrative of citizenship (with all the implied political consequences of the rhetorics of education and literacy), but also a means through which citizenship and nation are made to happen. The ability to constitute one’s identity through the construction of a cultural text within a given cultural moment is a liberatory act that draws explicit attention to the political consequences of literacy on both identity and nation, and hence, the nature of citizenship.

Quotes

I want to suggest that there is a need to refocus our attention on the students who in many ways can and do create the terms for discussing literacy through the production of texts that engage their own literacy practices as well as the literacy practices and expectations of our larger culture. (51)

The use of a rhetoric of “citizenship” [in popular American discourses of the promise of literacy] is an attempt to both appease resistance as well as to offer inclusion, though that inclusion in reality may be very limited. Thus students are still trained to become “literate” citizens, perhaps with a bit more “choice” but still remain very much part of the reproduction of structural oppression. Students do not have full “citizenship” in their own classrooms as they learn to become “citizens” and are not allowed to be seen as already contributing members of the community. They can only exist as or become “citizens” if they meet the cultural requirements and standards as defined by the Nation, though the narrative of Nation always makes the possibility of citizenship seem to be an easily achieved reality.

A move toward student self-determination, then, is not a rejection or dismissal of teachers or “knowledge” or “skills.” Rather, it is a recognition of the very existence of the students and the way in which they already construct themselves, construct culture, and place themselves within this culture. It is the reconceptualization of the classroom and its participants and dynamics. It is the recognition of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact zone,” those “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (34). (53)

This further destabilizes the ideological and institutional structures that have privileged texts and experiences that are not necessarily meaningful to the students in my class. On a theoretical level, I wanted to emphasize that textual production could be thought of as an act of cultural production; that the activity of writing the students were engaged in should not be thought of as being a distinct academic activity, but rather as an already existing cultural practice. By first recognizing the production of culture through their own texts as other cultural constructs such as literacy could be both contested and produced in terms that would be useful to them.

Narrating the Nation is an act of composing, perhaps ultimately rhetorical if the Nation is indeterminate, but important as a first step if one is to imagine oneself as part of a culture, and for my purposes, as a writer in that culture. While the Nation may often be a romantic narrative of progress and unity (perhaps like literacy), it provides for a space where individuals can write from or write against, where students can begin to locate themselves within the various spaces in which they find themselves. (66)

When Rose, Nate, Peter and the rest of the students write their texts, they write about their lives and their selves in order to create the context for their literacy. Certainly they will be influenced by the university and the larger American culture, but because they have begun to situate themselves within a knowledge that is purposeful to them they will be able to negotiate their identities and literate acts within the communities in which they find themselves. (69)

But they have begun to understand that to participate in public life and to use public language is not to lose a part of themselves. Instead they theorize their roles as writers and their place in the Nation because they recognize that they are cultural workers and already live literate lives. (70)

Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.

by Rachael

Published on: June 22, 2011

Categories: basic writing, critical pedagogy, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1995, education, language diversity, lisa delpit, literacy, racism

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Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New Press, 2006. Print.

Summary
In the 1995 introduction, the 2006 edition introduction, and the included essays “Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator,” and “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Lisa Delpit takes on the progressive, liberal white pedagogical model of the process approach to writing as a means for teaching writing to children of color, noting its manifest racism. While these works have been critiqued by many critical or progressive educators, Delpit’s anecdotal evidence and analysis makes a strong case for how varying models of authority across diverse cultures are real circumstances that must be taken to account in any pedagogy, particularly those that serve low-income students and students of color. She advocates a pedagogy that blends the affirming attitude of the process approach with explicit instruction in the codes of power (skills), and insists that teachers and parents of color be included (and really heard) in dialogues about how best to educate children of color.

