Communicating Art

I am part of a new wave of college students who, instead of joining the red cup tradition every Saturday night,  don the dubious uniform of a crappy job.  I live in a town called Orland (if you don’t know where that is, you probably blinked as you passed it when getting off the freeway– it’s the town of the intersection between I-5 and highway 32.)  I commute to school, I commute to multiple jobs, and I love living in the boonies of a small town not on the map.  I am lucky enough to have landed my dream job of being a high school basketball coach, so who needs an English Education degree?  Oh wait, I do.  I am 21 years old, and I will argue with anything you say just for the fun of it.  Who am I , you ask?  I am Stephanie Evans, of course!

To me, literacy has a changing definition.  I remember sitting in high school English class whining about having to learn the rules of grammar and spelling (ironically, the most difficult word for me to spell is ‘grammar’– who put that second ‘a’ there?)  Is that part of literacy? I grew up reading any book I could find– the best part about being tall for my age was being able to reach the important ‘adult’ books at the top of the shelf.  But is a fourth grader reading “Gone With The Wind” truly literate? I can tell you, the more I reread my favorite novels the more I find that there a whole lot of hidden meanings, symbols, and intrigue that was beyond the scope of my younger self.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t understand what I was reading.

I think that is part of the message Szwed discussed.  Why are the old, dry, collegiate definitions the ones that rule society? It may be a well-educated definition, but that doesn’t mean it is right, or even popular.  There are more kids reading Twilight and Harry Potter than there are reading Socrates.  Does that make the reading less worthwhile, when not taught in a classroom? My favorite line says, “Focus should be on the school and it’s relation to the community’s need and wishes.”  Szwed was talking about the possibility of bilingual and multilingual needs, but I think it goes deeper than that.  We are all part of a community, whether we like it or not.  Within that community, we talk, debate, share, and develop new means of communication, i.e. text messages, Facebook, email, etc.

I think Swed’s discussion boils down to one question.  Is literacy an act of communication or an act of art?  Technology has given us new ways to communicate and express ourselves, and new modes of literacy are evolving out of that culture.  Rather than denounce a new movement in it’s infancy, we should perhaps embrace a cultural change that brings new forms of literary art to life.  But such is “The G8 D8.”