| New Literacies in Action
This month, New Literacies in Action is written by Patrick Shannon, who describes the many and varied literacy projects in which he and his family are involved. Reaching far beyond print media, they experiment with other forms of literacy that enrich each of them personally, socially, and politically. |
What's a Fellow to Do? Family Literacy at This Time in This Place
Life moves faster than I care to admit. Our kids are taller than their mother. Our house needs painting again, inside and out. I can’t plant flowers for more than 15 minutes without having to (1) go to the bathroom, (2) stand up to straighten my back and/or knees, or (3) return to the shed in order to get something I’ve forgotten. I was once young and vital, at least intellectually. But lately things just seem to pass me by. Perhaps most distressing for me is the fact that my family now runs rings around me in their knowledge and uses of literacy. Each—even the stinking 12-year-old—has multiple literacy projects underway simultaneously, using media that might be beyond my comprehension.
When I proposed to them that we write this paper together, they responded that they were too busy with their own projects to help me with mine. In what follows, I hope to convey the seriousness of those projects, to articulate how they spring from the questions and interests of my family’s everyday lives, and to consider how they can inform us about literacy (one of the ties that binds us together as a family). I shall do so slowly and in a linear fashion, demonstrating my age to all.
Kathleen's Projects | Tim's Projects | Laura's Projects | My Projects | Multiple Media/Similar Intentions | Critique | Hope | Empowerment | Praxis/Pedagogy | Projects of Possibility | References
Kathleen is a first- and second-grade teacher at the private Quaker Friends School in our town. The school values simplicity, non-violent conflict resolution, and social responsibility. She was a reading teacher in a public school before accepting the challenges of a regular classroom. She employs her version of reading and writing workshops, which are primarily fiction laboratories. Her students experiment with personal narratives, fantasy, stories with very large numbers (only boys), and rewrites of popular culture. Occasionally, some of her students pen nonfiction during workshop to great effect. Titles like “Ancient Roman Terror” and “Dogs Lick My Face” come readily to mind. Her workshops can focus on fiction because every other subject requires considerable amounts of reading and writing across symbol systems.
Because we live in central Pennsylvania, an agricultural area of the United States, last year her class engaged in a year-long farming theme. During the theme study, these 6- and 7-year-olds composed songs, poems, collages, maps, diagrams, charts, tables, dances, graphs, reports (oral and written), dioramas, letters, e-mails, hypermedia museum exhibits, murals, and notes. Each consideration of the theme required students to consult multiple texts and to find some way to represent their new knowledge in order to convey it to others. Often the initial representation would be translated into another medium to inform other audiences.
One of Kathleen’s recent literacy projects was a puppet show, which she wrote and constructed with the help of members of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis. We became aware of this group last summer when the theater was celebrating its 25th year of operation by displaying many of its puppets (some as tall as 25 feet) on the University of Minnesota campus. Their work seemed to be directed at the everyday cultural productions of small communities. We were struck by the inventiveness with which they told stories of ordinary people’s extraordinary acts. Kathleen’s puppet project was to fit in a suitcase and tell the story of Susan B. Anthony, the first American woman to vote (for which she was arrested). Kathleen hoped to use it in her classroom during Women’s History Month.
She began with an old hard-shelled valise purchased at the Goodwill Store in our town and a trip to a Minneapolis neighborhood Ace Hardware. Her task was to create the puppets from papier-mâché, sew the costumes, construct the props, write the script, and choreograph the action—all in 2 weeks.
Tim is 12 years old and began seventh grade at a local middle school last fall. He attended the Friends School through fifth grade. At his parents’ insistence or when he’s interested, he reads and writes well. He prefers other media to print, however. He will draw complete stories on separate sheets of paper as in comic book form. He plays the types of video games that belie his Quaker schooling. These games require that he set up entire scenarios, giving all characters motivations as well as weapons. He plays these on computer, Nintendo, Gameboy (these may be the same thing, but I have never stopped to inquire) as well as with his friends. His purpose in all these activities is to control a universe—if not his own universe. To be sure, the computer programs and the rules of the role-play games limit his ambitions, but certainly not as much as those ambitions are limited by schooling, youth organizations (Little League, after-school clubs, etc.), or his home life. In this sense, his cartoon and electronic storying is utopian—he selects both his ideal spatial forms and social processes for his worlds. Let me tell you, we should hope that he does not come to power any time soon.
