Luke and Woods give us a traditional definition to the term “literacy” as a “mastery of skills, processes and understandings in making meaning from and through written text”. Tradition sees literacy as a fixed body of skills that is neutral to all cultures, and universal in its features. Yet over the past 20 years this view has been challenged by a multitude of disciplines. The authors reveal models of “critical” literacy to have a specific focus of developing useful and powerful mastery of texts to transform lived social relations and material conditions.” To these authors, rather than “teacher knowledge” being transmitted to the student learner, literacy is acquired through a process of naming and renaming, narrating and analyzing life.”
No longer simply defined by a ruling (dominant) class’s knowledge as the ideal literacy, new literacy grows from a new literacy technology which affiliates youth and industrial/professional cultures requiring a new vocabulary that creates practical alternatives for teachers and students to reconnect literacy with everyday life.
Reflection: Last week’s group discussion of skills vs whole language focused on skills as the necessary tools and whole language as the structure built by the tools. We agreed that "structures" are not only skyscrapers and modular homes of literacy … there are mud-huts and tee pees … igloos and yurts being built world-wide … utilizing a variety and whole different world of “tools” to build. There can be no “one-way” on these streets … all roads can lead to literacy as defined by its local culture.
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