The Literacy Connection: A Review
Ed. Ronald A. Sudol and Alice S. Horning
Hampton Press 1999
ISBN: 1-57273-217-2 $24.95 (paper) 255 pp.Review by Jeffrey R. Galin
Florida Atlantic University
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in the relationship
between cognitive sociolinguistics and literacy within the field of literacy
studies. James Paul Gee's Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology
in Discourses (1990) has proven to be a foundational text for many,
including Ronald Sudol and Alice Horning. Their edited collection, The
Literacy Connection, explores conceptions of "critical literacy" from
a decidedly sociolinguistic perspective.
Their short Introduction surveys a range of definitions of critical literacy, from Miles Myers, Mike Rose, and Robert Calfee, to Gee. While one might expect some extended references to the body of theory on critical literacy by authors like Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Ira Shor, Patricia Bizzell, and Paulo Freire, there is only one reference in the book to Freire by the editors and only two other references to these self-styled radical pedagogues in chapters six and ten. This diminished presence suggests several interesting potentialities: 1) that Sudol and Horning rely on Gee's dismissal of Freire based on contradictions in his ideology but, unlike Gee, neglect to appreciate the ideological implications of literacy education (they settle for the simple maxim that "literacy education is always necessarily political" (vii)); 2) that some literacy theorists are looking beyond the thirty-year obsession with emancipatory pedagogy as a model for teaching writing; and/or 3) that sociolinguistic theory finds cognitive, linguistics and educational psychology more fruitful ground for understanding critical literacy. No matter whether one of these potentialities is more accurate than the others, readers in the field of rhetoric and composition studies will find a decided shift away from familiar the terrain of critical/radical pedagogies in The Literacy Connection toward teaching secondary students and the sociocognitive implications of programs and lessons.
The co-editors explain in their Introduction that they "invited the contributors to this collection of essays to explore the connections between the academic and social/cultural sites of literacy development--hence, the literacy connection" (v). The chapters are loosely connected by explorations of "multiple levels of literacy in a variety of settings and situations" (see the table of contents). This statement summarizes nicely the eclectic nature of the book.
Chapter One presents a broad ranging and somewhat problematic historical review of critical literacy from a cognitive and psycholinguistic perspective. Jay L. Gordon traces what he calls "'emergent' critical literacy" from ancient Greece, medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Luther's Germany to revolutionary and nineteenth century France and the nineteenth century American South. In his attempt to cover wide ranging social and cultural time spans to articulate his historical survey, Gordon promotes a predictably vague definition. He explains that critical literacy is "both an advanced stage in cognitive development and a difficult but useful social skill" (1). While Gordon admits that any such historical study is "necessarily derivative," he fails to see that the way he defines the term "critical literacy" predetermines the "tentative conclusions" he draws from his study. For example, after selecting moments in history based on the definition he created to link them, he concludes that "the overall benefits of critical literacy have not changed much since classical Greece" (17).
Chapter Two represents the most coherent articulation of the form of critical literacy that the two co-editors seem to be promoting. Horning defines critical literacy as "the psycholinguistic process of getting meaning from print and putting meaning into print used for the purposes of analysis, synthesis and evaluation; these processes develop through formal schooling and beyond it, at home and at work, in childhood and across the lifespan and are essential to human functioning in a Democratic society" (21). In essence, Horning defines critical literacy as the abilities to encode, decode, and evaluate printed texts. She explains further that these abilities are acquired in a series of stages that students must go through, a process, and that critical literacy is "governed, like other language development processes, by the natural personality preferences of learners and may develop further much later in life as illustrated by some of the studies reported in later chapters of this book" (37-38). Her personality-based definition leads her to conclude that, "[t]eachers' awareness of the stages of development can inform their classroom instruction and support their individual help for students at different stages" (38).
While this definition of literacy leads to productive ways of examining the cognitive and psycholinguistic factors of individual learners, it barely acknowledges the broader social and cultural functions of critical literacies that have shaped composition as a discipline over the past twenty years. For example, Charles Schuster describes literacy in "The Ideology of Literacy: A Bakhtinian Perspective" as a social process of knowledge-building and meaning-making within cultural contexts. Schuster says: "Literacy is the power to be able to make oneself heard and felt, to signify. Literacy is the way in which we make ourselves meaningful not only to others but through the other to ourselves" (227). He argues further that those people who are deemed illiterate in our culture "possess a self only within the ghettoized communities that they seek to escape; and, once they escape those communities, they have no self at all" (231). Although Schuster's own claims are a bit overstated, his definition demonstrates how the purpose to which definitions are put determine which social, political, economic, and historical facets of literacy are highlighted and which are not. More recently, Cynthia Selfe demonstrates the implications of such specialized literacy definitions in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. She argues that critical literacy cannot be investigated in our current reform-minded, digital culture without some research into computer literacy or technological literacy. Had Sudol and Horning situated their work more carefully within the broad field of literacy studies, they might have appealed to broader audiences in rhetoric and composition.
The book also includes chapters on large-scale writing assessment in the Michigan high school proficiency test, several chapters on service learning, pre-service teacher training, collaborations among college and high school writing students, and a community literature and folklore project for teachers of public schools and community colleges, and concludes with chapters on a shelter for homeless women in Washington, D.C., and a writing group in a nursing home setting. While the book is interesting, the organization of the chapters might have worked better if it had been split into two separate projects or, at least, if it had been theorized with two sections: 1) socio-linguistics and secondary education and 2) service learning and community literacy projects. The readers who are most likely to find this book useful are those who are interested in the second category.