An evolving definition of Literacy

When I began this course in September, I had actually not given the definition of literacy much thought. To be literate in my view was to have the ability to read and write language. Other forms of literacy exist. We often hear the term "computer literacy" which refers to the amount of working knowledge one has with computers. There is also musical literacy; written music shares the term "literature" with written language. So, I had heard these terms before, and had a basic idea of what they meant.

From there I have decided that there are different degrees of literacy. Being able to write one's name is a form of literacy, and so is being able to write a graduate thesis, but there is quite a bit of room in between. In the assigned reading so far we have seen very basic literacy develop in the Anne Ruggles Gere article. Writers who may have been discouraged from writing in academia write in workshops and are evaluated by their peers. They acquire literacy in this fashion. The feedback from their peers offers an opportunity to expand and improve literacy.

From Gere we read Eubanks and Schaeffer and Bartholomae who took on the subject of academic writing directly. They posited that academic writing is full of difficult jargon and dense, complicated sentence structure that somehow, someway makes academic writing Very Good and not bullshit at all. If the writers have acquired that level of literacy that is, otherwise they are full of it. Bartholomae suggested new methods of teaching at the college level to help the poor struggling academic illiterate develop this literacy.

Along comes Gee. Gee seems to agree with my current belief that there are different levels (degrees) of literacy. He calls them Discourses. Discourses are acquired, not through classroom learning as suggested by Bartholomae, but through saying-writing-doing-being-valuing-believing. He suggests that to live outside of a Discourse is to be unable to acquire that Discourse, or level of literacy. Gee is taken to task here by Lisa Delpit who gives examples of minority students in poverty who acquired literacy on other Discourses within the school environment.

To me, at this point in the semester, literacy is a level of working knowledge. How literacy is acquired is a tougher question. We have read several viewpoints on this and none of them may be right, and there is very little actual evidence given to support the positions given. My opinion, right now, is that how literacy is acquired may very well vary well, depending on the individual.