5. According to E. Baker, sociocultural perspective marries literacy with culture as the concept of literacy shifts around different cultures. She suggests we use 4 characteristics of literacy to define it. Literacy is semiotic (uses symbols and signs like Powerpoint, graphs, etc in order to communicate information), public (peer to peer contact), transitory (with constantly shifting content and knowledge as new websites, books, and articles are released), and product-oriented (focuses more on the outcomes of learning and less on the process of learning itself.
6. Orality and literacy are very different methods of communicating stories or information. Orality can be more aggregative than analytic as people had to recant everything from memory. Thus, they used poems, parallel terms, epithets, and other repetitive, descriptive language in order to remember the details. This is different from the physical aspect of writing because when you write, you’re able to loop back around if you lose the context of what you’re reading/writing. Orality lacks the permanence of physical literacy, so communication is often slower and more thought through.
7. Socioeconomic conditions determine allocation of resources, finances, and quality of teachers. This has been proven to have an affect on the rate of incarceration and cause higher income disparity.
8. Cultural bias is assessed by investigating how the means of literacy standard created were formulated and who they serve. Most often, literacy standards serve as a way to keep poor people in the loop of poverty and wealthy people in a position to continue benefitting off the work of those in poverty. E BAKER: “For any text, oral or written or imaginal, we can ask, who (or whose perspective) is represented, who is marginalized, and who is just plain absent?” Standardized testing is a great example of a common American literacy standard. School districts with fewer resources aren’t going to be able to give their students a fair chance to outperform other students with more resources. Using those numbers as a basis to judge students in such a generalized way ignores the socioeconomic factors that contribute to test scores.
