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.
Is literacy more like an elephant or like an office lamp? This, some might say in very shortened fashion, is the question our Theories of Literacy class set out to answer during last week’s class. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, such an existential question cannot be answered in one week, and so our class discussion returned to Sylvia Scribner’s “Literacy in Three Metaphors,” the piece that had first brought forth the question, for much of this week (for a summary of the second part of this week’s class, see Alli’s blog).
“Wait, wait, wait…,” I hear you say, “an elephant? An office lamp? How did we get here and what does this have to do with literacy?” A valid interjection, I’ll admit, so let’s take a step back before diving deeper into this rabbit hole.
“How did we get here?” you ask. Well, to be honest, I’m not quite sure about that myself. It all started with last week’s blog by Hailey, who put the three metaphors for literacy detailed in Scribner’s text in conversation with a traditional Buddhist and Muslim parable called “The Blind men and an Elephant.” I will not retell the whole story and its application to Scribner, since I believe Hailey’s article already does an excellent job doing exactly that, but I will give a short summary since some of the main points might be helpful in understanding where our discussion of the text went this week (this also means that if you like her metaphor – great, you can give her credit! And if not – hey, at least it wasn’t my fault, she came up with it)…
In the parable, three blind men, who, ironically, seem to be referred to as philosophers in some versions, are put to the task of determining what an elephant is like. However, since they each examine different parts of the elephant’s body, they come to wildly different conclusions, commonly interpreted as a metaphor for the subjectivity of one’s own experience.
Hailey compared this story to the search for the ‘true’ definition of literacy as traced by Scribner. To illustrate this, she forced the poor philosophers to examine another object (the elephant was determined to have too many parts, considering that Scribner only explains three literacy metaphors), the office lamp (which also has many parts). The three men, studying the lamp’s base, rod, and bulb, respectively, quickly found that literacy could be described either as adaptation to the pragmatic skills necessary for survival, as a powerful instrument for both oppression and liberation, or finally as the experience of intellectual enlightenment. At the height of their disagreement and ready to admit defeat in their quest to define a “monolith of literacy,” as Hailey so nicely put it, they were saved by a deus ex machina Sylvia Sribner revealing that, maybe, these different metaphors need not be seen as competitive but might rather have equal validity – a conclusion that settled the debate but left the blind men even more longing for a more satisfying solution, one that would offer more concreteness.
Questions thus remained about how to put these different metaphors into action, and whether that step, as well as scholarly agreement on the matter, was even necessary.
So if three blind men can’t solve this problem – how about thirteen? (aka our classroom, which, much like the philosophers, regularly oscillates between the feeling of being an expert on the matter – This finally all makes sense! – and doubting our life choices – This will never make any sense!)
Bring on the expert panel then to see if our in-class discussion could shed some more light (without the help of an office lamp) on the matter & get on board for the wild ride of the sequel (which hopefully, unlike Disney movies, is able to live up to its predecessors)!
Unlike Hailey’s philosophers, we did not have to stumble through a dark forest first to find our object of study, and so we cut straight to an examination of Scribner’s three metaphors in light of recent developments in education and technology in order to test out if such a thing as putting the metaphors into action could exist.
The adaptation metaphor was chosen as our first victim, and with the help of Hailey’s (the one with the elephant) and Haleigh’s (the one without) comments on the class Perusall quickly identified as geared towards a society shaped by capitalism, defining literacy as the “skills [necessary] to secure jobs or advance to better ones,” and seeing the people learning such skills primarily as potential “contributors to economic growth and stability” (Scribner 9). Cool, so we can just forget about this metaphor, saying it works only in a capitalist society and totally ignores a human’s personal needs? This is going great!
But, oh, not so fast! In our quest to dissect the definition of literacy as fast as possible, we had almost forgotten this tiny tech innovation that has recently started shifting education practices – artificial intelligence. It wasn’t hard to agree that AI literacy is becoming increasingly necessary not only in an educational setting but also as a requirement on the job market – and thus an integral part of becoming ‘functionally literate’ in our society. More difficult to answer seems to be the question if this development, as inevitable as it seems, is at all desirable (as brought up by Sel) or whether it might actually only lead to more inequality in terms of access to a technology quickly disappearing behind a paywall, as Haleigh pointed out.
