If someone asked you if the problem of literacy inequality should be solved, what would you say? At first, the answer to this question may seem obvious: of course it should! Why would anyone want to have literacy inequality? Well, that all depends on how the term “literacy inequality” is defined. Or rather, it depends on who is doing the defining, and why they are defining it that way, which points to a major problem with definitions. As we discovered from Rowsell & Pahl’s “Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies” and Bloome & Green’s “The Social and Linguistic Turns in Studying Language and Literacy,” most literacy scholars can’t even agree on how to simply define literacy, let alone literacy inequality. So how do we know literacy is unequal if we can’t define it?

Once upon a time, literacy was understood simply as the skill of reading and writing. This skill, relatively new to human history, had radically changed the nature of how knowledge is constructed and stored: instead of relying on speech and memory alone, we were able to record language on a physical object that could be edited, read, and interpreted more easily than speech alone. With this skill came considerable power, something that the Catholic church saw as a major threat to their control of Europe when the printing press made literacy more widespread than ever. Once the common person was able to interpret the bible, question authority, and share knowledge with each other to organize their own ideas, it was pretty damn hard for any church to keep control over its followers, and a plethora of political, social, and spiritual revolutions followed. It seems reasonable, then, to infer that the skill of literacy is necessary for a society to advance, right? Surely everyone in the world should develop the skill of literacy, as it is a mark of functioning, intelligent, and conscious society. Literacy scholars like Jack Goody believe so. So does UNESCO. That’s why they want to get rid of “literacy inequality.”

But now as our idea of what knowledge is expands more and more in each moment, we can’t rely on only one perspective of what defines literacy, especially if it was based on a technology that was created 600 years ago. And that’s the main problem with this perspective: it’s only one perspective, namely a white European male perspective—the “western” perspective, as it is so often referred to. Not everyone shares the same values as those from the western perspective, so shouldn’t we be taking into account the ways that other cultures and societies have dealt with collective knowledge? After all, most of them were doing just fine before the Europeans invaded their land, erased their knowledge, and manipulated them for profit. Surely, then, we must expand our definition of literacy in order to understand what makes it unequal for many societies.

But there is power in a name, especially for those who do the naming. This point, along with the fact that the names of things have heavy consequences on the way policies for eliminating literacy inequalities are written and enforced, are things that literacy scholar Brian Street argues in his article “Literacy inequalities in theory and practice: The power to name and define.” In it he states that “not only is it crucial to know what we mean by [literacy inequalities] if we are to develop policy that actually works, but also because the very act of naming and defining is already an act of power, not just a separate academic exercise” (581), meaning that as long as our definition of literacy favors one culture and way of knowing over others, we cannot really call their idea of literacy as unequal. Goody’s definition of literacy is flawed because it tries to define but fails to describe, not taking into account the legitimacy of other cultures’ and societies’ literacies and value systems. According to Street, it’s an ethnocentric point of view: it puts one culture or society at the center of its understanding of how knowledge is constructed. In Street’s terms, this school of literacy studies is called the “autonomous” model of literacy because it “[uses] the power to disguise its own ideology, its own ethnocentrism” (581). To quote a male European man, “there’s the rub” of how literacy has been defined from the western perspective for so long.

