Literacy Studies in Education: Disciplined
Developments in a Post-Disciplinary Age
Colin Lankshear
Published in M. Peters (1999).
After the
Disciplines. Greenwood
Press.
Introduction
This chapter investigates literacy
studies with particular reference to educational theory and practice.
The argument is constructed in four parts. The first sketches some
key elements and stages in the emergence of an explicit and
well-subscribed focus on studies of literacy per se from the 1950s.
It describes developments in and across established disciplinary
areas like history, anthropology, linguistics, sociology and
psychology -- developments which, by the 1980s, saw a ‘sociocultural’
conception of literacy and literacy studies emerge in opposition to
the ‘traditional’ conception.
The second part of the argument traces
the related emergence of literacy as a focus of study within
education specifically, revealing similar conceptual, theoretical,
and normative tensions operating here as occurred in developments
outside educational theory and practice. The discussion grounds the
claim that what we count as literacy and, hence, as literacy studies,
is contestable, and that choices and decisions must be made.
Arguments are provided for the view that literacy and its study
should be framed in terms of the sociocultural approach. What should
count and be encouraged as literacy studies in educational and wider
academic inquiry and practice is identified here as what has become
known, variously, as ‘socioliteracy studies’ (Gee 1996);
‘sociocultural literacy’ (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996), and ‘the
"new" literacy studies’ (Barton 1994; Gee 1996; Street
1995).
The third part presents a current
picture of literacy studies (thus framed) in education. This includes
accounts of key goal statements, constructs, programmatic values,
methodological approaches, and practical implications.
The final part looks briefly at
critical literacy in relation to socioliteracy studies as a
whole.
Part 1 General
Background
Historical Studies of
Literacy
Since the 1950s, the notion of
literacy -- as distinct from ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘composition’,
‘grammar’, ‘rhetoric’, and so on -- has come increasingly to name a
focus for theoretical, conceptual, and research activities across a
range of disciplinary areas.
Much of the early work was done by
historians. Harvey Graff (1991) argues that by the 1990s historians
were entering a third generation of literacy studies. He identifies
the first generation of historical studies of literacy as comprising
work from the late 1960s and into the 70s by people like Stone
(1969), Cipolla (1969), and Schofield (1968). This work was
foreshadowed in the 1950s by that of Webb (1955) and Hoggart (1957)
on British working class readers, and by Fleury and Valmary in
France. The ‘first generation’ literacy historians made the case for
the direct study of literacy as an important historical factor. It
traced at a general level major chronological trends, transitions,
and passages in literacy over periods, and identified factors tied
closely to changes in the course of literacy across time, together
with its dynamics, distributions and impacts.
Graff’s second generation of
historical literacy studies comprised subsequent work by Schofield
(1973) and work by Johansson (1977), Lockridge (1974), Cressy (1980),
Houston (1983, 1985), Graff (1979), and others. These studies
established and drew on the quantitative record of literacy -- mainly
using census data, signatory sources, and the like -- in a closer and
more detailed way than previously. Second generation researchers
sought close evidentially-based historical interpretations of
changing patterns of literacy, particularly in terms of the
distribution of literacy and different literacy levels within given
populations. They also related trends in literacy to economic and
social developments including mass schooling, and to social class
formation. Other work foregrounded literacy in relation to
demographic behaviour, cultural development, social class
stratification, family formation, and the like. It also considered
literacy in relation to literary, cultural, and publishing issues and
themes as, for example, in the various histories of the press and
newspapers produced during this period.
Graff saw evidence of an inchoate
third generation of historical literacy studies beginning to emerge
at the beginning of the 1990s. This would involve work that moved
from the more quantitative evidential base employed in the previous
generations to embrace also critical questions concerned particularly
with developing a cultural politics and political economy of literacy
in history -- including literacy’s relations with class, gender, age
and culture. Issues of conceptualisation and contextualisation of
literacy within history would become central, benefiting from the
insights of landmark studies in sociocultural approaches to literacy,
such as those by Scribner and Cole (1981), and Heath (1983) -- and,
indeed, from interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborations more
generally. Potentially fruitful innovations like ‘historical
ethnographies’ were in the offing, along with possibilities for
comparative historical work. Graff envisaged increased interest on
the part of historians in developing new conceptualisations of
context in the historical study of literacy. This would, among other
things, temper the earlier focus on literacy as an independent
variable with a stronger sense of literacy as a dependent variable.
In Graff’s view, the work of this third generation would be to make
the shift from ‘historical studies of literacy’ to ‘histories that
would encompass literacy within their context and conceptualisation’;
that is, from ‘the history of literacy’ to ‘literacy in history’
(Graff 1991: xxii).
During the same period addressed by
Graff, further important work, much of it with a broadly historical
and cultural focus, was being done across other disciplinary areas
and across a range of themes. Some focused on ‘the Gutenberg
phenomenon’ -- the rise of the printing press as a decisive moment in
human communication. Seminal works here included Davis’ Printing and
the People: Society and Culture in Modern France (1975), Eisenstein’s
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), and Joyce et al’s
Printing and Society in Early America (1983). These studies mainly
worked across history, sociology, and anthropology, typically from
cross-disciplinary perspectives. Within the broad concern with the
emergence of mass print in the context of social practice and change,
a number of scholars focused more particularly on the significance of
the printing press for the Reformation. Early studies like R. W.
Scribner’s (1981) For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for
the German Reformation, and Strauss’ (1978) Luther’s House of
Learning, paved the way for numerous subsequent studies -- including
some within education -- of the nexus between the Gutenberg press and
Protestantism (e.g., Luke 1989).
Cross-disciplinary
Treks to ‘The Great Divide’
The period from the early 1960s to the
early 80s also brought landmark work by scholars working at various
interfaces between philosophy, classical studies, anthropology,
history and linguistics. This work profoundly influenced the
development and direction of literacy studies from the mid 1980s.
Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong are widely recognised as
most influential here (see Street 1984; Graff 1991; Gee
1996).
Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963),
Goody and Ian Watt’s 1963 paper ‘The consequences of literacy’,
Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), and Ong’s
Orality and Literacy (1982) identified literacy -- construed as the
advent of the alphabetic system and writing -- as a major factor in
epistemic, cultural and historical change. Their arguments are
variations around the theme that ‘literacy makes for a "great divide"
between human cultures and their ways of thinking … and modes of
cultural organization’ (Gee 1996: 49-50). Literacy is seen as a key
factor, if not the salient factor, that enables the transition from
‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’ culture.
Havelock, for example, argued that
writing frees humans from dependence on memory, and from ‘emotional
trappings’ necessary for purposes of recall. That is, a written text
permits emotional detachment from texts and, with that, the
possibility for objective reflection upon their content. New ways and
possibilities for thinking, judging, synthesising, comparing and so
on are seen to accompany the emergence of ‘an abstract language of
descriptive science to replace a concrete language of oral memory’
(Havelock 1963: 209; Gee 1996: 50).
Goody and Watt’s variation on this
theme was that important analytical and logical procedures like
syllogistic reasoning and identifying contradictions seem to be a
function of writing -- since writing permits expression of ideas to
be ordered, manipulated and compared as visible artifacts. In The
Domestication of the Savage Mind, Goody argued that the sorts of
traits typically seen as distinguishing ‘advanced’ cultures from
‘primitive cultures’ are linked to changes in means and methods of
communication, particularly, writing. Goody saw the development of
writing as crucially linked to ‘the growth of individualism, the
growth of bureaucracy and of more depersonalized and more abstract
systems of government, as well as to the development of the abstract
thought and syllogistic reasoning that culminate in modern science’
(Gee 1996: 51).
