What is Literacy, Anyway?
‘Literacy’ is an interesting thing. When I was in primary school, I did English work – writing stories, drawing story maps and practising my handwriting to write out good copies. I did English as a subject through high school and college – until suddenly something changed and I was learning about ‘literacy’ at university. Now, my nieces talk about their ‘literacy block’ at school, even though six-year-old Alice can hardly pronounce the word.
So, what’s changed? Mostly, it’s the idea of what one needs to learn to really be literate; what one needs to know to be able to operate in society (Emmitt, Komesaroff and Pollock, 2006). It’s not just about being able to read stodgy literature or figure out whether road sign says ‘Hobart’ or ‘Devonport’. The world has opened a plethora of texts that viewers need to be able to understand, manipulate and criticise (ACT Department of Education and Training, 2009) – movies, music, or even YouTube videos and twitter posts are just a few of the more common texts that one may interact with on any given day.
Nearly forty years ago, researchers Postman and Weingartner told us that we need to educate students to have a “fool-proof, built-in crap detector” (1971, in Campbell and Green, 2008, p.21). Since then, we have been granted access to vast amounts of information that isn’t guaranteed, or even required, to be accurate or in any way reliable. It’s not just the much-maligned Wikipedia that has this problem, either. Have you ever read an opinion piece in the newspaper and wondered where the columnist got their information? Or have you ever checked your phone to find a text message that says “be gone soon” instead of “be home soon” and wondered whether it was a threat or a promise?
The point is, simply teaching children how to read and understand printed texts isn’t enough anymore. We need to make our students critical thinkers who can interpret the context, culture, purpose and motive behind a text and use that to their advantage, whether they are the creators or the viewers. (MCEETYA, 1997, from ACT Department of Education and Training, 2009). That’s why Alice’s prep teacher implements a ninety minute literacy block every morning, and why my nieces can tell me all about a word that I didn’t learn until I was at least seventeen.
So, tell me… Is it important to teach children how to understand texts that aren’t books? Do we really need to be explicitly taught how to watch a movie or listen to a song?
March 26th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
yes, yes and yes. Propaganda is so easy to use to manipulate people with various media. I know a lot of individuals say “oh you read too much into things, someones picture of a boat is a boat” but you know… sometimes the boat is titanic, which has the subtext of irony, greed, human fallacy (and other wanky stuff :-p).
Anyway, my point is, if you give people critical skills for interpretation, they are able to view various themes/ideas and readings from it. I know when I write pieces of fiction I leave little extra stuff in there for subtext for depth/easter eggs for fun/grammar tricks and ticks/irony, and it usually never gets brought up by other people. But it’s something that does happen, and I’m confident alot of (professional and much better) writers do it too. Pieces are influenced by the person’s own experiences and the time they live in, and it shows. So I phooey to people who say subtext is jus people looking too much at nothing.
So yes again. :-p
March 28th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
Well said!
I used to scoff at the teachers who told me that author X put this in his text for a particular reason… sometimes it does seem like a long shot, and you’d like your English Studies teachers to let you make your own decisions about why (or even if!) Mrs. Dalloway died.
And maybe the original Dukes of Hazzard would seem a lot more douche-baggy if we didn’t apply our knowledge of the time it was set in, and the political and social conventions at the time – see, it’s not just canonical texts that this principle can be applied to!
Also: Sometimes the boat is a tiny fishing boat that piled too many animals into it, until THE MOUSE SANK THE BOAT!
March 28th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
I recently had to write an essay, much like this post- on an article which criticised the contemporary approach to literacy. It was actually fun to write about a topic that I wasn’t at all familiar with.
The article derided contemporary approaches to literacy as “jargon based, feel good, outcomes based, post modern, marxist” among other things. It baulked at how students in the modern classroom learned how “to read text messages and analyse the Simpsons”. Anyway I wrote my essay and desperately wanted you to give some feedback on it, but you weren’t online just prior to submission (Lucky Anna!).
While writing the essay I too was left a little puzzled at the consideration, ‘what is literacy’, I mean on the one hand I thought I always knew what literacy was- it’s English: learning to read and write. But then when I started to research this assignment and I was left with a much more ambiguous understanding of what literacy was and how it should be taught in Australia.
March 28th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Oh, I would’ve loved to read your essay!! (send it to me anyways? hehe) It would’ve helped me write this one!
Who said outcomes-based is bad?! Do we not want our children to have an outcome in their learning? Sheesh. For some reason the media hates how literacy is being implemented – if we were still teaching the old methods, maybe they’d tell us to get our act together and learn some new theories!
Besides that, if we do teach children to read texts and analyse the Simpsons – isn’t that giving them access to the texts that they will use and interact with on a day-to-day basis? What percentage of primary school students will use skills more than that? The ones that do will have a strong base to build their deeper knowledge on!
I wonder, though… if you’d just read that article without researching it, what would your reaction be? I bet it made a good argument!
March 29th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Interestingly, The Simpsons is sometimes one of the best shows for social commentary (later seasons maybe not so much…but still there). It’s biting, and has some good subtext to its jokes at times. Sounds like the article is assuming that just because it’s a family comedy it can’t be smart or have depth… which is just stupid.