Thinking on approaches to Literacy

Blogger’s Note: Class blog guidelines request that we limit our posts to 250-500 words. Obviously, I have flouted this guideline thus far. In this post, however, I will try to honor the original word goal of the assignment for the first time.

In my Literacy and Technology class we spend significant energy simply getting handle on the best ways to conceptualize literacy in the new digital age, with the ultimate goal of bringing a more informed and expert understanding of our students’ needs into the writing classroom. And thinking from that perspective I was struck by Stuart Selber’s “parameters for a functional approach” to computer literacy (summarized here far better than I could). The parameters are cast very wide, and they include a lot of qualities I would not immediately associate with functional literacy. But that seems to be precisely Selber’s point.

The term literacy has been batted around in our class for several weeks now, and we have seen several definitions presented. Gunther Kress (2003) defined it very narrowly as the ability to interpret and manipulate alphabetic text only. He then follows that by explaining that literacy and language are one of many “means for representation and communication” (p. 35). When I compare Kress’s notion of literacy + other means and Selber’s Functional literacy, I feel the concepts are more similar than they might first sound. Kress makes a semantic point of distinguishing and narrowing “literacy,” but he shares other authors’ (including Selber) concerns for communicating with newer modes and tools.

But I can’t help feeling Selber’s notion is the more useful. At the end I am interested in taking this knowledge into my classroom and suing it to help students. Selber’s parameters give me a set of concepts, and helpfully, a sample set of concrete class exercise to help me do precisely that.

On an unrelated note, I would like to say while reading Selber I was tickled by the mention of McLaughlin, Osborne, and Smith’s “taxonomy of reproachable conduct” (p. 54). A quick search tells me that it comes from an influential and often-cited article. But the name sounds like a gallery you’d walk through in Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Odditorium.