Further elaboration of this theme came
from the work of Ong (1977, 1982), who argued that committing
language to space profoundly increases its potential and restructures
thought. Going still further than Goody and Havelock before him, Ong
(1982: 14) argued in Orality and Literacy that literacy -- writing --
is ‘absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but
also history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and
of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including
oral speech) itself’.
Across "The Great
Divide’: Cross-disciplinary Contributions to Sociocultural Study of
Language and Literacy
The contributions of scholars like
Havelock, Goody, Ong, and others in similar vein promoted literacy
within humanities and social science domains alike as a powerful
independent variable which was instrumental in cultures moving from
‘primitiveness’ to ‘advanced’ states of development. At the very time
this broad line of development was unfolding, however, very different
work was underway across anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and
socially-oriented domains of psychology. This work was highly
diverse, whilst sharing a broad common interest in language and
communication as social practice. The tradition it spawned soon came
into direct conflict with the ‘great divide’/‘independent variable’
thesis. This conflict provided a key focus for Brian Street (1984)
and others (e.g., Cazden 1998; Cook-Gumperz 1986; de Castell, Luke
and Luke 1988; Edelsky, C. 1990; Gee 1989; Hodge and Kress 1988;
Lankshear and Lawler 1987; Levine 1986; Luke 1988; Michaels 1981;
Scollon and Scollon 1981; Stubbs 1980) who were involved throughout
the 1980s in crystallising and making explicit a distinctively
sociocultural paradigm of literacy studies.
This latter line of development was
very complex, involving many strands of activity and influence, not
all of which can be identified here, let alone described in the depth
they warrant. The following selections are indicative, but by no
means exhaustive.
In a recent paper James Gee (1998a)
describes a broad trend in theory and research within social sciences
and humanities dating from the 1970s, which he calls ‘the social
turn’. This was a turn ‘away from focusing on individuals and their
"private" minds and towards interaction and social practice’ (ibid:
1). Gee maps more than a dozen of the myriad discernible ‘movements’
which collectively made up the ‘social turn’. These movements
included the emerging sociocultural approach to literacy and several
which strongly influenced and were subsequently taken into the ‘new’
literacy studies (ibid.; Gee 1996: Ch 3).
Gee specifically identifies
ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and interactional
sociolinguistics; ethnography of communication; sociohistorical
psychology based on the work of Vygotsky and his associates and
Bakhtin; situated cognition; cultural models theory; cognitive
linguistics; the new science and technology studies pioneered by the
work of Latour; modern composition theory; connectionism (in
cognitive science); narrative studies; evolutionary approaches to
mind and behaviour; modern developments in sociology associated
particularly with the work of Giddens; work in poststructuralism and
postmodern social theory centred on ‘discourse’; and the emerging
‘new’ literacy studies (Gee 1998a).
Classic early work in sociocultural
literacy studies with an explicit educational focus was, perhaps,
especially influenced by developments in ethnography of communication
and sociolinguistics spearheaded by people like Dell Hymes (1974,
1980), and by western adoptions of sociohistorical psychology and
related work done earlier in the century in the Soviet Union by
Vygotsky and Luria. Shirley Brice Heath’s major ethnographic study of
language patterns and effects within community, home and school
settings across distinct social groups in a region of the US owed
much to -- and, in turn, contributed greatly to -- the ethnography of
communication (Knobel 1997). Heath’s 1983 book, Ways with Words, is
widely acknowledged as a seminal foundation study in the
sociocultural approach to literacy and literacy studies.
Likewise, Sylvia Scribner and Michael
Cole’s 1991 book, The Psychology of Literacy -- itself very much an
ethnographically-based study -- forced a major rethink of traditional
approaches in psychology to the cognitive effects of literacy through
its rigorous engagement with a problematic owing much to the earlier
Soviet work in sociohistorical psychology (Street 1984; Gee 1996,
1998a; Wertsch 1985).
Besides these ‘social turn movement’
influences, other notable early lines of influence on the emerging
sociocultural paradigm included the work of Paulo Freire in Brazil
and other Third World settings from the 1960s, and work done in the
‘new’ sociology of education during the 1970s.
Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’
(Freire 1972, 1973, 1974) explicitly denounced
psychologistic-technicist reductions of literacy, insisting instead
that ‘Word’ and ‘World’ are dialectically linked, and that education
for liberation involved relating Word and World within transformative
cultural praxis. Freire asserted the impossibility of literacy
operating outside of social practice and, consequently, outside
processes of creating and sustaining or re-creating social worlds.
For Freire, the crucial issues concerned the kinds of social worlds
humans create in and through their language-mediated practices, the
interests promoted and subverted therein, and the historical option
facing education of serving as either an instrument of liberation or
of oppression.
The ‘new’ sociology of education
addressed processes by which and ways in which schooling and school
knowledge contributed to reproducing sociocultural stratification
along class, race-ethnic and gender lines. Some of this work focused
more or less specifically on the workings of language within the
larger historical ‘logic’ of reproduction. Work contributing to the
‘new’ sociology corpus by Basil Bernstein (1971, 1975) and Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and
Passeron 1971) is widely recognised as having provided important
formative support for the sociocultural approach to
literacy.
In 1984 Brian Street presented a
telling statement of these two traditions and what was at stake
between them. His book, Literacy in Theory and Practice can be read
as the first explicit programmatic account of literacy studies from
the sociocultural point of view. The conceptual heart of his book
comprised the juxtaposition of two ‘models’ of literacy: the
‘autonomous’ model (based on the ‘traditional’ view of literacy) and
the ‘ideological’ model (based on the ‘sociocultural’ view). Street’s
account and endorsement of the ‘ideological’ model underpins his
extended critique of theoretical and practical work in literacy based
on the notion of literacy as autonomous.
Briefly, the autonomous model
construes literacy as existing independently of specific contexts of
social practice; having autonomy from material enactments of language
in such practices; and producing effects independently of contextual
social factors. Accordingly, literacy is seen as independent of and
impartial toward trends and struggles in everyday life -- a ‘neutral’
variable.
The ‘ideological’ model rejects the
notion of an essential literacy lying behind actual social practices
involving texts. What literacy is consists in the forms textual
engagement takes within specific material contexts of human practice.
These forms, which Street calls ‘conceptions and practices of reading
and writing’ (plus, we would add, imaging, keying, viewing, etc.),
evolve and are enacted in contexts involving particular relations and
structures of power, values, beliefs, goals and purposes, interests,
economic and political conditions, and so on. Hence, the consequences
of literacy flow not from literacy ‘itself’, but from the conjoint
operation of the text-related components and all the other factors
integral to the practices in question. The myriad literacies that
play out in social life should be seen as integral components of
larger practices, simultaneously reflecting and promoting particular
values, beliefs, social relations, patterns of interests,
concentrations of power, and the like. In no way, then, can literacy
be seen as ‘neutral’ or as a producer of effects in ‘its own
right’.
Part 2 Toward Literacy
Studies in Education
Some Developments and
Complications within Education
Theoretical, pedagogical, and research
activity concerned with aspects of reading and writing have continued
uninterrupted throughout this century within education. Much of it
has been dominated by paradigms from psychology, and has aimed to
understand reading, writing, spelling, and comprehension as cognitive
and behavioural processes in order to improve teaching and learning
approaches to mastering written texts. While this tradition is long
and widely established, it tended not to be identified as ‘literacy’
work until quite recently. Those working in the field did so mainly
under the rubric of ‘reading’, ‘writing’ and related terms, as
reflected in the names of long established journals and professional
associations: e.g., The International Reading Association, which
publishes The Reading Teacher, and the US-based National Reading
Conference, which publishes The Journal of Reading
Behavior.
