Can’t Literacy Have One Working Definition?

I am no teacher and do not plan on being one, but this simple thing can take on so many different views. I like it best when one of my classmates explained that ideological literacy is a leftist view and autonomous literacy is a conservative view. The clouds had parted and I felt like things in the world were right, then I read Street’s Whats “new” in New Literacy and I am again lost in this struggle. When Street suggest that in society there are “functional illiterates”, “good readers” and “illiterates” that all makes sense. There are students who can read and write, but do not practice these skills or are not enthusiastically involved with them simply because they carry limited weight in the field they are going into and that is fine, but in our fields we need to be good readers and in turn good writers. I would consider illiterates (in my culture these are people who have very limited reading and writing skills) to be those who did not graduate form high school or have a limited education. These are people I worked with back home at an auto parts store. They get along okay, but never seem to want to advance and are complacent where they are in society. Of course, I am saying this as in my working definition of literacy.

The youtube video for this week was something that caught my eye. HTML and CSS is my literacy. Teachers must learn how to write clearly and in a way that younger generations will understand. This is extremely important, however, in the public relations field I have the challenge of making text look “sexy” and keep people clicking throughout webpages and seeing what my company has to offer and what we are working on.

My literacy is different than anyone else’s, just as everyone else has a different working literacy than I do. Mine is not better or worse, I simply know coding and styles while others will be more directional or content based. Having both of these different types of skill set greatly benefits each other the way a bee collecting nectar benefits the flower it pollinates.