Just like the way Galileo (who was, ironically, a European man) decentralized Earth from the solar system, Street wanted to decentralize the western perspective from its concept of literacy. He sees the problem with Goody’s definition of literacy and provides this solution: the ethnographic approach. He argues that if literacy scholars study literacy the way that ethnographers and anthropologists study culture, then perhaps they could get a more comprehensive grasp on what literacy can be. This led to a few changes in the way we understand what literacy is, one being the idea that literacy, like culture, “is a verb” (581); instead of defining literacy, we should be describing what it does. This leads to a shift from the concept of literacy as a skill, which implies it as a static, cognitive ability that only happens independently in an individual’s mind, to literacy events (which happen in a certain context) and literacy practices (which entail many processes) that happen socially. Street calls this new way of looking at literacy as the “ideological model” and, quoting himself, directly compares literacy to culture, remarking that “[t]he job of studying culture is not of finding and then accepting its definitions but of ‘discovering how and what definitions are made, under what circumstances and for what reasons’” (581). This would require literacy researchers to take the perspective of the cultures and communities of practice that they are studying in order to better understand what their literacy meant to them, and how they valued them. For this reason, Street preferred to describe them as plural literacies rather than a singular concept of literacy, all in the name of recognizing multiplicity in literacy that reflected the multiplicity in culture. To illustrate these points, Street uses a Buddhist story about fish and a turtle:

There was once a turtle who lived in a lake with a group of fish. One day the turtle went for a walk on dry land. He was away from the lake for a few weeks. When he returned he met some of the fish. The fish asked him, ‘‘Mister turtle, hello! How are you? We have not seen you for a few weeks. Where have you been?’’ The turtle said, ‘‘I was up on the land, I have been spending some time on dry land.’’ The fish were a little puzzled and they said, ‘‘Up on dry land? What are you talking about? What is this dry land? Is it wet?’’ The turtle said ‘‘No, it is not,’’ ‘‘Is it cool and refreshing?’’ ‘‘No it is not’’, ‘‘Does it have waves and ripples?’’ ‘‘No, it does not have waves and ripples.’’ ‘‘Can you swim in it?’’ ‘‘No you can’t’’ So the fish said, ‘‘it is not wet, it is not cool, there are no waves, you can’t swim in it. So this dry land of yours must be completely non-existent, just an imaginary thing, nothing real at all.’’ The turtle said, ‘‘That well may be so’’ and he left the fish and went for another walk on dry land. (584)

The fish are analogous to the autonomous model of literacy, who only know their own ethnocentric perspective of the world and cannot grasp the concept of dry land. The turtle—representative of the ethnographic approach—is only limited by his own vocabulary to describe what dry land is, and travels back to dry land to gain a better understanding through new terminology. Like the turtle, literacy scholars must take the perspective of the literacy communities that we are trying to describe in order to describe them.

In the spirit of rhizomatic knowledge, I have decided to present the class discussion out of chronological order to group the in-class comments with the concepts brought to us by Brian Street’s article according to relatedness. But, since the act of writing alphabetic text is inherently linear, I naturally reorganized the comments and questions in a way that flows together but is achronological, accentuating the interconnectedness of the separate threads and digressions of our class discussion instead of the order in which the comments and questions were made. My repeated use of the word “point” is intentional: just as there were nodes that we created together as a class on the board to map out our literacies separated by space and time, the comments made and questions posed in class were particular points in time and space that made up micro-literacy events, connected yet happening separately and in an achronological order.

Our class session began with pizza, and I played the pizza man. As I brought the pie in, people were still trickling in. Kim told us to dig in just as class started officially.

Our task today was to map out our literacies on the whiteboard as a class. This was no easy task, as Travis stated so beautifully in his blog post last week: “Trying to define literacy is like trying to map the exact form of particular sand dunes. They are always going to be sifting, shaping in and out of form like waves.” Each of us in class were attempting to measure our own dunes, ever shifting from the winds of time, and then connect them to each other in a new context. It was messy. At an early point in the process, Kim suggested we write down the nodes first and draw lines for connection later, but that was soon thrown out of the window. No easy task, but it was fun!