Nonetheless, enclaves of educational
inquiry concerned explicitly with literacy per se did exist. For
example, from at least the 1950s scholars concerned with the
economics of education and educational development and planning,
among others, were vitally concerned with social implications and
efficacies of literacy. This concern was writ large, for instance, in
the World Literacy Program of UNESCO from the 1950s. In addition, of
course, within adult and continuing education, and extensions studies
departments in countries like the US, Britain, Australia, New
Zealand, and Canada, there has been an interest in adult literacy for
several decades, often associated with migrant populations as well as
educationally disadvantaged individuals from the native-speaking
mainstream. Certainly, ‘functional literacy’ has been a clearly and
strongly defined area of research and pedagogical interest in the US
and elsewhere since the Second World War. Nonetheless, until the late
1970s, an educational interest couched explicitly in terms of
literacy remained quite marginal.
During the past two decades, however,
talk of literacy in relation to school-based learning and teacher
education has become increasingly common. The term has increasingly
displaced references to ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ in policy statements
and school learning programs, as well as in the names of courses,
subjects, departments, schools, and divisions within teacher
education institutions. ‘Literacy Studies’ has emerged as a generic
name for diverse activities in research and scholarship broadly
concerned with understanding and enhancing the production, reception,
and transmission of texts. At the same time, ‘Literacy’ has become a
major focus for teacher professional development and policy
formulation within education systems. In many cases, the change in
terminology has not been accompanied by any substantial visible
change in practice (Lankshear 1993a). Familiar paradigms, questions,
and procedures for inquiry remain intact, but now go under a
different name.
In addition, important work has been
undertaken at the several interfaces between literacy, English as a
school subject, and curriculum theory and practice (Green 1993). From
an historical standpoint, ‘English has been the site where literacy
work has been done with regard to the school’ (Bill Green, personal
communication). This work goes well beyond literacy work in the
narrow sense of teaching basic literacy ‘skills’ as components of
primary and secondary school programs in Language/English. It
involves also curricular studies undertaken within English sub(ject)
areas like composition, rhetoric, textual studies, semiotics, grammar
and the like. Taking a still wider perspective on the relationship
between literacy and curriculum studies in theory and practice,
educationists and linguists alike have addressed diverse aspects of
subject (specific) literacies e.g., (Green 1988, 1993; Lankshear
1993b; Lemke 1990; Martin 1989, 1992). Such work includes accounts of
varying genres associated with subject-based modes of inquiry and
production, as well as addressing aspects and issues of subject
disciplines as discursive practices.
At an institutional level, surface
manifestations of the emergence of literacy studies include the
growing numbers of schools, departments, divisions, research centers,
and other organisational units within teacher education faculties
whose names profess a direct concern with literacy studies. Many of
the larger teacher education faculties in Australian universities
have Schools or Divisions of Language and Literacy Education, for
instance. Other indices include the names of academic and
professional journals, professional associations, categories within
publishers’ lists and book series, etc. In some cases, these examples
have involved name changes from earlier incarnations. For example,
the former Australian Reading Association, which is affiliated with
the International Reading Association, was renamed the Australian
Literacy Educators’ Association in 1993 and its journal, formerly the
Australian Journal of Reading became the Australian Journal of
Language and Literacy.
Within education, then, the situation
with respect to something called ‘literacy studies’ is complex -
especially when we ask what counts as literacy studies and from what
time can we talk about the serious emergence of literacy studies as a
field of educational endeavour. At least four ‘tendencies’ are
readily apparent in the period from the 1950s.
1. Long-standing studies of reading and writing
processes, characteristics of written language, and the like, which
were not thought of -- and whose authors did not think of themselves
-- in terms of literacy.
2. Work in this same tradition which, from the
(late)1980s onward, re-identified as literacy work, whilst remaining
firmly within ‘non-social’ – e.g., psychology of individuals,
literature and literary theory, physiology, etc. --
paradigms.
3. Studies grounded in larger study of social and
cultural periods, milieux, processes, and changes, explicitly
identified as studies of literacy, but where ‘literacy’ was broadly
and unproblematically defined as (alphabetic) writing, ability to
sign, or similar quantitative notions.
4. Literacy studies grounded firmly in an
understanding of literacy as sociocultural practice. This tradition
has made rapid and widespread advances since the mid 1980s, and today
boasts an impressive literature and research base.
How we understand the emergence of
literacy studies in education and the scope of the field will depend
crucially on where we stand in relation to these broad ‘tendencies’
and on our approach to ‘literacy’ as a socially contested concept. It
will also depend, of course, on what kind of questions we take
questions about the nature and emergence of literacy studies to
be.
For example, if we take a purely
‘operational’ approach, such that literacy studies is a matter of
whatever is done within institutional settings or forums that
self-define as departments, journals, or research centres concerned
with literacy education, we will arrive at a view that takes in
everything from theories about and methodologies for teaching
children’s literature, to ethnographic analyses of computer-mediated
communication practices, via approaches to teaching and learning the
mechanics of encoding and decoding print, and surveys of literacy
‘levels’. By contrast, if we adopt some kind of prescriptive
definition of literacy, the account we provide of the field will be
much narrower and more focused.
If we focus on explicit reference to
‘literacy’, the emergence of a literacy studies focus within
education has, then, been rapid. Of course, to the extent that
literacy is understood generally and by implication in terms of
reading, writing, transmitting and receiving texts, we might say that
there has been a concern with literacy studies for as long as there
has been a theoretical and research concern with education - it was
just a matter of nomenclature. This accords with Gee’s (1990, 1996,
1998a and b) notion of the new literacy studies, based on his
distinction between the ‘traditional’ conception of literacy as
reading and writing (an ‘old’ literacy studies) and the more recently
informed conception of literacy as sociocultural practice. From the
perspective of literacy as reading and writing we can identify the
great mass of educational work on reading, writing, and the like as
literacy studies, even though it mainly did not fall under the rubric
of what will be identified here as literacy studies. When we focus on
literacy studies as the study of literacy as a profoundly social
phenomenon, however, it is clear that literacy studies in education
really only begins to emerge with anything like a critical mass from
the 1980s.
There are, then, at least two related
issues to be resolved which bear directly on further discussion of
the nature and emergence of literacy studies from an educational
point of view: namely, (a) what kind of questions are we asking in
the first place (quantitative/qualitative; operational/normative;
descriptive/prescriptive)?; (b) what stand are we to take with regard
to radically competing constructions of literacy?
In education, as in other disciplines
and areas of practice noted above, literacy has traditionally been
thought of in terms of reading and writing - although with
interesting variations. Educationists have mostly seen literacy as ‘a
largely psychological ability -- something true to do with our heads’
(Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996: 1) and, to that extent, a somewhat
private possession. This reflects the heavy domination of educational
research and theory by psychology throughout this century. Being
literate has meant mastering decoding and encoding skills, entailing
cognitive capacities involved in ‘cracking the alphabetic code’, word
formation, phonics, grammar, comprehension, and so on (referred to by
Gee 1998b as ‘design features’ of language). Encoding and decoding
skills serve as building blocks for doing other things and for
accessing meanings. According to this view, once one is literate one
can get on with learning -- by studying subjects in a curriculum, or
by other print-mediated means. Once people are literate they can use
‘it’ (the skill repertoire, the ability) in all sorts of ways as a
means to pursuing diverse benefits (employment, knowledge,
recreational pleasure, personal development, economic growth,
innovation, etc.). Of course, this predominantly ‘psychological’ view
has been complemented in educational thinking by the more ‘external’
notion of literacy as a tool or technology. This is strongly
reflected at present in notions of technological literacy as
involving mastery of computers.
