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.