Other literacy projects arise from Tim’s interest in playing the guitar. I considered calling it an interest in music, but he is more interested in playing the guitar, I think, than in the music it makes. I believe this because he will play any music available without complaint. He has his preferences, of course (loud, fast, and out of control), but he has come to understand that his control of this medium requires negotiations with others and that he can “speak” through his guitar and produce meaning with the sounds it makes. These negotiations take place in a variety of settings. In his room by himself, he negotiates with the performers on CDs and tapes. Until recently, his enemy was overdubs, in which a band with a single guitar player might have two, three, even four guitar parts on a single recording (listen to Jimmy Reed songs). When practicing, he negotiates with his guitar teacher and me (who insists that he play challenging pieces each day—Hendrix, Montgomery, Santana, Vaughan, King(s), Burrell, Clapton). With his band, Younger Than Most, he negotiates with the other members in the group about which songs to perform and how to play them (Nirvana, Southern Culture on the Skids, Dead Kennedys, Rage Against the Machine, Violent Femmes). In order for his band to play in public, he must negotiate song lists with adults who control all venues. His latest project is to record his guitar playing himself with a four-track tape recorder.
Laura is 15 and in her second year at the alternative high school in our town. The school enrolls approximately 120 students and is well known for the freedom it affords students. No bells, no 42-minute periods, no study halls, parent involvement in advisory teams, a variety of ways to meet state, school, and course standards—all this appeals to Laura. Her coursework in art afforded Laura the opportunity to address issues publicly. She petitioned the school to allow her to develop her project within a hall locker to ensure that her public (the student body) had an opportunity to participate. Unsure of her artistic abilities from her traditional art classes in the past, Laura constructed her artwork from artifacts she found in her room, popular media, and our town in order to provoke students to consider or reconsider the commercial demands on teenage bodies. Particularly, she explored attempts to classify adolescent females as objects of desire. As she opened the locker door each day, the project unfolded into the hallway, inviting students to stop, look, and think.
In a year-long Historical Documentaries class, Laura produced two films. The first was a commentary on the use of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in the movie Armageddon (Ben Affleck sings it to Liv Tyler just before he accompanies a team into space to explode an asteroid). Laura thought the movie distorted what she understood to be the original intent of the song—to protest the Vietnam war—by making it seem patriotic. Her response was to make a music video for the song using clips from anti-Vietnam films to provide her fellow students with another interpretation of the song. Beginning with Robert Duval’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” quip from Apocalypse Now, Laura spliced together a four minute attempt to demonstrate for her classmates how history is taught to us by popular culture.
Her second film was a 50-minute documentary on the controversy surrounding efforts to include “sexual orientation” in the local school district’s antidiscrimination policy. Since the school board had a 2-year history with this issue, her research for the film meant hours in the library, reading newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor on the subject; days reviewing school board minutes and videotape from a local cable access channel; and weeks conducting many personal interviews with participants.
Last year, I worked on a book discussing the commodification of literacy and literacy education. The project began with a request to develop a Consumer Reports-type book evaluating the ever-growing list of commodities available for teachers of English language arts. At first I balked (I’m not a fan of the magazine, which does provide useful information but offers no alternatives to purchasing) but eventually I agreed, because the offer provided an opportunity to re-explore fetishism of commodities and alienation, two Marxist concepts that I think explain much in the literacy education business. The book is titled iSHOP, You Shop: Raising Questions about Reading Commodities, published by Heinemann (yes, this is a commercial announcement).
