Literacy and Composition

Paulo Freire called this empowering potential conscientização (often translated as “critical consciousness”), a state of mind achieved through an overtly political pedagogy situated in the everyday lives of the learners that, according to Freire, results in “the conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation” (Freire 67). James Gee echoes Freire somewhat in his assertion that literacy learning “works best as a cultural and not an instructed process” (Gee 39); that is, “words and grammar of a human language exist to allow people to take and communicate alternative perspectives on experience…to give people alternative ways to view one and the same state of affairs” (Gee 53). Gee positions this idea in contrast to a more “skill and drill” view of literacy centered on the literal act of decoding symbols for meaning, just as Freire positions the development of conscientização in learners against what he terms the “banking” model of education in which knowledge is acontextually transferred from teacher to student. James Berlin also emphasizes the social nature of literacy education in his study of rhetorical movements in nineteenth century American colleges. He posits that “a rhetoric is a social invention” deeply rooted in a particular historical and social exigency and, as such, “has at its base a conception of reality, of human nature, and of language…it is grounded in a noetic field: a closed system defining what can, and cannot, be known” (Berlin 1, 2).

A discussion of literacy, then, seems to require a consideration not only of what it does (i.e., the kinds of action it enables people to perform), but also of what it is. Beth Daniell, in drawing her connections between literacy studies and composition studies, notes: “To see reading and writing as social practice mediated and regulated by institutions instead of as a free-standing, individual mental operation supplied composition with a different lens to use in looking at our students, their texts, and our own work.” Literacy is thus “determined by social, economic, and political factors rather than by some prior definition” (Daniell 399). This approach has led to an examination of how these forces influence literacy practices both inside and outside education institutions, which can no longer claim an ideologically-neutral position as a site of knowledge reproduction and distribution; instead, schools need to be understood as sites and systems of cultural reproduction, a process that has real political and material consequences for both the students acculturated into that system and those students excluded from it.

de Castell and Luke, in their study of literacy in North American schools, make note of the moral subtext of nineteenth century literacy education: "Platonic faculty psychology subdivided the mind into three faculties: reason, will and emotion. This child, a 'barbarian at the gates of civilization' was regarded as a bundle of unruly impulses needing to be brought under the control of the faculty of 'right reason,'" that is, morally informed and rational judgment (Castell and Luke 163). Illiteracy in the United States in the nineteenth century “no longer meant simply the inability to read and write but was refigured as the cause of idleness, intemperance, and improvidence – a measure and mark of moral failure” (Trimbur 291). Trimbur notes that, for instance, the role of the common school in the nineteenth century U.S. was to open cultural and material avenues to success for the poor (Trimbur 290). The conceptual link, then, between poverty, illiteracy, and immorality, while not persistent throughout U.S. history, has certainly been with us since the nineteenth century, and persists today. David K. Shipler, in his book documenting the lives of the working poor in the United States, notes journalist Judy Woodruff’s casual linking of immorality and welfare during the 2000 Republican presidential debates (Shipler 6).

It is vital that educators examine the historical cultural assumptions about literacy in order to gain a better perspective on the current state of affairs. This is not to say, though, that only conservative discourses, which often advocate a skills-based or more cognitive approach to literacy learning, need to be investigated. Dennis Carlson, in his essay on literacy education in urban schools, argues that “liberal discourse on ‘higher-order’ literacy and urban school reform offers important advances over the conservative, bureaucratic state discourse and although…it continues to support an economically functional view of education, ignores ‘hard’ economic and social realities, and ultimately fails to offer a serious way out of the ‘literacy crisis’” (Carlson 219). Beth Daniell also warns against adopting an unbalanced and uncritical view of literacy, writing that we must be wary of “literacy narratives that make us feel good, not just those narratives that explain away social injustice by calling some people oral and others literate, but also those that cast some of us in the role of ‘hero[es] of liberty’” (Daniell 401). My point here is that, in examining the influence of a capitalist economy on schooling, I do not wish to automatically imply that that influence is necessarily bad, or that good schooling cannot happen concurrently with economic concerns. Rather, it’s important to look at how those economic concerns affect certain groups of people and who is articulating and implementing those concerns. Literacy scholarship and pedagogy must necessarily then be linked to a concern for social justice – if literacy is a means by which people can imagine different futures for themselves, then the project of literacy becomes a deeply democratic one as well. The question becomes one of whether and how schools are enabling this potential.

