What Does It Mean to Be X Literate?
Literacy Definitions as Tools for Growth
Defining a term or idea is a conscious and literate act. In this commentary, I suggest a simple strategy to approach the not so simple “What is literacy?” question. I briefly describe my path to defining literacy and provide examples of how my definition of the word has helped to define my teaching. Finally, I comment on what I believe is a “defining” quality of the literacy field.
Defining
Definitions are generally not a feature of home life. I have not heard the father next door ask his son, “Hey, Timmy, what is play?” We first encounter definitions as a fixture of school life, and they remain rigor mortised in our minds as an academic task. The same student who requests a “glossary of terms” groans when asked to define them. In school culture we want the definitions but resist the defining. Definitions and defining, however, can be a personal growth tactic within the culture of lifelong learning, as well as in public debate.
Whether in or out of school, defining is hard work. The following strategy is useful in schools (but not at social gatherings): insert the word in a question. This transforms the task into something more approachable to the human mind. In terms of defining literacy, the question I pose to students and myself is “What does it mean to be literate in this world?” The question seems to breathe new life into the term.
Recent variations in definitions of literacy have extended the traditional view of it as encompassing only reading and writing. Pettersson (2000, online document) has identified many literacies: computer, cultural, diagrammatic, document, economic, environmental, film, information, mathematical, media, music, political, scientific, technical, television, video, and visual. What, then, does it mean to be X literate?
Defining Literacy: A Personal Path
I employed this term-as-question approach when enrolled in my first reading course at graduate school. We were asked to read books and other publications about literacy and to “map our representations of literacy,” which seemed to echo Eisner's (1994) ideas on different forms of understanding, or the “devices that humans use to make public conceptions that are privately held” (p. 39).
I chose to read articles from Reading Research Quarterly, the Journal of Reading (as the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy was then known), Discourse Processes, Educational Researcher, and books including Barrett and Redmond's Contextual Media, Ellsworth et al.'s Literacy, Green's Releasing the Imagination, Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, and Randall's Stories We Are.
As a starting point in my mapping exercise, I felt compelled to define literacy. Partly from reading these publications and partly from a midlife sense of urgency, I defined it as “an ongoing development of one's capabilities to design and enact change” -- believing that it's not so much what one knows, what one's capabilities are, but what one does with this knowledge and these skills that matters most. To be literate, then, meant much more than having an ability to read or write, a topic I addressed in a short story I wrote for my students some time later. With apologies to Dr. Seuss, the story (which I titled “The Literacy Lurd -- It's Quite the Bird!”) begins as you hear in this audio clip (725 K) or read as follows:
What do you mean you can only read or write?
Haven't you heard?
There's more to Literacy than THAT almighty might!
Oh, but it's dawned on us near, HA!
You're only a visitor here.
What can we man-age to chan-age your tune?
Sing a song? Yes, go ahead, but not on our time, No!
There's more, much more to be said, a more fragrant rhyme!
It's just a thought, oh my, it's QUITE the sight.
What you need, we thinks, is to let you links with
The Literacy Lurd -- It's QUITE the bird!
My current definition of literacy resonates with Freire (1998) -- namely, that literacy includes personalized and sociocultural ways of reading the world for meaning. What counts, however, is how one uses one's definition of literacy to make a difference.
Defining Practice
Freire's (1998) “ways of reading the world for meaning” has influenced my teaching. For example, I use fiction to help students explore subject matter content rather than using subject matter text as the sole “container” of content. For an instructional design text (Shambaugh & Magliaro, 1997), I wrote a set of stories that dramatize the human aspect of designing. In them, two graduate students experience the instructional design process by living in a fictional instructional design world. For each phase of the process, a chapter depicts the human dilemmas of using a systematic process to design “possibilities” rather than prescriptive solutions, as in the following excerpt:
“I am your play director. Did you bring the scripts?”
“What's so important about....”
“A script? No script, no title, no excitement, no lines outside scrambling for tickets, no playbills, NO PLAY!” The Director's voice reverberated throughout the Playhouse.
Leslie and Michael started to laugh.
“No laughing. I'M THE DIRECTOR! I should be commanding respect, especially from novices.”
“Why?” asked Leslie.
“Why indeed!” snorted the Director. “I know the order of things. I know how one should act out the beginning. I know where the middle should be. I know when the audience should laugh, when they should cry. They don't cry until I say so. I know the outcome of this play and I know what should be in their minds.”
“What about their hearts?” snorted Leslie back.
“Every season. It's all the same. They send me novices with no scripts.”
“Maybe we're supposed to write our own scripts,” said Leslie.
“Well, I won't be responsible for the results,” barked the Director.
