Nicolle Carela – Conversation 2

Summary

The five elements Szwed mentioned in his article are: text, function and context plus participants and motivation. I want to go more in detail on “The why and under what circumstances is reading and writing done” (Function and context). He points out how minimal information there is about the way reading and writing works for us. These skills are not standard therefore they behave differently among societies. He believes that the day to day of each individual matters and should be counted in order to make the needs of literacy addressed properly. When taking into account all the diversity that exists in the circumstances that make one write or read, we will be better prepared to understand what literacy really stands for.
Ethnography is the method that Szwed recommends because he claims that ethnography methods are the only ones that truly work to find out what literacy is for real and also how it is measured. He means that we have to use ethnography not by just looking at one of its elements but to look at it as a whole. And to not judge the lives of the people because they are different. That writing and reading are not standard, but they change by economic factors, work and much different conditions.
I would make their day-to-day life matter when it comes to writing and reading. Understanding their society and themselves will make the understanding of literacy and how it affects us. Since there is not only one way of understanding literacy. They could be able to understand how interrelated the aspects of our societies are with how literacy is being used by them.
The two models of Literacy according to Perry are:
The autonomous model.
The ideological model.
The main difference between them is the source they are coming from and how the information is being collected. The autonomous model sees literacy as a set of neutral, decontextualized skills that can be applied in any situation. The ideological model on the other hand sees literacy as a set of practices. In my opinion none of them is better and we both play an important role and could easily complement each other.
I learned that orality refers to the ability to communicate verbally while literacy is the ability to communicate through reading and writing. With this said orality is used by those that do not have a strong literacy relationship. I also learned that there’s actually a book about this topic.
These practices are shaped by the different types of literacy and its uses among different types of communities. In the article Szwed mentions poor literacy teaching that shaped our literacy practices today, for example, not taking into account the background of individuals, another one could be the fact that classrooms are overcrowded making it closely impossible to focus and really absorb what is being teach.
These standards are created by the same societies whom they serve, they are created from assumptions of how things should be but not really taking into account all aspects. They are assessed for cultural bias because they are being used to judge communities just for their cover and how they look without looking more deeply at where they are coming from. One reference from this week's reading could be the example given in the article by Szwed where he mentioned how when an individual does not read let say a magazine, we just tend to assume that this person does not or cannot read without looking at the possibility that the individual could perfectly read let’s say a map.