Of the three pieces for this week, Scriber’s uses the most formal, academic tone and conventions. But she addresses a question you’ve already written about this semester: what is literacy? As she points out on the first page (6), how you answer the question of what literacy is leads to different ideas about the problems associated with literacy and the solutions you might pose to those problems.
Important point at bottom of 7: “Most efforst at definitional determination are based on a conception of literacy as an attribute of individuals…..But the single most compelling fact about literacy is that is is a social achivement” (7). Note at the bottom of 8 she explains the plan for the essay: that’s a good place to orient yourself.
Metaphor 1: Literacy as Adaptation (9ff.) You should be able to explain what literacy as adaptation is, and note the problems Scribner identifies as following from this metaphor.
Metaphor 2: Literacy as Power (11 ff.). You should be able to explain what literacy as power is, and note the problems Scribner identifies as following from this metaphor.
Metaphor 3: Literacy as State of Grace (13 ff.). You should be able to explain what literacy as grace is, and note the problems Scribner identifies as following from this metaphor.
Scribner offers a case study of literacy among the Vai (a West African people living in Liberia and Sierra Leone). She ends with thoughts about the importance of recognizing the multifaceted nature of literacy.
Question for the week: what types of literacy, or what metaphors of literacy, are present in the stories in Brandt or Hawisher et al.?
Brandt summarizes her argument on 649-651: she opens with two stories, and then summarizes the argument they illustrate, and argument she says results from the 65 interviews she conducted about literacy development (see methodology description on 651). If you want to orient yourself, stop around here and see if you can paraphrase her argument in ways that make some sense to you (even if you have some questions about how she came to those conclusions).
At the bottom of 651 she notes her purpose: “to begin to identify several of the major effets of ‘accumulating literacy’ that are especially pertinent to teachers of writing and reading who are trying to think more broadly about the historical context in which we are carrying out our work” (651). Literacy accumulates in two ways, for Brandt: it piles up, and it spread out. Through 653 she continues her explanation of the purpose of the piece. Stop and check here: do the notions of piling up/spreading out make sense to you?
There’s a historical digression—on transformation—that lays out some of the functions of literacy over time (like teaching moral values in the 19th century).
Then she returns to the narratives, first with the May family, and then with the Charles Randolph. Note that with each person profiled, Brandt tells the story of literacy accumulation, and then follows it with commentary (although there is some analysis mixed in with the stories). You should look to the stories and see what Brandt draws to our attention: what themes about literacy accumulation does she identify?
After the stories, she turns to theory (starting on 664), summarizing what the interviews confirm (mid 665) and then moving into what they show that we have so far “paid less attention to” (665). Brandt sees old and new literacies as intertwining more than competing.
You can look to Brandt as one model of a literacy profile; you should be able to see the stories she tells of the Mays and the Randolphs, and you should be able to see the themes she highlights in them.
I’m struck by this quotation in the 1982 Person of the Year article: ” As both the Apple Computer advertisement and the Las Vegas circus indicate, the enduring American love affairs with the automobile and the television set are now being transformed into a giddy passion for the personal computer.” Cars, tvs, and computers are intertwined in 2006 in ways we barely dream in ‘82. But in 1982, the provocate choice for the computer as “man” of the year was discussed:
There are some occasions, though, when the most significant force in a year’s news is not a single individual but a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process is changing the course of all other processes. That is why, after weighing the ebb and flow of events around the world, TIME has decided that 1982 is the year of the computer. It would have been possible to single out as Man of the Year one of the engineers or entrepreneurs who masterminded this technological revolution, but no one person has clearly dominated those turbulent events. More important, such a selection would obscure the main point. TIME’s Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.
It is easy enough to look at the world around us and conclude that the computer has not changed things all that drastically. But one can conclude from similar observations that the earth is flat, and that the sun circles it every 24 hours. Although everything seems much the same from one day to the next, changes under the surface of life’s routines are actually occurring it almost unimaginable speed. Just 100 years ago, parts of New York City were lighted for the first time by a strange new force called electricity; just 100 years ago, the German Engineer Gottlieb Daimler began building a gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine (three more years passed before he fitted it to a bicycle). So it is with the computer.
I come back to the 1982 article after re-reading Selfe, and am struck by the economic analyses and points of privilege built into the article. All the examples proceed from people with some privilege whose lives are added to by the new technology they had early access to.
Cut to 2006, and here’s another take on the power of technology:
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. (from the cover story)
And in Brian Williams’ companion piece, he worries “The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge … because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.”
I’ll come back to these stories later. Who’s the we?
Related stuff
“Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention.” CCC 50.3 (1999): 411-436.
This article is one I’m re-reading and I move into it pretty comfortably–I’ve read it before, I heard her give the original address, and I’ve read several of her books and other articles that follow from this one. I re-read it in its original journal format, and now I’m making notes after the paper reading (with Barney in the background, with a sick child home with me today). So it’s an, um, multimedia experience around here this morning.