There were many similarities between us, including books, language, identity, and a bunch of other wonderfully nerdy stuff, but also a lot of diversity between our influences, sponsors, hubs, and literacies. In reference to Street, Kim pointed out the importance of recognizing this diversity of literacies instead of focusing on whether students can perform a few select literacies that they get tested on in school. Then Alo brought up Street’s point about enumerative induction, and how we can’t reliably measure literacy with statistical data. Case studies are the way to go, it seems. But how do we go about it? Ben asked for clarification between etic and emic approaches to research at a later point in the class session, which I think highlights the main difference between autonomous and ideological models of literacy. The emic approach lends itself well to the ideological model that sees literacies as social practices, and the autonomous model seems to hold the belief that studying other cultures from an outside perspective can be objective. But on this same point, Ben raised another question: how can we really know if any outside perspective is truly objective? Don’t we all have biases? This made me think of linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, which Travis also brought up in his blog post. Like the way we use grammar, Travis suggested in class, literacies are flexible depending on the context in which they are practiced. Instead of prescribing parameters to literacy skills based on our own perspective, we should be trying to describe literacy practices based on the perspective of the culture that practices them.

In fact, Kim mentioned Dr. Judith Rodby and how she made it a point to never use the word skill to describe literacies, which implies finality—like they can be mastered and added to some type of cognitive toolbox. Instead, literacy scholars should refer to literacy events that happen at certain times and places, which make up the practices that go into a community. At an earlier point, Kim described literacy practices as value systems, to which Tim asked if we could gauge practice by various levels of participation. Of course we can! It was at this point that Kim mentioned Lave and Wenger’s concept of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), and I used my example of working at Laxson Auditorium. When I was first hired, everything seemed new and scary. They started me off with simple, inconsequential tasks, like tying on curtains to the pulley system. Eventually I was trusted with using the pulley system to take curtains in and out of the stage, which was moderately dangerous, and then finally I got to do the downright dangerous job of putting eleven-pound weights on the pulley system 60 feet in the air. Through LPP, I was able to build up the literacy events that culminated in the development of the practice of operating the curtain pulleys. 

A large portion of the class was spent talking about the literacies of school. Just like how Travis continues the practice of politely raising his hand in order to participate in class discussion, there are certain practices and habits that schooling seems to do to us as we grow up. At an earlier point in our discussion that day, Alo had Tim write “Hand Turkeys” on the whiteboard to signify the Thanksgiving schooling practices that we all seemed to share. What does this literacy say about our experiences in the school system? It points to our personal identity, how we use our own hands to create art; it points to our national identity, how US holidays are celebrated and reinforced; and it points to colonialism, how we favor some perspectives over others that are suppressed and eventually lost. But when we are in Kindergarten making our little hand turkeys out of construction paper, safety scissors, and glue sticks, are we thinking about these things? No, but subconsciously we internalize these literacies, even if they aren’t always the most useful. At some point Kim brought up how Lave and Wenger refused to study the communities of practice at school for this reason. What’s the point of understanding school literacies if they only happen at school? There is a whole wide world of literacy practices that are more interesting and consequential to our society!

But school isn’t the only institution that ingrains us with peculiar literacies that affect the way we view the world. Ben pointed out early on that his experience in the Christian church had given him a lens through which he could interpret life, for better or worse. This reminded me of Kenneth Burke’s concept of terministic screens, which can be defined as a lexicon of specialized language that experts in a field make sense of the things they see. An artist would see a bird in terms of light, color, shadow, and dimension. A physicist would think of a bird’s flight in terms of gravity, thrust, inertia, and airspeed velocity. An ornithologist would know the bird’s Latin name, its habitat, its diet, its behavior. The problem that Kim points to is that sometimes our expertise in something can sometimes make us blind to what newcomers don’t know; sometimes the best writing students make the worst writing teachers because it’s hard to imagine not knowing what they know. I wonder what Chris Fosen’s term for this is?

