Literacy Essay -- Education Learning Papers

LiteracyWhy is literacy of such interest to postsecondary teachers of writing? If literacy, as it might be defined by someone outside the field of English studies, is the ability to read and write, then why are we interested in it when our own students presumably acquired this ability in the distant past, about the time they learned to tie bows in shoelaces? That we are interested in literacy, I take it, is obvious from the proliferation of books with the word in their titles, of conferences on topics in literacy (the Modern Language Association has now held two), and of review essays such as this one, commissioned by the editors of a journal that purports to deal in issues relevant to composition theory and advanced composition at the college level.Defining LiteracyI might answer my opening question by redefining literacy from within English studies in such a way as to make it more complex and problematic, and thus to question the presumption that college students have already acqui red it. Indeed, in these proliferating discussions of literacy, its simple description as the ability to read and write is usually rejected at the outset. But in attempting to go beyond the simple definition, scholars begin to diverge. Consider, for example, the variety of essays poised under the title, The Right to Literacy (1990), a title which implies a unitary conception of literacy and a contest only over who possesses the desired object. In this volume, Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin befool twenty-nine papers from the 1988 MLA Right to Literacy conference. Most of the essays, therefore, are short and ranging through them, one gets a sense of the heterogeneous mixture of topics that accrue for Engli... ...Discourse Community. Curriculum dubiousness 12 (1982) 191-207.---. Literacy in Culture and Cognition. A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York Random, 1987. 125-37.Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement The Acts of Writers , Readers, and Texts. Carbondale Southern Illinois UP, 1990.Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Cultural Literacy What Every American take to Know. 2nd ed. New York Vintage, 1988.Kintgen, Eugene R., Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, eds. Perspectives on Literacy. Carbondale Southern Illinois UP, 1988.Lunsford, Andrea A., Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, eds. The Right to Literacy. New York MLA, 1990.Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH Boynton, 1991.Taylor, Denny, and Catherine Dorsey-Gaines. Growing Up Literate Learning from Inner-City Families. Portsmouth, NH Heinemann, 1988.