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.