If we go along with this traditionally
dominant view of literacy within education we can say that ‘literacy
studies’ have been going on in educational inquiry as far back as we
care to go, and that it matters little whether or not the activities
have been named in terms of ‘literacy’ or not. The contingent fact
that interest in literacy as such has escalated dramatically during
the past 20-25 years within countries like our own might be explained
quite simply by reference to successive pronouncements of educational
‘crisis’ and ‘falling standards’. These have attended growing
awareness of the extent and speed of contemporary social, economic,
technological, and demographic change, and fears of being ‘overtaken’
by other countries. This has been a period in which literacy has been
‘rediscovered’ locally as a key element of ‘human capital’ (Luke
1992) -- overlapping with numerous mass mobilisations around literacy
(campaigns/crusades) in ‘Third World’ or ‘underdeveloped’ countries
-- and where postindustrialism has been recognised as ‘upping the
ante’ for literacy in the ‘developed’ world (Levett and Lankshear
1994: 28). In an intriguing parallel development, the notion of a
critical mass of literate people being a crucial variable for
economic take-off into industrialism (see, for example, Anderson and
Bowman 1966), which was still playing out in the ‘Third World’,
received a second generation replay for postindustrialism.
Within this context, ‘literacy’ came
to name the most urgent educational tasks of the day and,
correspondingly, a good deal of work which had always been going on
under other names suddenly became ‘literacy’ work. As a leading
educational theme and task, ‘literacy’ was ‘everywhere’ - in
‘functional’, ‘cultural’ and ‘critical’ spaces’ and at all ‘levels’
from ‘basic’ to ‘higher order’ literacies, by way of ‘technological
literacy’ ‘scientific literacy’, and the like (Lankshear 1998). In
Australia, the embrace was near to total. 1991 brought The Australian
Language and Literacy Policy (DEET 1991). Schools, divisions, and
departments of language and literacy education mushroomed within
amalgamated (teacher) educational faculties. Entire research project
programs devoted to literacy -- some of them falling within the
prestigious Commonwealth Competitive Grants Scheme rubric -- emerged,
generating impetus for research centres specialising in literacy
research. Adult and workplace literacy became big business, enjoying
exponential increases in funding. A National Languages and Literacy
Institute of Australia was formed with federal funding to play a
strategic role in policy implementation.
The whole ‘shebang’ -- which serves
neatly as a trope for literacy studies from the
‘literacy-as-being-about-reading-and-writing’ perspective --
accommodates pretty much anything and everything to do with the
universe of written texts under the umbrella of literacy studies:
from work on the most mechanistic approaches to diagnosing and
‘curing’ disabilities with encoding and decoding, to the most
esoteric reaches of literary theory, via approaches to children’s
literature, ‘big books’ pedagogy, planning and programming for
classroom language and literacy education, critical approaches to
reading, writing and viewing, and the theory and methodology of
second/other/foreign language education. In this construction of
literacy studies, it’s all (equally) a part of the mix. Proponents of
the most decontextualised skills-based approaches to teaching and
researching reading and writing co-habit with literary theorists,
proponents of cultural literacy, genre theorists, and advocates of
the ‘new’ literacy studies, among others.
This, however, is not the line I will
take here. I do not accept the ‘traditional’ view of literacy’ but,
rather, the sociocultural view. Neither do I accept an operational
approach to the question of what constitutes literacy studies,
whereby literacy studies includes what(ever) is undertaken in schools
of departments of literacy education, or centres for literacy studies
and the like. Instead, I share Gee’s (1996) view that ‘literacy’
should be recognised as a social contested concept Hence, I take the
question of what constitutes literacy studies as a domain of academic
practice to be normative.
Framing ‘Literacy
Studies’ for Education: For a Sociocultural Paradigm
The kinds of questions we ask about
literacy studies, and the issue of how we frame literacy are not
minor matters but, rather, amount to nothing less than taking up a
stance for or against particular discursive practices.
Building educational theory and
practice on the traditional, autonomous view of literacy has
undesirable consequences. By contrast, educational endeavour is
advanced in progressive ways by taking seriously the questions of how
literacy should be framed and what we should count as falling under
literacy studies, and answering these questions in terms of a
sociocultural perspective.
Gee makes two important points here.
First, he identifies literacy as an example of a ‘socially contested
term’, and argues that debate about literacy ‘ultimately comes down
to moral choices about what theories one wants to hold based on the
sorts of social worlds these theories underwrite in the present or
make possible in the future’ (Gee 1996: 123). Second, he claims that
arguing about what words (ought to) mean is not a trivial business --
it is not ‘mere words’, ‘hair splitting’, or ‘just semantics’ -- when
these arguments are over … socially contested terms. Such arguments
are what lead to the adoption of social beliefs and the theories
behind them, and these theories and beliefs lead to social action and
the maintenance and creation of social worlds. (ibid:
15-16)
This is the approach I assume here.
Taking ‘literacy’ to be a social contested term clearly entails
approaching the question of what constitutes literacy studies as a
normative matter. Accordingly, we need to note the sorts of grounds
and arguments advanced by proponents of sociocultural conceptions of
‘literacy’ and literacy studies. My stance is that literacy studies
is best understood in terms of academic/scholarly/research activities
that seek to understand literacy as sociocultural practice, to build
on these understandings ethically, politically, and pedagogically,
and to advance them conceptually and theoretically.
Toward a sociocultural
approach to literacy studies
Understanding literacy as
sociocultural practice means that reading and writing can only be
understood in the context of the social, cultural, political,
economic, historical practices to which they are integral; of which
they are a part. This view lies at the heart of what Gee (1996) calls
the ‘new’ literacy studies, or socioliteracy studies -- which is what
will count as literacy studies (proper) for the rest of this
discussion (see also Barton 1994; Street 1984, 1993, 1995). The
relationship between human practice and the production, distribution,
exchange, refinement, contestation, etc., of meanings is a key idea
here. Human practices are meaningful ways of doing things, or getting
things done (Franklin 1990). There is no practice without meaning,
just as there is no meaning outside of practice. Within contexts of
human practice, language (words, literacy, texts) gives meaning to
contexts and, dialectically, contexts give meaning to language.
Hence, there is no reading or writing in any meaningful sense of the
terms outside of social practices, or discourses.
These elementary points are
fundamental to the grounds advanced in support of a sociocultural
perspective on literacy against the traditional view. Three main
grounds can be distinguished in the literature. I will sketch these
briefly by way of introducing a fuller account of (socio)literacy
studies.
* We cannot make sense of our
experience of literacy without reference to social
practice
If we see literacy as ‘simply reading
and writing’ -- whether in the sense of encoding and decoding print,
as a tool, skills or technology, or as some kind of psychological
process -- we cannot make sense of our literacy experience. In short
(see Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996: 1-4 for the detailed argument),
reading (or writing) is always reading something in particular with
understanding. Different kinds of text require ‘somewhat different
backgrounds and somewhat different skills’ if they are to be read
(i.e., meaningfully). Moreover, particular texts can be read in
different ways, contingent upon different people’s experiences of
practices in which these texts occur. A Christian Fundamentalist, for
example, will read texts from the Bible in radically different ways
from, say, a liberation theology priest.
