TITLE: The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity
and the “Basic” Writer
AUTHOR: Shannon Carter (Assistant Professor of English, Texas A&M University-Commerce)
ABSTRACT
The Way Literacy Lives offers a curricular response to the political, material, social, and ideological constraints placed on literacy education—particular basic writing—via the ubiquity of what Brian V. Street calls the “autonomous model of literacy” and instead treats literacy as a social practice. Accepting that a curricular solution to the institutionalized oppression implicit in much literacy learning is necessarily partial and temporary, I argue that fostering in our students an awareness of the ways in which an autonomous model deconstructs itself when applied to real-life literacy contexts empowers them to work against this system in ways critical theorists advocate. Building upon a theoretical framework provided by three, overlapping schools of thought (New Literacy Studies, activity theory, and critical literacies), the primary objective of the current study is to offer a new model for basic writing instruction that is responsive to multiple agents limiting and shaping the means and goals of literacy education, agents with goals that are quite often in opposition with one another. This new model is rooted in what I call a pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity, an approach that trains writers to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one.
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: “The Way Literacy
Tests” (1-36)
The first chapter situates
this new model for basic writing by drawing attention to the local context from
which our program emerged, especially the culture of standardized testing so
much a part of school-based literacy experiences in
Chapter 2: “The Way Literacy
Oppresses” (37-54)
Given
that much of the current project rests on an assumption that the autonomous
model is pervasive and extremely problematic for basic writers in particular, I
will spend the next chapter exploring the ways in which the autonomous model of
literacy shapes both public discourse about literacy education and the basic
writer’s perception of her own needs as a writer. In doing so, Chapter 2 will
attempt to illustrate the reasons why this perspective is both
politically/ideologically oppressive and pedagogically unsound.
Chapter 3: “The Way Literacy
Liberates” (55-87)
Explores
the various ways in which basic writing scholars have revised basic writing
curricula in response to critical theories, a philosophical perspective that has
become quite common among teacher-researchers in basic writing. I conclude
Chapter 3 with a description of a basic writing curriculum designed and
executed via an explicitly critical framework, where the goal was to develop
critical consciousness among those writers I believed to be constructed as
“oppressed” and thus in need of liberation through critically-aware literacy
education. Student responses to the curriculum are included, especially as
represented through the experiences of Ana, a blind student immigrant from
Mexico—experiences that have led me to question the viability of critical
literacy as a primary framework for basic writing.
Chapter 4: “The Way Literacy
Stratifies” (88-137)
Focuses
on the unequal value of various literacies as the dominant, autonomous model
reconstructs them, as well as the inequity of access to those literate
strategies perpetuated by this autonomous model.
Chapter 5: “The Way Literacy
(Re)produces” (138-186)
Further
establishes the theoretical framework of rhetorical dexterity by articulating
the ways in which various communities of practice (re)produce themselves
through literate actions.
Chapter 6: “The Way Literacy
Lives” (187-217)
Describes
a basic writing curriculum shaped by rhetorical dexterity, as well as various
student responses to this curriculum.
Conclusion (218-225)
Examines
again our tendency to separate orality from literacy,
often privileging the latter over the former, the “literate” over the
“illiterate.” Such separations are perpetuated by assumptions that a “Great
Divide” exists between the literate and everyone else, and this myth places new
literacy learners—like our basic writers—at an unfair disadvantage. When we
close that “great divide” between the literate and the non-literate—between the
basic writers and everyone else—we can begin to understand how to readjust
literacy education in ways that are much more equitable to all learners.
Works Cited (226-233)
Appendices (234-255)
Appendix
A: Chart comparing what adults with “limited literacy skills” can actually do
with what “common wisdom” holds they can do (Merrifield et. al).
Appendix B: Sample writing assignments from sequence
described in Chapter 3
Appendix C: Additional assignment described in Chapter 3
Appendix
E: “Map” of video game, as drawn by players of a text-based adventure game in
mid-1980s.
Appendix
F: “What’s a Community of Practice?” (brief essay used in sequence described in
Chapter 6)
Appendix
G: Group presentation included in sequence described in Chapter 6
Appendix
H: Individual presentation included in sequence described in Chapter 6
Appendix
I: Field Research Project included in sequence described in Chapter 6
Appendix
J: Critical Reflections included in sequence described in Chapter 6