At some point, Cassidy had asked a practical question: when assigning group work in a First Year Composition classroom, should students have the choice about which groups they are in? Kim generally seemed to value building community over choice in this regard, but it connected to a part of our conversation about student agency, a subject that I personally have much invested interest in. If students do their best work on things that interest them, how can we as educators provide them the freedom to choose their topics, while also fostering the specific literacies that go into academic writing? Kim mentioned “bounded inquiry” to describe the major project that she gave her students, and that led to wonder if there was some kind of balance, some sort of “controlled agency” that students could have in order to serve their identities and support them in their scholarly and professional pursuits. Travis pointed to an English class being taught at Butte College in which students voted on five books to read of their choice for the semester. But unfortunately, some teachers don’t have a choice. Larisa pointed out the fact that many high school teachers in the US start GoFundMe accounts to buy their students new and relevant books, increasing their level of choice and catering to their interests. Perhaps Street would see this as an issue with the connection between theory, policy, and practice.

On one end, there are the theories that scholars develop in order to understand how literacy practices are learned between members of a community, and on the other hand there are the actual communities where literacy practices are actually learned. Then there are the policies and policymakers in the middle, essentially acting as the middleman between theory and practice. But while policies are communicated and enforced in the name of improving education, they can actually be counteractive to the goals of the theorists whose ideas are used to make policy. Street makes this point in his article on literacy inequalities: while policy “works under the constraint of offering an overall and more uniform view of the issue at stake,” the theory that it is based on actually “complexifies the issue with multiple meanings and definitions and varied empirical examples” (583). Part of Kim’s teaching philosophy is to always combine theory and practice. Does that mean we should cut out the policy “middleman” to reach praxis?

• How do we reconcile the inherent opposition of the goals of theory and policy?
• How do we work Street’s ideas on the ideological model of literacy into our pedagogies?
• How do we put boundaries on literacies?
• And how can we truly be unbiased in our ethnographic approaches to literacy? Can we be either etic or emic in our research, or is it actually a spectrum?

Author Bio: Hayden Wright is an English Graduate student and first year composition instructor at California State University, Chico. His focus is in Language and Literacy and he is interested in learning and the creative process, writing his thesis project on interest and agency in the composition classroom. Hayden’s lifelong passion for music causes him to see the world in music-colored glasses, and occasionally you can find him wading in a body of water waving a fly rod at uninterested trout. His cat’s name is Quebert.

Hi everyone! 

During week 2 in Theories of Literacies, we explored all notions of what is constitutive of literacy by reading Jennifer Roswell and Kate Pahl’s “Introduction” to literacy studies in The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies. In essence, literacy is so much more than merely being able to read and write. Roswell and Pahl give a great definition on the expansive, complex, and diverse ways literacy emerges in our lives, for it:

“exists in homes [and many other places] with the varied ways that people live, speak and practice the everyday… Literacy is aesthetic, material and multimodal. Literacy is both local and global, evident in rural as well as in urban settings. Literacy changes with practices, and transmutes across borders, languages and modes. Literacy is digital, immersive and networked. Literacy is felt, sensed and associated with place” (Roswell and Pahl 1).

This is a noticeably longer take on what literacy is in comparison to the one we are used to hearing in grade school as simply the ability to read and write. As you read the definition you might think: “How can literacy be all these things?” “What happened to it just being about reading and writing?” 

Thanks to our other reading this week by David Bloome and Judith Greene, “The Social and Linguistic Turns in Studying Language and Literacy,” it works in tandem with Roswell and Pahl’s expansive and frankly overwhelming description, in order to to help us understand the reasons for such a broad take on what constitutes as literacy. These turns in the field of literacy— to the social and linguistic— are the reason why Roswell and Pahl’s definition of literacy can be so wide-ranging. 

It is important to understand in what ways these turns reshape our understanding of literacy —one that is aligned with how it is seen by literacy researchers— rather than our pop-cultural consciousness of thinking reading a book and being able to write a letter to your grandma as the things that make you literate, for example. Starting with what Bloome and Greene call an autonomous model of literacy, “the individual employs cognitive and linguistic skills, strategies, and processes that are mostly autonomous of the social context which the reading or writing occurs” (Bloome and Greene 20). Another title for this model of literacy could be the anti-social model, as it merely focuses on reading and writing skills that are outside the social and cultural context in which they occur. This model posits two ideas: 

1. that literacy is (only) reading and writing 
2. and that literacy is static in what is constitutive of it (i.e. literacy is not social). 

