Torrington: What Counts as Literacy in Context?

Researchers, educators, and scholars invested in literacy studies taken on the difficult labor of breaking down discriminatory ideologies of literacy that evoke strict binaries between "literate" (i.e., standard English readers and writers) and "illiterate" (i.e., anyone else) individuals--ideologies that stem back to decades-ago debates about the differences between oral cultures and "literate" ones (i.e., those that communicate through writing). These stakeholders recognize, as Street does, the New Orders understanding that "[w]hat counts as ‘effective’ [literacy practices] cannot, then, be prejudged . . . [because] there are multiple literacies in communities and . . . literacy practices are socially embedded" (2). As such, I want to take seriously Street's argument--which he frames as the argument for the larger edited collection this piece introduces--that "ethnographic approaches to literacy in development can offer such an accommodation of theory and practice and address the larger issues raised in the New Orders, while maintaining a focus upon the local meanings through which we all experience such processes" (6).

If, as Street notes, "[l]iteracy . . . is always contested, both its meanings and its practices, hence particular versions of it are always ‘ideological’, they are always rooted in a particular world-view and a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalise others," it is imperative that ethnographers of literate practices focus on the location of meaning in communicative exchanges that count as literate acts, particularly in pedagogical contexts. The location of meaning--the point at which meaning arises--in a communicative act necessarily affects what counts as literacy. Where an individual believes meaning is located in a situated act of communication—either in the speaker/writer or in the linguistic or composed text—underscores both how that individual takes up the act and the trajectories of the act in terms of what the listener/audience does with it. For example, if I (as a writing teacher) believe that meaning resides solely in a composed product, I am unable to account for the historical-cultural factors bound up within that product and thus begin to see students as “good” or “bad” writers, “literate” or “illiterate” beings, etc.; conversely, if I (as a writing teacher) believe that meaning resides solely in verbal communications, my notion of what it means to assign a grade to a student becomes shaped by the kinds of oral contributions I observe that student making, thus also excluding the historical-cultural mediating factors that may be at work when a student utters something like “It ain’t no thang.”

The above consequences lead me to reflect more on how assigning a particular location to meaning in a communicative act (and to think there are only two choices—either/or!) inherently shapes the ways that student writers are perceived as literate or illiterate by their teacher-audiences. The problem of the location of meaning is further complicated by the inherited locations--or, as Gee puts it, "[o]ne always and only learns to interpret texts of a certain type in certain ways through having access to, and ample experience in, social settings where texts of that type are read in those ways. One is socialized or enculturated into a certain social practice" (45). Unexamined, these formative assumptions can accomplish a great deal of pedagogic violence in the classroom. As such, I wonder how we as teachers might benefit from an understanding of meaning predicated on neither relativism (i.e., meaning depends on the situation) nor indiscriminate notions of writing for writing’s sake (i.e., it all means something, and speech acts and composing acts carry equal forces of meaning) but a consideration of the full range of mediating elements, including meaning, in a given communication system. Such a consideration may lend us, as teachers invested in multiliterate learning situations, a means to take seriously literacies across contexts.

Torrington: Method, Methodology, and Context (oh my!)

I find Gee's discussion of the relations among discourse, meaning, and culture--what he describes as "the social and cultural nature of meaning and communication . . . with due deference to individual human agency and responsibility" (87)--particularly useful in considering the frames with which we approach our research. For my own research on learning and the uptake of literate activities, his distinction between "acquisition" and "learning" (in Chapter 9, which we weren't assigned) in light of this network of relations is especially compelling. He writes,

Acquisition is a process of acquiring something (usually subconsciously) by exposure to models, a process of trial and error, and practice in social groups, without a process of formal teaching. It happens in natural settings that are meaningful and functional in the sense that acquirers know that they need to acquire the thing they are exposed to in order to function and they in fact want to so function.  This is how people come to control their first language.

Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching (through not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher) or through certain life-experiences that trigger conscious reflection.  This teaching or reflection involves explanation and analysis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned into its analytic parts.  It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter. (167)

Differentiating between "acquisition by meaningful and functional exposure" and "attaining knowledge that triggers conscious reflection" while accounting for individual agency, responsibility, and the social/culturally mediated nature of meaning, however, becomes fairly complex for the researcher- or teacher-in-practice--that is, it is difficult to identify, code, and quantify (in the case of the researcher) or assess (in the case of the teacher) moments of learning when those moments are ever-contingent on the learner's agency coupled with the socially/culturally constituted nature of what it means to learn in a given situation. As such, my question in light of this week's readings is: as researchers, how can we use theory, methodology, and method to investigate a research question embedded in such complicated systems? In other words, how can we use our own theoretical attachments to help mitigate the complexity of doing research?

One idea related to the musings above is the notion of context that Lillis takes up. Lately, I've been considering the limiting ways that scholars not only bandy about this term, but also the narrow range of connotations implicated when a scholar invokes the context aspect of her research; what I find especially troubling about the term context in linguistics, literacy, and writing studies is that too often it stands as a black-boxed term (in the Latourian sense). Though Lillis addresses this issue, expressing frustration with methodologies and methods that lead to "truncated engagement[s] with 'context'" (355), and advocating "[e]mic perspectives, [which] are central to understanding what is relevant to participants and thus core to understanding what is significant from the very large and empirically unwieldy notion of 'context'" (360), I argue that her proposed alternative--a move to consider not the context of research but the contextualization of communicative acts, grounded in an understanding of text and context as enmeshed--may still fail to illuminate the ways that what is relevant to individual participants may obscure socially/culturally constituted meanings that emerge from the interactions of those individual participants with the tools of language and ecologies of communication at hand.