Quotes
It is a deadly fog formed whenthe cold mist of bias and ignorance meets the warm vital reality of children of color in many of our schools. It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at “other people’s children” and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them. (xxiii)

What should we be doing? The answers, I believe, lie not in a proliferation of new reform programs, but in some basic understandings of who we are and how we are connected to and disconnected from one another. (xxv)

However, writing process advocates often give the impression that they view the direct teaching of skills to be restrictive to the writing process at best, and at worst, politically repressive to students already oppressed by a racist educational system. Black teachers, on the other hand, see the teaching of skills to be essential to their students’ survival. It seems as if leaders of the writing process movement find it difficult to develop the vocabulary to discuss the issues in ways in which teachers with differing perspectives can hear them and participate in the dialogue. (18)

Students need technical skills to open doors, but they need to be able to think critically and creatively to participate in meaning ful and potentially liberating work inside those doors. Let there be no doubt: a “skilled” minority person who is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of the dominant society, simply the grease that keeps the institutions which orchestrate his or her oppression running smoothly. On the other hand, a critical thinker who lacks the “skills” demanded by empolyers and institutions of higher learning can aspire to financial and social status only within the disenfranchised underworld. Yes, if minority people are to effect the change which will allow them to truly progress we must insist on “skills” within the context of critical and creative thinking. (19)

I further suggest that is it the responsibility of the dominant group members to attempt to hear the other side of the issue; and after hearing, to speak in a modified voice that does not exclude the concerns of their minority colleagues. [...] [It's] time to seek the diversity in our educational movements that we talk about seeking in our classrooms. (20)

Rather, I suggest that the differing perspectives on the debate over “skills” versus “process” approaches can lead to an understanding of the alienation and miscommunication, and thereby to an understanding of the “silenced dialogue.”
[There are 5 power premises, they are]
1. Issues of power are enacted in classrooms.
2. There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture of power.”
3. The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.
4. If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier.
5. Those with power are frequently least aware of–or least willing to acknowledge–its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence. (24)

A related phenomenon is that liberals (and here I am using the term “liberal” to refer to those whose beliefs include striving for a society based upon maximum individual freedom and autonomy) seem to act under the assumption that to make any rules or expectations explicit is to act against liberal principles, to limit the freedom and autonomy of those subjected to the explicitness. (26)

To provide schooling for everyone’s children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it. (28)

Several black teachers have said to me revently that as much as they’d like to believe otherwise, they cannot help but conclude that many of the “progressive” educational strategies imposed by liberals upon black and poor children could only be based on a desire to ensure that the liberals children get sole access to the dwindling pool of Amercian jobs. Some have added that the liberal educators believe themselves to be operating with good intentions, but that these good intentions are only conscious delusions about their unconscious true motives. (29)

I do not advocate a simplistic “basic skills” approach for children outside the culture of power. It would be (and has been) tragic to operate as if these children were incapable of critical and higher-order thinking and reasoning. Rather, I suggest that schools must provide these children the content that other families from a different cultural prientation provide at home. This does not mean separating children according to damily background, but instead, ensuring that each classroom incorporate strategies appropriate for all the children in its confines. (30)

Although the probelm is not necessarily inherent in the method, in some instances adherents of process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them. Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, that “product” is not important. In this country, students will be judged on their product regradless of the process they utilized to achieve it. And that product, based as it is on the specific codes of a particulat culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit. (31)

In other words, the attempt by the teacher to reduce an exhibition of power by expressing herself in indirect terms may remove the very explicitness that the child needs to understand the rules of the new classroom culture. (35)

If the children in her class understand authority as she does, it is mutually agreed upon that they are to obey her no matter how indirect, soft-spoken, or unassuming she may be. Her indirectness and soft-spokenness may indeed be, as I suggested earlier, an attempt to reduce the implication of overt power in order to establish a more egalitarian and nonauthoritarian classroom atmosphere.
If the children operate under abother notion of authority, however, then there is trouble. The black child may perceive the middle-class teacher as weak, ineffectual, and incapable of taking on the role of being the teacher; therefore there is no need to follow her directives. (36)

I futher believe that to act as if power foes not exist is to ensure that the power status quo remains the same. (39)

No, I am certain that if we are truly to affect societal change, we cannot do so from the bottom up, but we must push and agitate from the top down. And in the meantime, we must take the responsibility to teach, to provide for students who do not already possess them, the additional codes of power. (40)

To summarize, I suggest that students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstram of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own “expertness” as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent.
I am also suggesting that appropriate education for poor children and children of color can only be devised in consultation with adults who share their culture. Black parents, teachers of color, and members of poor communities must be allowed to participate fully in the discussion of what kind of instruction is in their children’s best interest. Good liberal intentions are not enough. (45)

Pandey, I. P. “Imagined Nations, Re-imagined Roles: Literacy Practices of South Asian Immigrants.”

by Rachael

Published on: June 10, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2006, arjun appadurai, benedict anderson, deborah brandt, globalization, harvey graff, immigrants, iswari pandey, literacy, translocalism

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Pandey, I. P. “Imagined Nations, Re-imagined Roles: Literacy Practices of South Asian Immigrants.” Diss. University of Louisville, 2006. Print.

