This week’s readings—or rather the readings for our last class that I switched up with the readings for this week—examine the influence of literacy on daily life, community, and profession. It seems clear from the readings that literacy studies is a crucial subfield of composition studies that asks questions just as much of scholarship as it does of society. Looking at the readings as a whole, it appears as though literacy studies calls for a reexamination of literacy, teaching on a community-by-community basis. Heath, Hull, and Cushman suggest that looking within the community’s complex literacies for the best solution to literacy-inspired problems will create better employees, better citizens, and a better understanding of the field of literacy studies as a whole. Brandt and McCarthy argue that locally based sponsors/teachers dramatically enhance/detract from the student’s learning of literacy and literacy abilities. On a community level, these teachers shape the literacy of their students and with it their abilities in composition as well.
As our earliest sampled theorist for the week, Shirley Brice Heath explores the “protean” or ever changing, complex task of assigning one stage of literacy to any one community. Using data collected from the community of Trackton, located in the Carolinas, between 1969-79, Heath explores the influence of literacy as it comes into contact with life from all angles, and concludes that literacy events and the literacies of communities exist in many forms that cannot easily be categorized on the scale developed by Goody for cataloguing a community somewhere between oral and literate. Rather, communities like Trackton—and arguably all communities—encounter different stages of literacy through different literacy events in different social transactions over time. As Heath states, "the nature of oral and written language and the interplay between them is ever shifting, and these changes both respond to and create shifts in the individual and social meaning of literacy" (466). So Heath’s contribution to literacy studies is not purely a call to view literacy events as varied event to event in each community, she also offers a call to understand that literacy events occur within a social context, one which shapes and creates meaning for both the individual and the community itself. Lucille McCarthy, who writes five years after Heath, suggests such a study could also apply to students whose many different communities are each class they take. Each must be examined and its literacy understood and learned separate from the other. Since each course may have different goals and objectives, it is difficult to gauge its placement on a literacy scale, just as it is difficult to place a community as described by Heath on a literacy scale.
I believe this is a very humble study that could easily be applied to prejudice for/against the literate/illiterate as defined by the scale Heath mentions as described by Goody. It is very important to not simply label a community by one or two literacy events but far more useful to examine, as Heath does, the interplay of literacy and orality within each community and perhaps the extent to which traditionally high-level literate communities exhibit oral activity and high-oral communities embrace literacy events. This is the very topic Ellen Cushman brings this very idea to fruition in her article where she defends the importance of the oft-neglected lower classes in policy making. Particularly looking to faculty members as potentially large contributors to policy change, Cushman argues that literacy studies gives weight to arguments made outside of the upper-class ranks of government.
Deborah Brandt, like Heath, sets out to view a historical understanding of literacy with fresh eyes. Outlining the rise and fall of apprenticeships at small, decentralized print shops of the American antebellum, Brandt concludes that like the sponsors of these programs, contemporary writing scholars "haul a lot of freight for the opportunity to teach writing" (183). Scholars, she suggests, must carry the burden of ideological influence of their teaching, especially that suggested from the classic argument from business employers that students who graduate college do not know how to write. Brandt hopes, in her final statement, that her work promotes an understand of composition not as a field which prepares its students for the job markets they wish to enter but rather as one which assists and studies individuals in their pursuit of literacy, and also of the literacy that pursues them.
Glynda Hull turns her study on literacy to the workplace. Investigating the current understanding of literacy in the workplace, Hull looks beyond the engendered stereotypes to see the potential for new understandings of workforce potential and literacy in the workplace. Interestingly, Hull suggests the benefits of an apprenticeship-style program may aid in instructing employees in the literacy of a particular workforce that may be simple to some but inaccessible to others. This reminds me greatly of the work I have done while at Starbucks Coffee Company, which is steeply entrenched in a literacy of its own making. I have had many opportunities to train new employees and have often found that the most learning comes from watching a skill in progress as a silent observer, learning about the skill, observing once again, and then attempting to carry out the skill. Just as Hull suggests workers cannot assumed to be fully-literate in their workplace without seriously rethinking the ways they are trained, teaching a new employee at Starbucks the entire culture of coffee as well as the company’s spin on this culture is a weighty process that works best when tailored to fit the person learning the material instead of the company or person teaching the material.
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