However, with the turn to recognize that language is inherently a social heuristic in which we communicate in our realms, literacy becomes a “non-trivial use of written language” where no matter what, the ways in which we— as humans— do literacy cannot be separated from the idea of what literacy means in that specific context” (Bloome and Greene 20).

This calls for a new model of literacy, one that understands the flux and social nature of literacy. The ideological model of literacy, according to Bloome and Greene, fits the social turn by a literacy that

“does not exist as a thing in-and-of-itself. Rather it is the situated, contextualized use of written language by people as they interact with each other within the social institutions and social spaces in which they live their lives. Literacy practices and events are embedded in, and constitutive of cultural ideologies. That is, a cultural ideology informs, and is informed by, what literacy practices are used in what social situations when, by whom, with what meanings, and with what social consequences.”

Similar to how I said you can think of the autonomous model of literacy as anti-social, you can think of this one as the social model of literacy. With that being said, the social turn in literacy allows for a more nuanced and accurate depiction of what literacy is, depending on the socio-historical context in which a certain literacy is taking place. Moreover, before we can turn back to Roswell and Pahl’s wide-ranging definition of literacy: it is still necessary to shift to Bloome and Greene’s explanation of the linguistic turn in literacy studies. 

The important thing to remember when it comes to the linguistic turn is the fact that language represents and organizes the social world we live in. This turn allows for the “deconstruction and reconstruction of disciplinary bodies of knowledge,” which allows for a multitude of epistemologies and ontologies to be thought up and considered, hence the fact we see Roswell and Pahl’s definition around what literacy can be, as so expansive-oriented (Bloome and Greene 22). The linguistic turn enables for the expansion of the field, while the social turn allows for literacy studies to continuously adjust and reshape depending on the sociohistorical literacy event. 

Therefore, when we turn back to the “Introduction” by Roswell and Pahl, it becomes clear that the spaced-focused, time-focused, multimodal, digital, hermeneutic, everyday, and communal literacy approaches all have a validity within the scope of literacy studies thanks to the social and linguistic turn within the field. When considering all the different approaches and subcategories within literacy studies through the lens of the social and linguistic, it is apparent that this reimagining of what literacy is, is important for a more nuanced, disparate, and accurate understanding of how we become literate beings in the world(s) we live in.

Recursively, the idea that “literacy is felt, sensed, and associated with place,” I begin to understand how place is a crucial component when thinking about literacy (Roswell and Pahl 1). However, a question I am left with from this reading is in what ways do I begin to understand the felt and sensed aspects of literacy? What does this mean exactly? 

During our class session our initial probing question into these readings was “What is the range for what this field [literacy] studies?” Of course after reading Roswell and Pahl’s “Introduction,” I was relatively overwhelmed with the rhizomatic structure that is literacy studies, all connected in some ways via the social and linguistic turn, but all doing vastly different things. This question was one we explored the meaning / answer to throughout our class time together, and one I believe which will shape the rest of the course, in order to gain a deeper sense of what the field studies. Thus, when referring back to the felt and sensed aspects of literacies, it has me thinking that they— like literacy itself— are always changing and influx, which results in me asking what ways do I currently feel and sense literacies in the places I am embedded into? 

After talking about the field a little bit we turned to schooled literacy, and ways in which we see the effects of these literacy events and practices shaping our histories of literacy in some ways. One of the largest themes from this discussion is the difficulty of breaking away from schooled literacies. For example, Alondra, a graduate student, explained how she still raises her hand when wanting to say something even though there has been no need / purpose to do this since her days in K-12. We also discussed why memorization is the test of importance on subject competency. Larisa mentioned how even in her high school English classes, which are notoriously known as a place for critical thinking and exchange of ideas through socratic seminars / fishbowls, there was still the need for supposed reading comprehension with tests on novels. Having a test based upon memorization of the novel’s material seems strange and foreign if given one in a college-level literature class. A hard question to answer as to why memorization is so important in K-12 education, but one reason that made sense (I forget who mentioned it, the irony) was the fact that standardized tests like the SAT and ACT were the determiners in getting into prestigious institutions after high school. 