Summary

In this dissertation, Pandey interviews 68 Midwestern South Asian immigrants in an effort to understand the ways in which they use literacy practices to construct self, hold on to their homes, build new ethnic nations, and negotiate the demands of the host nation. He works with these questions specifically in the context of globalization, global flows, and post-9/11 US anti-immigrant sentiment.

Quotes

With this inquiry, not only do I call attention to the symbolic practices of a population perceived and presented contradictorily in the sociological composition of the US–high-achieving “model” minority/immigrant as well as potential terrorist–but also, and more importantly, to the complex forms and functions of immigrant literacies. I do so by going to the contexts of those literacies’ production and consumption and by uncovering immigrants’ imagined and actualized relationships between themselves and their communities on the one hand and their communities and the host nation on the other, (1)

Literacy in traditional scholarship as well as the current crises rhetoric has become an identity trope to distinguish people and communities identifying with a dominant linguistic and cultural order form those that do not. This is to suggest that the literacy crisis is less an issue of literacy per se and more of legibility and legitimization. It is a question of whose practices can be understood and valued. Studies such as the present one challenge the crises rhetoric and democratize literacy discourse by highlighting minoritized and marginalized practices. (15)

However, once literacy is accepted as practice and its actual use is made the locus of analysis, the orality-literacy divide disappears, for it is the specific context and goal that determine the specific form of communication (Street, 1995, p.1), whether oral, written, or any number of semiotic forms such as words, images, gestures, of even silence. (18)

As the process, frequency, and character of migration alter, the relationship between literacy and long distance nationalism also changes. Understandably, the relationship with the host society is also enacted differently, now that newer technologies facilitate easier and faster means of exchanges. (29)

When immigrants experience their identity marked as the other, they create and deploy such literacy practices that construct and maintain a nationhood of their own, which, while transcending geographical border, also (re)invent strong affiliations with the originary home. (76)

Def postnational: “I deploy the term postnational not to suggest any false, teleological movement somehow “beyond” or “after” any problematics of nation-ness where subjects would be in a position to go about their business freely or be liberated from the burden of history. Instead, the term makes it possible to imagine an alternative conception of communities, kinships, and conflicts through deterritorialized modes of contact. (78)

Their literacy practices take on a distinctly rhetorical form of community identity (re)production when some of these members are invited to present on their culture by mainstream community groups and law enforcement agencies. These Muslim men’s reading and writing show literacy not only as cultural but also rhetorical practices that respond to political contingencies. Finally, these men mobilize their literacy practices to re-construct and reposition their individual and community identity here and now in relation to distant lands and values. (108)

While immigrant literacy acts demonstrate the predicament of navigating different cultural and political spaces, immigrants affiliation occurs mostly along the axes of ethnicity and religion rather than nationality and regionalism and reproduces a shared diasporic sensibility based on a nostalgia for the home left behind. Distance from native cultural landscape fills them with anxiety about authentic cultural self. Desiring positive reinforcement of one’s identity is perhaps only natural in a world faced with increasing instances of diaspora, global flow of cultural images and products, and cultural contacts. [...] And hence the need to create and deploy specific literacies for self-affirmation and cultural preservation, or to imagine communities and nations above and beyond the limits of geography and state politics. (122-3)

Most immigrant literacy narratives are embedded in those dominant rhetorics of globalization and multiculturalism, but their literacy practices–unlike their typical narratives–display such discursive spaces that are even more suggestive and meaningful than are those narratives. It is those practices through which they negotiate multiple borders. Of greater interest are the practices of those individuals, who are marginalized within their communities in terms of class, caste/race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or life chances and who appropriate the rhetorical powers of texts and positions to form and transform the norming structures that are increasingly transnational. [...]

