Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.
Imagine this. You’re placed in a graduate seminar titled “Theories of Literacy.” You have no other context, but you’re asked to describe the work being done in the course. What would you say?
If you’re like me, you most likely will draw as much as you can from the title – it is the only information you’ve been given, after all. You might start with the word “theories.” You know we’re discussing the ideas or principles that explain a given field. You know that this is separate from practice, or the actual application of such ideas. Okay, great! With this knowledge, you move on to “literacy.” And this is where things start to get complicated.
The act of defining literacy is quite a complex process, as anyone in Dr. Kim Jaxon’s Theories of Literacy course can tell you. Notions that “literacy” equates to reading and writing are complicated by questions such as, “Reading and writing what?” and “What counts as reading and writing?” The field can feel boundless, as cases can be made for most anything in response to these inquiries. This is especially so when we shift our perspective from a schooled version of literacy to a social one. It is precisely this – “a ‘social’ view of reading and writing” (Street 17) – that led to Brian Street’s “Literacy events and literacy practices: Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies.”
In recognizing this shift, Street found an increase in the terms used to describe the field. Terms such as ‘literacy practices,’ ‘literacy events,’ ‘multi-literacies,’ and ‘literacy activities,’ among others, were used broadly and interchangeably. In a space that was still developing, scholars didn’t seem to have a firm understanding, or even a mostly agreed-upon, usage of such terms. Street identified this, leading to his call for “some consideration and refinement of these usages” (Street 17). As Dr. Jaxon mentioned during class, this was a matter of solving issues related to research; Street was not participating in a “literature-style” analysis, but rather discussing how to talk about research in literacy studies. Because of the ways literacy studies were evolving at the time (Street’s piece being published 25 years ago at this point), there was a need for some boundary and definitional work.
One such area that Street pinpointed was the use of ‘literacy practices,’ which he felt moved from simply describing literacy in a specific social context to analyzing the practice. However, this was not universally decided on by the researchers and authors in the field. Instead, the term was used in a multitude of ways, understood by each author but never formally defined or agreed upon. As a result, Street’s work within the piece becomes twofold: (1) “to unpack some of the meanings and assumptions that underlie [literacy practices’] use,” and (2) to come to some agreement about specific language use in literacy studies (17-18).
He makes clear how he views both literacy practices and literacy events functioning. To Street, study of literacy events focuses on the reading and writing practices of a specific situation. One can observe such events and, perhaps, begin to describe their characteristics; however, the work remains purely descriptive. The processes that allow the literacy event to function are left unexamined. Street writes, “If you were to observe a particular literacy event as a non-participant who was not familiar with its conventions, you would have difficulty following what is going on” (21). Without knowledge of these conventions, the work lacks an analytical aspect, which the term literacy practices has the ability to address.
Street proposes a definition of the term, which, as mentioned earlier, had been severely lacking. He writes that “Literacy practices refer to [the] broader cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts” (22). It is through examining the cultural and social contexts that a particular literacy is situated in that it moves from a literacy event to a literacy practice. This shift is imperative. Only through understanding these contexts are researchers able to fully understand what makes a particular literacy work and how meaning is constructed within the space. Street claims that simply observing a literacy event is “meaningless;” instead, scholars need to be in the field they’re studying, “talking to people [and] listening to them” (21).
The idea of social and cultural contexts influencing literacies simultaneously complicates and comes off of the concept of an autonomous, singular literacy. As Michelle pointed out in a comment on Street’s chapter in Perusall, “When we understand literacy as autonomous, we assume the relationship between literacy and social progress is causal rather than correlated, that literacy reflects intelligence and competence rather than cultural and social practices.” This comment both encapsulates the shift in how scholars viewed literacy, as described in Street’s piece, and kick-started our class conversation. Our first step was to get on the same page about the context surrounding Street’s piece (literacy practice!!). Dr. Jaxon informed us that the aforementioned shift was a move away from literacy equating intelligence. Like Michelle stated, scholars in the field began to understand that literacies, plural, were more a reflection of the cultural and social practices surrounding them. This contrasts with the commonly held belief that literacy had to do with skill.
