Social Literacy

I think that the idea of social literacy comes from the idea of functional literacy. It is the literacy that we need in our everyday lives in order to function without causing problems. In comparison to a solely individual pursuit of literacy in which the reader/writer’s academic literacy is the only gain, a social literacy is one that includes everyone’s literacy goals and constantly changes with the new and upcoming changes in our social literature. For example, being an English major, I can mostly get away with simply being able to read words on a page which is what I learned in my first few years of school. However, inside the real world, outside of school, I have to be literate in more than just text and knowledge. In order to get my job I had to know how to navigate a computer, the internet, and also know the social literacy of a face-to-face interview. All of these social literacies build on one another to make me a functional human in this time and place, which will most definitely be different in even a few years time. I gained most of these social skills from interacting with my friends and navigating my way through my education using the internet and connections and many different things in order to achieve my goals. My social environment is what shaped my literacy in all of these mediums and without it, I don’t think I would be able to function the same way I do now.

What I found most interesting in our reading was Williams’ idea that what really fuels the “literacy crisis” is middle class fear of losing their status. Swved talks about the literacy gap and how we shouldn’t be surprised to see such a gap between minorities, those with disabilities and people of lower socioeconomic status because of the way literacy is tested. In these times the gap between the middle class and lower class seems to be closing in and the line is getting thinner everyday(at least that is what it feels like). Without access to certain privileges, the middle class fear that they will drop into that lower slot and that everything they “have worked so hard to achieve” will come crumbling down, including their upper hand in academic literacy. What we have to question is whether we should be testing functional/social literacy or academic literacy because either could drastically effect the future of the kids being tested.  It makes me wonder how much my own socioeconomic status affected my education and how things might have been different if I had been tested and leveled differently.