Kim brought up a great question in class, which was “for those of you who are teaching English 130W [Academic Writing aka FYC] this semester, what do your students think they are doing in regard to writing, and are they learning about different disciplines / discourse communities?” As someone who is teaching English 130W this semester, I began to think about the literacy practices I was asking of students, while also questioning the literacy event that I was constructing in my classroom. We moved on from this question relatively quickly, into related topics of students (personal) needs, and ways we can support students in coming to class and doing the work. However, when thinking back to Kim’s question it is one that I am interested in exploring for the entirety of the semester and beyond, as the classroom is an important place in which instructors can deconstruct certain K-12 sensibilities, while giving students opportunities to understand and operate in college settings both materially and in designated discourse communities. With that being said, one other thing that Kim mentioned that resonated, is the fact that there should not be a first-year composition course, at least the way we have it structured now. If we are asking students to write in certain discourse communities for their majors, why the hell are we not teaching them that? 

After discussing our relationship with literacy and our schooling— something that is hard to think outside of, as it is so interconnected to our socio-historical moment— we turned to mapping our own histories of literacy. Some fellow classmates shared books, professors, and classes they took, while others shared video games they played growing up. A challenging task to rhizomatically connect your literacy practices to one another throughout your life, I initially began thinking about my time in graduate school and working backwards from there. I was hoping to eventually get to other literacy practices and events that were present when I was a kid, however, I began to think too closely on the literacy practices I have gained while in college solely. Perhaps in the future, breaking up my literacy practices by place, will help me focus and hone in on certain literacies throughout my life. 

From this week’s readings and class discussion I am left with the following questions, including the ones I have bolded in my blog post above: 

• In what ways are my literacy practices being changed as I progress through this course? Do I feel I have gained a more keen cognizance of what my own literacy practices are (by the end of the semester)? 
• What do you teach when it comes to literacies (for all of us who are or want to teach in the future)? 
• How can we create effective heuristics to help us operate in certain places, spaces, and literacy events?  
• What literacies count and which ones do we disregard? Why? And in what ways can we ensure justice for disparate, diverse, and different literacies than ones that hold hegemony in our current position in the space-and-time continuum?  

Author’s bio: Brady Freitas is an English graduate student at Chico State. His research interests include spatial and geographic rhetorics, place-based pedagogy, and practices of the everyday. He currently teaches first-year composition, with hopes to continue his passion for teaching in the future. In his free time, he likes to spend time outdoors, hanging with his dogs, and going to Whiskeytown Lake. 

Hello all! This week we had two readings for the class. “The Social and Linguistic Turns in Studying Language and Literacy” by David Bloome and Judith Green, and the “Introduction” by Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl from The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies.

Rowsell and Pahl’s Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies first introduces the different complexities of literacy studies as a field of study. How literacy functions as a social platform to bring change, both in the context of communities and in the context of individuals. How literacy exists in every space of life: digital spaces, within material, rural or urban spaces, “across borders, languages and modes” (1). Roswell and Paul begin by describing the power dynamics surrounding literacy that try to inform what kinds of literacies matter and which kinds of literacies don’t matter. Roswell and Paul then begin to describe the research that continues to demonstrate how literacy studies as a field continues to expand beyond the limits it was originally put into. This continues to change the definition(s) of literacies– especially in the contexts that matter. The rest of the chapter breaks into different parts that describe different approaches or understandings of literacy studies. 

