The changing face of literacy
by Abigail Anderson
(published in Vie pédagogique – Numéro 149 – Décembre 2008)
In a scene from her novel The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison portrays her child-protagonist in the process of gouging out the eyes of a blonde, blue-eyed doll she has been given for Christmas. As she goes about the task, the child chants lines from the Sally, Dick and Jane reader that she had been given by her first grade teacher. It is an eerie juxtaposition for anyone who remembers the benign world of Sally, Dick and Jane readers. When asked about this scene in a recent interview, Morrison pointed out that her protagonist is surrounded by a parallel world to which she cannot gain entry; the characters of Sally, Dick and Jane epitomize that “parallel world,” a world of white, middle class families who stride confidently through their days and of children who are surrounded by toys, pets and doting adults. I should add that the Sally, Dick and Jane reading series, used in both the USA and Canada in the 1950s to teach reading to young children, was developed to standardize both the reading process itself as well as the teaching of reading. As President Eisenhower put it at that time, America needed something that would overcome “… the mediocrity of elementary school teachers and guarantee results.” As you might expect, the claims made for the success rate of basal reading series like Sally, Dick and Jane were unequivocal, but these claims overlooked the questions posed implicitly by Toni Morrison’s novel two decades later, namely: What is literacy? What is literacy for? Put another way, the literacy of the 1950s was viewed as a set of essential skills related exclusively to print, and it was closely connected to readers that would teach all children to read and write in the same way, thus assuring their success in higher education and in the working world. The young protagonist of The Bluest Eye, however, would have very likely failed to unlock the printed code in her Sally, Dick and Jane reader, since the predictability of the text was based on a common set of life experiences that she, as an Afro-American growing up in the 1950s in the poverty of an urban ghetto in the United States, would never know. And since (printed) texts were viewed as neutral at that time, it would not have occurred to even the most compassionate teacher that children in similar circumstances to that of Toni Morrison’s protagonist would be so compromised.
Today we understand that literacy is much more than a simple battery of decoding and encoding skills for working with print. Too, we are wrestling with what to do about texts in general–even for the very young–since we are beginning to see that no text is neutral. In 2008, we are able to understand the problem Sally, Dick and Jane posed for a non-white child in the 1950s, just as we know that it would remain a problematic text in the multicultural and multiethnic classrooms of today. And these two factors alone conspire to make the role of literacy teachers both more complex and more demanding than it was throughout most of the last century.
We live in a world that has been transformed by powerful information and multimedia technologies, a world of linguistically diverse, globalized societies characterized by radical changes to public and community life. In keeping with the view that literacy teaching, like language itself, must continue to ensure the participation of all of our students in public, community and economic life, a number of important principles have emerged in the work of literacy educators since the 1990s. Increasingly, the pedagogy of literacy is guided by the understanding that spoken, written and visual languages are modes or systems of representation. These systems design meanings and messages that are important currency in the world, constructing our view of reality and of ourselves. In other words, spoken, written and visual languages are both a medium of communication and social knowledge: language both designs and is designed, or shaped, by social and cultural realities. These “designs of meaning” directly influence our perceptions, values, beliefs and political orientations; they frame our attitudes by determining what is factual, objective and true. They present us with a plethora of gender and ethical issues, as in the use of women in television commercials and magazine ads to promote a variety of products, or the ethical dilemma of watching an infant die of starvation on our nightly television newscast. They are powerful instruments in the creation of propaganda and of social, cultural and economic inequalities. Texts that are constructed using any one representational mode, or a combination of modes, are anything but neutral.
To be functionally literate today, let alone critically literate, presupposes the development of reading and production skills in all three representational systems, as well as the capacity to use language to transact relationships in the world. To do this, the literate individual of the 21st century must be able to contend with texts that combine genres, media and modes. The literate individual of this century also requires the background and skills to recognize and evaluate the design(s) of meaning(s) in texts–which is less linguistic knowledge than it is social knowledge expressed through language–since to do otherwise risks becoming a passive consumer of other peoples’ ideas, viewpoints, ideologies, values and beliefs. It is worthwhile noting, as any quick computer search will reveal, that the “new look” of functional literacy is substantiated even at the level of basic employability skills by most countries around the world, including the Canadian Board of Trade.
