Teachers and professors involved in language and literacy teaching often find the task of helping students to learn language skills is less worthy of their talents than challenging certain mainstream social values. I once joined an association called the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association and was all set to attend a conference to meet people interested in language instruction. When I saw the agenda, I realized that they were much more interested in talking about gender, race and power issues that they had "uncovered" in well-known or obscure works of literature. I did not go to the conference.
When I visit universities I find that language instruction is relegated to a minor position, and most of the faculty in the "modern language" department are churning out learned papers on "gender, race and power" in early Macedonian folk literature or the like.
It is no different in the field of literacy it would appear. If you have the patience you can read through some examples of a discussion on literacy an social change. My comments are the ones in italics. The others come from various literacy instructors.
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I believe that social change will continue to be hindered until society as
a whole begins to recognize, value, and celebrate marginalized literacies &
practices. I see part of my job as an instructor to make cracks in that
which we "know" to be "Literacy". To keep an open mind and to encourage
students to see the significance of their primary discourses. Just my 2
cents.
I do not understand.
Here's how I see it. Any notion of "L" (capital L) Literacy is a social
construct, invariably tied to structures of power and inherently political.
I choose to believe that there are many literacies tied to social/cultural
transactional practices. Yet only certain ones are deemed valuable enough to
be taught/reproduced in formal educational sites--typically those that
mirror the language-use norms of historically elite populations. As Freire
noted, "reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by
a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is, of transforming it by
means of conscious, practical work." I am suggesting that social change
might be realized when we allow traditional notions of literacy to be
reconceived on the terms of those who are (sometimes mistakenly) deemed to
be without it.
Are you saying that people who have trouble reading books, and who want
to learn how to read books, should be told not to bother because
reading books is tied to power structures in society?
Are you
saying that since literacy means power in our society, the solution for
a person with low literacy skills in the traditional sense is not to
learn to read, but rather to wait until some other skill that he or she
possesses will be recognized as being just as powerful as the ability
to read.
I still do not understand what you are proposing.
I am by no means implying that we should discourage students from learning
to read books or that we should adopt an attitude of "sit around and wait
for the revolution." I understand fully the reality that that would be
doing our students a huge disservice considering the dominant beliefs about
what counts as Literacy, its subsequent commoditization, and the
economic/social consequences for those lacking traditional reading and
writing skills. I believe in my original post I talked about "making
cracks" in the master myths concerning what types of language practices are
valuable. I also noted the importance of honoring students' primary
discourses, recognizing as Gee (1996) does that the "acquisition of
mainstream Discourses involves, at least while being in them, active
complicity with values that conflict with one's home- and community-based
Discourses, especially for many women and minorities." So I guess I am
proposing that social change may, on some level, be related to our ability
to recognize, cultivate, and celebrate the language skills that students
bring with them to the educational arena even as they are apprenticed into
new social practices. I assert that we should continuously questions our
values as they pertain to the types of literacy acts that are worthy of
mastery. Social change is dependent, in my mind, on new actors forging new
paths. When there is no longer the notion of "our" skills and "their"
skills or, perhaps more accurately, "our" skills and "their" lack of skills,
but we can recognize that all adults coming to the table possess useful
literacy practices and that its largely historical circumstance that some
are esteemed above others, then have we realized some headway.
This
is a good definition of literacy, defined metaphorically by Freire as
reading ther word in order to read the world--even as the interaction
between the two goes in both directions simultaneously.
A
critical issue has to do with reading the political cultures, including
the politicization, of students that give shape to the formation of
adult literacy programs and agencies, and the ranges of potentiality in
working through the dynamics of critical adaptation (accepting the
broad paradigms as broadly normative, but with the potentiality of
substantial change within them (e.g. Obama) and radical change as
implicit in the rhetoric (I'm using this term descriptively in the
classical Greek sense rather than pejoratively) of your post which
reflects the language of radical pedagogy.
These
are important issues; that of trying to get at the range of viable
change within the context in and around the periphery of normative
adult literacy programs within the United States, though regardless as
to how this gets cut we are speaking here of the relationship between
pedagogy and politics all the way down as your post underscores.
Part
of the issue, too, is the balancing of a broad stream of pragmatic (I'm
using the term philosophically, referring to W. James, J. Dewey and
others) strategies and approaches to social change and the role of
idealism and utopian hope (reflective too in some ways in Obama, who is
an interesting mixture of the pragmatic and the ideal) within the
context of our programs and the cultural imagination which sparks them.
As
your post implies, this is no "mere" academic point, which to label it
as such, is a form of marginalization in its own right.
The argument is a little more sophisticated than that. Brian
Street has argued quite eloquently and almost irrefutably that literacy is not
a neutral technology that transfers between context, but rather an ideological
tool tied to various aspects of social structures. As such, literacy can be
used to oppressed and to liberate. In the 60s, the UNESCO started to promote literacy
in undeveloped countries of the southern hemisphere with the idea that
modernization could not be introduced without literacy. Freire argued that such
argument implied that to sell TVs and refrigerators to the natives they had to
first teach them to read and understand advertisements. He felt that literacy
had to be used not to introduce capitalism but to understand the economic
implications of capitalism. We all know now that the introduction of literacy
in pre-literate societies have devastated them economically, socially and
culturally and literacy was never introduced w/o ideology. In most of the world
it was introduced at the service of religion to “civilized the savages
and get them to accept progress.” That has always been tied to the
creation of artificial borders where there were non, the division of land into private
property of corporations for the extraction of something such as coffee, chocolate,
steel, copper, diamonds or whatever else by the natives in inhuman conditions.
It also resulted in the introduction of disease, drugs, alcohol and weapons of
mass destruction and tribal conflicts where there were non.
While I do not advocate illiteracy I advocate for a type literacy
that helps people to question, to think critically, historically, contextually
and a literacy that promotes care and respect for other human beings as
brothers and sisters. Any attempt to teach literacy as a neutral instrument is
essentially advocating the status quo. If you agree with it, then you are
promoting that ideology. In preliterate societies where people are living
without the introduction of industrialism, religion or other Eurocentric
values, we should leave them be.