Part I focuses on the different researchers (including Bloome and Green) who have laid the foundations for the ever-expanding branches of literacy studies. Part II is focused on spatial literacies or literacies that produce spaces that are “produced in societal contexts” (7), connecting literacy with community, society, and more global issues. Part III describes the literacy studies as a research that is longitudinal. This part of research focuses on the changes to literacy and literacy studies throughout time. Part IV focuses on how literacy studies can focus on literacies that are multimodal– existing across mediums, genres, and forms. Part V focuses on the turn in literacy studies into the digital world. Part VI looks at approaches to literacy studies that combine literary theory and hermeneutics. Part VII focuses on ‘functional’ literacy studies, which Tim Wall so aptly described, or uses of literacies in every day. Part VIII focuses on how research in literacy studies co-creates literacies that exist within communities. Phew! If that seemed like a mouthful or a list, that is because Roswell and Paul write this to give an idea that literacy studies are constantly changing, expanding, and adapting in different communities, fields of research, and in everyday life. This just creates definitions of literacies and different fields of research within literacy studies that are ever-expanding.

Green and Bloome’s article covers two different ‘turns’ or major changing points in the history of literacy studies. The first described is the ‘social turn’ in literacy studies. This is seen as a shift in the study of language as well. The best way I could describe this is in the difference between a prescriptive view of language from a descriptive view of language. Prescriptive views of language try to define language as it should be or could be in a kind of idealistic way. Descriptive views of language see language as constantly changing and thus believe there is no idealistic way of viewing language. The social term can be seen in the same light, where literacy studies switched from thinking of ways in which literacy should be to a more descriptive or ‘observing’ way of understanding literacy studies. 

The second turn in literacy studies is the ‘language’ turn of literacy studies. This describes the way language (and by extension literacy) is rooted in society and social organization and this understanding of language provides a lot of implications for literacy studies through ethnographies and in thinking about literacy studies in social power dynamics. This problematized the methodology of ethnographies where “the ethnographer writes culture, not finds culture”(9) or in other words, the ethnographer looks at language and culture from an outsider’s perspective. This also brought into perspective the ways in which literacy is understood as a technical or social skill. Complicating the way in which we think of literacies as important in “social context(s) and that is situated within a particular social system” (10). That is, literacies are only important to the particular contexts in that they are needed. There is no universal limit of literacy that can qualify some people as illiterate and others as literate. 

In class, we covered many different topics, often starting with a question that led to a complicated and shifting conversation, coming up with insights and answers along the way. The class began with debriefing. Kim Jaxon, our professor, laid out a potential agenda for our class time. We also expressed the different experiences we’re having as grad students– the stresses and challenges. 

Kim then asked us a question: “What do y’all get out of these introductory readings…what’s the range of what this field (literacy studies) is covering”? 

Ben started the class discussion by saying that the way literacy studies continues to expand and diversify makes him think that anything isn’t a discipline until academics study it. This led to a conversation on Western views of thinking– how something has to be ‘official’ or studied to exist in the Western world. This led to a conversation on reification, and the appropriation of different traditional Mexican and Mexican-American foods and beverages to fit a market of consumers who wish to buy healthier to-go food. Alondra brought up the example of a ‘spa water’ recipe by a tik tok creator that was essentially a bastardization and plagiarization of agua frescas. Larissa also brought up the example of street tacos being renamed ‘health tacos’ as a similar example of this. 

We then shifted the conversation towards thinking of literacy as it changes throughout spaces. This conversation was grounded in thinking about how literacy changed in our online education throughout the pandemic. We all expressed our grievances with Zoom learning: how engagement was terrible through the zoom platform and how difficult it was to learn in the same space day-to-day. Kim then introduced the thought that Zoom learning mostly mimicked the kind of learning that is done in the classroom. Essentially, the solution to teaching students online was to mimic the same learning that is done in class, but on Zoom. But Zoom as a platform essentially revolves around the same dynamic of teachers telling students what they need to learn. It’s recreating the classroom, digitally, but forgoing the online dynamics that weaken student engagement. Leading to a more lectured, and less engaging environment for learning. 

