Szwed’s 5 elements are literacy are texts, context, function, participants, and motivation. Quite simply, I think the element I think about the most has to be context: the situations in which one is reading or writing something. I have begun to pay extra attention to the contexts around the media I consume in which I no longer simply take things at face value, but question what is their grander place within everything. Why am I reading this book, why did the author include that detail, what has led me to read this and the author to write this?
Szwed recommends studying literacy through the lens of ethnography, in which the background of each individual, more fluid definitions of literacy that take place within cultural and individuals context, to allow for both a more proper as well as more informative and quality information.
Quite simply, we must objectively meet each person where they stand and be aware of the circumstances that led them to where they are in literacy, without infantilizing or making them feel as if we view them as lesser or we feel some sort of pity for them.
I think the first thing I would do is acknowledge my position as an outsider and come in with no assumptions, including but not limited to their level of base skills within literacy, as well as how they perceive me as a teacher. I then would proceed to learn to understand a) who they as individuals are, b) where each individual as at with base skills along with full literacy, and c) where each individual is in their life and what they would like to learn in my class this year. I’d then collect that information and reflect upon myself and how best I could teach them all, and then build them up from where they are to where they want to be, as well as push them to be a little bit higher than what any of them could imagine for themselves, even if the class is filled with the brightest students on the planet Earth.
Autonomous literacy vs. “new” or literacy as social function. The biggest difference is that autonomous is a static set of learnable skills that are pure neutral and without context, while new literacy is based in practices and focusing on a sense of non-neutrality and context within them. I’m not clueless to the truths of society, nothing in life and society is truly static, neutral, and especially never in a vacuum, so I believe new literacy is obviously better than the given alternative.
Orality, more than anything, separates itself from literacy in the fact that there is no written record and therefore everything has two states: additive or imaginative, where prior information is added upon or new information is made, or reiteratory, in which prior information is agonizingly repeated to keep traditionalism or conservatism. Literacy can be similar in ways, however lacks such agony within creating and spreading redundant information which can lead to less of a sense of traditionalism or social conservatism created by such attitudes. However, without the heavy lean into additive and imaginative creation spurred by orality, literate societies could have some sense of redundancy, which may be simple a trade-off for society to be no longer forced to follow a singular path due to an agonizing sense of disappearance of ideas.
In my personal life, nobody ever challenged my reading habits in any meaningful way and that was a lot due to the fact that I grew up firstly in suburban working class Pennsylvania, where more than anything I learned the sentiment of what the word “aggressively mediocre” was in terms of educational goals for students. I would only learn that great term on an 8th grade field trip to Washington D.C., where a friend used the term to more than anything to describe how aggressively mediocre it was with the group of friends he had chosen to go with, in which I agreed for different reasons. What we did agree on wholeheartedly however was how we were reading way under in classes, and whilst he grew up in an upper-class CT family which meant for him that he decided to read his own books in his free time and simply sparknotes’d the books in class. Meanwhile, me being of that Pennsylvanian variety, I simply decided to be a “good student,” and read the books as boring as they may have been, which probably pushed back my reading insights for a good bit. As Szwed says, I was simply born into a community in which literacy was seen as something “elite,” rather than a human gift and a pure pleasure, a product of outdated “book culture.”
My stepmother is creating the literacy standards for her entire middle school in which she realized, quite frankly, that cultural bias is not assessed in your average standards meeting or ever even thought about in creating standards. I’m really not sure who they serve because neither student nor teacher is served at all by standards that completely ignore cultural bias. Outside of education of course, Szwed makes it very clear who makes literacy standards which are the ones who are at the top of societal ladders, such as businesses talking with each other, bosses creating rules of writing for their staff, and least appreciated is communications between people within a community which, in my opinion and Szwed’s likely, is much more important in the big picture than the more ‘formal’ or ‘standard’ standards.
