AELS Literacies Exam Equivalent Dorian Love 7934102

Literacy and what it means to be literate has historically been an emotive issue, inextricably tied to mastery over, or access to discourses of power. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves has shown how the alphabet itself encoded mythologies of religious knowledge and power, controlled by priestly castes. The Medieval Church exercised much of its control by restricting access to the printed word, while the rise of mass literacy in Western Europe went hand in hand with the rise of Protestantism, and the challenge to this control. Literacy has historically been constructed as a matter of social exclusion or equity, a mark of social progress or rationale for stasis, a matter of individual development, or social responsibility. And yet, in received wisdom, it has come to be viewed as a neutral skill, free of value or context. Suzanne de Castell and Allan Luke, in their review of shifts within North American literacy education, identify three major paradigms which are indicative of this shift from ideologically situated to a claimed, ideologically neutral universality. The late 19th century view of literacy as an access to high culture and the canonical texts clearly supported an aristocratic world-order in which worth and nobility are conflated. The progressivist shift of the early 20th century towards pragmatic texts, on the other hand, reflected a greater emphasis on democratization and the needs for a functionally literate work force. Literacy here becomes a matter of social mobility and utility. Both these views see literacy as crucially situated within notions of the social order. Literacy is clearly value laden. However, from the 1950s, a technocratic view has focused on the quantification of educational outcomes, deconstructing literacy into discrete and measurable subskills (de Castell, S & Luke, A, 1986, p. 87). This move relocates arguments about literacy away from the social, towards the individual. While elements of the progressivist turn remain embedded in this view, the uses of literacy are conceived as being indicative of progress towards democratic enlightenment, literacy comes to be viewed as an autonomous and universal quality. This view was largely influenced by behaviourist and cognitive psychology, both of which, in their own way mark an individualist rather than a social agenda, and aid in viewing literacy as a universal cognitive skill. Failure to attain literacy thus becomes a mater of personal or institutional failure requiring remediation, a perspective which has fueled much of the popular debate around the crisis in literacy. While this view is still dominant, it has been powerfully critiqued. Brian Street attacks this model on a number of grounds. He argues that the treatment of writing as an autonomous mode of communication greatly overstates

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the supposed great divide between spoken and written modes and notes that more recently academics have come to view the relationship between orality and literacy on a continuum rather than as a divide (Street, B, 1993, p.4). When the focus is on local, ethnographic studies rather than western societies alone, and on everyday uses of writing, rather than exclusively on more formal, and academic writing, the overlaps between oral and written communication emerge more strongly. Street also argues that the supposed autonomy of the written mode had been exaggeratedly extended to individuals and institutions. The literate man is seen to have an autonomy from social context. Literacy is said to have certain consequences in terms of cognitive development, allowing for the development of rational and detached outlooks, which in themselves would guarantee progress. Researchers such as Luria (1976), Goody (1977) and Ong (1982) have argued this case (quoted in Prinsloo, M & Breier, M, 1996, p. 17), but Scribner (1987) and Rogoff and Lave (1984) suggest that the acquisition of skills is bound by social context, calling into question the claims that universal cognitive skills result from literacy (quoted in Prinsloo, M & Breier, M, 1996, p. 18). The consequences of the myth of literacy are to extend the great divide argument to literate and non-literate societies, and to argue that literacy alone might somehow advance economic development. These crude and ethnocentric stereotypes, and the way they inform development and literacy initiatives have largely been exposed as failures. Street argues, therefore, for ethnographic research of literacy practices as they actually impact on peoples lives. Gee has highlighted the ways in which the autonomous model of literacy has been challenged by a social turn towards a view of literacy which situated it within social practices. (Gee, ???) The New Literacy Studies has been amongst the most influential of these groups, developing an ideological model to replace the autonomous model of literacy. This model consciously addresses questions of the relations of power embedded in literacy practices. Literacy is conceived of as a social practice, located in the interaction between people (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, p.3) rather than as a set of cognitive skills residing within individuals. Literacy is a social practice rooted in social conceptions of meaning, identity and being. Shirley Brice Heaths study of differing ways in which Trackton and Roadville children were exposed to literacy practices, and how this influenced their chances of success at school, indicates the ways in which viewing literacy as social practices helps explain differential school success (Heath, 1986). The New Literacy Studies tradition has developed two key concepts around which the social nature of literacy is articulated; namely literacy events, and literacy practices. Heath, drawing on sociolinguistic notions of speech events, has described literacy events as any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants interactions and their interpretative processes (Heath, 1982 quoted in Street, 2001, p.10). The concept of literacy practice is used to link literacy events to broader social and cultural patterns, or ways in which literacy events are embedded with social practices and beliefs. It is a