First, immigrants’ transcultural and transnational engagements create what Homi Bhaba calls ‘spaces between’ and Gloria Anzaldua calls ‘borderland.’ While on the one hand they (re)invent authentic selves by (re)creating literacies along ethnic religio-cultural and/or linguistic lines to solidify affiliation with their native roots, they also claim membership in the adopted society. [...] Similarly, newer forms and functions of language and literacy practices also emerge. Some examples include (re)imagining nations and communities, forming and transforming cultural and individual identities, transnational collaboration (as in the case of students sharing their work over the Internet) and solidarity.

Second, immigrants’ reading-writing practices not only show that they are ideologically-saturated social practices and for functions as varied as being coping mechanisms to cultural bridge-making, they also serve as possibilities of negotiating and understanding across borders. [...]

Third, treating immigrant literacy practices as transnational would also mean to locate and advance a discourse that goes beyond the rhetoric of the national in the guise of the global. Most of the current “global” rhetorics underlie the contradictions of a free market with the ever-tightening national borders and strict immigration polities, but immigrant language and literacy practices present a way of building and sustaining alliances that transcend the national borders while also responding to the specific needs of the local. [...]

Fourth, if, as Bill Readings (1996) has argued, modern university had a “national cultural mission” (3) from its originary moment, what happens to it and its mission, especially that of producing national citizens, when we have entered a so-called new global order, and when the university when it is increasingly corporatization? The questions are endless. For example, if we assume that our job today as conscientious teacher-scholars is to prepare global citizens instead of just the citizens of a nation-state, and a “politicized citizenry” if you like Dewey, what does it mean in terms of our own roles as university teachers and what we do? (202-6)

If we really mean to learn from the strategic use of literacy by the othered members of the immigrant communities, we should use the ethos and authority that our position gives us to transform the structures that (re)produce and legitimize the very elitism and authority from which and with which we speak. (211)

Young, Morris. Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as Rhetoric of Citizenship.

by Rachael

Published on: April 6, 2011

Categories: critical pedagogy, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2004, anne ruggles gere, anxiety and nostalgia, becoming minor, brian street, citizenship, deborah brandt, eldred and mortensen, literacy, literacy narrative, morris young, omi and winant, richard rodriguez, robert yagelski, victor villanueva

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Young, Morris. Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as Rhetoric of Citizenship. Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print.

Summary

Young combines attention to literacy studies, critical race theory, rhet/comp, and more to see literacy narratives as a cite for (particularly) people of color to “become minor” before “re/visioning” what it means to be an American. For Young, literacy narratives are a site for self- and nation-making, just as language and literacy are a site for self/other-making and often -hating. Literacy narratives are a site to use literate skills (often hybrid/blended ones) to intervene in the well-told stories about what it means to be an American citizen, especially for people of color. Young looks at narratives by Villanueva, Rodriguez, Bulosan, and Kingston as examples of the revisioning he describes, and discusses the implications for us as people, citizens, teachers, and researchers.

Quotes

I want to understand how citizenship and cultural citizenship become important tropes to describe a person’s relationship to America, to bother strive for full recognition and challenge the requirements for recognition. In these narratives it is important to understand the “minor” positions that are constructed in order to complicate dominant narratives about literacy and race. Understanding citizenship and the “minor” can lead to the re/vision of citizenship and the ways we use literacy to construct citizenship. (12)

By using the conceptual terms and tropes of citizenship and cultural citizenship, the minor, re/vision, and literacy, students can productively engage the experiences of others rather than simply appropriate or recolonize these experiences. While the material conditions of an individual are affected by social class, gender, race, and ethnicity, or other “minor” positions, students can begin to move toward understanding what it means to be minor by both reading and writing literacy narratives that challenge their safe positions. (15)

What does it mean to become a public citizen from a minor position? I argue that being minor id in fact already a public act, an act that inserts the minor into the conversation with dominant American culture, which must now account for the array of diverse voices already present. (16)