Okay, great, so we’re back to capitalism then – just did a 360. Weren’t we out here to actually advance this problem? Fortunately, Dr. Jaxon intervened at this point, although unfortunately neither in deus ex machina fashion nor to save us, but to introduce instead an even wider scope of the problem. Citing an article from The Atlantic
proposing to ban the internet on college campuses altogether, she asked whether this whole debate is not pointing towards a larger societal debate about trust and the value of college education in times of ever-increasing technological shortcuts for cheating.
And indeed, we soon discovered a whole host of questions this can lead us to – if we do not adapt our education to teach AI literacy, then who will be imitating who? Will AI improve at imitating humans or will humans just grow dependent on it and imitate AI? And if we do adapt – how do we teach general AI literacy? Is “general” even possible in this context (or in any, really, considering that the word “general” has generally become a heated topic of discussion in class)?
Recognizing that our examination of this metaphor led to more despair than progress – captured perfectly by Bradley’s tortured outcry about the possible solutions discussed: “Why does it always have to be so extreme?” – we turned our attention to the second metaphor: seeing literacy as power. Setting out from Scribner’s finding that “literacy has been a potent tool in maintaining the hegemony of elites and dominant classes in certain societies” (11), we engaged in an examination of how literacy can also, Uno Reverse-style, be used to bring about social change. An important distinction was made by Michelle’s and Dr. Jaxon’s Perusall comments on the direction of this correlation – rather than seeing rising literacy as autonomously (a term much-disputed already in previous class sessions) effecting social change, it seems more accurate to see mass mobilization in social causes as a major factor for increasing literacy.
Awesome, so now we’ve finally got an action plan! Take all the illiterate and make them activists!
What do you say? That doesn’t sound so great when spelled out? Well, I’m afraid even this definition was not directly translatable into an action model, especially considering, as was brought up by multiple classmates, that in doing so, we might engage in an act of problematic saviorism rather than actually improving people’s lives. Too bad!
Admitting defeat at least in so far as neither the first nor the second metaphor in their practicality were able to elevate our elephant from the ninth circle of literacy’s definitional hell to the light of paradise (or something like that, this is just another metaphor for the confused state of our minds at this point in the discussion), we finally examined, since we were already talking about enlightenment, the third metaphor – literacy as a state of grace.
Yeah, this one never stood a chance. The questionable implications of declaring literacy a state of enlightenment were exposed immediately by pinpoint Perusall comments from Lourdes and Hailey – after all, the assumption that “participation in a literate […] tradition enlarges and develops a person’s essential self” allows the conclusion that literate and nonliterate individuals can be placed in “different stages of development” (Scribner 13) which, despite still being a prevalent attitude to this day, contradicts the basic fact that logical reasoning, among the Greek philosophers for example, preceded writing practices.
Yet we also noticed an interesting recent trend regarding this age-old supposition. Rather than worshipping the literate superhuman, anti-schooling sentiments currently seem to be on the rise amidst debates about which contents should even be taught, from elementary schools to college campuses. So where does all of this get us? Are we just creating more controversy in our quest?
I am afraid that after making you read all of this, I can only present you with more questions (as if we didn’t already have enough of those). But, as Julian asked in class, maybe our project was doomed to fail from the start, and we actually need new categories to accurately describe literacy and its practices in our current environment? Is it neither elephant nor lamp but something else? Should there be a new metaphor centered around artificial intelligence? Or are we just losing ourselves in a struggle for definition when the practical application is neglected, as Scribner warns against?
Hopefully, these will at least provide some food for thought and maybe even bring new solutions to the light. As for the expert panel, we’re out until next week and I think we’ll let the blind philosophers get some rest as well. Hope you enjoyed the ride!
P.S.: Is the elephant still in the room with us? If so, I sure hope it did not get blinded by my excessive use of light-related metaphors in this piece…
Tim Ziegler is a passionate observer of nature and humans, lover of all kinds of sports, and writer of stories about these things, who came all the way from Germany to Chico, only to find himself studying English again. When he’s not currently busy with the (self-imposed) task of coming up with absurd ways to summarize his classes for a blog, he can probably be found somewhere outside talking to God or sipping his coffee in a downtown café.