Learning to read and write particular
kinds of texts in particular ways presupposes immersion in social
practices where participants ‘not only read texts of this type in
this way but also talk about such texts in certain ways, hold certain
attitudes and values about them, and socially interact over them in
certain ways’ (ibid: 3). Different histories of ‘literate immersion’
yield different forms of reading and writing as practice. The texts
we read and write -- any and all texts we read and write; even the
most arid (and otherwise meaningless) drill and skill, remedial
session ‘readings’ -- are integral elements of ‘lived, talked,
enacted, value-and-belief-laden practices’ engaged in under specific
conditions, at specific times and in specific places (ibid.).
Consequently, it is impossible to abstract or decontextualise
‘literacy bits’ from their larger embedded practices and have them
still mean what they do in fact mean experientially. This, however,
is what the traditional conception of literacy does, in effect, try
to do -- and to this extent it is incoherent.
* The sociocultural model has
necessary theoretical scope and explanatory power
The sociocultural model provides a
proven basis for framing, understanding, and addressing some of the
most important literacy education issues we face: issues which cannot
be framed effectively -- let alone addressed -- from the traditional
perspective on account of its individualist, ‘inner’, or ‘abstracted
skills and processes’ orientation. These include issues of patterned
differentials in literacy outcomes and learning achievements across
social groups, and apparently anomalous instances of learners who
demonstrate competence in diverse social practices and their embedded
literacies, yet fail to come to terms with school
literacy.
Burgeoning work in socioliteracy
studies (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Barton and Ivanic 1991; Heath
1983; Knobel 1997, 1998; Moll 1992) highlights important inherent
differences between characteristically school literacies and those
integral to wider social practices. It also documents some of the
ways in which and extent to which there is a closer ‘fit’ for some
social groups between school literacies and their wider discursive
experiences and acquisitions than there is for other social groups
(Gee 1991; 1996). These differences ‘cut two ways’ within the context
of school learning.
First, as Heath’s work (1982; 1983)
shows, children from diverse social groups may learn to decode and
encode print in the literal sense (i.e., be able to read words from a
page and write words on a page) without being able to ‘cash in’ this
learning on equitable terms in respect of ‘valorised’ school
literacies. Heath (1982), for example, shows how working class
children performed comparably with middle class children in entry
level grades on literacy tasks, but fell progressively behind in
subsequent grades. This, she argued, was a function of literacy in
subsequent grades drawing on particular ‘ways’ of talking, believing,
valuing, acting, and living out that transcend (merely) mechanical
aspects of encoding and decoding texts, and that are differentially
available within the social practices (discourses) of different
social groups (see, e.g., Heath 1982; Gee 1991; 1996; Lankshear
1997). The traditional conception of literacy is powerless to get at
these kinds of analyses and explanations.
Second, many learners who are highly
proficient at certain text-mediated practices in out-of-school
contexts come to grief with school literacy even, at times, to the
extent of performing badly on what appear to be routine encoding and
decoding tasks. (For a classic recent example, see Michele Knobel’s
(1997, 1999) account of Jacques. For an equally graphic parallel from
the adult world, see Kell’s (1996) account of Winnie TsoTso.)
Pedagogical approaches which draw on the traditional conception of
literacy and try to enhance -- or ‘remediate’ -- learning by focusing
more explicitly and intensely on the ‘design features’ of literacy
(Gee 1998b) often fail. A sociocultural approach offers fruitful ways
of understanding and addressing what is going on here that are not
available from the traditional approach to literacy. These include
analysing ineffective pedagogies from the standpoint that they
confuse ‘learning’ and ‘acquisition’ (Krashen 1982; Gee 1991;
Lankshear 1997 Ch. 3), and/or that they do not differentiate between
the ‘design’ and ‘function’ features of language and, hence, fail to
build upon the distinction in pedagogically informed and effective
ways (Gee 1998b). Many students may simply fail to grasp the point of
school literacies on account of the gulf that often exists between
school practices and the ‘real life’ or ‘mature versions of social
practices’ learners experience in their larger lives. These ‘real
world’ practices are typically a long way removed from ‘essayism’ and
the ‘initiation-response-evaluation’ routines so prevalent in school
discourse (Cazden 1988; Michaels 1981; Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996:
Ch 1.
More generally, of course,
sociocultural perspectives on literacy and learning provide powerful
bases for pedagogical interventions aimed at ‘high quality’ learning.
These are becoming increasingly influential in shaping learning
approaches beyond school classrooms, and are exemplified by models of
learning derived from work in situated cognition (e.g., Lave and
Wenger 1991), sociohistorical psychology (Wertsch 1991), ethnography
of communication (Heath and Mangiola 1991; Moll 1992), and cognitive
science (e.g., Brown et al 1993; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993); as
well as from work based on cultural apprenticeship (Rogoff 1990), and
various approaches to critical literacy, collaborative and
cooperative education, and distributed cognition (e.g., Bizzell 1992;
Bloome and Green 1991; Edwards and Mercer 1987; cf, Gee, Hull and
Lankshear 1996: Ch 3 for an overview).
* ‘Unwanted’ theoretical trappings and
implications for social worlds
Proponents of socioliteracy studies
identify a raft of theoretical tendencies and implications attaching
to the traditional view of literacy which they argue are
educationally, morally, and politically regressive. For example, they
see the traditional view going hand in glove with quantitative
approaches and worldviews like psychometrics, measurable levels of
academic (dis)ability and (il)literacy, quantifications of
‘functionality’, and so on. These lend themselves to constructing
learners who experience difficulties with school literacy as ‘deficit
systems’ (e.g., as having inadequate or inappropriate home support
for school learning; not enough books -- or the right kind of books
-- in the home, etc.) or, in many cases, as ‘learning disabled’,
‘academically challenged’, ‘slow learners’, ‘ADD’, etc. Such theories
and constructs support the creation of particular kinds of ‘social
worlds’ (Gee 1996: 123). Policies and practices emphasising
diagnostic assessment, remedial assistance programs, regular
reporting against ‘profiles’, ‘standards’ or ‘benchmarks’, packages
of special learning-teaching techniques, and the like are ‘natural’
concomitants of the traditional view. More subtle ‘affiliations’
include the creation of social worlds grounded in possessive
individualism, commodification, and generalised logics of
instrumental and measurable value (think: exchange values,
comparative advantage, added value, competency portfolios, etc.).
Such theoretical ‘baggage’ and its
implications for the kinds of social worlds we create (and don’t
create) are writ large within the current education reform regime
which, of course, gives very high priority to literacy (and numeracy)
defined in thoroughly ‘traditional’ and ‘autonomous’ terms. Current
education reform proposals construct literacy as individualised,
standardised, and commodified in the extreme. They constitute
standard English literacy as the indisputable norm, advocate the
‘technologizing’ of literacy to unprecedented levels, and tie the
significance and value of literacy in increasingly narrow and
instrumental ways to economic viability and demands of citizenship
(see Lankshear 1998 for detailed discussion).
Not surprisingly, advocates of
socioliteracy studies argue that their approach provides a more
morally acceptable and humane basis on which to base educational
practice and social reform’ than do theories, concepts, values, and
practices coalescing around the traditional view of literacy (cf, Gee
1996: 123).