My second project was to try to keep up with all the literacy projects that the others were involved in. I tried to support whatever they attempted and to comment thoughtfully on the process and product along the way. Until recently, this was easily managed because they all worked in print. But now they choose to represent their meanings in too many media for me to come to grips with. I appreciate the transmediations of Kathleen’s students, but I am unable to help much with their art or hypermedia texts. The imagery in puppet theater is puzzling to me. I’ve purchased a guitar to practice with Tim, but I can only approximate the background for the more sophisticated compositions he attempts. I enjoyed watching the films on Vietnam again (never liked John Denver tunes though), and commented on several versions of Laura’s storyboard for the documentary. To be honest, I was no help with the film production. What’s a fellow to do?
Multiple Media/Similar Intentions
Gee (1999) defines literacy as control of language in a secondary discourse. This seems deceptively simple. A discourse is the set of markers that determines whether one is considered a member of a particular group. Those markers include values, language, customs, and even how one dresses. Gee suggests that there are as many literacies as there are groups. To be a member of a discourse group, however, one must be accepted by other group members and must be seen by outsiders as being a member of such a group. I’m not sure which comes first—membership or control of language in a discourse—but I know that both are necessary to be considered literate.
At first glance it appears that our family has a significant number of literacies. Kathleen uses art, print, computers, and dance. Tim uses art, computers, guitar, and music. Laura uses film, computers, and art. I use print, as do the others, and I type on a computer keyboard. Kathleen, Tim, and Laura might be considered artists—Kathleen a dancer, Laura a filmmaker, Tim a guitarist. All of us are computer nerds. We give the appearance that we are members of these groups because we seem to have control of language within these secondary discourses. But appearances can be deceiving.
Tim is a guitarist—no question about it—because he is recognized by adults and kids as being a member of that group. But the rest of us are really just wannabes in our fields—we are not really members of those discourse groups. We have not mastered the language of those discourses, nor acquired their markers. Rather, we use tools associated with discourses to our own advantage and satisfaction (and perhaps to that of others as well). None of us knows how to use a computer well (demonstrated by the number of those books for dummies on our shelves). Although Kathleen can still shake her booty on occasion, she’s not a dancer. Laura’s two films and a wonderful public display do not make her a filmmaker or an artist, although she may gain recognition for her work soon. I am a writer only by academic standards. Although we use many media, we all employ a similar literacy for similar reasons. In Gee’s terms, this would be part of the primary discourse of our family. It is one essential way in which we communicate with one another and we bring it with us when we attempt to become members of other groups.
Through this literacy, we seek the power to represent the world—to name it, to negotiate its social processes, and to contest prior namings or processes that we think and feel limit our development. Media are tools for us, not literacies; they are tools that we use to represent our meanings. Although we do not always understand the media other family members are using, we do know, at least abstractly, what the other is trying to do. I don’t think we should confuse this family literacy with power literacy, which Delpit (1995) writes about. One of her complaints about progressive education is that it does not teach African American students the school literacy that will enable them to participate fully in the economy (the "power code," she calls it).
In our limited experience with schools, we have not encountered school literacy with a focus similar to our family’s literacy. In travels around North America, I have met dozens of teachers who share our focus, but never a school with that focus (Central Park East in New York City and La Escuela Fratney in Milwaukee, WI could be the notable exceptions because each values a project approach to curriculum with an explicit commitment to civic responsibility). School literacy in general is something different, although each of us has been successful in acquiring that literacy, too.
As hip as we may appear, the Shannons are stuck in modern times. I say that because in essence, we echo the struggle of the Enlightenment between liberal romanticism concerning the continuous development of individuals and forces of alienation which separate him or her from connections with work, nature, and love. We attribute these forces to different sources. I think Laura sees them as consequences of patriarchy, while Kathleen complicates patriarchy with capitalism. I share Kathleen’s concern with capitalism. Tim is the most postmodern of our family, seeing power circulate through contexts in which at times he sees that he has an upper hand. Despite our differences (and they are sometimes quite large and loud), we each seek to name the structures of the worlds in which we operate, to negotiate roles for ourselves (and others like ourselves) in them, and to contest the social forms which, contrary to the claims for them, often inhibit our development as individuals. Like Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, we believe that we share the universal right to be freely active, to affirm ourselves, to be spontaneous in our activity, and to pursue “the free development of (our) physical and mental energy.” This belief animates our literacy projects.
