Rethinking literacy studies: From the past to the present (original) (raw)
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The Literacies Institute: Its mission, activities, and perspective on literacy
Literacy is a prerequisite for full participation in a modern, technological society. For the nation, broad-based literacy is a prerequisite for the effective functioning of democratic institutions at home and for continued competitiveness in an increasingly complex world. We think of the United States as a highly literate nation, and in the sense that nearly all citizens can read and write at a minimal level, it is. But full literacy implies far more than basic reading and writing proficiency. It implies an enculturation into ways of thinking, interpreting, and using language in a variety of complex activities and settings, typical of a rapidly changing and technologically advanced society. Moreover, it implies that this enculturation is widespread throughout the population. In both these senses, the U.S. is only partially literate. A good indicator of our current state of literacy is the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report on literacy in young adults. This report showed that 95% of the young adults in the U.S. could read and understand the printed word. Yet only a small percentage could carry out moderately complex tasks using their literacy skills. These tasks were relevant to the real world of work and daily life, such as locating and using information in tables, graphs, forms and schedules, or applying arithmetic operations in combination with printed materials, as in balancing a checkbook or completing an order form. There was a dramatic dropoff in the number of young adults who could succeed as the tasks became even moderately difficult. Furthermore, minority subjects performed even less well than non-minority subjects in the study. On tasks such as synthesizing the main argument from a lengthy newspaper column or examining a menu, computing the cost of a specified meal and determining the correct change from a specified amount, only about 40% of the White subjects, 10% of the Black subjects and 20% of the Hispanic subjects were successful. Results such as these highlight a pervasive failure on the part of our schools in teaching the analytic and critical thinking skills that underlie high level literacy, a failure that disproportionately affects low-income and minority students. This failure makes a mockery of the principles of equal opportunity and equal access to schooling, and threatens America's standing as a technologically competitive nation. Previous research on reading and writing in this country has had a limited positive impact on educational practice. This is, in part, because research has tended to fragment the phenomenon of literacy. Studies have isolated aspects such as the texts students produce or read, students' individual cognitive processes while composing or comprehending text, and the social and institutional settings in which literacy practices take place. But ignoring the complex interrelations among the individual, social, and textual creates fundamental obstacles to understanding what it means to acquire literacy skills in school. It provides at best only partial solutions to teachers who
Historical, Critical, and Cultural Perspectives on Literacy Theory and Research
UCLA, 2010
According to the popular discourse, America is facing a tremendous literacy crisis. Poor children and children of color trail their affluent and White counterparts on traditional literacy assessments. Employers complain that workers do not possess requisite literacy skills at a time when changing communications technologies are making old and new literacy skills mandatory for participation in the global economy or even civic life. As all of this happens, urban schools continue to fail to provide access to literacies of power for their students as they also fail to account for the local and popular cultural literacies that their students bring with them into the classroom. The true literacy crisis is that educators and researchers have not figured out how to decrease the literacy achievement gap; a gap that carries with it severe social, economic, and political consequences. Of course, nothing is inevitable, and there have been historic moments when populations have gained access to literacies of power as they also intervened in their conditions of oppression. Even now, literacy educators and scholars possess the potential to create positive, conceptually grounded and empirically tested strategies for transformative literacy education that can not only change classroom practices, but the world itself. This course examines historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literacy theory and research in hopes to produce scholars and educators who are able to theorize, create, and/or investigate these transformational practices. It begins with an examination of the historical legacy of literacy as a vehicle to freedom and empowerment for marginalized populations. Students will read literature covering the Cuba literacy campaign and the struggles of African-Americans in the United States as they consider (and reconsider) the role of literacy education in social transformation. The class will also investigate the major paradigms of literacy theory and research during the past half century examining myths about great divides between oral and literate societies and the transformation from “culturally neutral” theories of literacy to cross cultural and sociocultural theories. The course will also consider the impacts of the revolution in communications technologies on the nature of literacy and on contemporary new media literacy practices. Finally, the course will examine theories of critical literacy education and examples of literacy praxis in classroom and out of school settings.
Expanded Territories of " Literacy " : New Literacies and Multiliteracies
Facing the radical change in society in the 21st century, the conventional view of literacy and literacy education may no longer satisfy students' needs in working and social lives, especially beyond classroom settings. Therefore, expanded territories of literacy have been proposed to better support teachers' and students' literacy education and practices. This paper conceptualized two expanded perspectives of literacy that are important and useful to understand literacy and literacy education in the modern society, which provide theories and frameworks for scholars, educators, and practitioners in the field of education. 1. Introduction An important mission of teaching and learning literacy is to equip students with literacy skills so that they can fully participate in social and cultural activities in the modern world. The conventional view of literacy, however, is limited to the mastery of " page-bound, official, and standard forms of the national language " (The New London Group, 1996). In other words, the meaning of literacy is restricted to paper-based, formalized, and standardized forms of language that only reflects the dominant language and culture. However, along with the rapid change of technology and social life, the language skills needed to make sense of the world are also changing. The radical changes that occur in people's lives brought up new requirements for developing literacy skills that are much more complicated and various than before. Since the conventional view of literacy is too narrow to satisfy people's needs to fully participate in social and cultural activities, scholars attempt to broaden the scope of literacy so that the expanded understanding of literacy can better support researching, teaching, and learning. In this paper, two perspectives of literacy are introduced and discussed: New Literacies theory and Multiliteracies theory.