Reactions to these stories have been mixed. Some students say they love them (and when I gave a copy of the book to my mother, she read the stories first) while others loathe them -- and unless they are assigned, students quickly disregard them. There is risk in instructional innovation, and any innovation usually requires some teaching time, consistent support, and ongoing feedback from students as to its worth.
As an example of one such innovation, in my graduate-level course on instructional design, I practice a reflexive mode of teaching. I have chosen to act as a learner alongside my students. I openly share my teaching approach through a visual representation (see Figure 1 below, taken from Shambaugh, 1999, online abstract) and through research papers that document an ongoing study of my teaching (e.g., Magliaro & Shambaugh, 1999).
In a reflexive teaching approach, student and instructor are colearners, and each has unique beliefs, knowledge, competencies, experiences, sensibilities, and motivation. Although viewed as colearners, each plays different roles in the context of schooling. The instructor has responsibilities to design and implement instruction, while students have responsibilities to engage and perform learning tasks. Multiple activity structures are employed to foster joint participation, including learning tasks, personal conferences, electronic mail, and text (Shambaugh & Magliaro, 1997). Learning of instructional design principles and processes are supported through participants' written and oral dialogue within these structures.
My teaching, which is a blend of directed and social constructivist approaches, and my graduate students' learning are open for discussion and appraisal through learning task assessment and formal and informal teacher evaluations. This reflexive teaching stance, in which varied “readings of the world” are encouraged, requires time for trust to develop; it also requires desire and sustained commitment over time, and a belief that a “teacher's thinking in authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking” (Freire, 1998, p. 58). It begins with providing consistent and supportive written and oral feedback on student work. Some choice about learning tasks and negotiation of these tasks is also possible. Different types of participation, such as group activity, role playing, and discussion, also require modeling, structured guidelines, and some time to learn. I concentrate on ongoing assessment, viewing as particularly interesting how people move from novice to expert. The payoff to innovative change is student engagement with the learning activities and room for personal expression and responses to the assigned tasks.
Defining in Public
When publicly shared, definitions provide interesting encounters. In a burst of e-mail communication on the listserv of the International Visual Literacy Association in the spring of 2000, subscribers discussed the differences and relationships between media literacy, information literacy, and video literacy. The question of whether visual literacy is a component of media literacy was raised, and some found it unsettling. My take on the conversation was that although it was interesting, trying to fit one literacy into the other was less productive than discussing the relationships between them.
In his contribution to the listserv conversation, written from an airplane between South Africa and Scotland, Ladi Semali indicated that he believed that media, information, and visual literacy represent “different centers of interest and how meaning is acquired, interpreted, and transmitted.” He recommended Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Hall, 1997), a book in which the relationships over time between race, gender, and class are discussed.
Michael Ensdorf from Roosevelt University in Illinois made an interesting comment worth sharing: “I find that students tend to take anything visual for granted until you start focusing on it. Once you do, they start to think critically about visual information, and begin interpreting and evaluating images, and their relationship to text and sound.” (For more about visual literacy, visit this month's New Literacies Web Watch.)
This e-mail conversation raised the “dilemma of representation” -- that whenever we map meaning, we also frame and limit it. Some people are uncomfortable with this limitation. Although I am sensitive to it, I find representations -- definitions being one category -- useful to get our views out in the open. Overall, this discussion revealed how people defined terms that defined their professional lives.
Defining Disciplines
Currently, I am a university faculty member in instructional design and technology (IDT), a field with its own challenges in trying to define itself for people thinking about entering it and in order to certify competence in it (for more on this issue, see a survey posted at the site of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology). What does it mean to be IDT literate? This is a subject that the IDT field has wrangled with for many years.
Sometimes we equate technology literacy with being able to use computers. This is a much broader notion than instructional technology literacy. Those working in technology education have spent a great deal of effort redefining this field as it has evolved from a focus on technology as a vocational tool to a core curricular topic needed by everyone, since it involves understanding systems and problem solving (Dugger & Yung, 1995).
Lawrence Snyder from the University of Washington, writing as chair of the Committee for Information Technology Literacy (1999, online document), believes that literacy is the wrong word to use when talking about computer skills. His assertion is that “literacy” connotes a “skills-centric” view. Snyder's response is to use the term “fluency” to connote expertise, the ability to synthesize and to use the medium effectively. To be fluent with information technology, according to Snyder, requires skills, concepts, and capabilities, three types of knowledge that are continually changing.
Karen Swan (1999, online document) from the U.S. National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement has suggested nonprint literacy standards using television, video, graphics, computers, and the Internet. Swan divides these standards for elementary, middle school, and high school students.
