The Ethnography of Literacy

John F. Szwed explains the discourse around the ideas of reading and writing in the modern world. Around the world there has been a push for increased literacy, the western ideal of literacy: knowing how to read and write. Despite that literacy, according to Szwed, is "suffering a crisis." He makes an example out of the United States. For years I've heard that people don't read anymore, I don't know if they ever did but I've heard my teachers complaining about the lack of respect for the written art. Szwed explains despite universal schooling certain parts of the world population cannot seem to learn how to read and write. Szwed needs to take into account what it takes to get into a school. Even if there is no tuition, parents, economic circumstances, culture all plays a role in whether someone ends up in a school.

Szwed brings up a topic we've talked about before as a class. "But the stunning fact is that we do not fully know what literacy is."  The western push for reading and writing seems to be coming under fire by a lot of writing theorists.  I wonder when this shift of thinking occurred or has there always been two sides to writing theory? If I had to guess I would attribute the split to the different kind of writing theorists. The cognitive, expressionistic and social epistemic.

Recent Applications of New Literacy Studies

Brain V. Street introduces the two models of literacy in his article Recent Applications of New Literacy Studies in Educational Contexts.  According to Street the autonomous model assumes that acquiring literacy will lead to higher cognitive skills, greater economic performance, greater equality and so on. The model is based on the belief that literacy has effects on all the previously listed categories no matter what social conditions or cultural interpretations of literacy. Street's critique of the autonomous model is it's failure to take into account the cultural accept of literacy. "Research in social-practice approach challenges this view and suggests that in, in practice, dominant approaches based on the autonomous model are simply imposing western conceptions of literacy onto other cultures."

The ideological model in Street's opinion "offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. The ideological model stems from different premises, what upholds this model is the central belief that literacy is a social practice. Because literacy is social and societies everywhere are different it is hard to define what literacy is. Literacy is always politicized,  "It is not valid to suggest that 'literacy' can be 'given' neutrally..."

The autonomous model fails to take into consideration the background of the student whereas the ideological model will use the student's background as a base.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us

James Paul Gee argues in his essay "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" for schools to incorporate the advantages video game literacy into their curriculum. Gee believes that video games teach students to be their own individual thinkers. He makes the example that popular video games give information that is in demand and 'just in time' not "out of contexts of actual use or apart from people's purposes and goals" something he believes happens way too often at schools.

"People are quite poor at understanding and remembering information they have received out of context or too long before they can make use of it." That sentence struck me, it reminded me of my excel and access class I took last year. I learned all this information and forgot it when summer came around. I work for ITS as a lab consultant, and just last week a girl came up to me and asked me a question about formatting a chart in excel and I had no idea what to do. It was unbelievable, I spent a whole semester on excel and I realize because I had stopped using the program for a couple of months it was if I had never learned anything about it.

Gee describes video games as a motivated form of learning and thinks that schools should look to video games to bring some of the enthusiasm into the classrooms. "Games can show us how to get people to invest in new identities or roles, which can, in turn, become powerful motivators for new and deep learning in classrooms and workplaces."

I wonder what Gee is suggesting and what that would look like. Will there be video games in schools, or video games with certain academic subjects. Like a renaissance video game? A mathematician video game played in math class? 

Reflections on Academic Discourse

             Peter Elbow makes a strong case for teaching something along side or even besides academic writing in colleges and university. Elbow starts of by acknowledging the importance academic writing has on college life. Many courses that students take, from freshman year on, will require them to write academically.  Yet Elbow is sure of that only teaching academic writing and disapproving of any other kinds of writing harms the students in the long run. Elbow believes that a writing course should teach students how to incorporate writing in their everyday life, whether is journaling or writing letters to loved ones but he points out these days students are only writing when asked to for an assignment. He believes that stems from having academic writing shoved down their throats, the students have forgotten that writing can be enjoyable.

"There's something self-serving about defining people as ignorant unless they are like us."

Elbow compares different pieces of academic writing,some are convoluted and long winded while others are clear prose.

