Literacy Elitism

Last class we heard about the ImpaCT 2 findings in England that linked the amount of time students spend using network technologies with their attainment in different content areas. I couldn’t help but wonder if some of their findings were a correlation rather than a causal relationship. I do believe that networked technologies can affect students attainment but only if they are used in the correct way. I think this is why he found that in some schools and some subject areas technology did not have an affect on attainment. I see teachers using technology just to use it or to say that they use it. They do not use it effectively and it has no effect on the students learning. Sometimes it even encumbers learning. Technology should be used in the classroom only when it helps to meet learning goals.

He also brought up an important point that parents need to be more aware of what their children are doing on the internet. They need to know what they are learning and exactly how they are spending their leisure time. What are their children being exposed to? Who are they interacting with? Something as harmless looking as an online video game with cartoon looking characters can expose children to adults that are unconcerned about the content of their discussions and who is a part of them. The conversation posted in the blog below is tame compared to some of the conversations I have heard my guild members have in vent. This would be fine if we were all adults but we do have a couple of miners who talk on vent. The youngest of which is 15. Their parents should be aware of this. If they were aware of it I believe they would not approve.

Our class discussion also centered on textualization. I had never thought about how telling a story was so different from conversation and more like text. When I told my husband about the books he should read we had to entextualize the story. First I had to set up a space for myself to talk by asking him to let me tell him about the books I had read. He had to agree to let me talk and tell my story. I then told him a story that was told so that it could have been lifted out of the context and retold. Though there were still contextual clues in the story and it was dependent on the context it was told in.

If my husband decided to he wanted to tell someone else about the books I had read. He would also first need to make a space of time for him to speak. He would then decontextualize my story or take it out of the context it was told in. In his mind he may revise some of what I said in order to lift it out of the context. He would need to fill in any gaps left because of taking the story out of the context it was told in.

My husband would then need to recontextualize the story to fit it to the context he was telling it in. He might stress different aspects of the story depending on his audience. He might make reference to common experiences with his audience or to the setting of the story telling.

Olsen writes about text and its relationship to humans and society. He throws out a lot of the beliefs and cliques that western culture has created about text. He debunks the mythology of text. He discusses 6 deeply held beliefs society has about text that he says current scholarship has cast doubt on.


These beliefs and doubts are:
1. Writing is the transcription of speech – only certain properties of what is said is captured.
2. The superiority of writing to speech – writing is dependent on and secondary to speech, oral language is the main tool of the mind
3. The superiority of the alphabetic writing system – an aspect of our mythology and is limited in use, especially with homophones, other cultures been just as or more successful with different writing systems
4. Literacy is the organ of social progress – it is a mean of enslavement, domination and social control
5. Literacy is an instrument of cultural and scientific development – many great nations developed though dialectic or oral cultures, Greece was primarily oral not textual
6. Literacy is an instrument of cognitive development – you can’t connect means of communication to the knowledge communicated, reading ability depends on content, functional literacy depends on ones life

Until reading this book I held these same beliefs. This writing made me examine my beliefs about literacy. I never realized that my beliefs about literacy could be part of a western superiority complex and elitism. I realized that I am more ethnocentric than I believed. I question what this means for teaching literacy in schools and the importance society places on literacy as a tool students must learn while in school. What are we losing by emphasizing literacy?