The literacy narrative fulfills a particular project: Writers and readers respond to the anxieties and crises that they face in their present cultural-historical circumstances by reading and writing in the genre of the literacy narrative. [...] …the literacy narrative has emerged in many instances when marginalized peoples have been forced to prove their legitimacy as citizens or potential citizens through a demonstration of their literacy, education, and often a (cultivated) desire to join dominant culture. In each of the subgenres of literacy narrative defined by Eldred and Mortersen and Kaplan we find common tropes that set the conditions for the use-value of the narrative. Sanctioned literacy of language is represented as a goal, and students begin their processes of Adaptation. The newly enlightened subject now becomes part of the community and enjoys the rights and privileges of membership (often as economic, political, cultural capital), the realization of Power. Through education, transformation or conversion is achieved, and these “citizens” enjoy a State of Grace. While each trope plays upon different expectations to varied degrees–some tropes being more appealing than others–they all operate in the function of the narrative, as part of the rhetoric that attempts to persuade reders to a particular meaning. The subject position of those who write literacy narratives also contributes to this rhetoric and plays a crucial role in determining the us-value of the narrative. The literacy narrative can act to confirm, transform, or even reject a person’s participation in culture, raise questions about community identity and membership, or encourage participation of not only the writer but also the reader in making meaning from the narrative.

…

Thus the racialized subject reconfigures the literacy narrative as a strategy for resisting appropriation by a dominant American culture that imagines a unifying narrative of citizenship and culture through the naturalized discourse of Standard English by denaturalizing Standard English. (34-5)

“Becoming minor,” then, is a conscious choice (as opposed to being simply an assigned position) that creates the possibility to respond to hegemonic culture without being subject to its construction alone of how someone from “minority” culture should act. By examining the implications of a minor subject-position, by realizing how a lack of political, economic, educational, and cultural capital can have material consequences, minor subjects can understand how they are being exploited and begin to develop strategies to address their oppression. This is the move to connect individuals to political action. (42)

Cultural citizenship describes the constructed relations between individuals and the larger culture that dictate the ways these writers participate in these communities, how these communities construct them, and how these writers locate themselves in America. [...] America can maintain its cohesion as a “Nation” only if it can organize its subjects in ways that account for their difference but also subsume those differences, either by minimizing (assimilating) difference or maximizing (exposing) difference. This act of imagining becomes problematic as not only Asian bodies byt all racialized bodies then become subject to the disciplining power of the state in order to maintain classifications for understanding “National” culture. (48-9)

As I have tried to lay out in this chapter, the process of minor re/vision is a complicated one that requires people who find themselves on the margins of American culture to engage with dominant discourses of literacy, race, and citizenship; to imagine themselves as minor; and to argue for a cultural citizenship that inserts them into and rewrites the American story. [...] These writers who become minor use the literacy narrative to deterritorialize dominant discourses that have constructed them in specific ways, to move toward political action by recognizing their sociopolitical conditions, and to provide a collective assemblage of experiences which precludes the essentializing of identities. In starting to narrate literacy and citizenship, we initiate a process where we begin to understand the contexts for our literacy, to re/vision how and why we are literate, and to transform literacy for use in our own projects. (52-3)

Whether we are researching the literacy practices of diverse communities, teaching in classrooms that are either widely heterogeneous or narrowly homogeneous, or participating in professional conferences where we make arguments and claims about the work we do, we need to keep in mind out responsibilities to individuals and communities: that in doing research about literacy and in teaching literacy to a variety of people. we are also working to create opportunities, to reveal inequity, and to act in the interests of social justice. (171)

Asking students and ourselves to use literacy narratives is a way to investigate in more thorough ways our relationship to literacy, how literacy functions in specific contexts, and how literacy functions in larger cultural narratives, which may describe and reproduce values, beliefs, and practices in uncomplicated ways. This is a re/vision of research, a move toward locating more clearly the multiple positions we occupy as researcher and object of inquiry and toward understanding how the personal provides another lens through which we perform our analyses of public culture, using the ordinary, daily, and minor to disrupt dominant narratives about literacy, race, and citizenship. (184)

Bacon. “Of Studies.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 21, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1600, francis bacon, literacy, reading

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Citation

Bacon, Francis. “Of Studies.” Bacon’s Essays with Annotations. Ed. Richard Whately and Franklin Fiske Heard. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1868. Print.

Summary/Quotes

In this short essay, Bacon positions “study” in what we would call a rhetorical way–reading is done well when it is done by the right person in the right moment for the right purpose. It can be over and under used and must be done judiciously.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 27, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2004, composition, deborah brandt, discipline, globalization, kathy yancey, lester faigley, literacy, marshall mcluhan, multimodal composition, rhetoric of literacy

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Citation: Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

Summary: In the publication of her 2004 chair’s address, Yancey composes an intertextual work with four quartets, blocked off and bolded quotations, epigraphs, and metacommentary that tries to capture the spirit of her argument in a print-bound space.