2016
Recent times have seen an increase in the use of literacy, and in many cases, the substitution of literacy where reading was once the term of choice. A deep curiosity about these shifts by professional organizations, a range of stakeholders, and the program descriptions at institutions of higher learning led to this essay. It is guided by three specific intentions: (a) to explore the varying (and often overlapping) definitions of literacy and reading in order to establish their substantive and subtle differences, (b) to ponder the implications of selecting one term over another or using them in combination, and (c) to spark questions for future research that would further clarify literacy, reading, and their individual and combined importance for the education of our nations’ youth. Improving the reading achievement for all students (and adults) has long been a national (and international) priority. More frequently than in previous times, literacy replaces reading as the label to fr...
What Is Literacy?--A Critical Overview of Sociocultural Perspectives
Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 2012
Sociocultural perspectives on literacy include various theories focused on the myriad ways in which people use literacy in context, which include a strong emphasis on power relations. Yet, these theories also have important differences, and many in the field of literacy do not clearly differentiate among them. I provide a critical overview of influential sociocultural perspectives on literacy, focusing on three major perspectives: (1) literacy as social practice, (2) multiliteracies, and (3) critical literacy. In an effort to support researchers in framing their scholarly work and to support practitioners and other consumers of research make sense of research, I discuss the ways in which each theory would answer the question, "What is literacy?" as well as the affordances and limitations of these theories in terms of literacy development, literacy use, and literacy instruction.
Columbia University, 2014
According to the popular discourse, America is facing a tremendous literacy crisis. Poor children and children of color trail their affluent and White counterparts on traditional literacy assessments. Employers complain that workers do not possess requisite literacy skills at a time when changing communications technologies are making old and new literacy skills mandatory for participation in the global economy or even civic life. As all of this happens, urban schools continue to fail to provide access to literacies of power for their students as they also fail to account for the local and popular cultural literacies that their students bring with them into the classroom. The true literacy crisis is that educators and researchers have not figured out how to decrease the literacy achievement gap; a gap that carries with it severe social, economic, and political consequences. Of course, nothing is inevitable, and there have been historic moments when populations have gained access to literacies of power as they also intervened in their conditions of oppression. Even now, literacy educators and scholars possess the potential to create positive, conceptually grounded and empirically tested strategies for transformative literacy education that can not only change classroom practices, but the world itself. This course examines historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literacy theory and research in hopes to produce scholars and educators who are able to theorize, create, and/or investigate these transformational practices. It begins with an examination of the historical legacy of literacy as a vehicle to freedom and empowerment for marginalized populations. Students will read literature covering the Cuba literacy campaign and the struggles of African-Americans in the United States as they consider (and reconsider) the role of literacy education in social transformation. The class will also investigate the major paradigms of literacy theory and research during the past half century examining myths about great divides between oral and literate societies and the transformation from “culturally neutral” theories of literacy to cross cultural and sociocultural theories. The course will also consider the impacts of the revolution in communications technologies on the nature of literacy and on contemporary new media literacy practices. Finally, the course will examine theories of critical literacy education and examples of literacy praxis in classroom and out of school settings.
EDUCATION 240B THEORETICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF LITERACY Fall, 2003
The course will be divided into four parts: (1) historical meanings of literacy and introduction to tensions in the field (classes 1-3); (2) literacy and the individual (classes 4-7); (3) socio-cultural perspectives on literacy learning (classes 8-11); and (4) literacy and the social world (classes 12-15). Within these parts of the course, we will discuss questions such as the following: (a) What is literacy? How is it defined? (b) Historically, what has it meant to be literate? (c) What is known about the relationship between literacy and thought? Between literacy and learning? What are the implications for schooling? (d) What theories can teachers use to guide students in becoming literate? (e) What are the influences of school, culture, and community on literacy development? (f) What are the relationships between literacy and economic and political development? (g) What are the implications for the future of literacy research? I hope you will leave this course with a critical understanding of central theoretical issues in literacy studies, with understanding of their implications for schools and the larger culture, and an understanding of how these issues relate to our social and political world. I also hope you will learn about how the theories we study can be used as a foundation for research on language, literacy, learning, and culture.
Literacies In and Out of School in the United States
Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2008
Research on literacy practices separates into two strands. School-based research has focused on reading and writing in formal classrooms, often by examining teaching methods, curricula, learning, and assessment, its goal being to improve students' academic performance. Out-of-school research has documented the myriad literacy practices that occur in a range of institutions and social spaces with an interest in expanding conceptions of what counts as literacy. Important theoretical and conceptual advances in literacy studies have come from research within the second strand. Yet, a divide still exists between the engagement claimed for many youth in terms of their out-of-school literacy practices in contrast with their alienation from school-based reading and writing. In this chapter, we sketch the major theoretical traditions that have shaped research on the relationships and borders of literacy in and out of school-the ethnography of communication, cultural historical activity theory, and the New Literacy Studies (Hull and Schultz, 2002)-and then introduce recent perspectives from cultural geography and semiotics. Research on literacy out of school continues to be an important and necessary corrective to unidimensional understandings of texts, processes, and contexts. However, the persisting challenge in an age of accountability and testing, narrowing conceptions of literacy, and growing socioeconomic disparities, is how to bridge out-of-school and in-school worlds in ways that make discernable, positive differences in youth's present circumstances and social futures.