Part 3 Literacy
Studies in Education: A Current Picture
Those working within literacy studies,
as framed here, aim to enhance our conceptual and theoretical
understanding of literacy as sociocultural practice, and encourage
educational practices which build on these understandings
pedagogically, ethically, and politically. This work involves
multiple component tasks. These include:
i. providing theoretically informed
accounts of sociocultural practice in general
ii. clarifying literacy as (an
integral component of) sociocultural practice
iii. articulating a moral position and
a political ideal to inform theoretical and practical work in
literacy education
iv. researching and analysing literacy
in use, and the outcomes and effects of instances of literacy in use
under their particular conditions of social practice
v. assessing examples of literacy in
use in relation to moral and political ideals for literacy
vi. advancing ideas for promoting
literacy practices that promote these ideals, and for redressing
literacy practices that impede them
vii. informing literacy pedagogy with
insights gained from the above-mentioned work.
The corpus of work falling under these
descriptions is already vast, and generalising from it is beyond the
scope of this chapter. Contributions vary in scope as well as in
their more detailed theoretical investments. For an ostensive
definition of representative current work in literacy studies, we
might reasonably look to Taylor and Francis’ series, ‘Critical
Perspectives on Literacy and Education’, edited by Allan
Luke.
Rather than attempt the futile task of
reducing current work in socioliteracy studies to a list of accurate
generalisations, I will simply identify briefly some ‘artifacts’ and
‘emphases’ which may be seen as typical progressive ‘moves’ within
the discourse of socioliteracy studies and note some of their
implications for literacy education. There are, of course, many
besides those noted here.
i. A sociocultural
definition of literacy
Any acceptable and illuminating
sociocultural definition of literacy has to make sense of reading,
writing and meaning-making as integral elements of social practices.
Such a definition is provided by Gee (1996), who defines literacy in
relation to Discourses. Discourses are socially recognised ways of
using language (reading, writing, speaking, listening), gestures and
other semiotics (images, sounds, graphics, signs, codes), as well as
ways of thinking, believing, feeling, valuing, acting/doing and
interacting in relation to people and things, such that we can be
identified and recognised as being a member of a socially meaningful
group, or as playing a socially meaningful role (cf Gee 1991, 1996,
1998a). To be in, or part of, a Discourse means that others can
recognise us as being a ‘this’ or a ‘that’ (a pupil, mother, priest,
footballer, mechanic), or a particular ‘version’ of a this or that (a
reluctant pupil, a doting mother, a radical priest, a ‘bush’
mechanic) by virtue of how we are using language, believing, feeling,
acting, dressing, doing, and so on. Language is a dimension of
Discourse, but only one dimension, and Gee uses discourse (with a
small "d") to mark this relationship. As historical ‘productions’,
Discourses change over time, but at any given point are sufficiently
‘defined’ for us to tell when people are in them.
Gee distinguishes our primary
Discourse from our various secondary Discourses. Our primary
Discourse is how we learn to do and be (including speaking and
expressing) within our family (or face to face intimate) group during
our early life. It (we each have only one primary Discourse, although
there are many different primary Discourses) comprises our first
notions of who ‘people like us’ are, and what ‘people like us’ do,
think, value, and so on. Our secondary Discourses (and we each have
many of these, although they differ from person to person) are those
we are recruited to through participation in outside groups and
institutions, such as schools, clubs, workplaces, churches, political
organisations, and so on. These all draw upon and extend our
resources from our primary Discourse, and may be ‘nearer to’ or
‘further away from’ our primary Discourse. The further away a
secondary Discourse is from our primary Discourse and our other
secondary Discourses -- as in the case of children from marginal
social groups who struggle to get a handle on the culture of school
classrooms -- the more we have to ‘stretch’ our discursive resources
to ‘perform’ within that Discourse. Often in such cases we simply are
unable to operate the Discourse at the level of fluent
performance.
Gee holds that any socially useful
definition of literacy must build on the notion of Discourse and the
distinction between primary and secondary Discourses. In part this is
because the context of all language use is some specific social
practice or other, which is always part of some Discourse or other.
Gee defines literacy ‘as mastery (or, fluent performance) of a
secondary Discourse’ (Gee 1996). Hence, to be literate means being
able to handle all aspects of competent performance of the Discourse,
including the literacy bits: that is, to be able to handle the
various human and non human elements of ‘coordinations’ (Gee 1997;
Latour 1987; Knorr Cetina 1992) effected by Discourses. To play a
role, be a particular identity, etc., is a matter of both ‘getting
coordinated as an element in a Discourse, and of coordinating other
elements. Language/literacy is a crucial element of discursive
‘coordinating’, but it is only one aspect, and the other elements
need to be ‘in sync’ for fluent performance -- literacy -- to be
realised.
This idiosyncratic, but powerful
sociocultural conception of literacy has much to offer
education.
* It honours the reality of myriad
literacies -- since there are myriad secondary Discourses.
* It takes the emphasis off ‘print
competence’ (skills, inner processes), whilst retaining a contingent
link with ‘print’ by virtue of the fact that most secondary
Discourses (being non face-to-face/non kinship) involve ‘print’ --
which must now be extended to include digitally encoded language.
This reminds us that literacy is never an end in itself, but always a
part of larger purposes. To this extent, we may get various
‘language/literacy bits’ right, but to little effect, because of
failures to get other elements ‘coordinated’. This is why so many
pupils can learn to encode and decode print/digital texts and yet
fail to ‘achieve’ in school and wider world Discourses.
* It denounces the misguided notion of
‘literacy’ being ‘foundational’ or ‘linked in a linear way’ to larger
practices. It is not as if we ‘learn the print stuff’ and can then go
on and ‘use it’ in straightforward ‘applications’ to ‘forms of
life’.
* To this extent it puts the emphasis
within education in the right places, insisting that literacies be
acquired ‘whole’. This generates important issues of pedagogy, long
silenced within education, but being increasingly recognised beyond
formal schooling (Heath and McLaughlin 1994; Gee, Hull and Lankshear
1996: Chs. 1-3).
* It provides a basis for questioning
the narrow and peculiar privileging of characteristic ‘School
Discourse(s)’, and the assumed relationships between school learning
and wider domains of social practice (ibid).
* Similarly, it provides a basis for
understanding patterned differentials in school literacy-mediated
achievement -- in terms of the fact that many primary Discourses are
far removed from school Discourse(s).
* At the same time it helps explain
why bridging the gap between primary Discourse experiences and
secondary discursive competence proves so difficult. As is evident in
our primary Discourse, coming to acquire mastery of the various
coordinations takes a long time, and much of the mastery comes by way
of immersed acquisition rather than through instructed
learning.
* It focuses our attention on the
arbitrariness and injustice inherent in historically produced
hierarchies of Discourses and, therefore, in the processes whereby
schooling privileges certain literacies over others; thereby
advantaging those whose primary and other secondary Discourses ‘fit’
more closely with the cultural selections of school and the wider
social order (Gee 1991; 1996). This helps us ‘unmask’ simplistic and
ingenuous models and rhetorics of empowerment (for elaborations see
Freire 1972; Delgado-Gaitan 1990; Lankshear 1994).
ii. A three
dimensional view of effective literacy
From a sociocultural perspective,
literacy must, as Bill Green puts it, : be seen in ‘3D’, as having
three interlocking dimensions - the operational, the cultural, and
the critical - which bring together language, meaning and context
(Green 1988: 160-163). An integrated view of literacy in practice and
in pedagogy addresses all three dimensions simultaneously; none has
any necessary priority over the others.
