Blog Four

Okay this reading was excruciating. Almost everything confused me but I actually somewhat figured out and understood Street’s ideas of literacy events and literacy practices after looking them up on Google. At first we were trying to find out what the difference was between them, and that was super confusing because then I found out they are somewhat inclusive of each other. I stole this from a website: “Literacy events serve as concrete evidence of literacy practices. “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes” (p. 93). Any activity in which literacy has a role is a literacy event.” So basically a literacy practice would be how we use literacy everyday; reading a traffic sign, writing and email, etc. Then: “Barton and Hamilton (2000) describe literacy practices as “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives. In the simplest sense literacy practices are what people do with literacy” (p. 8). Literacy practices involve values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships. They have to do with how people in a particular culture construct literacy, how they talk about literacy and make sense of it.”

They are individual and social practices that create a social literacy sphere. Literacy practices create our values and rules about literacy, which then shape our social attitude of literacy and how we each feel it should be used in society or what our society’s level of literacy should be.  Yeah, it’s still really confusing.

 

This is where I got my info http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/rush/literacyevents.html