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last.updated 3.6.13

The Politics of Literacy Education

Purpose

As it has become clear in our discussions, literacy is not simply a monolithic entity that all should strive to achieve in order to achieve a promised success. Literacy, instead, is much more complex and contextualized. And, consequently, it is also quite political. In today's class we will discuss how literacy education responds to the "non-dominant" populations and think about what we would do in the classroom to address the literacy development of these populations.

Discussion I – Doing the Time Warp

Since we did not get to last week's readings in detail, we will address some of the questions you posed about those readings in your blogs and clear up any other issues that you may have had.

Discussion II – Getting Political

The readings for this week address issues of literacy education for students who do not come from socially dominant US populations. We will discuss the following:

• What questions, comments, and concerns do you have about these articles?
• What are their respective arguments?
• Canagarjah writes predominantly about the spoken word in his argument. But what can we learn about our attitudes toward writing and how we evaluate it from the principles he lays out? Is he simply advocating throwing everything out the window? What can we practically do in the English Studies classroom with what he advocates?
• What does Gutiérrez mean by "sameness as fairness"? And what are her objections? How does LoBianco's observations about language policies and language education speak to this principle? In what ways is English Studies founded on the principle of 'sameness as fairness'? Likewise, how has it resisted this rhetoric? Is this rhetoric appropriate for English Studies? If you were to resist it, how would you?
• How do we see Ahmad and Nero bridging the gaps between literary studies and writing studies in the ways they discuss vernacular uses of langauge?
• If we were in an English Department together and we were charged with the task of re-examining the traditional skills and drill-based curriculum of the developmental writing course, how would we respond? How have the readings thus far support our appraoch?

Class Activity – Designing Pedagogy for Diverse Students

As a class we will develop an assignment for a literature or popular culture class paying close to how the assignment speaks to and gives access to culturally and linguistically diverse students.