Reflection Post

Reflection on ENGL B6400, Theories and Models of Literacy

Prior to taking ENGL B6400, I had the opportunity to take many Language and Literacy electives. When I took Digital Literacies with Tom Peele and Transnational Literacies Missy Watson, I unconsciously learned that there were, in fact, multiple meanings of literacy. In Digital Literacies, I was first introduced to the New London Group’s article “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” and the concept of multiliteracies. In Missy’s course, transnational literacy was defined as the meaning-making and communication skills transnationals use as strategies to navigate between national boundaries. Therefore I’ve had a rather circular journey toward understanding literacy because I was already aware, in a peripheral sense, that literacy could not simply be considered reading and writing.

However, after completing ENGL B6400, I now have a deeper understanding of literacy as the skills people use to make meaning of text, whether that text is print, digital, visual, or oral. To me, literacy is the way in which people a) take meaning from print, b) use language to communicate and construct meaning with others, and c) multimodal.

Although Missy Watson’s course in Transnational Literacies provided an overview of the split between the autonomous, cognitive approach to literacy and the sociocultural approach to literacy, I really appreciated the wider historical context that this course provided. Casting as far back as the tradition of oral reading and the transition into silent reading just highlighted the flexibility of the definition of literacy. I especially enjoyed the focus on reading and the flexibility of choosing a topic for the second paper because it allowed me to focus of topics I genuinely wanted to learn more about on my own. In my second paper, I was able to turn my attention to a subject that fascinates me still—the evolution of punctuation—and that paper gave me the freedom to explore it to my heart’s content.  For me, papers are great learning tools.

I appreciated returning to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words. Even more, the article Heath’s article, “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School” provided a much needed clarity to the book I’d read a year and a half ago. The new reading (for me) of Victoria Purcell-Gates Other People’s Words was a particular joy for me. Her style of writing was not only accessible (hopefully opening up the potential audience to those outside of academia) but it was also eye-opening for me in a way that Ways with Words wasn’t for some reason. Perhaps it was the way Purcell-Gates brings the reader into the lives of Jenny and Donny, and the way her writing didn’t objectify them, but rather invited the reader to see them as people with actual dreams, goals, and challenges.

As a future literacy instructor, it behooves me to understand that literacy can manifest in many modalities and that can influence that way in which I assess my future students. This course and all of the concepts I learned in it has helped broaden my perspective, and, I think, has given me a stronger foundation on which to build my pedagogical philosophy. 

Discussion Post #4: Other People's Words

Reading and Adult Literacy

Other People’s Words by Victoria Purcell-Gates was enlightening. While Ways with Words shed some light on different cultural ways of taking meaning from text, the communities of Roadville and Trackton were, in some shape or form, moderately literate. In Purcell-Gates' book, we are introduced to a family on the extreme end of low literacy, and the journey Jenny and Donny embark upon to acquire literacy is immensely inspiring.

One aspect of the book that really stands out to me is Jenny’s process of acquiring reading. As most of my experience is in tutoring adult students or facilitating CATW workshops, I really connected to the difficulty Purcell-Gates expressed with guiding Jenny’s reading education. Purcell-Gates writes, “My theoretical and knowledge base as a teacher of reading and writing told me that Jenny needed to read meaningful, predictable text in order to begin to develop as a reader” (101). The readings need to be meaningful and predictable, yet Purcell-Gates also states, “As I wrote for her to read, I was conscious of the need to keep the difficulty of the text with what Vygotsky calls the zone of proximal development” (106).  In my CATW workshops, I’ve been limited to the sample prompts given to me. They are abbreviated readings on a wide range of topics that don’t necessarily interest most of the students I’ve worked with. Purcell-Gates manages to bypass this problem by this issue because Jenny’s primary motivation is to read books to her children. This provides ready-made reading selections for Jenny. So, student’s motivation is a key factor is reading selections, but I wonder how I can implement that on a class-size basis rather than on a one-on-one basis. How can I possibly cater to all students’ interests in meaningful texts?

Discussion Post #3: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freirian Approach to Education

              In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire lays out his concepts and elements of what is considered the transformative approach to education. In his method, he describes the established education system as a banking system of education. In this model, educators are the sole point of authority in the classroom, dispensing information to passive students who must “bank” or store the information. This is the system I’m most familiar with. Throughout my education, I occasionally encountered teaching styles that attempted to subvert the passivity of students by trying to push us into being more active. However, these teachers tended to be the exceptions rather than the norm, and much of the burden of the class instruction and students’ success relied on what the teacher did or did not do.  I did not question this teacher-centric teaching style until a one-on-one conference with an English professor in my Junior year of undergraduate study. In that meeting, the professor was not directive in her feedback on my project and encouraged me to become self-directed (in the sense of taking in upon myself to go beyond the given texts of the course). While this was not quite the dialogic approach that Freire recommends, this was a crystallizing event for my own understanding that students can and should have input in their own education. Since reading this book two years ago, I have tried to incorporate a dialogic approach in my tutoring, and in my small group CATW grammar workshop, I attempt to inject information about students’ social reality. While I haven’t quite managed to the successfully implement praxis (as far as I know,) I hope by the discussing the politics of language while so teaching grammar I can get my students to reflect critically upon the the power dynamics of SAE and students' home language.

