The concept of literacy keeps expanding with each article and class discussion. Brandt brought up the idea of sponsors and how literacy accumulates as it changes. Because of some other readings I’ve done and conversations I’ve had with friends and family, I often think of minorities and/or poor families, how this affects them, how is best to react to it. Upon further thought, I realized that this is an issue that affects everyone. Things that are complicated tend to. Few seem to like change. Yet, “naught may endure but mutability.”

(Just gimme my hard copies. I just can’t annotate on an e-reader. I develop tics if I can’t annotate easily. But I’ll get to that.)

My parents read to us for the first few years of our lives. I remember my stepfather and my mom reading religious books to us (I still have one, even though I’m hardly religious anymore. It brings back fond memories), and my dad reading books to us even before then. It was how my brother learned to read. Now I have my own family, and I know how important it is that they love books. I’m not very good about reading to them like I used to be, but they see me reading all the time. They ask me why I do it, why I like to. My daughter reads for hours at night (if only she’d try some new stuff! and sleep!) and every now and again I’ll catch my I-don’t-like-reading boy reading in bed. Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants for the win!

Literacy has changed since I was 7, 8, and 9. My third grader came home with homework with the word “morphology” on it (thank god I’d already taken linguistics). It’s more than their ability to get online and contribute to their class blog, or explain to me the intricate ins and outs of kid social media, of references I swore I’d always be on top of–but dammit, I am not. They introduce algebraic concepts in kindergarten. My youngest was reading before then. My son and daughter’s third grade teacher has this amazing class library that does everything I hear a class library should do, such as how it’s classified not by reading level, but by subject. There are no book reports! Thank god! I didn’t mind them, but they’re easier now to cheat on than they were before. My fourth-grader, with her National Science Project teacher, is writing reports on plants, animals, and now a biography report. She doesn’t have vocabulary tests but a weekly dictation where she is to hear what I read to her, write it down (and this is not easy—far above grade level), and then correct it herself. That said, the grammar her instructor provides isn’t always correct and so I come in and help her. I think that’s interesting as well. I didn’t have that growing up. My parents didn’t go to college. I taught myself grammar.

And lets not forget, while i had standardized tests to take in school it is nothing near to what my kids have to deal with now. Taking tests is a literacy now. A taught literacy. I see some value in that but the extremity of it shocks me.

Suffice it to say, these are not things I learned in the fourth grade. And I suppose that whatever new things are coming out that I’m not exactly up on, their school might be, or their friends. These things are important. The internet as a social, practical thing was pretty new when I first logged in at around 14 or 15 years old. There was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter. There were chatrooms, though, and back then blogs were just online journals. I had a few of those and did build a fairly successful website to honor my favorite singer at 16. My senior project was to spiff the site up a bit, and part of my presentation was showing off my HTML coding for the page–the adults in the room were really impressed. Today HTML is used, I suppose, but WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) is the norm now. You just highlight and press “B” for bold. Further, I was stunned when my sister, 13 years my junior, wanted to make sure I understood what “lol” stood for. I said, “Lady, I practically invented that.” But being an online nerd back then was not exactly considered cool. Now it’s a part of life, expected. Now it’s part of being in education. Now we worry about people being internet illiterate. Now people walk around–my son included–verbally saying “o-m-g” in place of “oh my god/gosh.” So there’s overlap there with the newest slang. That’s pretty radical, dude.

It’s hard to think about my own scope of literacy without discussing religion at least a little. My husband grew up in a religious household that worried about allowing for access to books, critical of their doctrines. I grew up Protestant and then spent ten years of my life in my husband’s former religion, reading the “right” things and avoiding what would hurt my eternal self. These things are no longer worries for us. They hopefully won’t be worries for our kids. Then again, our kids know very little basic biblical stories—that can be a hindrance in this society, and it’s something we’ve discussed as parents. Just the other day I realized they didn’t understand Adam and Eve references. It’s weird.

But let’s be honest—you don’t have to be religious to have restricted access to reading material, or even poor and/or a minority. I’m aware of things like book bannings and censorship issues. I thought for a long time I’d be the girl who’d let her kids and her students read whatever they wanted until my 9-year-old daughter asked for Twilight. It was then, for various reasons, that I stopped to think that way (eventually I gave in. She read the first book and is now over it). I worry about my students, about sharing with them the books I love to read, or books I think they’d love. But I’m not their parents, and I’m not sure right now how to navigate those waters, to justify books others might find rather offensive or frightening for whatever reason. And what if the students write something “questionable”? What is questionable?

So now the sponsee has become the sponsor, and I’m stunned with the implications and responsibility of that. I think about the poor students, the minority students, the kids who will come from families and cultures that do not prize reading and writing in the white-and-educated-middle-class sense and wonder how we’ll communicate, how I can teach them in a way that lets them know I respect where they come from even if education right now does not. I want to know how I can get to know and appreciate what literacy they do prize and use it to their advantage—whatever that means. How will I work with other educators who don’t necessarily respect “kids these days and their electronics” (or whatever) because they come from a time that didn’t really have or need them? Will I be open or more open to emergent technologies as I grow older? I’m trying, but like I alluded to earlier, I do prefer my paper books to an e-reader. How can I give my students choice, be a part of a ruling institution—and a political one at that—and democratize their literacy? I can see how the literacy they may find in my ideological classroom might confront their family’s or culture’s ideological literacy ideas at home—will what might scare the family, in whatever sense free the kids?

