A Revisionist Luddite’s Lexicon for Literacy: Theories and Practices in Real Time

Although brought up and educated in an era (during and immediately after World War II) where my instructors, using the “look-say” or “whole word” method, may have disagreed with Rudolf Flesch’s later theory, which stated, “We have decided to forget that we write with letters and learn to read English as if it were Chinese” (Flesch, 5), it appears that my earliest instincts were in accord with those Flesch espoused. Literacy, for me, may have worn the mantle of rote as I learned to read which, I must admit, I don’t remember. What I remember, probably incorrectly, is that I should have learned English using phonics, or that may indeed have been the way I learned it. Somehow, like breathing, reading (or literacy) was always a part of my existence. The only actual difficulty I can remember was in the dyslexic transposing of the “a” and “c” in the word sacred, always pronouncing it scared, which confused others but seemed to make absolute sense to me. It wasn’t until some sixty-five years later that I began to grasp the many different definitions, variables, theories and models of literacy. Literacy, to me, was simply the ability to comprehend what I read and to be able to transcribe (write down) my thoughts. This essay will be an epic (in the manner of being the story of a people, in this case one…me) attempt at distilling some of the other concepts of literacy, including multicultural rhetoric, reader response theory, and reading and writing online.

Multicultural Rhetoric

In 1983, addressing multicultural literacy, Richard Rodriguez bleakly summarized his exposure to education in his statement, “that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life” (Rodriguez, 474). To what was Rodriguez referring? What had changed? Earlier, in the very same essay, Rodriguez elaborated on his “success in the classroom...[because] schooling was…separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student” (471). Being embarrassed was part of the price Rodriguez paid for being a “scholarship boy.” What occurred to Rodriguez was, “that the scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes” (471). There was a definite chasm between Rodriguez’s worlds, at home the student “learns to trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing” (472). From his teachers, at school, the student (Rodriguez) learned “the value of a reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action” (472). This separation began to cause Rodriguez to “alter” his early childhood habits. Rodriguez insisted that it was a product of “good” schooling, because the boy is “very much of both…worlds, home and school” (473).

Rodriguez bemoaned his education only insomuch as there was no addressing the differences between his home environment and that of his education. Those differences, as Rodriguez progressed through his education, caused him an uncomfortable embarrassment. In attempting to educate all students in like fashion Rodriguez stated, “the best synonym for primary ‘education’ is ‘imitation’” (479), quite simply postulating that “education requires radical self-reformation” (479). Because of his education Rodriguez knew that he “had grown culturally separated from [his] parents, [but his] education had given [him] ways of speaking and caring about that fact” (482). Rodriguez’s education, which he criticized as being that which separated him from his family and culture, still provided him with the means to be “unafraid to desire the past” (482), and as Shakespeare noted, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Later on, in 1993, the idea of an awareness of multiculturalism was beginning to take a more formal hold in the educational concepts that defined literacy. Victor Villanueva, Jr., having competency in rhetoric and composition, and placed in charge of his school’s English department’s basic-writing program, was taken with Paulo Freire’s philosophy as espoused in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Villanueva, quoted Freire, that the liberating teacher was “not directive of the students, but directive of the process…not doing something to the students but with the students” (Villanueva, 93). At the same time Villanueva understood that, “students cannot be left to their own devices totally, yet they cannot be handed everything” (93).

How did Villanueva propose to introduce the cultural, that is, the effect that one’s cultural background will inform one’s literacy and the pedagogy required to take advantage of it. Villanueva stated, “the basic idea is to present the cultural in such a way as to have students question worldviews, become critical….Questioning what is commonly accepted makes clear the need for action. Among the things that are commonly accepted is the canon” (99). Villanueva was quick to point out that even persons sharing very similar backgrounds “can come to polar viewpoints” (100), differences diametrically opposed, indicating, in this regard, the disparities between the views of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Introduce the literacy “norms,” even with this disparity as a possible result, because that disparity is the result of the student possessing a “critical view.” As such, Villanueva proposed that students not “relinquish national-cultural myths….[but] to expose them to differences and similarities within the literacy conventions they have to contend with…looking at the norms [of literacy conventions] critically” (100). Subsequently, Villanueva prefers “‘tradition’ to ‘permanence,” given Hirsch’s observation that traditions can and do change” (96).

Villanueva, to illustrate his arguments, calls on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, who Villanueva criticizes for the idea of a “national-cultural set of common assumptions” (94). There is also the mention of Antonio Gramsci’s “folkloristic” accepted ways of the world, and Basil Bernstein’s “hierarchical authority” which, in working-class homes, is “position-centered,” and in the middle-class, “person-centered” (111). It is Villanueva’s thesis that, “class cannot be subsumed under culture without neutralizing the political dimension in education….Without considerations of class…[one] paints an ideological picture of a pluralism…which does not yet exist in our society…without acknowledging the struggles inherent in the class system” (114). This was and is certainly a thesis formed by understanding Paulo Freire.

