mlr_minilectures

=MLR-Mini-Lectures=

[|1.1 text (below) & Jing] (available now ) 1.2 text & Jing (available now ) [|1.3 text & Jing] (available now ) [|1.4 Jing] (available now   ) [|1.5 text & Jing] (available now  )

1.1 from Chap 7 (pp68-74) Brief Penguin Handbook

Goal of the reflection assignment: share your "discovery of the significance of an experience."

Reflection topic: how you have learned by/through media

Reflection focus: communicate a central idea to your reader. A focus comes from concentrating on a detail that somehow makes the other items come together and communicates the importance of the experience.

Reflection Example: When I was ten/twelve I read a lot of comic books. I especially recall reading Comics Illustrated. I recall this experience with "media" fondly and wonder now about its relevance to my life. What did I learn from reading these comics? Well, I learned to be an independent reader. I found material that I was interested in and never depended on school to give me that material. I also learned to connect different media. I often read both the comic and the novel. I became interested in how a novel became a movie. And, the experience of reading comics frame by frame gave me a way to see how novels and films were constructed and led me as a student and teacher to be interested in dramatic technique in both novels and films. Now when I teach my upper division writing classes I remind my students over and over about the necessity to read from a writer's perspective. This focus on technique can be seen as rooted in my early fascination with the media of the literary comic book.

[Read the follow except from Street's article on New Literacy Studies and in Mini-Lecture 1.2 I will provide some context for his ideas and show you some ways to integrate his ideas into your paper.] What's "new" in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice

by Brian Street Kings College, London

The Context and Background

A rich vein of articles and books has recently addressed some critical issues in the field of New Literacy Studies, both in terms of theoretical perspectives and of their implications in educational and policy contexts. I address some of these critiques as a way of both updating NLS and of addressing its implications for practice.

What has come to be termed the "New Literacy Studies" (NLS) (Gee, 1991; Street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focusing not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1985). This entails the recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space, but also contested in relations of power. NLS, then, takes nothing for granted with respect to literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problematizing what counts as literacy at any time and place and asking "whose literacies" are dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant.

To address these issues ethnographically, literacy researchers have constructed a conceptual apparatus that both coins some new terms and gives new meanings to some old ones. My own work, for instance, begins with the notion of multiple literacies, which makes a distinction between "autonomous" and "ideological" models of literacy (Street, 1985) and develops a distinction between literacy events and literacy practices (Street, 1988). The standard view in many fields, from schooling to development programs, works from the assumption that literacy in itself--autonomously--will have effects on other social and cognitive practices. Introducing literacy to poor, "illiterate" people, villages, urban youth etc. will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their "illiteracy" in the first place. I refer to this as an "autonomous" model of literacy. The model, I suggest, disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it so that it can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal and that literacy as such will have these benign effects. Research in NLS challenges this view and suggests that in practice literacy varies from one context to another and from one culture to another and so, therefore, do the effects of the different literacies in different conditions. The autonomous approach is simply imposing western conceptions of literacy on to other cultures or within a country those of one class or cultural group onto others.

The alternative, ideological model of literacy, offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. This model starts from different premises than the autonomous model--it posits instead that literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill; that it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, and being. It is also always embedded in social practices, such as those of a particular job market or a particular educational context and the effects of learning that particular literacy will be dependent on those particular contexts. Literacy, in this sense, is always contested, both its meanings and its practices, hence particular versions of it are always "ideological", they are always rooted in a particular world-view and in a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalize others (Gee, 1991; Besnier & Street, 1994). The argument about social literacies (Street, 1995) suggests that engaging with literacy is always a social act even from the outset. The ways in which teachers or facilitators and their students interact is already a social practice that affects the nature of the literacy being learned and the ideas about literacy held by the participants, especially the new learners and their position in relations of power. It is not valid to suggest that "literacy" can be "given" neutrally and then its "social" effects only experienced afterwards.