New Literacies 2.0, ch 1: What IS Reading?

When I got my first teaching job (still my current job), I was told that the open position had changed from Language Arts to a Reading position. I was asked if that would be a problem, while simultaneously being told that the Reading class was basically the same as Language Arts. Fresh out of college and looking for a job, I replied, without much thought, “Yes, I’m still interested.”

And here I am 5 years later.

At my school, “Reading” class was created because they switched to block scheduling and if they didn’t create a pseudo-Language Arts class, two L.A. teachers would be out of a job. I am “allowed” to use the content area/on-fiction selections in the Prentice Hall text (most of which are painfully boring and selections which middle schoolers can’t connect to). I have since added in tons of illegal photocopied stories and a novel J .

To me, Reading is so much more than decoding, comprehension, writing, and oral reading fluency. Literacy is also much more than the above skills. To me, literacy is the simultaneous viewing, understanding, interpreting, and interacting with text of any kind…and trying to address the implications of that specific text.

In ch 1 of New Literacies 2.0, the complex views of literacy seem to have one similarity: the idea that literacy is not an independent, individual act--- it involves one’s social/cultural interactions with another person, group, or institution. Freire’s concept of literacy stated that it was necessary for people to “read the word and the world.” With Freire, reading was more than looking at words on a page and being able to pronounce them. Words could allow people to be critically aware of oppression and even attempt to change it.

[ I wish I had the Freire/Macedo book in front of me. I used Literacy: Reading the Word and the World for a course last semester; somehow that book and a Paul Gee book are currently “missing” from my bookshelf—I have this fear that I somehow accidentally returned them to the MSU library---I’m a pretty calm, laidback person but it frustrates me to no end when I lose/misplace books]

Gee saw literacy as being able to participate in many discourses, both primary and seconday. While Freire and Gee’s notions both involve the “reader’s” participation in the world, Freire’s notion seems to be that if your discourse is considered less dominant then you should use your knowledge and try to raise awareness about the oppression.

With literacy, there is more at stake. Literacy is not just decoding novels and knowing how to read the newspaper. Literacy is taking a critical look at texts and figuring out how they fit into the world and considering additional texts that people need to be exposed to.

Further complexities of literacy were shown through Green’s (1988) three-dimensional model, with the most important point being that “no one dimension has priority over the others.” Green’s concept seems close to Gee’s idea that a powerful literacy is not necessarily one specific type of literacy; rather it is a “fluent mastery of languages uses within…secondary Discourses” (p.17).

Nowadays, literacy is more than reading a book, knowing the answer to a comprehension question, or using website information. Literacy is maneuvering in our current world, both “physical space” and cyberspace. Literacy is maneuvering between those worlds and knowing how to interpret information/knowing which information is not worth interpreting. Literacy is being able to use information to control or change
one’s world.

Literacy in the 21st century is multi-faceted--- it makes me think of a tree with various branches breaking off from one another into smaller branches, which eventually then somehow intersect with one another.