By 1997, in the pursuit of a definition and understanding for a new literacy, based on having a multicultural student body, Bonnie Lisle and Sandra Mano explored the concept of a “Multicultural Rhetoric.” They were/are looking to broaden the scope of comprehension in teaching “cultural variation[s] in rhetorical strategies” (Lisle, 16). In looking to broaden the ethnographic footprint of teaching rhetoric, Lisle and Mano stated that, “most rhetoric texts remain ethnocentric, ignoring the particular needs and interests…of culturally diverse students” (12). Subsequently, in quoting Guadlupe Valdes, “the distinctions we typically make among bilingual students, speakers of nonstandard English, and basic writers are crude and inadequate” (13). It was, in the view of Lisle and Mano, exposed by “a survey of persuasive strategies” that suggested that in other cultures “a measure of rhetorical effectiveness the logocentrism of Western tradition is the exception rather than the rule” (16). Lisle and Mano suggest that even though change is what is desired today in the teaching of rhetoric, it is unfortunately mired in tradition. Exploring the cultural differences in Arabic, Japanese and Chinese writing and storytelling, there is a profound difference with that of American or western rhetoric. In this regard, “both oral and literate traditions of non-European cultures challenge the straight-edged geometry of Western rhetoric” (16). To achieve the desired goal of a multicultural rhetoric, Lisle and Mano “believe a rhetoric such as the one we describe will foster an awareness of varied audiences, purposes, and social contexts for writing through an examination of students’ linguistic and cultural communities….Because multiculturalism is fast becoming a reality…instructors as well as students must engage in a learning process” (26). In summation, Lisle and Mano stated that their rhetoric “requires self-transformation” (26). They assert that, “committing ourselves to the long process of learning and relearning that this effort entails must be ``our first step toward a truly multicultural rhetoric” (26).

In a complex world, especially in the United States, where peoples of all nations live in what we would like to think of as harmony, it becomes the teacher’s goal, nay duty, to become aware of those cultural differences and, through that awareness, nurture and educate students using their ethnic diversity as the alloy to reinforce education as a steelmaker uses carbon to strengthen steel. Ethnic diversity, in these complicated times, is that strengthening agent, an alloy that is the carbon in our national fiber.

Reader Response Theory

Much of the content of Literature as Exploration relies on my being able to paraphrase, not unlike Louise Rosenblatt’s 1938 contention in the essay that, “to demonstrate ‘understanding’ of a work has been primarily a matter of paraphrasing, defining, applying the proper rubrics” (Rosenblatt, 58). The article illustrates the basic differences in reading either for information (efferent) or for feeling (aesthetic). In the teaching of literature Rosenblatt avers that the teaching “has the effect of turning [the student] away from [literature]” (59). This occurs because there is no intrinsic link between the student and the work, only the absolute response to the teacher’s request for information and analysis.

Today, it seems apparent that Rosenblatt’s contention that the teacher create “a situation favorable to a vital experience of literature” (61), is remarkably intuitive. That might have been considered counterintuitive in 1938 because, in his study of literature, the student knew that, “he must prepare for certain questions, that his remarks…must satisfy the teacher’s…ideas” (63). However, “few teachers of English today would deny that the individual’s ability to read and enjoy [italics added] literature [as] the primary aim of literary study” (64-65). Most importantly is the “relationship between teacher and student that will permit the student to respond intimately and spontaneously [italics added] to literature” (76).

However, the student must assimilate “complementary objectives: …a critical awareness of his own reactions, and…a keener…perception of all that the text offers” (77). There was the idea that this pedagogy had “been insufficiently recognized” (77). Literature as enjoyment is still taught with many of the rubrics of the past, creating still more roadblocks to learning and appreciation, because bypasses around these defiles are obstructed, intentionally or otherwise, all along the way. The student must be able to feel “safe” in the classroom, and “free from judgment and constant correction.” In short, he should be able to say whether he enjoyed a text or not. That, in itself, is the basis for learning, forming an opinion, and making connections with the text, not having an imposed point of view.

In The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Rosenblatt adds another layer of understanding to the relationship between the reader and the text. Rosenblatt defines “text” as “a set or series of signs interpretable as linguistic symbols” (Rosenblatt, 12). Among other functions provided by the text, there are two major ones. First is as the “stimulus,” activating “concepts linked with verbal symbols” (11). Second, it “helps to regulate” (11) what the reader will select “to keep his attention on while interpreting the text.”