What are some of the implications for literacy pedagogy raised by these factors? Certainly the first must be the importance of explicit instruction about why and how texts are constructed as they are. In this pedagogical context, the teachers’ own literacy is their strongest resource, since it enables them to harness their own understanding about and experience with texts in the service of their students. It needs to be stressed that looking at texts in this fashion is an interactive process, in which the teacher monitors and guides discussions about different texts, with a particular emphasis on making explicit connections between the function of the text (why it is used in the world/what it’s for) and the structures and features of the text (how it is made given its function in our society at this time). Notice that we are not looking at traditional content issues in the way we might, for example, discuss the plot of a novel. Rather, our focus here is on the deliberate construction of meaning(s) and/or message(s) and how they influence or affect us, i.e. their function. These functions include storytelling, the presentation of information, the construction of relationships from the most formal to the most intimate, and the construction of key social concepts, such as notions about time, power, gender and space, or boundaries. Connecting the function of a genre, or text, to how it is constructed is not only crucial to helping our students evaluate the way its meaning or message has been designed, but is also important social knowledge, since texts transact so much of the way in which we live in society and shape the way we understand our own identities. In both elementary and secondary school, teaching literacy begins with a conversation about how a text is constructed and how these textual elements allow the text to achieve its function, using model texts as examples. Following this conversation, the teacher reviews what has been discovered about text and function before either introducing another text of the same type to be read or a production activity, in which students will be asked to draw on their understanding in order to produce another text of the same type. It should also be understood that, whether students are asked to read or to produce a text that they have been studying in this manner, the activity needs to take place in a learning context, or situation, that includes specific information about audience, purpose and any other information the learner requires. For example, after examining the connection between structure, features and function(s) of a number of promotional posters, teachers introduce their students to a learning context where they will be asked to produce a promotional poster, in which information such as who will read it and what it is they want their readers to think, or do, is specified, i.e. the poster’s social function. Without this sort of attention to detail in the teacher’s pedagogy, students can easily make the assumption that texts are constructed and produced in an arbitrary fashion.
Another important consequence of reexamining our approach to literacy is the necessity of incorporating texts that draw on spoken, written and visual modes of representation, as well as combinations of image, sound and print into our students’ reading and production repertoires. Increasingly, the texts we encounter in everyday life are multimodal; even traditional written forms, such as the novel, have undergone deep structural changes over the last several decades in response to the increasingly multimodal environment of texts. However, daily exposure to multimodal and single-mode texts is not identical to developing the kind of multiliteracy required to think critically about them. The integration of reading and production activities is a powerful way to help students consolidate their learning as well as their critical reasoning skills. Production opportunities are also important because for much of the time spent with multimodal texts in our daily lives, we are construed as the target audience, rather than as the producer. When they are asked to become producers, students quickly discover that all meaning(s) and message(s) they encounter on the Internet, or on television or radio, were made by someone in a very conscious, deliberate fashion. As importantly, the production of a text also takes students into the different representational systems in a manner that allows them to experience directly how the system–in terms of its structures, features, codes and conventions–works. It is essential that the texts students are asked to explore in these ways match the experiential level and degree of conceptual awareness of the learner, since texts that are too distanced from a learner’s experience and development become almost impossible for them to read or produce critically. However, even the very youngest child can conduct this sort of study with a high degree of success by producing texts such as posters, personal photo-narratives and multimedia journals.
The preceding has looked more at how texts are made than the actual meanings and messages they convey. This final observation about literacy in the classroom focuses on the situatedness of meaning–the fact that any meaning or message contained in a text is designed by the particular sociocultural and/or historical and/or ideological context in which it is produced. Nor is the connection between meaning/message and context a kind of lock-step relationship. Precisely because all meanings/messages are situated in a context, their production redesigns, or alters, that context as well. What this implies on a very basic level is that there is a diversity of competing meanings and messages in the texts we encounter, be they in the context of the six o’clock news on one’s local television station, or in a debate on the topic of globalization, or within a novel we are reading. We experience this diversity of meaning perhaps most pointedly when we are forced to come to grips with two apparently irreconcilable realities, such as the conflict between indigenous peoples and mainstream opinion about the status of Columbus within American culture. This dimension of literacy pedagogy has less to do with resolving diverse meanings than it does with learning to recognize and anticipate the situatedness of all meanings and messages and taking this into account when we interpret their significance. It is this capacity that distinguishes critical thinking from all other kinds of thinking. Too, it is the capacity to “read” the situatedness of a text that makes critical thinking a cross-curricular skill, relevant to all fields of discipline and endeavor.
Teachers can play a key role here by providing opportunities for their students to discover the contextual elements that situate a meaning or message. An example of the form this might take in a classroom involves contrasting two news items from different sources that look at the same event, in an effort to account for different viewpoints, for differing information and for the ways in which the information is sequenced and/or organized to promote a different set of assumptions and to enhance its truth value. Other available texts, for beginning this kind of inquiry, include magazine and newspaper ads, television commercials, music videos, promotional posters, promotional Web sites and some public service announcements. In the case of magazine ads, for example, teachers encourage students to discover the motives of those who produced the ad, how the audience is targeted by the ad producers–images used, print that appeals to some aspect of the reader’s wants, values and beliefs, appropriateness of the magazine in which the ad appears, etc.–and whether or not the ad is effective. This type of textual inquiry demonstrates to students that meanings can be anticipated, questioned and re-designed. Once again, one sees how such a conversation about a magazine ad becomes a vital resource when students go on to construct magazine ads of their own and how making the reading-production connection allows them to consolidate their learning. As importantly, the capacity to situate meanings and messages is a hallmark of the literate individual who has learned to use his/her reading and production skills to go well beyond the surface of ideas, knowledge and information.
Abigail Anderson is the Curriculum Coordinator for English Language Arts at the Direction générale de la formation des jeunes of the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport and an adjunct professor at McGill University, Faculty of Education.
References
Cope, B. and M. Kalantzis. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Cope, B. and M. Kalantzis. The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
Kress, G. Literacy in the New Media Age, London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Lankshear, C. Changing Literacies, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1997.
Wilhelm, J. D., T. N. Baker and J. Dube Hackett. Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.