Our projects share other characteristics. Each employs a language of critique. Kathleen’s theme study was her effort to demonstrate learning for her students. She is a product of the city—Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Jose—and knew little about farms, farming, and farmers before she began her study. She shares Horton’s (1990) view that the best teacher is the one who demonstrates for others how to learn by learning herself. One doesn’t study farming very long without coming across the myriad problems that farmers face—high costs and low prices, technology and genetic research, ecological concerns, to name a few. So along with the wonders of agriculture, animal husbandry, and rural life, Kathleen thought it was appropriate to sing songs like "The Farmer Is the One Who Feeds Us All," to inform others about milk production, and to study migrant labor.
In Kathleen's puppet show, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are dwarfed by a wall of white men who place a ring of domestic responsibilities around them as children, thereby denying them education, property, and suffrage because of their sex. The sheriff in Anthony’s arrest and the judge at her trial come off that wall. Originally, Susan’s father was a member of that wall, but the members of the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre thought that was too critical for an audience to bear.
Tim’s voice of critique is less direct. He suffers under the institutional structures that surround him. He plays Little League baseball, but not in the league that practices seven times a week, because it places him under adult control too much of the time. His efforts to play organized football require him to participate in an evangelical church league. It was interesting to watch his Quaker-educated face when the coach insisted on a prayer before playing. His retreat to the computer and role-play games offers him more control, he thinks, and he is fairly articulate about how the commercialism of these games ropes him in other ways. Choose your poison, says he.
The electric guitar represents rebellion against order, as it did for early rock and roll players. He tried the violin at age 4 and said he wanted a guitar. Nothing dissuaded him from it—and we did try to dissuade him. His control of the guitar is fulfilling work for him, through which he can develop himself. His talent makes him powerful in a world where 12-year-olds have little control or power. He negotiates with others as part of that development, unwilling to alienate any part of it from him. And when I or others attempt to direct that work (even with bribes), he withholds his labor. A born union member.
Laura’s language of critique is right in your face. In this way, she’s the punk, not Tim. Her art project takes on patriarchy, commercialism, and traditional art directly. She is troubled by the male gaze and control over notions of beauty. She finds nothing natural in her friends’ concentration on their appearance, and she is startled by how she falls into the traps herself. She resisted her academic advisor’s suggestion of taking the art class because throughout middle school she had been made to feel that she couldn’t “do” art . The early theoretical work and the public orientation of the alternative high school art class caught her interest quickly, and she enjoyed the opportunity to use art to critique what she considers important social issues.
Her music video critiques the rewriting of American history and patriotism, two themes that gained strength during the Reagan administration and have captured the imaginations of many of the young since then. Her documentary probes the meaning of antidiscrimination, the reasons for such policies, the commitment of school officials to such policies, and the abilities of young and old to deal with difference. With dozens of clips of students unable to recall if the school has an antidiscrimination policy, she critiques the school personnel’s commitment to difference and their pedagogical understanding of such policy.
I critique the incursion of business into literacy and literacy teaching. For over two decades I have commented on the ways in which literacy has been commodified and teaching has been commercialized. iSHOP You Shop combines these issues to demonstrate ways in which literacy is packaged and sold as cultural capital or service. For example, current rhetoric ties the teaching of phonemic awareness in preschool to students’ prosperity as adults. Legislators and policy makers argue that 5-year-olds without the ability to blend sounds will not find high skill, high wage jobs waiting for them in the global economy. The literacy of phonemic awareness (if we can call it that) becomes cultural capital to accumulate. One need go no further than H & R Block to see how literacy is commodified as a service. When they do your taxes, you are paying them to read the tax forms and codes.