The “poem” is defined as that which “presupposes a reader actively involved with a text and refers to what he makes of his responses to the particular set of verbal symbols….It is an event in time” (12). Rosenblatt is referring to the aesthetic transaction (the feeling) between the reader and the text.

Although there is the supposition that, “the reader ‘finds’ the meanings in the text” (14), Rosenblatt demurs. She postulates, “the finding of meanings involves both the author’s text and what the reader brings to it” (14). There is no denial that the text is “the outward and visible result of an author’s creative activity. Nor does it deny the importance of the author’s text” (15). However, in quoting T.S. Eliot’s embracing of the idea when reading a poem that, “a valid interpretation…must be at the same time an interpretation of my own feeling [italics added] when I read it” (15-16). There is that marriage of ideas, based on history and experience that the reader brings to the author’s intent in the text. Out of this grows the idea of “transaction” between the reader and the text; “‘Transaction’ designates…an ongoing process in which the elements or factors are…each conditioned by and conditioning the other” (17). Zen, a Buddhist school of philosophy, emphasizes experiential wisdom or understanding over theoretical knowledge. There is a zen-like construction of the author by the reader – “the voice, the tone, the rhythms and inflections, the persona – as part of what [the reader] decodes from the text” (17), because “it must be internalized (italics added) by each individual human being” (17).

It was W. Ross Winterowd, in 1989, who, in his chapter, “To Read,” from The Culture and Politics of Literacy, echoed the zen concept of well-learned lessons. Winterowd articulated that, “to act on the ‘cues’ that make up the text, readers must have (a) the proper world knowledge and (b) competence with the language system” (Winterowd, 59). The reader’s interpretation, and transaction with the text, is based on that which he has “‘up here’ in [his] mind” (59). However, Winterowd then deconstructed that part of language, the zen, that we’ve absorbed through a lifetime, an experiential transaction with the text, reading and writing. The text, the “thing” we read, is broken down into endophoric and exophoric cues and clues; the endophoric being those that direct the reader to the structure of the text, while the exophoric are those that direct the reader to his or her knowledge of the world. From these indices, reading instruction is extrapolated and defined as “a physiological, psychological and cultural process/problem,” all of which is realized through the reader’s transaction with the text.

Where Rosenblatt states that reading text “is an event in time,” Winterowd articulated that, “reading and learning to read always takes place in a scene, a time (italics added) and a place, and scene is closely related to motive,” and that “children who grow up in homes where reading takes place…learn to read” (64). Deconstructionist tendencies in Winterowd’s view extend to his expostulation on comprehension, “the goad of reading…is comprehension: understanding in a complex and deep sense” (71). To illustrate, Winterowd explores “gist,” the text’s main point, “coherence,” how “details relate to…the main theme” (74), and “cohesion,” how to “get from one segment to another without puzzling over relationships” (75). In essence, Winterowd expounds that the text’s “clues…direct the reader in two directions; inward to the textual structure itself, and outward to the reader’s knowledge of the world” (82). Reading is as much experiential as it is theoretical…reinforcing the concept of an inner assimilation of the elements that make us individuals.

Reading and Writing Online

Bronwyn T. Williams, in Shimmering Literacies, stated, “Sometimes it’s not easy to get past the obvious” (Williams, 1). Elaborating, Williams also noted, “there is nothing particularly insightful in noticing that adolescents spend a great deal of time reading and writing online” (1). We’ve entered a new era of writing and/or preparing text. Couple this with Cynthia L. Selfe’s encouragement in The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing, that, “teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, …adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it – and other (italics added) modalities – can play in contemporary communication tasks” (Selfe, 616). Selfe simply illustrates that contemporary composition instruction in the U.S. “functions to limit our professional understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and deprive students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning” (617). Undoubtedly Williams and Selfe are discussing the same topic from two different viewpoints.

Selfe would have us become aware of the importance of sound to contemporary students. College students (and others) are somehow always attached to their iPods. Sound is integral to their existence. Selfe suggests, “we need to pay attention to both writing and aurality, and other modalities” (618).

In the 18th century, prior to print, “college education in America was oral, drawing on classical tradition.” Print has been in a privileged position in composition since the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. It was suggested, according to Selfe, “how digital communication environments and digital multimodal texts have encouraged some teachers of composition to rediscover aurality as a valuable modality of expression” (619). This is one potential example of where the exposure to contemporary culture will bring our 21st century students. They are connected to the electronic world in ways that were unthinkable a mere twenty years ago. Williams suggests we, “talk to students about their lives outside the classroom and the extent to which they are involved with popular culture becomes quickly apparent” (Williams, 2), because “popular culture often shapes the content and form of current online reading and writing” (3).

