Language, literacy and social change

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.

Comments

[Rollo]

This is the result of the of Gramsci's "Long march through the universities" that the cultural Marxists used to successfully attack our society. You are correct, they are not interested in language teaching, and certainly not learning, but rather in ideology.

There doesn't appear to be any relief on the horizon, short of an economic collapse that brings down the country (possible), or an asteroid wiping out 90% of life on the planet.

[Ryan]

I agree 100%! I took a few classes at the local junior college and was shocked at a "Public Speaking Class" and Spanish class that were much more about ideology and philosophy than they were about becoming better public speakers and communicating better in Spanish.

Professors need to stop taking advantage of young and impressionable students who don't know any better and stick to their course subjects.

[chris]

This problem isn't just restricted to language teaching, though. It's an issue that afflicts the humanities and arts as a whole. An expert in literature or history nowadays is someone who specialises in an obscure, fragmented subfield of a subfield of study (gender relations in Macedonian folk literature, to borrow your example) and it is often such that he or she may in fact be the only current expert in their field.

I understand hyperspecialisation is a neccessity for, say, science, where there is a firm need for objective criteria, however the arts cannot be treated in this way. They must be approached in a wholesome manner, to the extent that I would say "jack of all trades, master of none" is not necessarily a bad thing, if we define 'master' or 'expert' according to its academic usage. In other words, breadth is I think of ultimately greater value in the arts.

I don't find anything inherently wrong with studying literacy vis-à-vis social structures and power values, but in terms of societal benefit, and certainly the fact that the taxpayer is made responsible for these endeavours, students would be far better off gaining basic language skills (in multiple languages) than debating and discussing what are, comparitively, arcane minutiae.

[Kogoro]

Steve,
I am an American who has been teaching English and linguistics at a university in Japan for over 20 years. I have been following you blog for about a year and agree with a lot of what you say about language learning. I too am a language learner (Japanese, Italian, Finnish, Chinese, Korean) and I have tried to apply some of your ideas to my own learning.
On this particular issue, however, I feel you are venting your frustrations in the wrong directions. The organization you refer to, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, is mainly a group of academics involved with literature, not the teaching/learning of foreign languages. You would do far better to look into TESOL <http://www.tesol.org>, an organization mainly concerned with the teaching/learning of English as a foreign/second language. Many of the members advocate learner autonomy and self-access centers for language learning. There I believe you will find "kindred spirits." You might be interested in attending their convention in Denver at the end of March this year.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Kogoro,

Did you read what these English teachers had to say? Did you read their obfuscating prose and their message, more concerned about trying to use learners for their own ideological purpose than for teaching language skills?

[ed]

I think that the discussion turns on the idea that literacy is in part an ideological phenomena as opposed to reading which is a more mechanical process. How you interpret what you read and the types of available choices is literacy. I think the academics here are saying that the types of choices available and the preferred interpretations are informed by the existing power structures, which I assume they feel are unjust.

I don't think obscurantism is unique to literacy/tesol academia. Have you ever tried to read anything about high finance?

[Steve Kaufmann]

Literacy means the ability to read. That is not an ideological phenomenon, or at least should not be, although these practitioners want to make it ideological. How you interpret what you read is up to you, not the teacher. All societies have inequalities of power, and literacy teachers are not going to change that.

High finance is complex because the instruments of finance and the phenomena are complex. Some writers are better at explaining it than others.

This discussion on literacy is not complicated, rather the complication is introduced by the teachers, who write in jargon, and do not really make a lot of sense.

[ed]

Nothing in life escapes being interpreted as contributing to a specific goal or set of goals, IE interpreted as an ideology (that's my definition of the word anyway).

Literacy can be interpreted as contributing to the individual potential to create material and social wealth within the existing power structures. Learn to read and get (or create) a job.

Literacy can also be interpreted as limiting people to taking positions that support the existing power structures based on the predominance of certain texts, stories, truisms etc communicated with the written word. This interpretation of literacy as "limiting" arises when you question how the current powers came to be (were they put there by foreign powers?)and how much human suffering the current power structure entails (accepting the fact that material inequality is inevitable).

I agree this is tortured academese, but I don't think they are advocating NOT teaching people to read, they are just assessing the goals.

[doviende]

If we, for a moment, ignore the hyper-specialization and elitism, let me just say that books are composed of ideas, and it seems clear to me that depending on the books that are chosen for the classroom to read, different ideas may be imposed on that classroom. If the teacher is choosing the books, especially for young kids, wouldn't you agree that they have a lot of influence on the way those kids think? I think this is true no matter what particular ideology the teacher may or may not follow.

On another note, check out this partially related article about the affect of political/racial situation on the performance of students: http://thelanguageguy.blogspot.com/2009/01/obama-effect-on-aas-test-performance.html

We know from experience that *interesting* material is way more helpful than uninteresting material....so wouldn't it then be feasible that if you are, say, a black child at a school with white teachers, then the teacher's culture may not match with yours and you may therefore be given materials that aren't really that interesting, which would affect your uptake of reading skills?

[Steve Kaufmann]

doviende,

My whole approach at LingQ is based on letting the learner choose. It is not for the teacher to impose content on the learner. We want our members to contribute content, and the most interesting to people is the normal conversations that people have. Whether a person of one ethnic group prefers to only hear about people of his group, I do not know. I doubt it. Many people around the world were recently more interested to hear what Obama had to say than to listen to their own leaders speak.

Teachers have a responsibility to offer choice and a variety of perspectives, and not to impose an agenda of social change, nor to pretend that "critical thinking" is something that they can teach, as if the literacy learners cannot think, and need them to unlock the hidden agenda of the material they are reading.

These literacy practitioners whom I quoted here use jargon to mask their lack of original thought, and yes of critical thinking. I am appalled that money is collected to fight literacy and people like them are the ones doing the instructing.

[reineke]

Postmodernism, Derrida (a Frenchman! haha), deconstruction, rereading, discourse analysis, hypertext, textuality, the language of power… my God how I hated the postmodernism class. It was extremely useful. Now I can smell overfed, idle, uberliberal intellectual elite douchebags from miles away.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

[Steve Kaufmann]

reineke,

I really liked the link. Is this a parody or for real?

[reineke]

It's often difficult to figure out - just like the academic dribble. The description for the site is:

"A parody of the postmodern school of academic writing written by Andrew C. Bulhak, using a system for generating random text."

Another worthy link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

While I am against the dumbing down of our society, complexity is not necessarily a sign of intelligence. Complexity is a neutral, abstract quality. Unnecessary and even deliberate complication and obfuscation point to an inferior mind and/or hidden agendas.