Szwed states that the 5 elements of literacy are text, context, function, participants, and motivation. Function is the purpose for why you may be reading or writing. It can be for religious practice, to occupy time, for directions, for school. It is about what you want to get out of it or why you need it to participate in your environment.
Szwed recommends a method of studying based on observing and understanding the person’s relationship with literacy. It is based on natural interaction with the environment and functioning society. It is ethnography by going past the basic understanding of literacy being based on what book someone can read or essay they can write and considers personal experience. It is more based in everyday reality.
I think that when Szwed says “we must come to terms with the lives of people without patronizing them,” he means that we often judge a person’s literacy based on what it would look like without any other factors besides reading and writing in a what might be considered a typical classroom, but there are many other strong influences. This is connected to ethnography because it is taking into account the background of the person as well as the contexts they are put in.
If I were a literacy instructor at a high school in the Bronx, to follow Szwed’s advice, I would have students take pictures if they can of signs or advertisements in whatever language they speak and bring it in to analyze it and respond to it. I would have the students write pretend emails to bosses.
According to Elizabeth Baker, the sociocultural perspective of literacy is the idea that literacy comes directly from culture and shifts alongside it. The four characteristics of literacy that Baker suggests we use are that literacy is semiotic, public, transitory, and product oriented. She suggests these based on how she saw a technology based classroom working. There were symbols, not much privacy with the internet/computers, websites were changing, and there was a goal in a lot of what they were coming across.
I learned from researching that literacy is about reading and writing while orality is about verbal communication. My understanding from this is that orality is used in the context of societies where reading and writing is not studied or well known, so their literacy is through speech.
One way our literacy practices are shaped by our communities or how we are raised is based on when we were beginning with literacy. Elizabeth Baker mentions how in the mid 1700s, reading was not for educational purposes and 1900s it was defined as simple understanding while now it is largely based on interactions over the internet and on technology.
Baker says that literacy standards are created by culture and time. Szwed talks about how these standards serve only a small amount of people and more likely from privileged groups, but that is not even necessarily consistent. They are assessed for cultural bias by observing the whole situation instead of just measuring reading and writing compared to others.
