Notes on Literacy

For my first unit in my composition course, I’ve decided to have students analyze and write their own literacy narratives. We’re spending the first week of class or so figuring out what a “literacy narrative” is, so I thought I might post some ideas here while I think it through for myself.

Questions
1. What does it mean to be literate? I just read David Russell’s introduction to Writing in the Academic Disciplines, and he writes, “”Literacy is thus a function of the specific community in which certain kinds of reading and writing activities take place … As Brazilian sociolinguist Terezina Carrahar notes, a professor may, without irony, express pleasure that her maid is ‘literate’ because she can barely decode recipes and take down phone messages, but complain that her students are ‘illiterate’ because they do not yet understand the conventions of written discourse in her discipline” (13). (We’re gonna go ahead and breeze through the idea that a professor could ever make enough money to hire a maid to take phone messages, and while we’re at it, we’ll forget about the complicated ethics of such a decision.)
2. How do different people/groups define literacy? What is the link between literacy and community?
3. What different kinds of literacies are there? Whenever I am around new people (as I have been recently), I often try to evaluate their pop-culture literacy, because pop culture is important to me and because I make a lot of pop culture references. In fact, even in writing this blog I’ve thought about how literate my readership is with respect to the various references I’m making. In this way, I’m sort of defining literacy as “knowing stuff about stuff” but more specifically in reference to people who read entertainment news, watch TV and movies, etc.
4. Who is our “best” audience for our writing? People who are literate in the same way we are? One of my pet peeves is people who randomly quote movie or TV show lines and then just stare at you as thought you’re supposed to know what they’re talking about. One of my favorite things though, is when people make those references and I get them. It’s like we’re sharing a literacy! So part of knowing your audience is knowing their literacy.
5. What literacies do I have? (Note: Word put a squiggly red line under “literacies”)
6. A literacy narrative is basically a story about language, speech, reading, or writing and learning. How does the style of the narrative reflect the literacy being explained?
7. Are most literacy narratives stories of failure or success?
8. How do we measure literacy?
9. Are some literacies valued more than others?