On the first day of class, I recall being asked to write down my personal definition of literacy, and I purposely kept it quite broad. I knew that being literate involves being able to read and write at a certain basic level of proficiency, but there was a lot I didn’t know about the implications and applications of literacy and literacy studies.
At first, I thought of literacy as merely having a skill or skill-set, like the ability to read a certain language, or being literate in a computer program. As the weeks went on, though, I began to see it more as something subjective, personal, and culturally embedded. There is no such thing as literacy without cultural and social context.
It also matters what we think about literacy and literate people. There are these deeply entrenched narratives and assumptions about what it means to be literate that we should question.
I feel similarly after taking this course. Going to a monolingual public school, I had always viewed literacy as just being proficient in whatever language needed to communicate with others around you. I now understand that because of social and political constructs, the definition of literacy has been misconstrued to mean something entirely different. I realized that there really is no solid way to define literacy, as it means something different to everyone and there is no universal way of measuring it.