Difference between revisions of "Literacies"

Revision as of 22:24, 5 September 2013

Literacy is a contested term. There are several perspectives and approaches to the study and to the conceptualization of literacy. The term, has become so stretched that there are literacies of everything nowadays. There is a diversity of the literacy experience. The concepts of literacy depend of its context. They are also related to power, control, and participation in culture and society. What it means to be literate in a given society and culture is subject to change? Literacy has an evolving nature, it changes as society, culture, technology, and media change. Literacy is related to teaching, learning, and education in general.

However, in its most basic form, we can speak of literacy as ability for reading and writing in a given language.

Different disciplines have approached to the study of literacy and they have focused on different aspects of the field. The most important approaches, historically, have been:

• psychology : focusing on the mind, literacy as individual’s perceptual and cognitive process. This is the oldest research tradition on literacy: it focused on reading and how readers decoded texts. Understood as an individual skill, dependent on a reader’s intellectual and perceptual capacities. It informed approaches to the teaching of reading.

• applied linguistics : analysis of written texts and the teaching of of reading and writing.

• sociolinguistics and anthropology: observing and documenting literacy activities in everyday life with attention to the social and cultural contexts. This approach studies how language is used in social life. It acknowledges the diversity of literacy experience and what it means to ‘be literate’ in any society.

• learning sciences (education) : interest in researching ways in which children and adults learn to read and write

In my research project, I understand literacy from a historical sociocultural perspective. This approach has an emphasis on social and cultural practice and that is why it has points in common with the "practice turn" of social sciences. That is, literacy is a social and cultural practice, something people do with various texts to participate in the meaning making in social communities. The notion of text could be expanded not only to typography but also visual text, audio, audiovisual, electronic, computer, video, videogame, media, internet and many other kinds of languages.

Literacy practices include the construction of knowledge, values, attitudes, beliefs and feelings associated with the reading and writing of particular texts within particular contexts. (Street 1984, Baynham 1995, Barton & Hamilton 1998, Barton et al. 2000).

Are literacy domains the same as social fields? arenas? settings? Literacy practices are realised in particular events, in concrete occasions where texts are used and where acting and interacting around the texts can be identified. Events are embedded in larger contexts, literacy domains, such as school, work and community. (Street 2000, Barton 1994, Barton & Hamilton 1998).

Literacy practices from different domains influence each other: literacy practices at school are shaped by the institution, but at the same time they are enforced, renewed, transformed and even ignored by the out-of-school literacy practices.

Literacy is not objective nor ideologically neutral: All uses of text are shaped in and by their social contexts which means that even the most established and institutionalised conceptions of literacy can be traced back to social and cultural conventions, needs and values (Gee 2000).

The curriculum, textbooks, tests and classroom practices regulate and determine what counts as literacy and what kind of literacy practices are valued in society (Luke 1996).

Literacies? multiliteracies? new literacies?

There are many literacies today and they are complex. Literacy today is complex. It involves many different social practices. The changes taking place require that we expand the notion of literacies, and it has become more accurate to talk about multiliteracies.

"with the advent of information technology new ways of using language are emerging which make it difficult to continue to argue that the two modes are completely distinct in nature, or in the skills they require for their use. Consider, for example, the use of email, conferencing and other similar kinds of computer-based communication. All involve ‘writing’, yet in their spontaneity and interactivity they often share more characteristics with spoken conversation than with formal letter writing."

As a growing number of individuals use technological means for communication, linguistic activities come to shape the ways in which we view and use language in a “post-typographic” world. (Lankshear & Knobel 2003, Lemke 1998, Reinking 1998).

Multiliteracies captures the growing diversity of culture, language and forms of texts within an increasingly global community and within the multiple modalities of communication (e.g. The New London Group 2000, Cope & Kalantzis 2000, Kress & van Leeuwen 2001).

Multiliteracies involves "not only the ability to produce and interpret texts, but also a critical awareness of the relationships between texts, discourse conventions and social and cultural contexts."

"A multiliterate person can be an active participant in the different interaction chains in contrast to just being handed information to, being interacted with on the terms of the other participants" (Warschauer 1999, 2003).

Through participation in different (multi)literacy practices individuals make sense of their identities, manifest their membership of groups, and their ownership and authorship to texts (Gee 1990, Cope & Kalantzis 2000, MacCleod 2004, Bartlett 2005).

Literacy practices are situated social and cultural acts of identity (Ivanic 1998, Lankshear 1997). And identities can be seen as dynamic – multiple, changeable, negotiable, and contextual.

In order to function in a knowledge society, one has to understand what kind of literacy practices society values (e.g. critical literacy), and how to show competencies to gain affirmation and recognition (Hall 2002).

Multiliteracies allow us to see the interrelation between different literacies, contexts, social fields, settings. They reveal the complexity of literacy today as well as the pervasiveness of media and technology. They also show how they are not even. In a given context, a specific kind of literacy can become more important, more relevant. It can be the dominant literacy in a societal field. However, not having the other literacies at hand can turn out into a disadvantage. The acquisition and use of literacies is then also related to social positionality and cultural and social capitals. However, even in disadvantage position, youth can also acquire and use certain kind of literacies that allow them to participate, to articulate identities. However, the not even distribution of literacies, and the absence of some of them, especially the ones that are more critical can limit the participation, the mobility, and the reach of the agency. The uneven distribution of literacies, and the weak development of some of them, is revealed in the complexity of the everyday interactions across several societal fields and micro fields.

The complexity of literacies is also manifested in the complexity of participation. Understanding this complexity reveals how participation is fluid and changes across different fields. As well as how the interrelation between literacies affect participation. There is a correlation between levels of participation, agency, and control, and the even or uneven development of literacies as well as the critical understanding and interrelated use of them.

Contemporary society and culture are complex. Pervasiveness of media complicates even more the situation. There are many layers of information that need to be read. Reading the world and writing it requires many skills, multiple literacies. A single one is not enough. Multiple technologies that are networked and that are used for communicating. They are interrelated. Many devices connected, many languages being articulated, many forms and contexts being juxtaposed. Reading and writing in todays world requires multiple literacies and knowing how to interrelated, how to make them work together, in connection to each other. In any given situation or event, in a context of social and cultural practices, there are multiple literacies, a costellation of literacies being articulated, used, and developed.

The challenge is then, to identify the literacies I would like to describe and study. They are multiliteracies, yes. But they need to be divided in subgroups that can be studied and described in a simpler and more detailed way. Some of the more relevant are:

• New media literacies
• Digital literacies
• New literacies
• Information literacies
• Internet literacies
• Visual literacies

Each of these literacies can also be subdivided in very particular sociocultural practices.