She sets the piece with a description of the current moment of composition. She writes that:

never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres. The consequences of there two factors is the creation of a writing public that, in development and in linkage to technology, parallels the development of a reading pubic in the 19th century. And these parallels, they raise good questions, suggest ways that literacy is created across spaces, across time. (298)

Like those earlier reading publics, she points to the fervor with which people now engage in self-motivated public writing. She ends the opening by asking what writing is and how we should approach it, given the circumstances.

In the first quartet, Yancey further delineates the parallel between the 19th century reading public and today’s extensive writing public. She further highlights the global moment and the astounding fact that in an age of so much access to education, so much of this writing has nothing to do with school. She writes:

Like 19th-century readers creating their own social contexts for reading in reading circles, writers in the 21st centruy self-organize into what seem to be overlapping technologically driven writing circles, what we might call a series of newly imagined communities, communities that cross borders of all kinds–nation, state, class, gender, ethnicity. [...] the members of the writing public have learned–in this case, to write, to think together, to organize, and to act within these forums–largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without our instruction. (301)

As she transitions to the next quartet, Yancey poses the question of what all these shifts mean for teachers and researchers of composition. Following this, she discusses comp’s history as a gatekeeping system and suggests that through appropriate and better curriculum design we could be a gateway as well. After describing some common current practices in the comp classroom, she argues that “we already inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school” (308).

Her next transition asks what ought to be the content of composition, in response to which she poses that we work on “three changes: Develop a new curriculum; revisit and revise our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” (308).

She proposes a writing and rhetoric major, which would fill the gap between FYC and grad education in comp. She urges us to think about circulation of texts in a multivalent way (public, intertextual, contextual, etc) (311), and she pitches a new model of composition that includes “circulation of composition, canons of rhetoric, and deicity of technology” (312). Circulation in this case means thing about genre, remediation, and knowledge making, among other things, her discussion of the canons reminds me of Collin’s book-calling for us to rethink them in the contemporary context; deicity refers to words like now and then, or, words that can mean very different things depending on the time or place. Literacy is like this, she says, especially now that technological change is so rapid. The spaces of digital writing prompt users to imagine new uses unintended by designers, and encourage new inventionary moments. She writes that

This new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy.New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on to it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us. (320)

And concludes that:

In helping create writing public, we also foster the development of citizens who vote, of citizens whose civic literacy is global in its sensibility and its communicative potential, and whose commitment to humanity is characterized by consistency and generosity as well as the ability to write for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited. (321)

Discussion:

In this piece, like in Grabills, we see the rhetoric of literacy as a sort of all-powerful tool for navigating the social and political complexities of life. I’m not trying to be reductive-the types of literacy she’s implying here are far reaching and complex to be sure. My concern, however, would be the lack of specificity and attention of material details of life in particular individuals’, communities’, institutions’, and nations’ circumstances. As Collins and Ross explain in Global Crises, we need to use digital literacies to exploit the tensions in high tech global capitalism toward the cause of social justice, but we need attentive, thick, macro/mezzo/micro level thick description of the context at hand in order to do so. I suppose rhetorics of literacy like this one are wonderful general goals, but we should encourage research that takes it seriously the deixis (to stretch Yancey’s metaphor) of literacy. Although, I don’t think there are so many works that do this that are also well-regarded in the field. I’ll have to think more on it and keep my eyes open, as well as hold it in mind as a methodological principle for future work of my own.

Grabill, Jeffrey. “Utopic Visions, The Technopoor, and Public Access: Writing Technologies in a Community Literacy Program.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 27, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1998, community literacy, design, jeff grabill, jim porter, literacy, rhetoric of literacy, selfe and selfe, technopoor

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Citation: Grabill, Jeffery. Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Print.

Summary: In this article, Grabill uses James Porter’s framework of access (infrastructure, literacy, community) and Selfe and Selfe’s discussion of interface design to evaluate the literacy training program at Western District. He argues that through our research, teaching, curriculum design, and voice in public policy, computers and writing folk (as he suggests we name ourselves to encompass a broader vision of the work we do) can be active in reframing what literacy programs and technologies do to provide not only functional sorts of literacies, but also critical, social, political, rhetorical literacies for the technopoor toward their own personal and professional purposes.

