Typing Out Loud

It is helpful, when attempting to understand literacy, to differentiate between having specific literacies and being literate. Literacy, for example, has extrinsic, not intrinsic value that accumulates only as a companion to the process of becoming literate. Being literate is the result of what one does with the literacies that one has, and this in turn reflects value back onto literacy. As an analogy, if I learn five languages but have nothing interesting to express (write, speak) or do (think, translate, travel) with any one of them, then the value of that language acquisition is nil. The value increases, though, alongside my application of the languages. Literacy has reflected value.

Societies that consider the processing (in the largest sense) of words and numbers to be valuable, set standards of literacy that emphasize the coding/decoding of printed text (also in its largest sense). If those societies are formally coordinated around administrative, civil, military and ecclesiastical documents, and day-to-day life includes inventories, contracts, birth and death certificates, wills, petitions, ledgers, journals, books and calculations, members of those societies must have basic reading, writing and arithmetical literacies in order to participate. As societies become more complex – that is to say, they change in unfamiliar ways – new “values” are created and new literacies are needed to support them. For example, we live in a society whose demography and whose customs regarding family, faith, place, communication, class and roles are changing radically and rapidly. Stimuli bombard us in ever increasing and sophisticated volleys that compete for our attention. This all feels very complex, and our previous literacies do not give us adequate tools to navigate the maelstrom. Where comprehension and expression or application were previously sufficient literacy criteria, we now need “higher” skills – the ability to analyze and evaluate – and have added “critical thinking” to the reading, writing and arithmetic mix.

These critical thinking skills also happen to address “infomania,” or our information glut. In a world where the half-life of information is decreasing exponentially, Herbert Simon says, “the meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.” More than knowledge, we need to know what it is we need to know in order to actually know something and think/act productively with it – a knowing that depends on both critical thinking and information literacies.

Our literacies travel with us. My literacies could not have helped me survive the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. However, we learn of a remote Indonesian island “primitive tribe” whose members saved themselves by moving to the mountains because their elders were able to “read” the earthquake and understand its likely consequences. Applied environmental literacy.

Literacy is situational because, viewed from Dewey’s theoretical model, no human phenomenon can be understood in isolation from its physical and social environment (see Alain Findeli’s essay, Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-46).

Literacy is also political. And cultural.

(to be continued)