Hull: “Hearing Other Voices: A Critical Assessment of Popular Views on Literacy and Work”
Hull effectively lambastes those who would blame working class for the ills of the American economy by articulating some of the problems with a monolithic understanding of literacy and by showing that American workers do not lack literacy, even when they do lack school literacy. She points out the equivocation around terms like “literacy” and “basic skills.” Some of the articles and studies she quotes are amazingly vague and badly reasoned. One of my personal favorites is on page 664—the one that says that mechanics have to navigate so many more pages of text now to be able to fix any automobile on the road. I mean, how many mechanics can fix any car on the road? Since when does an increase in quantity equal an increase in complexity?
The “trend . . . to break complex work into a multitude of simpler repetitive jobs” in the workplace is analogous to the way that process composition methods break down writing into the smaller tasks like prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing (668). Perhaps the ideology of Taylorism still affects our thought about aspects of life other than the organization of the factory. The economic goal of efficiency has perhaps permeated composition theory. I’m having difficulty finding the words to convey what I’m trying to get at, but here’s my best shot: Maybe one reason we have broken writing down the way we have is because Taylorist values have become commonplaces in American ideology. The American vision of higher education has shifted focus from turning out liberally educated people (men) to turning out professionals, so it makes sense that an economic ideology like Taylorism would permeate our thinking to the degree that breaking down complex processes into “component tasks” seems perfectly natural.
Hull says that researchers have begun to investigate actual work situations” rather than “assuming that poor performance in school subjects necessarily dictates poor performance on related tasks at work” (671). To this I would add that perhaps we should attribute high percentages of “poor performance” at schools as signs that something’s wrong with the system of education rather than with teachers and/or students.
I could go on and on about this article. I really liked it. I think Hull makes a lot of sensible observations, and there are a lot of analogues between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in business. I think that the stuff I said about Taylorism is relevant to the similarities. I know that this week’s articles are probably supposed to get us thinking about workplace writing, but I just find myself relating everything to teaching. I guess I’m just so immersed in my paper that I’m having a hard time getting out of the classroom this week!
Peace to all.
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You're right to be critical of the tendency to reduce process pedagogy into discrete steps. But we've read stuff this semester that is similarly cautionary. That is, Connors hisotries of writing isntruction warn against the over-simplification of any pedagogy. Textbooks tend to do this. And (untrained) teachers tend to want this. We'll be reading an article on Post-Process theory that makes teh same critique.
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