References: Porter, Selfe and Selfe, Cushman, Sullivan, Street, Cooper, Faigley

Key Quotes:

Instead, curriculum design that might increase the literacy accesses of students would likely include teachers, students, and if necessary, outside resources, like computers and writing specialists, who could help design more appropriate curricula. (310)

I want to call into question the focus of our work in computers and composition but not to say that research shouldn’t continue in this area. Rather, because of social, technological, intellectual, and work changes, it is useful to think more broadly in terms of computers and writing. When considering computers and writing, we are necessarily forced to consider the public and civic uses of computers for writing. Such a consideration demands we look at work, at civic life, and at the variety of literate practices in community settings and the ways those practices are (or may become) computer-mediated. (311)

…The need for computer writing technologies in public institutions like community centers is there, and if designed as writing technologies, computers are part of the complex network of initiatives necessary to change the meaning and function of written literacies (in any institution). (312)

Discussion: This is excellent early work on the topic-I’m not sure what kind of follow up work has been done since-should look into it. In any case, the passage Grabill sites from the Western District’s mission statement, that “The program further articulates a concept of adult students as ‘persons who are unique, learn throughout their lives, have the potential for growth and self-fulfillment, have a right to be involved in the process of making decision that affect them, and have a right to learn how to effectively and positively manage their own lives’” (306), made me begin thinking about the rhetoric of literacy as a liberatory tool. This sort of rhetoric is rampant in my own work, and in Freire’s and others’, but is also tempered within the scholarship, like Selfe and Street and Brandt. Either way, it’s something I need to start tracking as a trope (and sort of have been in my attention to authors’ “vision for education”).

Street, Brian. Literacy in Theory and Practice.

by Rachael

Published on: January 5, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, Reading Notes

Tags:anthropology, bernstein, brian street, ethnography, harvey graff, ideological model, james paul gee, linguistics, literacy, shirley brice heath, thick description, william labov

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Citation: Street, Brian. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge Univ Press, 1984. Print.

Summary: In Literacy in Theory and Practice, Street takes on literacy work done across linguistics, education, and anthropology to denounce what he terms the “autonomous” model of literacy. In this model, scholars, teachers, and policy makers understand literacy to have a particular set of technical skills which have cognitive consequences. More specifically, autonomous model scholars, such as Jack Goody who Street uses as the archetype of such thinking, see speech and writing as interchangeable, and therefore see no issue in using written language as a model for speech (66). This model also facilitates the transition from civilized/savage ethnocentric cultural comparison ethnocentrism to “literate/non-literate,” and help people like Thomas Farrell make arguments about how people without a strong written language to be deficient in abstract thinking, or as Street cites, unable to think from the “I” perspective as seen in Patricia Greenfields study of schooled and unschooled children in Senegal.

Street advocated instead for an “ideological” model of literacy in which :

It assumes that the meaning of literacy depends upon the social institutions in which it is embedded;

literacy can only be known to us in forms which already have political and ideological significance and it cannot, therefore, be helpfully separated from that significance and treated as thought it were an ‘autonomous’ thing;

the particular practices of reading and writing that are taught in any context depend upon such aspects of social structure as stratification (such as where certain social groups may be taught only to read), and the role of educational institutions (such as in Graff’s (1979) example from nineteenth century Canada where they function as a form of social control);

the processes whereby reading and writing are learnt are what construct the meaning of it for particular practitioners;

we would probably more appropriately refer to ‘literacies’ than to any single ‘literacy’;

writers who tend towards this model and away from the ‘autonomous’ model recognise as problematic the relationship between the analysis of any ‘autonomous’, isolable qualities of literacy and the analysis of the ideological and political nature of literacy practice. (8)

Street takes up several examples for his analysis. The primary site of investigation is his reflection upon his time in the Iranian mountain villages. He describes the system of ‘maktab’ literacy, in which students learn various levels of actual reading skills through the studying of scriptures under various mullahs. One of the primary skills people took way the recognition of meaning based upon visual textual design, such as the use of various fonts toward particular meanings, or the off-setting of significant passages. Others used their recitation of passages to learn Farsi/Persian/Arabic thanks to the similarity of their home language and familiarity with meanings of the texts based on discussion of passages in group settings.