My second project, keeping up with my family’s literacy, affords me the opportunity to comment on the institutions that surround them and me. Few of the kids’ teachers and few of Kathleen’s colleague embrace the critical nature of their literacy. Both Laura and Tim have faced explicit censorship, and Kathleen hasn’t found others with whom to discuss literacy and literacy learning. I see these unfortunate circumstances as consequences of the structures of schooling rather than individual thoughts and actions.
Despite our concerns about the present, all of us are hopeful for the future. Each continues to pursue literacy projects, acting as if they can and will make a difference for ourselves and perhaps others. Although we do engage in literacy for its own sake—Laura is reading the play Romantic Comedy (by the fellow who wrote the TV series Bewitched), Tim is reading the second volume of the new Star Wars series; Kathleen is reading Susan Sontag’s In America; and I finished rereading Jack London’s The Iron Heel—the literacy projects that I described above are intended to be social acts. That is, we hope to make the world, or rather our tiny spots within it, a better place.
So, along with the critique of agribusiness, Kathleen organized a trip to an organic family farm, a fund-raising enterprise to help the Heifer Project, and a study of migrant workers’ unions. In the puppet show, Susan B. Anthony grows in stature with the actions she takes in the struggle for women’s suffrage, symbolizing Kathleen’s hope for women’s rights.
Tim’s games, while gruesome, are an attempt to learn to develop lawful societies and to ensure negotiated social relations (at least among the human players). Truth be told, I think he finds these games more hopeful than the competitions surrounding organized sports for adolescents. His guitar is his tool to reach a wider audience, showing what kids can do on their own. Efforts with the band are directed not only at self-expression, but to open up the rules of behavior in their school. It’s interesting to watch how the list of songs for sets can begin to develop a coalition among parents, school personnel, and kids.
Laura has demonstrated her hope by the choices she makes about her schooling. At 5, she knew that the Friends School offered her more freedom than the public school kindergarten class (see Kathleen’s 1995 book At Home At School for a further discussion of this), and at 14 she chose the alternative high school for the same reasons. She believes that schooling can be helpful in self-development. Her literacy projects suggest that she believes that difference can be examined and understood. She seeks categories in her work that suggest coalitions among various “others.” For example, her documentary asks students, teachers, parents, and other community members to reconsider their definitions of difference and to recognize that discrimination against any group is a problem for all.
For the past several summers, I have worked with teachers on campuses across North America. This work always begins with their description of a situation in their school lives which they consider to be political, and a separate explanation of why they think it is political. We exchange descriptions and respond with our understandings of the situations in political terms, and then compare explanations. My hope, which is often realized, is that these teachers will develop their sociological imaginations by seeing their personal “problems” as being social issues shared by others. The comparisons of explanations afford us the opportunity to gain perspective on our problems, which in turn provide ways in which we can become political (that’s consciously political) in our work. (Several of these teachers contributed chapters to my 1992 book, Becoming Political.) During the school year, the challenge of helping Reagan babies consider the limits of a market rationale for schooling keeps me hopeful for a more democratic future. And our family demonstrates that progressive literacies are possible (see text, lies & videotape for my account of how these developed).
The ability to name the world through critique and hope brings us some power in and over our lives. We do not defeat capital, patriarchy, or social structures single-handedly, but we can contest the interpretations of the world that are handed to us. Kathleen looks beneath the bucolic literature that depicts the family farm as the backbone of our community and country. Tim considers the official definitions of “childhood.” Laura addresses the social construction of beauty, history, and equality. I stare at the “natural” outcomes of science and the economy and wonder. Each of us considers it our right and obligation to voice our names for things, to state our views, and, of course, to defend the names and views when necessary. Although we don’t sit around the table and talk about it, we believe that we create culture through our literacy projects (our work). That is, we see our literacy as a contribution to the ongoing streams of cultural production in our everyday lives. Kathleen’s literacy makes an important contribution (often recognized) to her school. Tim’s and Laura’s cultural production is readily acknowledged by all who hear or see it. My literacy contributes to the intellectual culture among the graduate students on our campus, if not to others. We are cultural workers.