James Berlin observes that “looking at theories of writing instruction…unlocks their implications for behavior. When we teach student to write, we are teaching more than an instrumental skill. We are teaching a mode of conduct, a way of responding to experience” (Berlin 86). These implications can be disastrous when that mode of conduct results in the tracking of certain students into certain sectors of the economy. Examining the urban school reform movement of the 70s and 80s, Carlson traces the attempts of “corporate elites” and states officials “to realign public schools consistent with the rapidly developing changes to postindustrial America, to create a new semiskilled, entry-level work force” (Carlson 222-223). This realignment took the form of “basic skills” or functional literacy instruction which severely limited not only the academic avenues open to urban public school students, which by this time were predominantly African-American and Hispanic students (Carlson 218), but it also limited the way students themselves were constructed by the institutions meant to serve them, implementing a deficit-based pedagogy. The problem is particularly acute because “the new capitalism is in danger of producing and reproducing an even steeper pyramid [of inequality] than the old capitalism did…it will need institutions – like schools, first and foremost – to reproduce that social structure.” Those at the base of the pyramid “will merit their lowly places because of their lack of knowledge and educations – the new currency of the new capitalism” (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 47).

What’s at issue here is an ideological collusion between public institutions, corporations, and the systems of classist and racist discourses (often cloaked in rhetorics of morality) that inform them. This is not to say that a skills approach to literacy education is necessarily and always a sign of injustice. In fact, Lisa Delpit points out that a process-based pedagogy – one often positioned in opposition to a skills-based approach – is often seen by African-American educators as racist and disempowering, masking its roots in white, middle-class culture (Delpit 16-17). John Trimbur also constructs the process-based composition classroom as a “middle-class family drama” (Trimbur 191) in which the formalized relations between teacher and student reflect a parent-child family dynamic only some (but certainly not all) students may be familiar with. Delpit advocates a skills approach “within the context of critical and creative thinking” and points out that many “minority teachers…have been able to conquer the educational system because the received the kind of instruction that their white progressive colleagues are denouncing” (19). The difference, then, between the skills approach described by Carlson and that by Delpit is really one of agency developed through critical consciousness, the power to materially and representationally participate in the dominant culture of which schooling is a part.

But, as David Barton points out, this narrative of the empowering potential of literacy education has become, to draw upon Beth Daniell’s work, a grand narrative of literacy education, and thus somewhat diminished. This is a danger, of course, in operating within systems of power that tend to make themselves invisible. Schools, driven by sociocultural cognitive educational theories, realign themselves with American late capitalism. Both "advocate school reform centered on collaborative learning with a stress on communication skills...symbols, not commodities, are what the new capitalism has to sell, and what ultimately it wants its workers to produce” (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 67). One of the pitfalls of this new capitalist system, though, is that the rules for entry and the operations of power governing them, are no longer as explicit as some imagine they once were: There are…troubles in attempting to lodge traditional critiques of the new capitalism. The problem is this: the new capitalism has itself co-opted a good deal of the language and many of the themes of ostensibly opposing movements..for instance, the sorts of radical post-structuralist and postmodernist movements often associated by those who disdain them with the label ‘political correctness.’ (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 68)

The New London Group echoes this assessment: Replication of corporate culture demands assimilation to mainstream norms that only really works if one already speaks the language of the mainstream. If one is not comfortably a part of the culture and discourses of the mainstream, it is even harder to get into networks that operate informally [like those of fast capitalism] than it was to enter into the old discourses of formality. (The New London Group 66)

The role for literacy educators in this system then, according to Gee, Hull, and Lankshear is to emphasize the core values of critical consciousness and the political and social forces shaping identity formation since many of our pedagogical practices align so seamlessly with those organizational values and business practices of the fast capitalist system (67). For the New London Group, the role of literacy educators as “designers of social futures” (65) is to help students “develop skills for access to new forms of work through learning the new language of work…the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (67). It seems to me, though, that this is something we’re already seeing in the current generation of college students -- which Gee chooses to call “Millennials” (Gee 99) -- at the public University at which I teach. Gee points out that these “shape-shifting portfolio people” (for the most part, the middle-class and affluent, but not exclusively so) begin training for careers earlier and earlier, and are willing and able to adapt their work identities more or less unquestioningly according to the demands of the economy. They realize that “school (or at least the classroom at school) is not the only, perhaps not even the central, site for filling up one’s résumé” (105). Both the New London Group and Gee put in a call for the teaching of design, a pedagogical approach emphasizing situated meaning-making in various media with an emphasis on kairos.

-- BrianHoule - 09 May 2006