Anne Frances Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola: "Blinded
by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?"
(19)
| "When we speak of 'technological literacy,' then, or of 'computer literacy' or of '[fill-in-the-blank] literacy,' we probably mean that we wish to give others some basic, neutral, context-less set of skills whose acquisition will bring the bearer economic and social goods and privileges." (352) |
In Chapter 19, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola
trouble the god-term literacy, asking in the first part of this chapter,
"What are we likely to carry with us when we ask that our
relationship with all technologies should be like that we have with the
technology of printed words?" (349). According to their argument, when
we approach digital literacies in the same way we approach print literacies,
we are treating literacy as though it were neutral and value-free.
Neither literacy nor technology, as the writers in this volume have demanded
again and again, are value-free. To treat literacy as a discrete set of
basic skills is to perpetuate the Myth
of Literacy and the normalizing forces of literacy education.
| "'We think,' writes Glenda Hull, 'of reading and writing as generic,
the intellectual equivalent of all-purpose flour, and we assume that, once
mastered, these skills can and will be sued in any context for any purpose,
and that they are ideologically neutral and value-free' (34)."
"'. . . most people in education and communication are comfortable using the term "literacy" for [describing a relation to print, visual objects, television, and computer] because the various literacies have in common the image of people able to use symbol systems and the media or technologies in which they are instantiated in order to express themselves and to communicate with others, to do so effectively, and to do so in socially desirable ways' (Aimee Dore, "What Constitutes Literacy in a Culture with Diverse and Changing Means of Communication?" 145)." both quoted in Wysocki
and Johnson-Eilola 352
|
The second part of
this chapter considers the following question: If the term "literacy" is
inadequate, then "What other possibilities might we use for expressing
our relationships with and within technologies" (349)? As alternatives,
Wynsocki and Johnson-Eilola remind us of Pratt's "linguistic contact zones,"
Giroux's "border spaces," and Anzaldua's "borderlands." Wynosocki and Johnson-Eilola
also offer this possibility, a possibility that I find most intriguing
and most appropriate given the context of this collection: Slack's "Articulation."
| "'Articulation is, then, not just a thing (nor just connections) but
a process of creating connections, much in the same way that the hegemony
is not domination but the process of creating and maintaining consensus
or of co-ordinating interests' (Slack 114). "
quoted in Wysocki
and Johnson-Eilola 36
|
With this chapter, Wynsocki and Johnson-Eilola set the stage for the more story-like chapters to follow, stories that reveal the significant ways in which the contexts of people's everyday lives affect our various literacies, as well as reveal the destructive forces of literacy pedagogies that treat literacy as a series of static, value-free skills to be passed on to the deserving few (Amato, Joyce).
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7 8 9 10 11 12 |
13 14 15 16 17 18 |
19 20 21 22 23 |
Contents |