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broader and more abstract concept. Literacy events are located within particular contexts and can only be understood in these terms. Events are governed by social rules which shape the domain, such as work, home or school, within which they occur. Different domains of life are characterized by different discourse communities, in which language is employed in different ways across the group (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, p.10). However, not all discourses are equally advantaged, and literacy practices are embedded within and shaped by power relations within social institutions. The boundaries between domains are seen as permeable, but some literacy practices are clearly dominant and others are less visible and less influential. A major concern of the New Literacy Studies has been to document and give voice to these local and vernacular literacies. Whereas the autonomous model of literacy assumes a universal and singular literacy, the ideological model identifies multiple literacies, and is concerned to give marginalized voices a hearing. There is a danger in this approach of relativising literacy, and failing to recognize the importance for marginalized voices of gaining access to the privileged and hegemonic discourses of power, of merely celebrating the local (Street, 2001, p.12). However, as Street has pointed out, the model has been alive to the dynamics between central and local, and is relativist in terms of a concern for articulating interventionist programmes more sensitively with existing local practices, rather than as seeing all literacies as essentially equal, and ignoring the dynamics of power relations (Street in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996, p.6). A key idea within the New Literacy Studies tradition is that of mediation. While the autonomous model posits a literacy which resides within individuals, as Fingeret (1983) argued activities requiring literacy can be achieved by individuals labeled functionally illiterate by their ability to employ skills within peer groups or social networks (in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996, p.20). Catherine Kell, for example, has shown how individuals are able to draw upon networks of reciprocity in which skills, including literacy skills, are shared amongst a community (Kell in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). Reder (1985) has distinguished between two types of engagement in literacy practices; individuals are technologically engaged when they are directly involved in coding or decoding writing, and functionally engaged when they participate in the practice, but without direct coding or decoding (Prinsloo & Breier, 1996, p.20). The social meanings of literacy practices within different domains such as school or Church crucially affect the choices individuals make about their engagements in literacy practices. Another important concept is that of apprenticeship learning, in which literacy skills are acquired informally from peers, or in the workplace, much as the taxi driver learned by watching an experienced driver, learning the road signs by observing how the driver behaved (Breier, Taetsane & Sait in Prinsloo & Breier, 1996). Gee has highlighted how literacy in a particular domain of discourse involves far more than just a recognition of surface meaning, but involves the

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attitudes, values, and shared participation involved in making meaning within a particular discourse. Gee uses the idea of semiotic domains to explore these ideas. He defines a semiotic domain as any set of practices that recruit one or more modalities (e.g. oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, and so forth) to communicate distinctive types of meanings (Gee, 2003, p.31). This notion of semiotic domains goes further than the social conceptions of literacy within the New Literacy Studies in that it explicitly includes modes other than the written in its explanation of how meaning-making occurs within social contexts. Gunther Kress has written about a broad trend towards visualization, in which graphic modes are becoming increasingly important carriers of meaning, at the expense of written language as the Age of print gives way to the Information Age. (Kress, 1998). Any socially constructed view of literacy, highlighting the social uses of literacy clearly needs to extend its explanation of what constitutes literacy to take these trends into account. Kress looks, for example at the ways in which Science textbooks have changed from the 1930s, when the main meaning was conveyed by the text, with the graphic merely complementing the written word. Textbooks of the 1980s, however, show that the graphic information has become the main carrier of information, with the text serving to orient the reader (Kress, 1998, pp.63-65). The New London Group has advocated the idea of multiliteracies, by which is foregrounded both the idea of the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity as well as the multiplicity of communications channels (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p.5). The key idea behind the multiple modes of meaning making is that one mode is not simply a translation of meaning conveyed in one mode by another. The visual mode conveys meaning differently to the linguistic mode, for example. Theories of language alone are not adequate to describe increasingly multi-modal means of communication or the cultural uses to which they are put. A pedagogy of Multiliteraciesfocuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects (Cope & Klantzis, 2000, p.5). Where information is increasingly conveyed in multi-modal ways, literacy too needs to become a multi-modal literacy. This argument complements, rather than replaces the multiple literacies argument, which focuses on linguistic literacy alone. The other strand of the New London Group argument relates to globalization and the increasing proximity of cultural and linguistic diversity, making the former emphasis on written, standardized national languages obsolete. We must note the similarities with the New Literacy Studies concern with local literacies. While the multiple literacies view argues for the privileging of local or venacular literacies, the multiliteracies view stresses the importance of human agency in shaping social futures. Human agency is foregrounded in the concept of design. For Kress, in a rapidly changing social landscape the value of critique, the main purpose of which is adding dynamism to static systems, is overridden by the need to find