Elbow ends his piece remarking that academic discourse is changing for the better, but certain scholars are worried about what they consider to be the dumbing down of their precious subjects. 

Unpacking Literacy

This paper focuses on the Vai people of Liberia, who have an independent phonetic writing system and teach it to the men of their society without formal education. There is Vai script, arabic script and english script. All three are used but by different degrees. The Vai script is for more personalized writing, and it is the most widely known, arabic script is used for religion and is the second most widely known. English script is used for political, official work and is the least known.

The authors describe how Arabic is learned by the Vai people, it starts of with the authors call "rote memorization" where students recite words they don't understand and can't decode but after that phase is complete the students learn how to speak arabic and how to actually write the language. "Thus Arabic literacy can relate to individuals to text on both the 'lowest' (repetition without comprehension0 and 'highest' (analysis of textual meaning) levels."

The way Vai script is learned is a bit different and the authors call it "literacy without education". Usually, a friend, relative or fellow citizens agrees to teach the characters to the person who is acting as the student. The student commits it to memory and practices writing names and letters.

The main question raised by this article is: What is real literacy?
the Vai people don't learn Via script and Arabic script the conventional way yet they can write and read the language.

In the beginning of the article there is a model on what writing is, the authors conclude that the model "fails to give full justice to the multiplicity of values, uses, and consequences which characterize writing as a social practice."

Inventing the University

Inventing the University by David Bartholomae is an interesting article. It addresses the process students go through to do college-level writing. They have to appropriate the language of the professors in order to be considered a good writer. Writing academically does not mean that one is writing well, but it is frowned upon to write colloquially. Bartholomae mentions how some students have caught on to vocabulary needed to sound academic but don't really have anything to say.

The subject of audience is addressed. "I think that all writers, in order to write, must imagine themselves the privilege of being 'insiders'-- that is, of being both inside an established and powerful discourse, and of being granted a special right to speak." The authors opinions on audience and power of the writer is a bit confusing. He draws analysis from a couple of samples of college freshman all given the same prompt. Describe a time when you felt you did something creative and then draw some general conclusions about creativity.

The example of the Jazz writer and the Clay Model writer is interesting when the two are compared. the clay model writer was clearly faking a level of sophistication in writing that he had not yet reached, there were issues on the sentence level and some of his ideas failed to come through but he was using academic language. The Jazz writer made sense, it was clear he had a grasp on the language he was using but he talked around he subject instead of answering it.

The main point of Bartholomae's article in my opinion, is-- there are stages of development students go through when they enter college. There is a lot that is asked of them and they learn to do what they need to do to succeed. 

Audience Adressed/Audience Invoked

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford analyze the subject of the audience in writing and the authors relationship with the audience. The two authors refer to Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor's piece "The Integrating Perspective: An Audience-Response Model for Writing" and base their analysis on where they agree or disagree with the two authors.

The first problem Ede and Lunsford address about Mitchell and Taylor's piece is what is left out. Ede and Lunsford point out that the two authors don't talk about invention, they don't address how the authors come up with ideas and form a written work. Another critique Ede and Lunsford offer has to due with the focus on the audience and not the writer.

Ede and Lunsford quote the Susan Wall, "when writers read their own writing, as they do continuously while they compose", 'there are really not one but two contexts for rereading: there is the writer-as-reader's sense of what the established text is saying, as of this reading; and there is the readers-as-writer's judgement of what the text might say or should say…"

The authors analysis of the quote is explained when they state "what is missing from Mitchell and Taylor's model, and from much work done from the perspective of audience as addressed, is a recognition of the crucial importance of this internal dialogue, through which writers analyze inventional problems and conceptualize patterns of discourse." I think this quote is the thesis of Ede and Lunsford piece.

The tension of different teachers having different perspective of what good writing is, is something we've explored together as a class and it comes up again in this article.  I've never come across the debate of the audience addressed and audience invoked before this audience. I have had teachers tell me to just write and not worry about the audience and I guess that's what audience invoked is all about.