Our literacy also helps us gain some power over our lives as well, in that we use it to participate in the discussion and development of alternative actions in our daily lives. Most often freedom is considered a power of choice. But personal and social freedom are not served by selecting among alternatives offered by someone else. That is the false freedom of the marketplace, in which quantity of choice substitutes for quality of choice. Freedom is the right to help in the construction of alternatives from which all may choose.
Part of Kathleen’s choice to teach first and second grade rather than to remain a reading teacher was the possibility it afforded her to participate in curriculum development. Through his negotiations with school officials over sanctioned extracurricular activities, Tim uses his literacy to expand the options from which middle school students might choose. Laura’s willingness to petition school officials for permission to use locker space in a different way established channels to challenge school and social norms. In the end, she participated in the development of options for art in school and choices for adolescents in their lives. I participate, admittedly at the margins, in the social construction of teachers’ alternatives during reading instruction in schools. Due to state and business interference, those alternatives are dwindling rapidly (Shannon, 1989).
Only Kathleen and I are paid for our teaching. All of us are teachers, however, and all of our literacy projects are pedagogic. Each of us makes literacy public, adding more voices to the social practice of naming the world and all things in it. We all recognize that our knowledge is incomplete on any topic we address and that there is more to know and learn; some of what there is to learn has yet to be conceived, and we hope to participate in the making of it. Part of our development is to reflect on what we know, what we learn, what we do, and what we can hope. This reflection cannot remain a personal activity, as what we know is a social construction. We raise our consciousness about the world and how it works by putting what we know (or think we know) in public view for multiple audiences. These acts of making our literacy public afford us opportunities to negotiate the names assigned in the world, and they place us within the negotiations of the social process of naming. They make us players (maybe not star players, but players none the less). We become vulnerable through public literacy. Some object to our names and to our naming. However, public displays allow us to find new allies (sometimes in the strangest places).
Our praxis of literacy is a dialectical mix of four elements: coming to know our own experience through the use of multiple texts and points of view; making connections between our experience, those of others, and social structures; believing that names and processes need not remain as they currently are; and acting on our new knowledge. This praxis is most apparent in Kathleen’s projects in which she invites first- and second-grade children to engage in the farm theme. But her puppet show and the rest of our projects also represent this praxis, although not always perfectly. The puppet show asks youngsters to consider their young gendered lives; to place their lives alongside Susan B. Anthony’s; to recognize that change happens through hard work, collaboration, and personal risk; and to act on what they’ve learned about gender. During puppet shows, Kathleen provides her audience with lessons on history and literacy. As she learns more about the possibilities of the medium, she will better understand the pedagogy inherent in the codes of puppetry.
Tim’s guitar work takes him across multiple texts and deeper into his understanding of why musical genres are so different—why cultures and subcultures offer such variety. Yesterday he worked on Gershwin’s "Summertime" because his guitar teacher considers the chording structure to be similar to Thelonious Monk’s "Blue Trane." He also worked on Jimi Hendrix’s "Castles Made of Sand," Jeff Beck’s version of "Greensleeves," Fugasi’s "Adventure," and Harvey Danger’s "Flagpole Sitta." His explorations connect him with different groups who play and listen to jazz, blues, classical folk, surf punk, and pop. Working across genres and groups, Tim recognizes that the categories are constructions, and also porous. His attempts to play these songs for multiple audiences demonstrate his concern for the limits that these categories place on his playing and also the expectations for his (adolescent boy) behaviors. As he works on recording, he increases his chances to reach wider audiences. Look for his punked-up version of Woody Guthrie’s "It’s Against the Law." We wait for him to follow Guthrie’s lead and brandish the label "This guitar kills Fascists" on his Stratocaster.