Selfe starts positioning her field–computers and composition–in the larger field of comp studies, arguing that English people just don’t like to pay attention to computers. Evidence: lack of attention at our conferences, body language when she talks about her work; fact that tech issues are frequently the province of a single faculty member or staff member. “As a result, computers are rapidly becoming invisible, which is how we like our technology to be” (413).
The problem: not paying attention sustains the ideology of print, which “support[s] a pattern of continuing illiteracy in this country” (413). (I bet students will take issue with this claim).
I love the subheads in this article: so very clear and useful. Action-oriented. So why do we need to pay attention?
- lit and tech have been linked that promote social inequality
- in failing to attend to the seemingly-invisible technology, we ignore “serious social struggles” (415)
- literacy now increasingly linked to computer technology
- English teachers are not involved with technology
Selfe looks at the Clinton-Gore Getting America’s Children Ready for the 21st Century report. (No version of this document is easily available on the web in 2006). She highlights the costs of computer technology. Despite increasing spending, and the fact that professional documents now assume or assert the need for computers, our professional associations “do not provide adqquate guidance about how to get teachers and students thinking critically about such use” (419). She argues that “by payign critical attentio to lessons about technology, we can relearn important lessonsa bout literacy” (419).
Historical lessons from other large-scale literacy campaigns suggests that, as Brian Street says, “lack of literacy is more likely to be a symptom of poveryt and deprivation than a cause” (qtd 420). Lack of access to computers is more common in low-income schools and schools serving minority students. “profoundly disturbing” (420). Run-down of the digital divide on 421-22. “In sum, we have litle evidence that any large-scae project focusing on a narrowly defined set of officially sanctioned literacy skills will result in fundamental changes in the ratio of people labeled as literate or illiterate” (423).
Literacy education is political, not just educational. Starting on 424, Selfe outlines the political concerns–mostly economic–that drove the Clinton-Gore approach to putting computers in schools. Underlying attention to a global marketplace, need to boost high-tech industries.
“The people labeled as ‘illiterate’ in connection with technology–as expected–are those with the least power to effect a change in this system” (427). And what is the role of teachers? We are “the unwitting purveyors of technology and technological literacy–even as we try to avoid a technological focus by attending to more traditionally conceived topics within the humanities” (428). We are not “paying critical attention” (429).
So what should we do: she calls for situated knowledge
- in curriculum committees, standards documents, assessment programs
- professional orgs
- scholarship and research
- classrooms and courses
- computer facilities
- districts, states
- voting
- English Ed programs
- libraries, community centers
All are sites where we can ask about power, use, critical thinking. What would the landscape look like if we asked Selfe’s questions more often? “It is my hope that by paying some attention to technology, we may learn lessons about becoming better humanists, as well” (435).
Connections and Resources
“Among the Greatest Benefactors of mankind”: What the success of Chalkbaords Tells us about the Future of Computers in the Classroom. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33, No. 2, Computers and the Future of the Humanities (Spring, 2000), 6-16.
Motivation: seeking historical parallel to address the common assumption that technology isn’t necessary to teach English. “Just use what’s there,” some colleagues say (6) .
Critics note that even disappeared or naturalized writing technologies still have ideological influence (cites Bruce and Hogan, Baron). Writing long has a history of disassociation with technology (Wendell Berry’s wife typed his poems). Plato worried that writing would reduce wisdom, insulate people from each other, the first critique of technology associated with writing (writing itself as a technology, in fact).
Origin of chalkboards: early 19th century. Prior to that, schooling was individual. Discusses some reforms that seem ludicrious now–Jos Lancaster’s system had 1:284 teacher/student ratio! “it kept costs low by minimizing the use of paper, ink, pens, and books and b/c it facilitated group instruction by monitors and teachers” (10). Chalkboards spread and were quickly well-loved and widely-adopted. One commenter said that the chalkboard’s inventor “deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learnign and science, if not among the greatest benefacotrs of manking” (11).
What makes the chalkboard a successful technology: it’s cheap, reliable, ubiquitous, lasts long–many qualities lacking in computers (although less so as time goes on, imho).
Side note: I just found a quirky Reed College essay on the chalkboard and teaching with technology. Interesting photos.
Back to Krause: it’s easy to accept a technology that enhances what you were doing anyway. Word processing, for example, is easily accepted, as is e-mail. But computers in classrooms sometimes are expected tochange teaching. “It is pedagogy that motivates the use of improved technologies, not the technologies that motivates imporvements in pedagogy” (14).
Ends with a call to think about change: “we need to work harder in emphasizing change in our pedagogical acproaches so that computers are seen as essential and as natural in the classrom as chalkboards” (15).
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Questions to ponder: what’s driving the development of a pedagogy? why do people change what they do? and when should they?
Interesting contrast in terms of a technology that enhances what is already done vs. a technology that requires change.
I’m rather charmed by the subject line and personalization of Mr. Wordpress, so I’ll leave this post here.
I’m usually a take-notes-in-the-margins reader, so I’m curious how this will all pan out…but searchable notes seem like a cool thing to have.