The operational dimension refers to
what Green calls the ‘means’ of literacy (ibid: 160). It is ‘in and
through the medium of language that the literacy event happens’.
Control of the operational dimension involves ‘competency with regard
to the language system’. When we speak of the operational dimension
of literacy we ‘point to the manner in which individuals use language
in literacy tasks, in order to operate effectively in specific
contexts’. This is to emphasise ‘the written language system and how
adequately it is handled’. When we address literacy from this
perspective, we focus on the ability of individuals ‘to read and
write in a range of contexts, in an appropriate and adequate manner’:
that is, to focus on the language aspect of literacy (see Green 1988,
1997a, 1997b; see also Lankshear, Bigum et al 1997 vol.
1).
The cultural dimension involves what
Green calls the ‘meaning aspect of literacy’, and ‘competency with
regard to the meaning system’(Green 1988: 160). This is to recognise
that besides being context specific, literacy acts and events are
also content specific. In other words, we are never simply ‘literate’
(in and of itself) but, rather, always literate ‘with regard to
something, some aspect of knowledge or experience’ (ibid). The
cultural aspect of literacy is a matter of understanding texts in
relation to contexts - to appreciate their meaning; the meaning they
need to make in order to be appropriate; and what it is about given
contexts of practice that makes for appropriateness or
inappropriateness of particular ways of reading and writing. Take,
for example, the case of a worker producing a spreadsheet within a
workplace setting or routine. This is not a simple matter of ‘going
into some software program’ and ‘filling in the data. Spreadsheets
must be compiled - which means knowing their purpose and constructing
their axes and categories accordingly. To know the purpose of a
particular spreadsheet requires understanding relevant elements of
the culture of the immediate work context; to know why one is doing
what one is doing now, how to do it, and why what one is doing is
appropriate (ibid; see also Lankshear, Bigum et al 1997 vol.
1).
The critical dimension of literacy has
to do with the socially constructed nature of all human practices and
meaning systems. In order to be able to participate effectively and
productively in any social practice, humans must be socialised into
it. But social practices and their meaning systems ‘are always
selective and sectional; they represent particular interpretations
and classifications’ (Green 1988: 162). If learners are not also
given ‘access to the grounds for selection and the principles of
interpretation’, we can say that they are being ‘merely socialised
into the dominant meaning system’, and constrained from playing
active parts in transforming it. Acknowledging the critical dimension
of literacy is the basis for ensuring that participants are not
confined merely to participating in established practices and making
meanings within them, but that they can also ‘in various ways,
transform and actively produce it’ (ibid).
This ‘3D’ model provides a very useful
adjunct to the definition of literacy in terms of secondary
Discourses. It gives due significance to the operational dimension,
which includes the mechanical aspects of encoding and decoding,
whilst insisting on recognition that much more is required of a
pedagogy for ‘effective literacy’. In the current education reform
context, this provides a valuable basis for critiquing unduly narrow
constructions of effective literacy (cf DEET 1991a and b; DEETYA
1998). It also speaks usefully and powerfully to specific components
of ‘literacy strategies’ within current reform plans: such as
reporting profiles, literacy ‘standards’ or ‘benchmarks’, and the
like. For example, benchmarks would need to be framed in ways that
honour literacy as sociocultural practice. They could not be reduced
to (merely) textual ‘lowest common denominators’, since text stands
to literacy as discourse stands to Discourse in Gee’s conceptual
scheme. In addition, assessment would need to be of literacy in
practice: that is, as an embedded and integrated component of
Discourse events or ‘moves’.
Equally, the 3D model accommodates
important issues at the interface of literacy studies and curriculum
theory and practice - such as subject-specific literacies, and
teaching and learning within the English subjects. It is probably
fair to say that facets are still in the process of negotiating their
places within and relationship to the overall field of literacy
studies. Many English teachers, for example, prefer to think of their
work as involving considerably more than ‘literacy’. From a
sociocultural standpoint, however, the interface between literacy
studies and curriculum theory and practice is a key area for further
development.
iii. Applications of
cultural apprenticeship models of learning to literacy
pedagogy
Adopting a sociocultural frame for
literacy studies opens the way for exploring the potential for
literacy pedagogy to be informed and enhanced by models of learning
developed within other component ‘movements’ of ‘the social turn’. In
an account of what more ‘authentic’ school-based curriculum and
pedagogy might look like, Heath and McLaughlin (1994: 472) critique
classroom pedagogies which ‘create "authenticity" artificially rather
than study contextually authentic curricula -- authentic to youth --
in supportive organizational structures’. They argue that classroom
educators can learn much from examining effective grass-roots
organisations like the Girl Guides, Girls Club, and drama groups.
These provide rich social contexts and opportunities for ‘learning to
learn for anything’ everyday by means of ‘[cognitive and social]
apprenticeship, peer learning, authentic tasks, skill-focused
practices and real outcome measures’, such as completed public
projects, performances, displays and exhibitions (ibid.). Heath and
McLaughlin believe these characteristic features of effective
authentic learning converge in Barbara Rogoff’s (1990; also Rogoff
1995) account of learning through sociocultural activity.
Rogoff advances three planes of
analysis for interpreting and evaluating learning. These are
apprenticeship, guided participation, and participatory
appropriation. They correspond with community, interpersonal, and
personal processes. While these planes are mutually constituting,
interdependent and inseparable, identifying them individually enables
particular aspects of a learning process to be brought into sharp
focus for analytic purposes.
According to Rogoff, ‘apprenticeship’
operates within a plane of community and institutional activity and
describes ‘active individuals participating with others in culturally
organized ways’ (1995:142). The primary purpose of apprenticeship is
to facilitate ‘mature participation in the activity by less
experienced people’ (ibid.). Experts -- who continue to develop and
refine their expertise -- and peers in the learning process are
integral to Rogoff's account of apprenticeship (Rogoff 1995, p. 143).
Both categories of participant find themselves ‘engaging in
activities with others of varying experience’ and moving through
cycles of learning, teaching, and practice. Investigating and
interpreting sociocultural apprenticeship focuses attention on the
activity being learned (with its concomitant skills, processes, and
content knowledge), and on its relationship with community practices
and institutions -- eschewing traditional conceptions of
apprenticeship as an expert-novice dyad.
‘Guided participation’ encompasses
‘processes and systems of involvement between people as they
communicate and co-ordinate efforts while participating in culturally
valued activity’ (ibid.). It involves a range of interpersonal
interactions. These include face-to-face interactions, side-by-side
interactions (which are more frequent face-to-face interactions
within everyday life), and other interactional arrangements where
activities do not require everyone involved to be present. Hence, for
Rogoff, guidance is provided by ‘cultural and social values, as well
as [by] social partners’ who may be local or distant (1995, p.
142).
‘Participatory appropriation’ refers
to personal processes of ongoing and dynamic engagement with learning
through socially contextualised and purposeful activities that
ultimately transform the learner. Rogoff uses this concept to
describe processes by which people ‘transform their understanding of
and responsibility for activities through their own participation’
(Rogoff 1995, p. 150). Here analysis focuses on changes that learners
undergo in gaining facility with an activity, as well as acceptable
changes learners make to activities in the process of becoming
‘experts’, enabling them to engage with subsequent similar activities
and their social meanings.