Discussion Post #2: Ways with Words

Response to Heath's Ethnography

         In Ways with Words, Shirley Brice Heath studies the language acquisition and use of the member in two communities, Roadville and Trackton. Throughout the book, Heath continually affirms that the children of Roadville and Trackton’s different language use are a result of different cultural practices: family structures, community members’ roles, socialization, religious practices, and more. Implicit under this argument is that all children’s language use is shaped by the language patterns of their community, and as such, these cultural language usages need to be taken into consideration when teaching literacy. Literacy does not occur in a vacuum; the history, both of the individual and of the socio-cultural landscape of that individual, impacts learners at the attempt to acquire literacy.

     In Chapter 5, I was particularly interested in the focus placed on storytelling, and on the role storytelling had in literacy practices.  Heath maintains that storytelling is an important part of socialization in both Trackton and Roadville; however the function of language use differs between the two communities and children’s language use reflects these differences. In Roadville, stories adhere to factual elements and linearity. The stories in Roadville often end with a moral or proverb. On the other hand, in Trackton, stories often strain credulity by embracing exaggeration. The exaggeration can be seen a connection to universal truths. I find the stylistic differences between storytelling (their interaction with oral language) in the two towns interesting because they directly reflect the print literacy practices.

          As I mentioned in class last week, I found Heath’s article, “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School,” much more digestible, even though the details of the book are just as pivotal to my overall comprehension of the social practices model of literacy. At the end of the article, she provides concrete suggestions for educators dealing with the mixed populations of Trackton and Roadville. For students of Roadville, Heath recommends that they need an “extension of [the skills they learned at home to extract meaning from printed text] to other domains” and clear “distinctions in discourse strategies and structures,” as they also need to “be reintroduced to a participant frame of reference to a book” (72)

For students who hail from Trackton, Heath suggests that they need to learn the “skills of taking meaning from books” but they should also be taught in such a manner where they can “retain their analogical reasoning practices” so that they may “learn to adapt the creativity in language, metaphor, fictionalization, recreation of scenes and exploration of functions and settings of items they bring to school.” (72) These are all incredibly specific recommendations for the students of Roadville and Trackton, and these solutions can hardly be blinded applied to other areas. Heath concludes her article with a call for more ethnography, in the hopes that placing social practices model at the forefront can produce similar results in other areas. However, I wonder how well this type of ethnographic research can be applied to hugely diverse cities like New York. What would an update to this approach look for a shifting, increasingly globalized classroom?

Discussion Post #1: Looking at power and punctuation.

Response to Alberto Manguel's "The Silent Reader."

This reading gives an historical overview of the tradition of reading: in particular, how we went from oral reading to silent reading. Alberto Manguel describes the shift from oral reading in the tradition of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers who read to an audience to the silent reading we now of today. Thanks to the writings of Saint Augustine, Aurelius Ambrose is known as the first “definite instance recorded in Western Literature” of silent reading, and, from Augustine’s reaction, we know that this silent reading was not the norm for the time period. Manguel also goes on to describe how Irish scribes moved away from scriptua continua towards the adoption of word separation, paragraphing and punctuation and how this facilitated the normalizing of silent reading. Furthermore, the article also relays the enormous impact silent reading had on society. Once individuals could silently read religious texts and other texts, there was suddenly room for dissent and individual interpretation. This was a large motivating force for the Protestant Reformation.

However, it is Manguel’s description of the role punctuation played in the transition from oral reading to silent reading that really piqued my interest. I’ve been doing my own research into the punctuation of the Introduction to Language course, and this reading gave me a lot of perspective on the history of reading. For a long time, I either hadn’t put much thought into the origins of punctuation or assumed that the punctuation system we used today was just one that logically evolved alongside text. However, in my reading of this chapter and an article by Naomi S. Baron, “Commas and Canaries” The Role of Punctuation In Speech and Writing,” I now see that the evolution of punctuation has a far more complex story and that story i rooted in the struggle between two perspectives which consider the different functions of oral reading and silent reading: the rhetorical view of punctuation and the grammatical view of punctuation. In the rhetorical view of punctuation, punctuation is used merely as a means of replicating the “oral rendition” of the text (Baron, 2001, p.22). Consideration and placement of punctuation marks were designed to make the reading of the text aloud easier for the reader. Such considerations were first noted in the system used by the librarian of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium (251?-180? BC). In that system, three marks were used to distinguish the amount of time that should elapse before continuing to the next section. As the system for punctuation developed for the use of silent reading, however, the function of the punctuation began to shift. Soon, punctuation became a means of signaling relationships between syntactic units. I think that shift explains a lot between the disparity of what I was taught about punctuation in K-12 and what I was taught in a prescriptivistic grammar classroom.

 Can you think of any parallels between (1) the transition from oral reading (and composing)  to silent reading (and writing)  and (2)  the modern day transition from print literacy to digital literacy?


In regards to this question, I think the parallel between these two transitions are the de-centralization of power. When silent reading was adopted, the authority and power of religious leaders was threatened because individual citizens had the access to the text that religious leaders claimed dominion over. While print literacy was more readily available than having to pay a scribe to copy a book by hand, digital literacy is even more accessible to the everyday person in a country with decent digital infrastructure. And in much the same way as with silent reading, the power of this access should not be underestimated.

That week's comments:

Response to James' Post

RE: "Learning to Read" & "The Shape of the Book"James,
I wholeheartedly agree with the parellels between e-readers and the various historical forms of books have taken. It's fascinating how consistent humans have been about demanding the the form and function of the book match. I was especially taken with the medical travel-book Dr. Dutschke displayed. It reminded me of the small moleskin I carry arounfd in the summer to sketch with and jot down ideas. The idea that hundreds of years ago, a doctor with his own reference notebook shouldn't be surprising as it was to me.  

Introductory/Test Post

Hello, this is a text post for my Theories and Models of Literacy course. Welcome!