I do believe that we can and should celebrate all ideas of literacy. We should remember those of the past by layering them with the present but allow for the inevitable changes. I can do what I can to “work the borders between tradition and change,” and one way I can think of is allowing the kids to have a say in what and how we navigate in the surplus of literacy.

 

Literacy as social. This concept is one of those things that made me think “of course. Why haven’t I thought of that?” It’s always been a part of my life. My most vivid memory, however, is being in a chat room at 15-years-old. A guy named Chris was quoting Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and I was fascinated. I had to read it. Not only that, but I created a character based off of Chris, and initially with that Clockwork kind of influence (nothing terribly violent, but maybe too much so). My friends and I would share our favorite songs with each other and pick apart the lyrics, discuss why they were SO DEEP and then later let them influence our own writings—poetry and songs, mostly. These online interactions and similar interactions with friends at school had me reading and writing like crazy, had us waxing (again) deep about the intricacies of life.

The same sorts of things happened at school. My sophomore English teacher allowed me to discuss most of what I wanted to—she just cared about the structure and effectiveness of my arguments. It felt like a respectful discussion between student and teacher. In my creative writing classes we always shared what we wrote. My mom found a story I wrote back then, and on the back were notes between my friend George and I discussing what worked and what didn’t. These were my best friendships. At the end of my senior year, my teacher gave us an opportunity to “say goodbye” to our classmates. Some sang, and some did a skit. I used writing to express what I couldn’t and hadn’t been able to otherwise. It was my “goodbye” poem and how I felt, the reactions I received, were amazing. It was exactly what we needed.

I wrote a blog to process my feelings about belief, I’ve kept journals, I still write stories and poems. I did rely on the reactions from readers and commenters—strangers or not. Reviewers. My friends and I rant and rave about books, political articles and rhetorical techniques, recommend reading material to each other. I read humor pieces to give my heart a break. I read books and magazines on education and teaching English both because I’m fascinated and because it gets me to be part of a conversation both in some family and friend circles, and at school. It gives me a home, a place to stay. A person to be. It is and has been my saving grace.

This—all of that—is my social and individual literacy, and you’ll notice it overlaps into the political, the pop culture, the job market, and relationships. But others live in a different sphere of literacy. Maybe they weren’t allowed to read what I was, or were allowed to read what I wasn’t. Maybe their parents didn’t speak English so they had to write and speak and read for them. Maybe they relied on the few words they know to make out messages. Maybe they weren’t even into English as a subject (!!) and instead read gamer magazines or computer software reading material like my brother, or could tell you in writing everything you need to know about baseball, using sports jargon, tone, and sports article structure. Maybe their literacy is enough to get them out and protest in whichever way they can against the powers-that-be that systematically oppresses them, or to just quietly live their lives. Maybe their literacies keep them going at the jobs they have—retail or corporate. As a cashier I had to learn about various departments at Orchard Supply Hardware so I could answer questions for those departments. I couldn’t stand it for long enough to retain any of the information. They simply didn’t pay me enough to do homework.

One thing I gathered from Scribner’s article is that functional literacy doesn’t even have one definition: what is functional today, tomorrow, and to the individual or group? What is keeping them from being functional in other ways so that they could move up or at least keep from going down? To many black students and other minority ethnic groups, literacy as defined by the educational system and society at large is oppressive so they create their own literacy, their own writings and reading materials to protest, to assert who they are. To cross any barrier for those within that group (in any group: to stay or leave?) is terrifying in so many ways. It also has so many implications for our country economically and politically, and just for the individual as a person.

Sometimes the definition of literacy is what keeps certain individuals and groups illiterate, or considered as illiterate. As Williams alludes to, sometimes it’s those who cry out that we’re in the midst of a literacy crisis because the language is always, always changing, and we hate change because we begin to feel out of control and left out.

From my own experiences what and how we learn to read and write as an individual is dependent on our social circles—and I include any social circles we might involve ourselves in on the Internet. There are different structures and styles and tones for different things, and god forbid those things conflict with what we are taught is okay at school. Really, god forbid we take what we’ve been taught is only okay at school and try to appropriate it elsewhere. It doesn’t work.

I tend to think the social and individual literacies overlap more than they don’t. It seems to depend on who you are and where you are. I wonder if location is the most driving force behind what we read and write because it determines what is and who are most available to us. What is social tends to define what is individual–even if you’re the person who rages against the machine, you are defined by how you react to trends. 

But our secret readings and writings—we all have those. Those may or may not make its way into any public sphere, and some may take the hit of being called “illiterate” for the privilege of their private literacies. Yet social literacy, whatever is defined as “literate,” could and does have a profound effect on our private literacy. What pushes us into our closets to read and write? If we still want to read and/or write at all.

I never know how to start these things without being intensely boring, but hey. I’m pretty good at boring. And dry sarcasm.

