Final blog: What I have learned this semester

“I have a hard time looking at my own literacy practices and understanding the importance of them. Different literacy practices that I exhibit are reading for school, reading for entertainment (books, magazines, and manga), reading online (Facebook, blogs, random webpages, online memes, news articles, etc), reading emails and text messages, and the list goes on and on. Where writing is concerned, I usually write online on Facebook or through class blog sites, in class, at work, and on occasion to write some kind of story. I found that most of my own writing and reading involved some kind of communication of knowledge or information.”

My first posting for this semester consisted of me not being able to understand the importance of my literacy practices, or even what my literacy practices were. I kept the idea of literacy to its most basic forms of reading a story by Shakespeare and writing an essay about it, because I was so unaware of the influence it had on culture and the influences culture had on it. This quote that I used from Szwed, “The definitions of reading and writing, then, must include social context and function (use), as well as the reader and the text of what is being read and written”, meant so little to me at the time. My horizon of what social context and function meant was not defined or refined. The way I had learned English and what the sphere of English entailed, only included being able to use “smarter” words, with my somehow miraculous knowledge of the dictionary, and enjoying reading written text, which was a quality that automatically made me an English person although everyone read something at some point in every day of their life.

I must admit, I still do not have a clear definition of what literacy is today and how it applies to the people of today, but I do know what it has been defined as and what it could become. We encounter literacy practices, as I mentioned earlier, everywhere in our lives. Literacy to me has become something that is defined through the people we interact with and how we communicate with them and take in what they communicate to us. Literacy is academic, it is entertainment, it is social, it is introverted, and at times it is even multimodal. I began to touch on this idea of the social aspect of literacy when we were reading Scribner, by saying:

“Considering the fact that we learn more literacy practices from interacting socially with others around us, it only makes sense that students would struggle with literacy testing in schools or be put off with the type of curriculum that is supposed to teach better literacy practices.”

I had no idea yet, what this would spark in me later on in the semester. There was still a lot for me to understand about what roles literacy played in a society, but I was aware that it did have a role to play and that it was a natural part of the human psyche that needed further understanding to encourage for a positive learning space.

There was a moment this semester, when looking at the literacy practices of someone from an older generation that made me realize something very important. This moment started with my grandfather saying: “…school was a very hard time for me most teachers had the idea that was just another dumb Mexican kid because I didn’t finish my homework or what was going on in class.” I realized here that my grandfather was the product of a time when teachers didn’t understand the literacy practices that students were exhibiting. Then I had THE moment. The moment when I looked around at what my peers and I were doing and what we were striving to create and I realized that my grandfather wasn’t the product of THAT time; he was a product of THIS culture. The negativity and issues that he faced are still around today and students are still being put down for their “lack” of literacy, only fueling the idea of the literacy crisis.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Williams defines the literacy crisis as “literacy [being] implicitly defined as the reading of great books that make one a great person rather than as rhetorically effective communication.” This static way of thinking about literacy is holding our society back from what we can really do for the classroom and for students. Literacy is and always has been dynamic; its very definition is constantly changing with the way society interacts. We have recently come into the digital age where digital literacy takes on a whole new meaning compared to what is considered to be traditional literacy.

As we saw earlier on in Wesch’s video about multiliteracies, literacy on the web allows us to make information interchangeable and moveable over time and space. We are able to communicate information in so many different ways and through different types of literacies. It is as Street says in his article that “literacy in use more often than not serves multiple interests, incorporating individual agents and their locales into larger enterprises that play out away from the immediate scene.” We are no longer developing information around a single source, locally, but instead incorporating what others have done (distant) and to what we have done (local), all through digital literacy.

I saw this fully when working together in my article groups and in book club. In both of those groups I focused mainly on gaming and literacy and how it broadens the definition of literacy to include a whole new way in which people interact. We gain different things from experience different kinds of games, whether they be first person shooters, online RPGs, or what I call third party adventure (games like Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, etc.). In each of these games we are experience different way of interacting socially and with the given information. As James Gee points out in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, “critical thinking…involves learning to think of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways.” This design spaces that are created for allow us to change the way we communicate and reciprocate the information. It teaches us how we are supposed to win the game but allows us the freedom to win or lose depending on the choices we make throughout the game. I never imagined the world of literacy involving this kind of practice.