As a model of pedagogy for effective
learning, cultural apprenticeship has important implications for
literacy education. By grounding learning as far as possible within
settings where genuine opportunities are available for apprenticeship
to skills and procedures, and where conditions exist for guided
participation and participatory appropriation, it minimises
counterproductive forms of abstract(ed) and decontextualised
activity. At the same time it allows for skill refinement through
repetition, drilling and the like (c.f., the practice and training
dimensions of sports and games) - but within situations and settings
that approximate to ‘the real thing’. With the drilling, habituation,
repetition, in other words, come also concrete and embodied
experiences of participation that convey situated cultural
understanding.
At the same time, the cultural
apprenticeship model is basically one of enculturation: learners are
recruited to Discourses ‘from the inside’. While this may be very
effective for mastering operational and cultural dimensions of
literacy, it may work against the ‘critical’. This recovers for
classroom learning an important role which -- almost by definition --
cannot be undertaken in situ and in role: i.e., the tasks of
identifying and judging the values, purposes, interests,
perspectives, and the like that are written into particular
Discourses, and those that are thereby written out.
Part 4 Critical
Literacy and Socioliteracy Studies
The relationship between critical
literacy and socioliteracy studies is interesting from an
historical-developmental perspective. By the early 1990s it was
common for literacy theorists to speak of critical literacy as one of
several competing Discourses of literacy -- along with functional
literacy and cultural literacy, among others. This largely reflected
the emergence of a critical literacy ‘school’ out of the work of
Paulo Freire and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Critical literacy emerged as an aspect of the larger phenomenon of a
radical alternative educational perspective (including such things as
the ‘new’ sociology, critical theory applied to education, critical
pedagogy, etc.) to the longstanding ‘liberal’ view of education. It
was framed in conscious distinction from and opposition to cultural
and functional models (the latter equating roughly with the
‘operational’ component of the ‘3D model). This separation often
served to marginalise critical literacy from achieving the
broad-based constituency it sought, which called for ways of taking
functional and cultural considerations seriously within a larger
pedagogy.
With the emergence of a defined field
of socioliteracy studies it is now easier to frame and pursue
critical literacy work within the ambit of a transcendent
sociocultural ideal of literacy: that is, as an integral component of
literacy in three dimensions. Building on ideas already canvassed in
this chapter, we can expand the brief statement of the ‘critical
dimension’ of the 3D model by way of concluding this
discussion.
Work within socioliteracy studies
identifies at least three related levels of activity involved in the
critical dimension of literacy: namely,
* developing a critical perspective on
literacy per se. This is precisely the kind of thing the
sociocultural approach to literacy exemplifies. Gee’s account of
‘literacy’, for example, invokes meta level understandings of
language in use which enable a critical stance to be adopted toward
other constructions of literacy and their implications (see, for
example, Kress 1996; Wallace 1992; New London Group 1996; Muspratt,
Freebody and Luke 1997; Lankshear 1997; Gee 1996);
* engaging in critique of particular
texts or specific instances of literacy in use. This involves
developing and using techniques which reveal how texts do work and
produce effects as elements of larger social practices and discursive
‘coordinations’. This presupposes drawing on some theory or ideal --
ethical, political, educational -- as a basis for choosing and
employing particular kinds of techniques in the first place, as well
as for making judgments about textual practices/literacy in use in
the light of the analysis performed (e.g., Gee 1998a and b; 1996: ch
5; Luke 1992; Kress 1985; Fairclough 1989, 1992; Schiffrin 1987,
1994);
* making ‘critical readings’ of
Discourses and enacting forms of resistance or transformative
practice on the basis of preferred ethical, political and educational
values/ideals (e.g., Fairclough 1989; Gee 1996; Lankshear 1997,
Muspratt, Luke and Freebody 1997). This would include the kind of
work that seeks to explain and critique the operation of school
literacies as interest-serving selections from a larger culture,
which systematically advantage some groups and language communities
over others.
In a recent statement, Gee integrates
these levels of activity in making a case for making concern with a
particular kind of ‘work’ central to socioliteracy studies. This is
what he calls ‘enactive’ and ‘recognition’ work: work done by human
beings as they go about ‘getting coordinated’ and ‘coordinating other
elements’ within everyday participation in Discourses -- a conception
which owes much to the work of Latour (1987, 1991 and Knorr Cetina
1992).
Gee argues that social worlds are
created and sustained by human beings organizing and coordinating
‘materials’ in ways that others (come to) recognise; to see as
meaningful. These ‘materials’ are, of course, the ‘stuff’ of
Discourses: ‘people, things, artifacts, symbols, tools, technologies,
actions, interactions, times, places, ways of speaking, listening,
writing, reading, feeling, thinking, valuing, etc. (Gee 1998a 15).
Our discursive practice involves ‘attempting to get other people to
recognize people and things as having certain meanings and values
within certain configurations or relationships’ (ibid: 14). Enactive
work refers to these ‘attempts’ (which, of course, are often
‘unconscious’ - they come with recruitment to Discourses -- but can,
equally, be conscious -- as in witting acts of transformative
practice). Recognition work refers to the efforts by others to accept
or reject such attempts -- ‘to see or fail [refuse] to see things our
way’ (ibid: 15).
These attempts and recognitions are
precisely what produce, sustain, challenge, transform, etc.,
particular discursive effects, including those of particular concern
to critical literacy theorists and educators: namely, the creation
and maintenance of relations, processes, arrangements, etc., within
which individuals and groups have markedly unequal access to
‘representational systems and mediational means’, ‘linguistic
knowledge’, ‘cultural artifacts’, ‘actual financial capital’,
‘institutional entry’, and ‘status’ (Muspratt, Freebody and Luke
1997: 2). Enactive and recognition work is, then, political and
ethical. And the stakes of such work are ‘always "up for grabs".
Actors, events, activities, practices, and Discourses do not exist in
the world except through active work, work that is very often
unstable and contested’ (Gee 1998a: 17).
From this standpoint, critical
literacy becomes a political project involving informed ‘enactment’
and ‘recognition’. Employing appropriate techniques of discourse
analysis we can investigate how language is recruited, in conjunction
with other ‘elements’, for enactive and recognition work. From this
basis we can engage in our own informed enactments and recognitions
on the basis of our moral and political commitments and our larger
sociocultural understanding of literacy and Discourse. In the end, it
is precisely these possibilities that underwrite the importance of
framing literacy studies in sociocultural terms -- and fighting for
that framing as enactive work.
Conclusion
Socioliteracy studies provides a case
of postdisciplinary development that has helped achieve some
important academic advances. It has provided people working within
established fields of linguistics and language studies with an
important material focus for ongoing theory development and
application: namely, discursively embedded social practices mediated
by literacy -- notably, within diverse educational contexts. Work in
linguistics is the richer for this. So is work within the academic
study of education, which has access to a considerably wider range of
theoretical, conceptual, and research perspectives than
previously.
In particular, the development of
socioliteracy studies has helped the process of geting educational
studies -- in principle always a cross disciplinary domain -- out
from under the tyranny of the narrow paradigms of psychology that
have dominated educational inquiry throughout this century.
Unfortunately, at the points of most practical application -- the
‘chalkface’ -- education remains powerfully in the grip of
psychologistic-technicist policy predilections. Even so, literacy
studies in education provides a key battleground from which to
continue the struggle against the psychology-technocracy ‘alliance’,
and to have sociocultural practices better understood for what they
are. This remains our best hope for contributing academically to the
pursuit of more humane and just agendas for social policy and
development.
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