Laura’s praxis begins with self-reflection. She is working through her understanding of gender, patriarchy, commodification, policy, sexual orientation, and the role of teenagers in the world. Her self- exploration is connected to others through her work at school. Her questions concerning the commodification of young bodies extend the school’s critique of the treatment of those bodies in traditional schooling. Her documentary on the antidiscrimination policy probed students’, faculty's, and community members’ thoughts on schooling and the limits of schooling. Laura’s perspective that the policy was an opportunity to teach and explore was shared by only a few. Those few, cutting across ages and roles, are the beginning of a coalition to work for change. She and they have plans, ones which Laura hopes will invite others to join the discussions around body, commercialism, schooling, and difference. Along the way, she is learning some interesting lessons about institutional power and how the external structures of schooling become internalized by old and young alike.
Beginning with text, lies & videotape and most recently in iSHOP You Shop, I’ve come out from behind academic discourse to explore my actions and thoughts about literacy and lots of other things. Prior to those books, my efforts to reflect on my thoughts and actions were limited to my public role as a teacher and researcher. When I found connections between my work and that of others, I probed the structures of teaching reading within institutions organized according to social forces of capitalism with all their entailments (Broken Promises). Those structures and consequences become even more pronounced as neo-liberalism becomes “the only alternative” available to us (Reading Poverty). These macroanalyses offered histories of translations of social forces in school structures and instructional practices (The Struggle to Continue). These projects have had some success in suggesting that things could have been and could be different in schools. The more recent personal writing explores how these social forces—alienated labor, fetishism of commodities, commoditification, rationalization—affect my and other individuals' daily lives and how literacy might combat these forces personally and socially.
Perhaps the crux of our family literacy is an effort toward freedom with the expectation that everyone (not just family members) ought to enjoy that possibility. In this way our self-development is connected to the self-development of other individuals and social development in general. That literacy involves a dialectical mix of critique, hope, empowerment, praxis, and pedagogy in service to both individual and social development. That service requires that we learn one lesson from Susan B.’s life: that personal and social change come from hard work, collaboration, and personal risk. Call it political literacy, critical literacy, civic literacy, or whatever else you’d like. But we think of it as our literacy, our development, our work.
Simon (1992) wrote about our right as human beings to develop continuously and freely. He suggests that dreams be considered one of the agents of that development—daydreams of what might be, who we might become, and how we wish to live together with others. Those dreams allow us to imagine what might be possible and desirable. They can serve as templates against which we match the social structures with which we live and the freedom they are supposed to provide. Simon calls this use of dreams “projects of possibility” in which the contradictions between social forms and human capacities for development are the starting points to work for change.
Kathleen, Tim, Laura, and I understand our literacy projects as projects of possibility because they imply our dreams of a better future. By making our projects public, we have learned that others have similar dreams, which in turn influence our dreams and our actions, keeping them fresh and reflexive. As we learn to combine our literacy projects with others around those shared dreams, we become more powerful agents in civic life within communities, states, and nation.
So although my family’s use of media humbles me, I remain a practitioner of our family literacy. I am proud of the ways in which our projects connect with one another’s and with those of others beyond our reach. We are daydreamers, but we are not loafers. We are interested in self-development, but we are not self-absorbed. We are serious, but not somber. Put simply, we are literate and a family.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children. New York: New Press.
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Gee, J. (1999). Social linguistics and literacies. New York: Taylor & Francis.
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Horton, M. (1990). The long haul. New York: Doubleday.
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Shannon, K. (1995). At home at school. Bothell, WA: Wright Group.
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Shannon, P. (1989). Broken promises. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
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Shannon, P. (1990). The struggle to continue. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Shannon, P. (1992). Becoming political. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Shannon, P. (1995). text, lies & videotape. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Shannon, P. (1998). Reading poverty. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Shannon, P. (2000). iSHOP you shop: Raising questions about reading commodities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Simon, R. (1992). Teaching against the grain. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
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Patrick Shannon is a Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He welcomes reader comments on this article. Contact him at Pennsylvania State University, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, 253 Chambers Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. E-mail: pxs15@psu.edu.
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Citation: Shannon, P. (2001, April). New Literacies in Action: What's a fellow to do? Family literacy at this time in this place. Reading Online, 4(9). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/action/shannon/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted April 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232