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meaning in new, constantly changing ways. Human beings are inheritors of patterns and conventions of meaning while at the same time (being) active designers of meaning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p.7). This notion of design reflects the way in which people are seen as active meaningmakers. The theory posits six design elements, linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial and finally multimodal, which relates the first five modalities to each other. This view rejects the rather simplistic model of communication prevelant in much communication theory which rests on a cognitive theory in which a message is encoded by a transmitter and sent as a signal to another, the receiver, who decodes the signal. Instead, the interconnectedness of all possible modes of communication which humans draw on is highlighted. (Finnegan, ???). The category of multi-modal, as a separate category is significant in drawing attention to the conceptualization of this inter-connectedness as itself a carrier of meaning. While each mode has particular affordances, the ways in which modes combine to convey meaning are almost mystical and recreate in a post-modern landscape perhaps what best passes for spirituality, a sense of the ineffable once certainty and progress have been eliminated from our vocabulary. The New London Group has also set out a pedagogy of multiliteracies, detailing four components of pedagogy: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice. This emphasis on pedagogy reflects the social programmatic of the group, and its vision of a multi-cultural educational system where trends towards globalization and diversity are employed to develop an epistemology of pluralism (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p.10) which allows access to social power, without erasing local identities. The chosen model of design reflects a process in which available designs, conventions, are transformed through the process of design, creating the redesigned, which will always, in unique ways reflect the process of change. This seeks to reflect culturally diverse and fast changing worlds, at the same time highlighting agency as a crucial element. Available design includes the grammars of various semiotic systems as well as orders of discourse, the ways in which different discourses articulate with each other (Fairclough quoted in Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, pp.20-21). The process of design is conceived of as always representing a re-representation or re-contextualization of available designs, never being simply mimetic. Even the simple translation of writing into reading is of itself a re-working. Every act of reception is also thus design, a productive activity. The redesigned is consequently always a re-making of meaning and the self. The key terms used are hybridity, the extent to which society and culture are processes involving the combinations of genres and conventions, re-workings in new ways, and intertextuality, the ways in which texts speak to each other through reference or allusion.

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It seems to me that what is really exciting about the state of literacy studies at the moment is that the current models, New Literacy Studies or Multilitericies and multimodalities, are dynamic models drawing on many different traditions that offer programmatics encouraging human agency and foregrounding ideological positions rather than occluding them. As a teacher, both explanations and the articulations between them offer explanations at the interface between global and local, culture and sub-culture, determination and agency which confirm why professionalism is still important in the teaching profession, and why what happens in classrooms still matters. I started this essay with reference to Robert Graves and his idiosyncratic research into alphabets and the power of the naming of gods. It seems to me that as teachers and researchers we have our own White Goddesses to pursue, and that we have our own roebucks and lapwings to deconstruct, largely in the form of departmental edicts, which often seem to obscure the purpose of education. It seems an odd place to end an examination of the social turn in literacy studies, but the perception that literacy names our gods seems crucial both to an understanding that deities are socially constructed, and that they matter. When humanity has ceased to have something to name, it will have ceased to be.

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References:
Barton, D & Hamilton, M, Local Literacies, London & New York, Routledge, 1998 de Castell, S & Luke, A, Models of literacy in North American schools; social and historical conditions and consequences, in de Castell, S, Luke, A & Egan, K (eds), Lietarcy, Society, and Schooling A Reader, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986 Cope, B & Kalantzis, M, Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the Design of Social Futures, London & New York, Routledge, 2000 Finnigan, R, Communicating. The multiple modes of human interconnection, London & New York, Routledge, Gee, J, The New Literacy Studies. From socially situated to the work of the social, Gee, J, Opportunity to Learn; a language-based pesrcpective on assessment, in Assessement in Education, vol. 10, Nr 1, March 2003. Graves. R, The White Goddess, New Jersey, Noonday, 1997 Heath, S, Critical factors in literacy development, in de Castell, S, Luke, A & Egan, K (eds), Literacy, Society, and Schooling A Reader, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986 Kress, G, Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: the potentials of new forms of text in Snyder, I (ed), Page to Screen. Taking literacy into the electronic era, London & New York, Routledge, 1998. Prinsloo, M & Breier, M (eds), The Social Uses of Literacy. Theory and practice in contemporary South Africa, Cape Town, Sached Books, 1996 Street, B (ed), Cross-cultural approaches to literacy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Street, B (ed), Literacy and Development. Ethnographic perspectives, London, Routledge, 2001.