Blog+for+January+12

Rather than comment on assigned readings, I want to reflect about how the definition of literacy can become too inclusive. As we discover that all disciplines have a "literacy," we are trying to validate every kind of thinking by calling it a "literacy." I am not one who believes that "thinking" is a kind of "literacy." To me "literacy" is a vehicle for a certain kind of thinking, rather than all kinds of thinking. In //(Re) Imagining Content-Area Literacy Instruction (2010)// Roni Jo Draper and Daniel Siebert propose that literacy is "the ability to negotiate (e.g. read, view, listen, taste, smell, critique) and create (e.g. write, produce, sing, act, speak) texts in discipline-appropriate ways or in ways that other members of a discipline (e.g. mathematicians, historians, artists) would recognize as 'correct' or 'viable.' " (30). To me, this stretches the notion of "literacy" to equate it with "intelligence." Why should we expand the term "Iiteracy" to overlap considerably with other cognitive categories like "intelligence" or "aptitude" or "domain proficiency"? Somehow literacy feels it has to affirm the integrity of all disciplines by including them in the "literacy club" and that any exclusion from the category "literacy" is a prejudice or a chauvenism. We have to prove we a large-minded by allowing all kinds of thinking to be called "literacy." But "literacy" has its roots in "littera" a "letter." It may include multi-modal forms of expression, but it should include alphabetic language somewhere in the occasion. Solving "x" for "y" and playing notes from a musical staff have to be considered different, because they require different intelligences. You can perform these operations without benefit of a verbal language at all. They are a definable intelligence, not dependent on sentences to perform their operations. This does not mean there is no disciplinary literacy for non-verbal performances. We can speak and write about any mental operation and that articulation is the "disciplinary literacy." We can speak about how we arrived at an algebraic solution and we can reflect about why a particular piano sonata is so difficult to play. We need verbal language for that. We can articulate observations made with a camera or speculate about why an artist painted as she did, and all that requires a literacy of the discipline. That does not mean that the performance of the discipline is dependent on alphabetic language. Concerts are complete without reviews, but reviews can not be rendered with musical notes. So there is the performance of the musical notation and the commentary about the performance. Probably performers of an art can claim there is a meta-language of that art that allows the artist to comment in the same medium she performs. Music and visual art can be satirical or reflective. There are hybrid forms, such as flow charts and diagrams that allow for commentary, but they, too rely on verbal language. So performance and commentary on the performance may overlap. But "literacy," in my view, requires the use of verbal language, even if that language is distinctive to its discipline and use symbols characteristic of its discipline. Once we abandon the words or the articulations for explaining or reflecting, we are leaving the realm of literacy and playing in another domain. It's good, intelligent play, just not "literacy." __Cited__

Draper, Roni Jo and Amy Petersen Jensen, Jefferey D. Nokes, Daniel Siebert, eds. //(Re) Imagining Content-Area Literacy Instruction//, New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.