1) According to Szwed, the five elements of literacy are text, function, context, participants, and motivation. Context is the idea that reading occurs for various reasons. Szwed uses the examples of bedside reading, educational reading, reading to children, etc. He expands on this idea and explains that the definition of literacy must include context because skill is affected by the context in which someone is reading.
2) Szwed recommends studying ethnography because he believes that it is the “only means for finding out what literacy really is and what can be validly measured” (427). Ethnography is an approach to social sciences that relies on individuals and their experiences. So, by implementing this in our approach to literacy, we would be factoring in individuals and their needs, rather than treating everyone as one.
3) When Szwed states that “we must come to terms with the lives of people without patronizing them,” he is stating that literacy is not a binary practice, and to build a literate society, we must be understanding of the needs and background of others.
4) Approaching literacy in a different dialect can be quite daunting and challenging to connect to, if not difficult to understand. Szwed emphasized the importance of involving bilingual/multidialectal instructors in communities where the general population speaks a different language/dialect. So, teaching literacy in the Bronx may require literature that uses more casual parlance than the classic literature used in American education.
5) According to Perry, the two models of literacy are autonomous and ideological. These two can most easily be contrasted as skill versus practice. Autonomous literacy is simply the ability to read and write whereas ideological literacy is how one approaches literacy. I believe that both models are important. While the ability to read and write is important, those skills don’t mean anything without an understanding of the world around you.
8) It has become clear that the term “literacy” is obsolete, however, literacy standards are as prevalent as ever. It is a widely accepted fact that if someone is illiterate — unable to read and write — they will have less success in life. It is also known that the highest rates of illiteracy in the US exist among impoverished minority communities. But what these two facts fail to acknowledge are the circumstances under which they came to be. Szwed states that “book culture” came from the “small, well-educated elite; [with] considerable spatial and temporal privacy” (425). In other words, the literacy standard in the US comes from a class that had time for leisure in a society where poor communities had to prioritize work to survive and therefore weren’t given the same opportunities to access literature.