I take a broader view of instructional technology than is generally applied to the schools. I am beginning to work extensively with teacher educators and public school teachers to explore the possibilities of how instructional technology supports their teaching (for information on Trek 21, a project in this area, visit www.trek-21.wvu.edu). In effect, I see technology initiatives in schools as a means to help teachers study their teaching. When I work with public school teachers (and university faculty, too), the question “What is good teaching?” provides the right platform for us to talk about what they know -- teaching -- before we begin to talk about technology. The conversation is about teaching, not technology. The caveat here, however, is that in order to study one's teaching, one needs to step outside one's practice and examine the possibilities for different teaching approaches that are dependent on individual, institutional, and societal views of the learner, the teacher, the content, and assessment. Instructional technology must support one's instructional purposes. These purposes must be continually reappraised.
Rather than positioning instructional technology (IT) as one more thing for teachers to do, I encourage teachers to ask themselves, “How does instructional media and technology support my teaching? How does IT support my students' learning?” If the answer is “It doesn't,” then my response is, “Don't use it.” Again, the caveat here is that one must continually think about one's instructional purpose.
Definitions Defining: A Worthwhile Investment
Definitions represent an investment in sustained thinking and effort, and are risky because sharing them “puts us out there.” But they also represent developmental thinking: we can change our minds! After the hard work of developing definitions (or models and other representations), we sometimes become overly possessive of them -- or, as “lazy adopters,” we're seduced by their simplicity or complexity or intuitive obviousness. We tend to fix our position and forget that the same process of thinking that brought them about can also allow change.
The process of defining can be a solo and a social activity, or a process in which each activity influences the other (Salomon, 1993). I find the definition task a good way to begin a classroom conversation about the subject at hand. Sometimes students don't want to go there, but the task structures and crystallizes thinking. Subsequent discussion reveals the degree to which individuals interact and practice true dialogue, as opposed to monologue.
Definitions also provide a means for a discipline to become renewed and to grow. One of the attractive features of literacy as a discipline is that literacy educators ask students and themselves to define what literacy is. In fact, all disciplines could benefit by continually asking, “What does it mean to be literate in this world?” Asking the literate question in any field not only opens doors for the individual but ensures that the discipline continues to grow as its members continually appraise what it is about and the role it has in developing a more literate world.
References
Barrett, E., & Redmond, M. (1995). (Eds.). Contextual media: Multimedia and interpretation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Bruner, J.S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Committee for Information Technology Literacy. (1999). Being fluent with information technology. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Available: http://books.nap.edu/catalog/6482.html
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Dugger, W., Jr., & Yung, J.E. (1995). Technology education today: Fastback 380. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
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Eisner, E.W. (1994). Cognition and curriculum revisited (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
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Ellsworth, N.J., Healey, C.N., & Baratta, A.N. (1994). Literacy: A redefinition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed (20th anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum.
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Green, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossy-Bass.
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Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Magliaro, S.G., & Shambaugh, R.N. (1999). Teaching instructional design: Reframing the relationship between teacher and designer. In 21st annual proceedings: Selected research and development papers presented at the 1999 national convention of the American Educational Communications & Technology Conference. Bloomington, IN: Association for Educational Communications & Technology.
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Pettersson, R. (2000). Literacies in the new millennium. In W. Strykowski (Ed.), III Miedzynardowa Konferencja. Media a Edukacja. Poznan, Poland: Oficyna Edukacyjna Wydawnictwa eMPI2s.c. Available: http://www.idp.mdh.se/informationsdesign/forskning/rapport/Poznan-2000_Literacies.pdf
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Randall, W.L. (1995). Stories we are: An essay on self-creation. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
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Salomon, G. (1993). Distributed cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Shambaugh, R.N. (1999, February). Development of a co-participatory and reflexive approach to teaching and learning instructional design. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Polytechnic Institute &
State University. Abstract available: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-020599-094356/
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Shambaugh, R.N., & Magliaro, S.G. (1997). Mastering the possibilities: A process approach to instructional design. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
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Swan, K. (1999). Nonprint media and technology literacy standards for K-12 teaching and learning (Rep. No. 12013). Albany, NY: National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement. Available: http://cela.albany.edu/standards/index.html
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About the Author
Neal Shambaugh is an assistant professor in the Department of Advanced Educational Studies, West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV, USA), where he teaches courses in technology education and educational psychology. His research interests include his own instructional pedagogy, technology integration in public schools, and the use of visual representations by students and teachers. He can be reached by e-mail at nshamba@wvu.edu.
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Excerpt from Shambaugh, R.N., & Magliaro, S.G., Mastering the possibilities: A process approach to instructional design reproduced by permission of Allyn & Bacon.
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Citation: Shambaugh, R.N. (2000, August). What does it mean to be x literate? Literacy definitions as tools for growth. Reading Online, 4(2). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/shambaugh/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted August 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232