My Perspective on Theories & Models of Literacy Class

ENGL B6400 has been the first class I have ever attended focusing on literacy. To me, it has provided an invaluable overview on the development of the alphabet, the diffusion of literate skills, the tensions between orality and literacy, the notion of sponsor linked to the diffusion of literacy, thus the political value of possessing literate skills as linked to the reasons and modalities of diffusion of the alphabet.

As a foreign student of American culture and literature, I have also found this class extremely relevant to have a better, clearer, and in-depth understanding of the American society in regard to concepts such as multiculturalism, race, power relations between groups, cultural tensions. ENGL B6400 has given me very important insights on the complexities of the American society as a postcolonial and neo-colonial reality, where education plays or can play a very important and complex role either in assimilationist or in multicultural directions. Besides, as an Italian, I have found this course inspiring to understand the changes my country is undergoing now that many groups and communities from other countries are coming to work and live in Italy. As I would love to take part to teaching classes to immigrants, I am happy to have been made so aware of the problematic implications of integration through education, and of the importance of encouraging learners to express themselves through literacy, that is, to use literacy in ways that are first and foremost relevant to them. Indeed, my own understanding of literacy as the “true” means to free people has been somehow quenched by placing literacy in context, and valuing it consequently.

Even if I have found meaningful almost all the readings I have done for this class, the most interesting ones have been those on orality vs literacy (Ong, Goody); those on the idea of emergent literacy (Purcell-Gates et al.); and those on multicultural rhetoric. I have also found the idea of the sponsors of literacy (Brandt) extremely helpful in connecting the first part of the course (on the reasons of the diffusion of the alphabet) to the second part of it (on literacy in contemporary America).

I will definitely use the framework of literacy in the States to go on with my literature studies, and I am interested in exploring better the “divide” orality/literacy, which I perceive as a false dichotomy. In respect to the idea of literacy and the web 2.0, I think it is extremely interesting but I need to read more on that, in order to soothe the little bit of scepticism that I have on it. Indeed, discovering that American education is mostly based on writing and does not encourage oral practices a lot at a high school or college level, has made me think that students may also voice their rhetorical practices through more accessible and cheap media as their own voices in the classroom. Yet, the idea of online literacy is deeply valuable because of its hinging on aurality and intertextuality, beside the fact that it implies the need to be conversant with web technologies – I just think educators would want to make sure that web technologies are not mistaken for an end in itself, and keep their status as means to attain critical consciousness.