Week of 4/21

Heath: “Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions”

I agree with Heath’s claim that the universalist and positivist assumptions of the scholarship that was current in 1982 needed to be interrogated. But some of the questions she asks surely were being addressed by scholars in other fields at the time (Marxist cultural critique, for instance). The answers to others seem (and would have seemed at the time) pretty damned obvious to me. Of course “modern society contain[s] certain conditions which restrict literacy just as some traditional societies do”! Even in 1982 we were aware that economic inequalities (and injustices) affected literacy development. We knew that schools were differentially funded, that kids came to school more or less well-nourished, etc.

After I could see beyond my fury at those who refused to allow people to negotiate documents themselves, I realized that that particular episode revealed to me the biggest difficulty I had with Heath’s article: The way her attempt to be non-judgmental and objective prevented her from drawing all of the conclusions she might have, especially given that she set out to discern whether “modern society contain[s] certain conditions which restrict literacy just as some traditional societies do” (445). Just the way American society is characterized—“modern,” rather than capitalist, industrial, or a host of other conceptualizations that would have more accurately reflected the economic context—obfuscates the link between economic regulation of the worker and the ways literacy was restricted in Trackton. It made the limiting seem a merely local. Like it was just some people who work in a particular factory who patronized the workers in this way because it was more convenient. Instead, I read this interaction as characteristic of capital’s regulation, discipline, and control of the working class. In fact, it represents working-class self-regulation and control, the manifestation of what Habermas calls “false consciousness.” And that’s pretty disturbing to me.

The paucity of written materials produced in this working-class community reinforces what I said a few weeks ago about the Dias et al. article: Most people don’t have jobs that require that they produce documents. They may have to write, but writing and producing documents are not the same thing.

I was intrigued by the idea that solitary reading can carry connotations of anti-sociality. It makes sense of my mother’s oft-repeated admonition that I should put the book down and go out and play with somebody. Her observations about group reading and meaning-making could have significant implications for the way we teach writing, because they imply that working together can invest the meaning-makers with authority—and McCarthy’s observations of David certainly bear that out.

I am quite sympathetic, however, to the idea that literacy and orality overlap. I’ve long thought that the distinction between orality and literacy was too strongly drawn, that the relationship between them is dialectical. Aren’t orality and literacy mutually constitutive? This insight is, I think an important contribution to both composition and literary scholarship, and Heath’s observations provide good evidence that this is the case.

Brandt: “Sponsors of Literacy”

Brandt’s Bourdieuvian contextual analysis satisfied me a lot more than did Heath’s. Probably not surprising given how much more recent the article is. I’ve been working for years with one of the biggest literacy sponsors in the US: Literacy Volunteers. Still, I’d never considered that LVA (Literacy Volunteers of America) might “gain advantage . . . in some way” by sponsoring literacy (166). So, I started doing some research about the LVA group I worked with in Buffalo. What I found was that those who serve on its Board of Directors also serve on the boards of other, less benign institutions. I began to consider the kind of cultural capital that accrues to those who do volunteer work and those who we perceive as enabling those who do volunteer work to do it. I suspect that many of the people who sit on the LVA Buffalo board are aware of the enhancement that accrues to their reputations because they sit on the boards of benevolent/philanthropic institutions. Even though I don’t have time right now, I want to do some research into who funds LVA. I bet the funding comes from major corporations at the national level and from local corporations at the local level. Better, more efficient workers, anyone? Even as a reading instructor, I was trained to emphasize the advantages that would accrue to those I tutor—these are the incentives Brandt talks about—well, some of them, anyway. Advantages like being able to fill out a job application and to read the notices around the break room. Being me, I talk about other stuff, but that’s kind of irrelevant here, I think.

I’m questioning the kinds of “ideological freight” that the methods we’re trained to use carry. For instance, we’re trained to use only whole language approaches to teaching reading and writing. But I’ve found that it doesn’t work as well as a combination of phonetics and whole language, so I depart from the standard and do what seems to work. But I wonder who benefits from the limited literacy that students acquire through whole-language approaches and whether any of the beneficiaries are represented by the board’s membership.

But this is a limited understanding of the “sponsorship” concept. The contrast between Raymond and Dora makes the social, political, and economic layers of sponsorship clearer. Even access to sponsorship positions is mediated and regulated by other, more powerful sponsors. And what we have to read can be formative of political positions and ideological presuppositions we embrace (174). And Brandt demonstrates well the ways in which literacy becomes a means by which corporate practices (and thus the ideologies that undergird them) enter the home and individual consciousness.

When Brandt began to discuss appropriating other people’s literacies to adapt to new contexts, I began to consider what literacies we can adapt to the FYC class, and how we can best introduce them. Brandt’s descriptions of Carol and Sarah indicate, I think, that modeling is useful, even though other research we read earlier in the semester seemed to indicate that it was not. It seems to me that the difference lies between providing belletristic essays as models for students expected to engage academic discourse, and providing models whose structures can be adapted for relevantly similar contexts. The success of the latter (McCarthy saw some success with this, too) and lack of success of the former, combined with Heath’s findings that students come to think of themselves as writers when we take their writing seriously indicates to me that the best models for our students are their own writing.

McCarthy: A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum”

I think that there are some other factors that should probably be considered before any generalizations are made about male students in general on the basis of this observation. First, as my first sentence should make clear, I’m not sure we can extrapolate anything about how women learn from observing how a man does. Although McCarthy mentions that David took the Composition class with male friends who were also in his group, she doesn’t mention whether he had male friends in the Poetry class. David took Poetry with his girlfriend, we know, but we do not know if she (or whomever he was involved with romantically) was in the Composition class. Here’s the thing: Sedgwick and others have shown that one primary way American males establish public masculinity and homosocially bond is through competition with other males. That could have been a factor in a class in which David worked so closely with other males, especially males with whom David had already bonded. Regarding the Poetry class, I wonder how much internalized ideologies of masculinity and gender set David up for failure in a class in which he had no male competitors. Moreover, we do not know how his girlfriend did in that class. If she did better than he, I think we should ask how much his failure to perform as he would have liked had to do with the idea that men aren’t good at poetry, with the fear of feminization. Now, I’m not saying that these are conscious processes. I don’t claim to know how the unconscious works in these situations. I’m just trying to point out social factors that also have fingured into David’s (un)successful performances in different contexts. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I think researchers all too often try to apply findings from data collected from observing one sex to the other, and that might not always be legitimate, whether for social or neurophysiological reasons.

McCarthy does provide some useful information for those of us who want to teach. For instance, that “Dave’s characteristic approach across courses was to focus so fully on the particular new ways of thinking and writing in each setting that commonalities with previous writing were obscured for him” (245) tells us that we may need to point out explicitly the connections and commonalities between different writing situations. It seems that having students write summaries might be a useful way to get students to stick their toes into new discourse communities. That Dave relied so on material texts as he wrote ought to tell us something—I’m just not sure what it is. Dr. Forson’s admission that his responses to student papers were designed to allow him to justify grades tells us one way we might want to avoid commenting on papers. And it seems that we also learn something really obvious from him: give the students a chance to respond to your comments; not doing so is to deny the dialogic dimension of writing.

Peace to all.