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last.updated 9.23.12

 

Literacy & Discourse Communities

Purpose

While the study of rhetoric helps the field of composition answer the question, "HOW do we write?," the study of literacy addresses the question: "WHY do we write?" (Note that this is a Big-Why? question that is concerned about universal truths as opposed to individual situations). Due to the political nature of literacy, we have been exposed to many arguments about what it means to be literate. In this class, we will closely examine these definitions and question their implications. Once you have developed a definition of literacy for yourself, think about how it justifies what you do in the classroom.


Before Class

FreeWrite

Answer the following questions so that you can contribute to the class discussion. You have the first ten minutes of class.

What does it mean to be literate? What does it mean to be literate in the context of the academy? Who decides? Based upon what you read for this week, do you think that this is a reasonable benchmark for literacy? Explain.

Discussion: Literacy & Academic Discourse

The discussion today will address the following questions:

  • What is literacy?
  • What does it mean to be literate? illiterate? And who decides?
  • How does/should it mean to be literate at the academy? How does/can the composition class facilitate this?
  • What are discourse communities? How do they help or hinder the the development of literate practices?

To help answer these questions we will look at some definition provided by Dornan, Rosen, and Wilson (2003, pp. 12-17)

Literacy as Intelligence–literacy is commonly perceived as a sign of a person's intelligence; therefore "illiterate" is predominantly used as a pejorative label.

Cultural Literacy–Often associated with E.D. Hirsh's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know in which he proposed a given set of cultural knowledge that students should know (e.g., Walt Disney, Helen of Troy, mutual funds, proletariat, "Rome wasn't built in a day"). Promotes the sense of commonplaces, as Bartholomae describes. Critics find the set of knowledge that cultural literacy proponents promote to privilege the middle- and upper-classes and to have more use in trivia games than in stimulating critical thought.

Functional Literacy–characterized by "correctness in oral reading, accuracy in word identification, and the ability to write simple sentences and paragraphs with minimal surface errors." Remedial education tends to focus just on providing students the skills to be functionally literate, while mainstreamed students get the opportunities to engage in real world literacy practices (e.g., writing plays and performing them)

Critical Literacy–"[S]tudents need to use writing in multi-media formats, to see writing as a way of negotiating their place in society , and to use written language to question and critique and establish themselves as literate, thinking members of society."

Visual and Technological Literacy–related to the reading and production of various mediated texts–TV, video games, movies, the Internet. Students must learn to be both critical consumers and composers of these texts so that they use them in sophisticated and thoughtful ways.

Questions for discussion

  • Which of these literacies should inform what we do in the composition classroom?
  • How do these various types of literacies speak to the movements in composition that we discussed last week?
  • What is the difference between the writing sample on page 161 (Bartholomae) and the writing discussed on pages 608-611 (Canagarajah)? How would you respectively evaluate these samples?

Activity: Writing Assignment

As a class we will work together to...

  • develop an assignment idea
  • outline what we, the instructors, will do to get the students from the point of assigning the project to the point of collecting the final draft
  • composing the actual assignment sheet (if time allows)