Lina 2 : Learn through social ___

Humans are characterized by having a large brain relative to body size, with a particularly well developed neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, making them capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, problem solving and culture through social learning.”       —From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

With no doubt, literacy should be learned and analyzed from social view. Based on the discussion and readings we have so far, my understanding is that literacy is created by human. The content, elements, structure, function, external push, motivation, social network, all the things around literacy is social related, horizontally and vertically. In the social network, literacy is created, learned and changed by human at the same time; all the changes happen at the same time.

Szwed: there are “5 elements of literacy: text, context, function, participation, and motivation” (423).

Williams: culture capital, middle-class anxiety

Scribner: “ideal literacy is simultaneously adaptive, socially empowering, and self-enhancing”. (13)

Brandt: “[Sponsors] they help to organize and administer stratified systems of opportunity and access, and they raise the literacy stakes in struggles for competitive advantage.” (178) Also, “Just as multiple identities contribute to the ideologically hybrid character of these literacy formations, so do instructional and material conditions.” (182)

From the readings, to study literacy, to talk about literate ability, to learn and teach literacy should be done in social context.  All the sponsors that Brandt mentioned in the cases can be human and non-human but human-related like economic, history, politics. In the social network, human and non-human are agents and have power on the network. From this point of view, it is easier to understand the three metaphors that Scribner mentioned: “adaptive, socially empowering, and self-enhancing.”

In real life,there are so many genres in the world, developed in different situations, cultures, and periods of history. Even the same genre, the application in real situation is totally different from what I learned in school. Take an interview for example. That’s my first job interview, and there are two parts of the interview. First, the interviewer pretended a customer calling in, and I tried to answer all his questions. They had already given me an answer sheet and I need to find the answers quickly and organize my answers in my words to answer the question that customer has. I need skim it, pick out key ideas and describe the process in words that the customer is familiar with. Also, after they give me a prompt to ask me “write” an official require in 5 mins orally; although I have learned how to write one in school, it is totally different. These two things require a lot more practice and I never learned this kind of literacy practice in school. For me, this interview experience is horrible, but it does make me think more about my ability—what I have learned cannot be used in real life and my ability is denied by reality, what is the problem? As I know, there are different clusters in the social network; apparently, these clusters are different from each other, and each career, specialized area can be considered as a cluster. If I want to enter that cluster, I need to have go through a link to the target cluster and practice there to get in. Then, my question would be: what we can do for students in school? To what degree can we prepare them?