Five weeks in and we’ve used the word “literacy” more times than I have in my entire life.
(I don’t feel the need to substantiate this claim, so please don’t ask.)
Remember being challenged as a kid to repeat a word countless times until it lost meaning or at least sounded funny? As an adult I know this is called “semantic satiation“, but in my youth I was just being inventive with my free time. (Years later, I found that I also tended to repeat words ad nauseam during free hours, but with more of a slur and much later in the night.)
Literacy. Literacy literacy literacy literacy…literacy.
I’m not just milking the word count here, I promise. I’ve become stuck on the concept of the study of literacy. It’s a weird one–literacy doesn’t really seem like something that can be studied by itself. I guess that could be said for anything, to some degree. At least with other fields, though, you have some objective constants. The human body can be studied through anatomy, anthropology, biology, and countless medical concentrations and specialties. The methods and questions posed differ but the focus is always the body. The reference point is the body.
With literacy, you still have the various conduits: ethnography, anthropology, (maybe) neurology, etc. But what are you studying? What is literacy? We were asked this on Day 1 and have had it looming over our heads through each reading because we don’t know. It could be a lot of things. It could be as simple as Goody and Watt tried to make it. (Just kidding.)
Our most recent readings have emphasized that the study of literacy has dealt with changes in approach since the beginning of its relatively short lifespan. (Kaestle notes that historians didn’t give the time of day to the field until the 1960s. This is also when Goody and Watt showed up. Coincidence?! #literacyconspiracytheories #ivegotnothing)
Street openly criticizes the allegedly neutral autonomous model of literacy that Goody, Watt, and Ong doled out like Halloween candy (they probably handed out raisins) and pushes for an ideological agenda. In this way, perhaps claims of literacy actually would be more “indifferent to attack and complete in [their] self-containment” (Ong) because the composite knowledge of various areas of science could corroborate these ideas.
Collins quickly touched on how it’s also problematic that Goody and Watt treat literacy like a thing to be attained rather than something ingrained in us that can be influenced and shaped. I agree with the idea that we all possess the capability to learn and display literacy practices, but you know what I might need to back that claim up?
A PET scan.
