Give Me Literacy or Give Me Death

That title is dramatic and doesn’t really have anything to do with my blog, but I thought it sounded pretty catchy. Actually, I guess I could generate my post around this title, because literacy has become so prevalent and wide-spread that if you ARE illiterate you can’t really progress very far in our culture. The case study of Genna May and her great-grandson prove this to be true. When Genna was growing up all she needed was twelve weeks of grammar education. She lived in a rural area on a farm and did not need to know how to read or write in order to milk cows. Her great grandson was a different story. He was learning to read and write as a precursor for kindergarten and was part of a special education program. Brandt argues that the requirements of literacy has dramatically changed. In Genna’s day-and-age it used to belong to the “elite”. Social status usually determined your level of education. By the time her great grandson was born those requirements changed to “the challenges faced by all literacy learners in a society whose rapid changes are tied up with literacy and its enterprises” (pg. 3).

So why does this matter to us as future teachers? Because according to Brandt those challenges will continue to change and it is our job as teachers to change with them. In the case study of Genna and Michael, Brandt argues that the educational expectations have changed (in this case it was societal as the the economy shifted from agricultural to suburb/urban), which complicates the argument that now we are expected to read and write at a level that “used to belong only to an elite” (page 3). Oh how simple it used to be! Our children are expected to read and write, they are expected to know how to use social media and keep up with the every changing, fast-paced literary world of our society. Before it was an option, now it is a necessity. I know I am repeating myself, but heck, I’ll say it again: What defines being literate has changed. It no longer means “reading and writing”, but has diversified, which complicates literacy.Today, literacy means “a person’s capacity to amalgamate (merge/unite) new reading and writing practices in response to rapid social change” (pg. 4). This is huge. Our children, we have learned, already know when to switch their level of language depending on who they are corresponding with. They know who to tweet, blog, online chat and surf the every vast web for information. They know how to process this information and regurgitate it. In short, our children have turned into little computers and we expect them to function like little computers.

Brandt states that literacy “piles up” and “spreads out”. Piling up means formal education among families has risen as more and more parents have gone to college and expect the same standards for their children. In short, there is a rise in literacy expectations. This complicates matters because the old methods of literacy still exist, along with the new methods, which means kids have to known two forms of literacy: old and new. That will be a focus for me as a teacher: teaching the old methods of literacy and the new methods.

Society is every-changing, even from when my parents were in school to current. That’s only 30 years! My parents never went to college. My father, much like Genna, was raised on a farm and all he was expected to know was how to milk cows and fix farm equipment. His mother, my grandmother, was EXACTLY like Genna in the fact that she received her education until she was in 8th grade and then worked on her family’s farm, got married, had kids, and then worked on her husband’s farm. My mother wanted to go to college to be a nurse, but her parents never pushed the issue and encouraged her to get a job at 16 at a bank, which is what she did. She married my father, had three kids, and helped my father on our farm. My siblings and I were never discouraged from going to college, but it was understood that we didn’t have to if we didn’t want to. The only important thing to my parents was to get a job where we could financially support ourselves, and that job could come from a higher education, or a vocational job. My brother and I went to college. My sister chose a vocational job; both of them are acceptable to my parents. The point is, now that I look at our every-changing society if I have kids they will be expected to go to college. It’s not an option anymore. Even the most mundane jobs require you to have at least a high school degree, if not a college degree.

This expectation puts a huge amount of pressure on me as a future teacher. Not only will I be responsible for thousands of kids’ education, but I will be expected to continuously educate myself on the rapid changes in literacy. If I don’t, then I imagine I will fall to the way-side.

The “spreading out” of literacy, Brandt says, comes from increased powers according to print that have made reading and writing a necessity of every-day life. An example that Brandt gives is growing food has changed to manufacturing foods, which has developed into managing information about manufacturing food. Our ability to earn a living is tied up closely with our ability to read. Brandt states we live in a “document reality” with “raw data passed through socially organized systems of recording and reporting”.

So how do we as teachers solve this huge dilemma of increased literacy expectations piling up and spreading out? According to Brandt we do this by teaching the history of literacy in schools so people can see a connection between past, present, and future literacy development in a society that is rapidly changing its literacy standards. The problem isn’t in the lack of literacy in society, but a surplus of it (pg.19). “Being literate in the 20^th century has to do with being able to negotiate that burgeoning surplus” (pg19). That is how, we as future English teachers, solve this huge dilemma.