My name is Lisa Jenkins, English Education major, aka the married mama of three. My husband Eric graduated from CSUC in 2007 and is now an 8^th grade Algebra teacher. He’s kind of amazing.

I’ve always loved writing. I’ve always loved words—probably too much, as I tend to use a lot of them, ha. In my sophomore year, Mrs. Parker said she didn’t know what I was doing in a regular English class and recommended me for English 3 Honors the following year. Then she gave me an A on my essay on why I hated a particular book we read. I loved that woman.

During my very first year of college I met a girl who introduced me to a church. I joined, dropped out of school (the church isn’t exactly supportive of women in school and wanting to work), married my husband, had three kids, and officially resigned twelve years after my baptism. I also stopped writing. And reading…until my husband convinced me to read Harry Potter. A few years before we officially left, I went back to school. This December I will officially be the first in my family to graduate college and I’m pretty proud of that.

Literacy practices. I’m a Young Adult (YA) nerd. I want to say I’ve always been, but in high school I read stuff like V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange—controversial stuff like that. And Dean Koontz. Now I’m into John Green and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and ohmygod The Hunger Games and LGBTQ novels–books like that. I read them because I love them, for the escape they offer. I read them because I find (most of) them crazy smart and compelling and beautiful. I read them because they will be the books my students will be reading and connecting to, as well as my own kids. I read them because I feel like I missed out on a lot as a YA. I read them because my good friends read them and the community and excitement and fire is just so contagious and wonderful. To a degree, too, I don’t feel like I’m 31. It’s not that I hate “adult” books (oooh, no. not that kind. Unless it’s written well, winkwink). I actually loved Water for Elephants and I really want to read Night Circus and I’m sure there are others. I’m not against them. Contemporary books can be amazing, but YA books save the lives of kids who think they’re alone. They change the lives of kids who learn about others—all books do, though. Toni Morrison’s Beloved was one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to read (high school), but it changed the way I think about everything.

I also write YA. It feels like I always have. It’s a processing. It’s accessible. It’s unassuming. It’s fun. I also want to keep in contact with real-life YAs. I think it helps me remember what they’re going through, what they’re feeling, what they love. That’s important when you have kids of your own and students that age. But I also write (poetry as well) to figure out what I’m feeling. I write better than I speak. I always have. It slows down the hurricane of thoughts I often experience.

I find myself reading—or trying to read—more non-fiction books lately, too. I went through a Henry VIII thing after watching the Showtime series (SO GOOD). I have a bunch of English nerd books—read Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer. Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide is great, too. I’m pushing through The Believer’s Brain (it is great! Holy cow. It’s just a lot) and Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System. See, I want to be smart. It’s more difficult for me to get through most non-fiction. I prefer if they’re written more casually. I also subscribe to Time magazine to keep up with what’s going on, blogs (“The Bloggess”), anything for a laugh, and so on. My boy and I are reading Judy Blume’s Superfudge at the moment.

I read and write for so many reasons. To process my new belief system. To learn about the past. To learn about others. To hopefully be a smart English teacher. To be able to hold my own in a debate because I really, really like debating. And because I really enjoy the company I often find myself in.

Obviously it’s so much more than the ability to read and write and even more than if people do. It’s what and how and when and why. In reading Szwed, I had more “I’ve never thought about it that way” and “I should’ve already thought about it that way” moments than anything else. I loved how he defined literacy and discussed contexts and didn’t dismiss any one kind of literacy. I fell in love with his statement that we “do not know what reading and writing are for in the lives and futures of [our] students” (422). That schools don’t even think about this because we all think we know better, because we don’t think outside the context of the classroom—or even outside the context of our own bubbles. That numbers mean nothing. That we don’t know or even consider what kids (or anyone else) read in their private lives versus their public lives.

There was at least one point that confused me a little. I remember when, in my very first year of college English, my professor broke some grammar/writing rule. A classmate called him out on it, and my professor simply said “I know the rules, so I can break them.” I was thrilled and have found myself repeating it to others. I hate most writing rules because breaking them sends its own message. It’s the manipulation of words I’ve always loved. Rhetoric. So what does Szwed mean when he says “It is not only the assumption of a single standard that we must question, but also the assumption of a single, proper learning progression, such that one can only ‘violate’ the rules when one has mastered them…” and so on (426-27). Is it that we assume that people can’t break the rules even if they haven’t mastered them, that they have no idea, no control over what they are saying from a rhetorical point of view? Like with “Ebonics”? And call them illiterate? Like when he says “We must come to terms with the lives of people without patronizing them or falling into what can become a sociology of pathos”?

I’d love to discuss what this can mean for a classroom. Perhaps by having the kids study others’ writings and analyzing their styles and what message they are sending, or annotating their own writing so that we, as their teachers, can follow their thought process? Asking them straight away what they read/write and why they read/write without judgment, why others they know do the same? Asking them what they thought of an author’s assertion of who they are and where they come from (the “outsiders” point of view—for example, The Help)?

Reading Szwed’s article has made me really excited about this class and thinking about literacy in more complex and non-judgmental terms. As always, I’m also now fighting the urge to want to be an ethnographer. See? Nerd.