Response 10 4/15/08

The defining and contextualizing of texts or "literacy events" is explained in Heath's "Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literacy Traditions". Once again the idea of orality versus literacy is brought to my awareness. Her initial points on the assumptions one can make when hearing a story as opposed to reading it, or the question of whether a job application should be filled out through writing or answered orally (443). As I read the articles addressing orality and literacy I kept wondering are we devaluing the cultural importance of the spoken word by putting such an extreme value on reading and writing. Literacy is absolutely of invaluable importance but so is our oral culture, that is how language evolved after all and still does. Most new words do not end up in the dictionary because they are written down for the first time, they end up being recorded because they are said so much, and as a result of being used verbally they end up in our writing. 

Reading Heath's article was like going back in time, as she described the literacy events of the African-American community of Trackton, comprised mostly of textile workers, who in most cases made more than those in professional positions. I liked the community's value on group literacy: talking about the news, local events, church, and their overall use of literacy when it was needed. It showed that children can develop literacy to a degree without books and questions about what they read and about what is going on in the world around them. However, as Heath points out this can also have a negative impact when members of the community apply for a loan or receive an important letter. Without the text in front of them they do not have the background to know what questions to ask, they rely on each other. This reliance is also helpful and hurtful, the sense of community is definitely becoming more and more unique, as our society becomes increasingly self-reliant. It is hurtful because as mentioned the people of Trackton do not always have the appropriate knowledge base to make the decisions that are best suited for them, their upward mobility is also limited. Although in an industrial based community how many options are there for advancement? Trackton's communal literacy reliance also reminded me of the working class communities in Las Vegas, particularly those with limited English. Within these communities there is tremendous reliance for translating involved in applying for a job, renting an apartment, etc. I feel I can make this generalization because I have worked in both the service field and professional field and I have seen it in both places all over the city. 

"Why are we reading this? Why do we have to write every day?" These are questions that often pervaded my middle school classroom. What I took as annoying questions to which I always had a different answer, I now see as very complex questions. Deborah Brandt in "Sponsors of Literacy" writes "Sponsors are delivery systems for the economies of literacy. The means by which these forces present themselves to-and through- individual learners. They also represent the causes into which people's literacy usually gets recruited" (167). Why is literacy so important? I don't promote it just because I want students to enjoy reading and writing, literacy is a business. I know that the more advanced abilities a student has, the better off they will be in the long run whether they go to college, a trade school, or directly into the workforce. Their opportunities will be increased because they can speak, read, and write better than the competition. Through multiple examples from the same Midwestern area Brandt shows how literacy is accessed, for reasons of education, personal advancement, and job training. Her examples show the effects of access to literacy and how it influences personal and career advancement. We as teachers, have to do what we can to realize that our students all come to us with an array of accessibility and to then show them how they can increase and make use of what they learn. 

In Hull's "Mobilizing Literacy:Work and Social Change" she cites the U.S. Department of Labor's and the American Society for Training and Development's list of basic skill groups that employers desire. I read the first item "Knowing how to learn"(664) and began laughing. By the time I read through the rest of the list and got to "Organizational effectiveness and leadership" I was cracking up. Why? Because most "professionals" lack in at least a few of those "basic skills", I have worked with many who lack all of them and those were "educated" people! Hull writes "The popular discourse of workplace literacy sets up a we/they dichotomy. It stresses the apparent failures of large numbers of people-disproportionately the poor and people of color-to be competent at what are considered run-of-the-mill daily tasks" (669). This also pervades the educational world, assumptions are instantly made by teachers about students, based on their backgrounds and capabilities in class. Just as in the business world, in schools the focus is on what students cannot do rather than what they could achieve with just a little push and a lot of faith. The population has and is changing which means that we have to rethink and reprioritize how and what we teach whether it is at school or in the workplace. I really enjoyed Hull's optimistic outlook, giving examples on the business and personal side of both successes and failures gave me a balanced view of all sides of her rationale. 

I love, love, love the metaphor in this article. Indeed a college student navigates through many "cultures" as he or she tries to make the grade in college. This exemplifies why the dropout rate from college is so much higher during the first year. Students just simply give up and I know from experience that even going to office hours, attending study groups, and going the extra mile  sometimes does not pay off. This article reminded me of a Renaissance Literature class I took during the first semester of my Junior year of college. I was already quite good at "navigating" the system, I had been in the College of Education for a year and I was pretty happy with my G.P.A. That was until I took a class with Dr. X, the bane of my existence. He taught me more about Ren. Lit. than I ever thought I could possibly know, the class was based on 3 in-class essay exams and a short answer exam in which we had to receive a 95% in order to give us an added 15 points to the essay portion. If we fell below an 80% on the short answer those points were automatically deducted. This class was cut-throat and I did everything in my being to succeed in this class, in the end it was the hardest 3.0 I had ever worked for, and in any other class that grade would have been unacceptable. That was until I found out that his failure rate was 50%. So in short, I can totally relate to Dave in the article. We have all had a Dr. X , some of us survived and some of us had to retake the class with an easier prof during the summer term. 

As McCarthy finds, students are not able to relate one context to another. "Because all writing is context-dependent, and because successful writing requires the accurate assessment of and adaptation to the demands of particular writing situations, perhaps writing teachers should be explicitly training students in this assessment process" (262). Definitely, this should happen in every course, we cannot assume that our students know what we want without first showing them. Dave's biology teacher said, there is too much material to cover to focus on writing(237). This leads into the argument of teaching writing across the curriculum, non-English teachers feel that it is not their job to teach students how to read a Science book or write a lab report. I can argue back that it is not mine either, that it is not in my curriculum, which it isn't. The fact of the matter is that we have to teach students not only how to write for our particular class but how to relate assignments to each other and to create the much needed context that is necessary to be successful.