In the following chapter, he looks at how the tradition of the ‘maktab’ literacy helped those mountain agricultural villages to develop commercial literacies in a way that they were much better able to account for the new demands of a booming economy in the late 60′s and early 70′s than were the plains villages who didn’t have that same literacy experience (although they shared the maktab literacy). This analysis helps develop his idea that literacy only really makes a difference in the lives of the already privileged (107), and that literacy can enable social benefit, but is not the direct cause of it.

In the final two chapters, Street critiques literacy programs by Unesco that work out of autonomous literacy models. He remarks that:

While education, and in particular literacy, are regarded as ‘technical’ processes this problem gets little attention since it is assumed that anyone professionaly trained to impart ‘skills’ can do so to anyone ‘intellectually’ capable of acquiring them. Once, however, it is recognised that teaching literacy involves putting over a specific ideology, particularly one alien to the students concerned, then the ‘problem’ of the teacher becomes crucial and developmentalists are obliged to take some account of local values and ideology. (198)

This is a problem that also must be negotiated by radical literacy campaigners like Freire who must be aware of their own ideological positioning compared to that of the students as well.

In the final chapter, Street praises the work begun by the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit, who suggest (and offer the beginnings of) a list of possible types of literacy skills that would be desired by literacy students who could choose which skills would best serve their needs in their particular local contexts, rather than those skills being chosen and implemented from above. He poses the question at one point, which I feel is extremely important for teachers of Academic writing,

Activists have to ask, in this as in other areas of struggle, is it right to opt out of the establishment institutions and to work instead at ‘comprehensive socialisation’ in alternative sites of struggle? Or does this deflect energies from the major task of changing those institutions themselves?

Street finishes he book be arguing that “we need to build institutions which enable people to acquire what they say they want and not what teachers, radical or otherwise, think they want” (226), and that we need “changes at the level of ideology within the institutions themselves. A step in this direction would be achieved by the dissemination of the ‘ideological’ model of literacy more widely amongst those responsible for the organization of these establishments as well as amongst those engaged in day to day literacy teaching in them” (228).

Citations and Cross-References: Gee, Anderson, Graff, Goody, Greenfield, Bernstein, Labov, Heath, Freire

Definitions: the ideological model (8), literacy (43), literacy mentality (112)

Quotes:

Regarding literacy as a technology in the view of the autonomous model: “The arguments concerning the social nature of scientific progress relate aslo to the product of that progress–technology. This includes what Goody calls ‘technology of the intellect’–literacy. Technology is, however, not a neutral ‘thing’ that arises out of disinterested scientific inquiry and which must then be accomodated, responded to, decided about in the society. It is itself a social product that had risen as a result of political and ideological processes and institutions and its particular form has to be explained in terms of such processes. Literacy, then, is not, as Goody appears to be arguing, a ‘neutral’ technology, with ‘potentialities’ and ‘restrictions’ depending simply on how it is used. Rather it is a socially constructed form whose ‘influence’ depends on how it was shaped in the first place. This shaping depends on political and ideological formations and it is these which are responsible for its ‘consequences’ too. (65)

Technology, then, is a cultural form, a social product whose shape and influence depend upon prior political and ideological factors. [...] But literacy, of course, is more than just the ‘technology’ in which it is manifest. No one material feature serves to define literacy itself. It is a social process, in which particular socially constructed technologies are used within particular institutional frameworks for specific social purposes. We cannot predict the social concomitants of a given literacy practice from a description of the particular technological concomitants. (96-7)

Questions/Comments: If I were to offer a few critiques, the first would be methodological. He seems to advocate what later comes to be termed thick description, as would fit with his values regarding specific attention to local/political/economic/social/ideological realities, but he doesn’t offer much edivence aside from his own anecdotes and rhetorical analysis of the work of other academics. Second, and more importantly, I wonder what are the implications or results of turning to an ideological literacy model for teachers of literacy. This gets sort of addressed in the last chapter or two, but I wonder in what ways we can ethically design, say a national literacy program within the current school structure, that would be aware of the designers’ ideological goals while also taking the needs of smaller local communities into account. Is it possible to satisfy all parties in this way?

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