Summary
The five elements of literacy according to Szwed are: text, context, function, participants and motivation. I selected text to go in more detail because I believe it is fundamental for our society and it has become an element of everyday use in technology with all the platforms that exist today where people are able to communicate by writing texts and reading them. Texts have changed in many different ways over the years like for example we now can use text messages, as its own name claims it. People write and read knowledge, ideas, opinions, news, greetings, expressions, feelings, behaviors, stories. All of it should be considered and studied. Szwed recommended the ethnography method in order to study literacy to find out what it truly is and how it can be measured because he considered it as the only instrument strong enough to gather and collect the information needed from society in order to be able to properly clarify the doubts out there. From my point of view he means that we can understand the lives of people and study them without getting in no one side as to why they have the life they have or decide to do the things they do. Come to terms in a neutral way. I will encourage my students to identify their weaknesses and strengths in a list when writing and reading because this will help understand what needs to be worked on and also will be useful to recognize the potential of their differences. The two models of literacy according to Perry are as follows: The autonomous model and the ideological model. They different in the fact that the ideological model sees literacy as a set of practices and the autonomous model looks at it as a set of skills. I believe the ideological model is better because it seems more realistic. I learned that orality is defined as the quality of being spoken or verbally communicated and that literacy as said before is the ability of communicating with others around us through writing and reading.
2 thoughts on “Murphy Cabrera – Conversation 2”
Orality in “Orality vs Literacy” also implies a world with lacking economic value and little stability. Your details of text are missing some examples from the work by John F. Swed. The use of ethnography has it’s advantages due to contrasting from surveys and questionnaires, which lack specifically made tools for accuracy. Your method of teaching students might not be good due some students not being able to actually explain that information easily. It’s hard to tell someone you’re good at reading for long periods or that you don’t use writing in leisure times.
It is most likely that an extremality poor and resource deficient country would lack on literacy, making orality it’s better alternative. Therefore, the definition I decided to share on my post. There is not wrong or right answer to the question that was asked to us on topic (What did you learn from researching the term “orality versus literacy?”). One’s learning could be different from some else’s and that is completely fine.
My focus on giving for detail about “Text” is to point out how using Szwed ideas we can see that as he mentioned the standard that we know should not be the only ones taken into consideration. Text has changed a lot from years back and this is the point that I wanted to expand on my answer.
In reference to your comment of what ethnography is lacking on, I appreciate your response, but this is not what was asked to us. The question focuses on Swzed view. He considers this method at the best regardless of anything else.
I do not see how helping students identify their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to writing and reading or actually anything else that you could think of not good. Therefore, I have to disagree with you. When we know ourselves, we are able to make better choices on our lives therefore our quality of life improves.