Post 1: What is literacy? Amanda Haydon

Hello fellow classmates! My name is Amanda Haydon and I am a SUUUPER Senior (5^th Year) who is majoring in English Education. I’m a Chico local girl, and I love this community so much that I decided to stay and go to college here when it came down to the whole picking college thing. After I graduate in May (whooooot) I’m planning on teaching English overseas. I would absolutely love to teach in Japan, but I’m really not that picky. I just want to see the world! I have two wonderful parents and a loving younger brother (my family put the ‘fun’ in ‘dysfunction’) who live about 5 minutes away from me. It’s actually pretty nice living close to my family because a) they are so important to me and b) I get my mama’s cooking at least once a week.

Lately, the majority of things that I read are for school purposes. This embodies articles, blog posts, e-mails, syllabi, course calendars, etc. I’m currently reading The Symposium by Plato for my Great Books class, and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline for ENGL 534.  My writing isn’t that different from my reading. I send a dizzying number of texts, e-mails, blog posts, facebook/twitter updates, and more on a daily basis. The purpose of my writing is to release my thoughts into the digital world, communicate with my students, teachers, bosses, etc., and to keep in touch with family, friends, roommates, etc. Welcome to my world. School, work, students, family, friends, schedules…life as I know it. 

The Szwed reading was a little bit difficult to get through, especially when he started talking about the importance of ethnographical studies to literacy, but I overall thought that it was a good and insightful piece. I have always thought of literacy as a two dimensional concept (ability to read x ability to write = literate), but what this article made me realize is that the idea of being “literate” is not two dimensional, but a multi-dimensional concept. For instance, in the reading Szwed touches upon the “problems with defining reading and writing” by describing a boy who may be “labeled retarded and unable to read assigned texts” could still have the ability to read a “baseball record book”(423). This passage really struck me because I myself did “stat’s” for my highschool baseball team for years. Give me a scorebook and I can tell you what happened during that entire baseball game. But does this ability make me literate? In one sense, I think that it does. But this answer led me to ask the question “what does it mean to be literate”?

This is most definitely a loaded question with probably an infinite number of solutions, but this is how I broke it down. The whole point of being able to read and write is to retain some type of information, and then have the ability to write down that information and share it with others. While my ability to read a scorebook doesn’t make me literate in all aspects of the word, it does make me “baseball literate”. My boyfriend is a geographer, which means he can “read” and interpret maps like no one’s business. Doesn’t this make him “map literate”? This is how my multi-dimensional theory of literacy was born. While we may think of literacy as the ability to “read and write”, there are so many things in this world that we “read” (like traffic signs) and write (#literacystudies) that convey information. Without knowing these symbols, signs, social conventions, etc. how would we ever be able to navigate through our current world?!?

So, not only was I able to think about the “multi-dimensional” aspect of literacy from this reading, but I was also able to realize that not only is literacy broken down into an infinite number of “literacy groups”, but there are also levels of literacy within these groups (no I’m not going crazy…just let me explain). Szwed states that there is “not a single level of literacy, on a single continuum from reader to non-reader, but a variety of configuration of literacy, a plurality of literacies” (423). Remember how I said that my boyfriend is a geographer who can read maps? Well, I can read maps too. I know that the blue stuff on a map is water, and the green/brown parts are land, and that the little compass in the corner lets us know where North, South, East and West is. So technically I’m literate when it comes to reading maps like he is…right? Yes and no. While I can be considered “map literate”, my boyfriend has a much higher level of “map literacy” than I do. He can tell you the longitudinal and latitudinal degrees of an area, the population density, what type of erosion happened in a certain area, how many birds pooped in Los Angeles (okay, maybe not this but you get my point; he is a better map reader), etc.

All in all, what I took away from this article is that we, as a society, need to understand that the concept of literacy is much more than just the black and white definition of being able to “read and write”. We are all literate in a multitude of ways, and we must utilize these literacies to navigate through our world each day. Some people may have a higher degree of literacy compared to someone else. And, more importantly, we cannot alienate someone who has been deemed illiterate by society simply because they don’t fit into what society has deemed is “being literate”. We all “do” writing and reading every day. Sometimes it might look like a tweet, or a list on a stickey note, or a octagon shaped red sign that says “stop”, or  , etc. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that the basic idea that literacy embodies the ability to read and write in a language is still a crucial part to the definition of the word. But I also believe that society needs to become more open to the idea of a multi-literacy ideology.