Thus, our conversation turned toward the idea of “literacy skills,” deemed problematic and in need of some consideration. “What is the problem with the word ‘skill,’” one of our colleagues asked. To acquire a skill does not, at first glance, seem like an issue. In fact, it seems to carry a positive connotation. However, as our discussion turned to, it also carries many other connotations. For one, it implies that it is something to be learned once and never examined again. It suggests a mastery, which in turn suggests competence and intelligence. Second, as Dr. Jaxon mentioned, a skill is something that can be put away and taken out, as needed. This contrasts how we see literacies functioning, especially considering the contexts surrounding them. As Julian stated, “Literacy is not a tool like a hammer.”
Julian continued to say that literacy seemed to have more to do with social and cultural capital. That is, we need to know what a culture values to understand better how literacy functions within a particular space. Knowledge is not a matter of prestige, but rather, a matter of value. Such values shift between different societies and cultures; not everyone will hold the same values. Because of this, it is a mistake to believe there is a singular version of literacy that equates to intelligence or the idea that knowledge correlates to prestige. Not only is it a mistake, but it is a harmful one. By believing literacy functions in this way, we are prescribing a white, Eurocentric ideal, as that is who has the most capital. We are disregarding different cultural practices and, either directly or indirectly, implying that these cultures and societies are less intelligent because they employ different literacy practices.
It is for this reason that we must continue to move away from thinking about literacy cognitively and toward how it functions in people’s everyday lives. As Street mentions, the field needs to be examined through an ethnographic lens, not just an anthropological one. Viewing literacy as a whole is both damaging and fruitless, as it is never general, but always specific. Through working in the field with people enacting specific literacies, we can more effectively understand the context in which those literacies function. This work does bring up another concern, however, one that Bradley posed to the group: What does it mean for a researcher to participate in a practice, and what are the boundaries surrounding naming the literacies of others?
While we didn’t come to a conclusive answer, I believe it is a question we need to consider. Perhaps part of the answer, if not the entirety of it, lies in something Street mentioned earlier. Literacy scholars must talk and listen to the people they are working with. In doing so, they can discuss groups’ literacies in the groups’ words and with said groups, rather than inserting their own explanations onto their practices. This, of course, is not definitive. It is more of a start to the conversation rather than the conversation in its entirety.
This points to a somewhat broader issue within the field. As far as we appear to have come from the time Street’s piece was published, we still have a way to go. Problems remain in literacy studies, such as the matter Bradley pointed us to, as well as areas that have not shown much progress at all. Our class conversation turned toward how literacy was examined in school settings. Especially in K-12 education, literacy is not observed; it is tested. To test for reading, students must read aloud and are marked down if they pause, stumble, or make a mistake, regardless of whether it is rectified. This schooled version of literacy contradicts how learning works, or at least how it should function. Learning comes from attempting to engage in a certain practice, from trial and retrial, from practiced acquisition, and from curiosity. These tests do nothing of the sort.
Furthermore, reading and lexical tests do nothing to examine what students can do by looking at what they’re already doing. It seems that when placed in a school setting, we forget everything established about literacy in the last 25 years. The ethnographic lens gets thrown out of the window, and we continue to equate literacy to intelligence, rather than understanding it through a cultural and societal perspective. This is seen directly in what “counts” as reading in school. For example, Mitchell mentioned his daughter’s enjoyment of the Captain Underpants series. But because these books aren’t viewed as being challenging enough (whatever that means), she stopped reading them. Since the series was not valued in school, she removed her practice of reading them.
This leads me to some lingering questions that I will continue to examine after this week:
- What would happen if we flipped the above scenario? Instead of asking students to change their practices to fit school, we asked school to change its practices to fit students?
- How do we bring a literacy practices method of study into classrooms? In a space that still values and utilizes an autonomous version of literacy, how do we shift our perspective to focus on the social and cultural practices that surround students’ already established literacies?
- Given the importance of being in the field, working alongside groups and their literacy practices, how do we do so in an ethical way?
Street, Brian. “Literacy events and literacy practices: Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies.” Multilingual literacies: Reading and writing different worlds, edited by Marilyn Martin-Jones and Kathryn Jones, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 17-29.
Lourdes Knowles is a graduate student and instructor in the English department at California State University, Chico. Her research interests focus on the intersection of student language and academic spaces and on creating more inclusive writing classrooms in higher education. She is currently working on a Teaching Portfolio, a culmination of the theory and practice she has engaged in during her MA program. If not writing or reading, you can find her doing something active or outdoors, ideally both with her dog, Bags.