This led to a discussion about the ways in which students and teachers have been ‘school’d’ or shaped into thinking about school and learning in traditional and restricted ways. Cassidy brought up her example of teaching and her students continuing to ask to use the bathroom. Hayden also expressed an example of students wanting to raise their hands instead of speaking up to share something in class. Brady expressed that high school was not preparatory for college and even was pervasive in the ways students think about college. We also discussed the ways in which students are taught to write ‘in general’ in most writing composition classes. We discussed how this is problematic because there is no writing ‘in general’– the writing and reading needs for students vary upon context. Brooke brought up an example of a forensics class she took where she was allowed to use her notes during the test. Brooke explained that note-taking in forensics is a real writing/reading need. She explained how the class she took is an example of the class teaching or reflecting the real-life literacy needs required for the actual field the class is intended to prepare students for. 

At this point in the class, I asked the grad students around the table what advice they would give to me as I will one day teach a writing composition class as they are now. Much of the advice led to a discussion on the importance of being flexible with students. This involves creating assignments that are relevant to what students are interested in. It also means designing a space that demystifies the different ways new students coming straight from high school may think college functions. It’s about being conscious of the environment new students are immediately coming from– an environment that very much has them school’d (high school). 

We then got to discussing the ‘social’ or ‘language’ turns in literacy. We spent some time defining and thinking about what those actual turns were. We discussed how literacy is really a moment in time. Trying to define literacy is like trying to map the exact form of particular sand dunes. They are always going to be sifting, shaping in and out of form like waves. We thought about the actual act of mapping literacies and literacy events. If we mapped literacy events in learning environments in time and space we think we would see something like a rhizomatic system. This led to Professor Jaxon showing us a video by Marijke Hecht that compared learning environments to rhizome root systems in trees. Professor Jaxon then provided us with papers and pens to map out our own literacy and learning events that have led us to where we are now. We weren’t able to finish this project during the class period and reflect on the experience, but I can reflect on my own experiences as I had them. 

I felt like tracing my literacy and learning events was extremely difficult, and almost became too difficult of a project to complete within that class period. I started by thinking about why I was personally invested in reading and writing to begin with. A lot of my interest stemmed from my experiences with literature and how I believe developing a sense of critical thinking allowed me to think about my own life in re-inventive and productive ways. This laid the groundwork for much of my experiences with every course I’ve taken in college (which I mapped out) and every book I’ve read (which I also mapped out). ‘Thinking outside of myself is the direction the map was ultimately headed. It was connected to readings like Carmen Boullosa’s Before, or Yu Hua’s To Live, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. It was also connected to writers like Audre Lorde, Simone de Beauvoir, or Ibram X Kendi. The direction of ‘thinking outside of myself’ is also thinking ‘reflective to myself’– understanding the spatial, historical, and critical perspectives that are involved in reading, writing about and teaching literature as well as thinking about one’s own place in that field. The nodes became too many to connect on one sheet of paper for me. I decided to stop before I dug out too much of my brain. I hope as we continue this course we can continue to think about these questions: 

-Why do we set standards for literacies? Who do these standards benefit? Who do these standards hurt? 

-How can we picture environments of learning that are more rhizomatic? Or at least more inventive or creative than the standards of learning environments we continue to use? 

-What kind of literacy events occur in our classrooms? Both the ones my cohorts teach and the class we’re in now? 

-What kind of literacy experiences are we bringing to ENGL 632 with our unique backgrounds? 

Author bio: Travis Cowley is an English Graduate student at CSU Chico. He’s doing the English MA program to develop professionally, research California Multicultural Literature, and because, believe it or not, it’s fun! If he’s not at school he’s probably at home gaming or hanging out with his lovely partner Bella.