Weeks One & Two

In response to James Collins, “Literacy and Literacies” and Sylvia Scribner, “Literacy in Three Metaphors”; Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “How Writing Came About”; and John Boardley, “The Origins of ABC: Where Does Our Alphabet Come From?”

How has your definition of literacy evolved since our first class session?

What have you learned about the origins of writing that have surprised you?

Week Three

In response to From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology by Dennis Baron

Do you have and/or have you ever had a favorite pencil or pen? What did you love about it? What technological aspects of the pencil or pen did you notice? What aspects do you now (after reading Baron) see you saw as “natural” and not technological?

What new technologies for writing have you resisted? What new technologies for have you heard others dismiss? Did you agree or disagree with their dismissals?

Week Four

In response to Carl Kaestle, “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers”

Kastle writes: “Among the most important technological features of writing are these: it allows the replication, transportation, and preservation of messages, and it allows back-and-forth scanning, the study of sequence, deliberation about word choice, and the construction of tables, recipes, and indexes. It fosters an objectified sense of time, and it separates the message from the author, thus ‘decontextualizing’ language. It allows new forms of verbal analysis, like the syllogism, and numerical analysis, like the multiplication table… Writing has allowed bureaucracy, accounting, and legal systems with universal rules. It has replaced face-to-face governance with depersonalized administration. On the other hand, it has allowed authorship to be recorded and recognized, thus contributing to the development of individualism in the world of ideas.” (16). What experiences do you have with any of these specific claims about the effects/consequences of writing? For example, with text-based “depersonalized” government, with authorship and individualism, with deliberation about word choice, or with the replication, transportation, and preservation of messages?

Week Four (cont.)

Also in response to Carl Kaestle, “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers”

Kaestle defines literacy as “the ability to decode and comprehend written language at a rudimentary level, that is, the ability to look at written words corresponding to ordinary oral discourse, to say them, and to understand them” (13). How does this compare to your own definition of literacy? To other definitions we’ve seen this quarter?

“The Renaissance, the printing press, and the Reformation had planted seeds for the democratization of reading, but those impulses were not universally accepted and did not complete the process. In the nineteenth century, another watershed was passed: the governing classes began to encourage the universal spread of reading ability” (26). Why did governing classes begin to encourage reading ability?

“Literacy can serve many purposes, sometimes traditional and constraining, sometimes innovative and liberating” (29). What examples of traditional, constraining, innovative, and/or liberating purposes does Kaestle mention? What other examples of these purposes can you think of?

Week Six

In response to Elizabeth McHenry and Shirley Brice Heath, “The Literate and the Literary” and Deborah Brandt, “Sponsors of Literacy”

Who sponsored your literacy? How did they sponsor your literacy practices? What, do you think, were their motivations?

Do you know about examples of other marginalized communities/peoples using literacy—specific practices, texts, genres, etc—in an explicit effort to bring about improved social standing or more generally change circumstances for the community/people in the context of the larger society?

Week Seven

In response to Anne Haas Dyson, “On Reframing Children’s Words: The Perils, Promises, and Pleasures of Writing Children” and Helen Damon Moore, “Introduction and Chapter 1 from Magazines for the Millions“

Can you think of examples from your life where, as Damon Moore says in her discussion of Ladies Home Journal, you encountered a written text that detailed, described, and/or persuaded you to engage in gendered commerce? E.g., magazines or websites you read? How did this text represent gendered behavior? What aspects of commerce did it encourage participation in?

Have you experienced teachers explicitly or implicitly basing their judgement of your writing or others’ work based on the high/low culture distinction that Dyson describes? What happened? What, in your example, was high culture? What was low culture? Did the teacher make a case for why the high culture was good and/or the low culture was bad or was it implicit/implied?

How is media still gendered and how has that affected your personal life in relation to literature?

What time in your life have you been actively swayed to buy something by gendered advertising?

How does your consumption of magazines today compare to that of Moore’s description in her reading?