Williams speaks of the “skills and practices students are developing” (3), while Selfe wants to “encourage students to deploy multiple modalities in skillful ways – written, aural, visual – and that they model a respect for and understanding of the various roles each modality can play in human expression” (Selfe, 626). Today’s students are already composing in the ether, that is, blogging and communicating on the internet, adding pictures, audio and video to their compositions. Currently, these two imbricated concepts layer, reinforce and weatherproof these modalities from a storm of 20th century protest.

Selfe acknowledges that it might be difficult to produce compositions with audio and video because of limited resources or technological dissonance. But, at the same time, she argues that teachers should pay attention to, “the multiple ways in which students compose and communicate meaning…[that] we need to better understand the importance that students attach to…new and different kinds of texts that help them make sense of their experience and lives” (642).

Williams extends the idea of adapting popular culture online, how there is a “relationship of pop culture to online technologies.” There is the affirmation that “participants in online networks…develop a kind of ‘collective intelligence’” (Williams, 14). Because of this “participatory popular culture,” students are involved in all the new media which, by definition, must cause literacy practices to adapt, especially as computer literacy has become intertwined with these selfsame literacy practices. It is briefly summed up, by Williams, in the observation that “the ability to compose with images, graphics, and video [has] challenged the traditional print literacy emphasis on linearity in communication” (7). “A text,” according to Williams, quoting Gunther Kress (2003), “has three central qualities:

To represent states of affairs or events in the world – the
ideational function; to represent the social relations between the participants
in the process of communication – the interpersonal function; and to represent
all that as message-entity, a ‘text’ which is internally coherent and which
coheres with its environment – the textual function (7).

Both Selfe and Williams agree that other modalities and methods for communication and composition must be included in the pedagogy for a new age.

A Personal Realization

In a world that is more and more heterogeneous, we must become aware of the differences that reinforce our similarities. Our reactions as human beings, colored by our cultural experiences, in my limited unscientific observation, are more similar than they are different. There is that attempt, by all the students I have been fortunate enough to encounter, to succeed at a level high enough to participate in our manifold convoluted society.

Starting with the idea of multicultural rhetoric, that is, being aware of the cultural differences of my students, and what they may bring with them to the classroom, was and is not so much a problem but an opportunity to assess many variegated views of the subject matter that it was my pleasure to impart. In speaking of the ancient Greeks, how is the concept of western civilization viewed by my students various cultural backgrounds and life experiences? Granted, there was a certain limit to the digression from the central issues, as understood in the teaching of the Humanities, but I allowed for the viewing through a prism of culture, refracting the information and breaking it down into its components, rather than a pane of pedagogy, showing only the glossy surfaces.

The growth of western civilization, as is understood today through the pedagogy of the past 3,000 years, may somehow be understood somewhat differently from the point of view of one who has lived in a civilization 5,000 years old, as in China. What about contemporary cultural differences in the same civilization? What is our expectation of those whose experience with books, reading and comprehension are different, or limited, or virtually non-existent? Is it there that we insist on a pedagogy similar to that of Bartholomae or that of Freire? Does Flesch provide the answer in Why Johnny Can’t Read?

The transactional process, as expressed by my students’ responses to their required reading, was almost always concentrated with the efferent rather than the aesthetic. All reading was conducted in the effort of extracting information. In the classic readings, prior to works of the early 20th century, there was virtually no aesthetic transaction in my students. However, when we read more contemporaneous writings, and viewed film, even one more than forty years old, the students participated and were, at times, even animated. My exploration of pedagogy would have to include some method of reaching the students with historical works…an area of constant research for me.

I know that the answer to my prior conundrum lies in the new technology and the students’ reactions and participation in it. There is an extraordinary willingness to use all that is new. It was amazing to me to watch my students taking notes on their laptops or netbooks. Even though I possess a netbook, I find it virtually impossible to take notes on it. That is where I’m still the luddite of the title. Using electronic note-taking, the students I’ve observed appeared to have an immediate and comprehensive grasp of the information. This is not to be confused with some form of recording. The information is just in note form. Because of its popularity, it is through this new (but not nascent) technology that we will reach students going forward.

Although there is a little of the tongue-in-cheek in the title of this essay, the concept of a “Revisionist Luddite,” there is that part that is quintessentially my essence. What do I mean? It is difficult (but not insurmountably so) for me not to agree with Flesch and “my earliest instincts,” concerning pedagogy and teaching and learning in general. To achieve an educated society (or civilization), I believe in the idea of a shared common cultural heritage, one that will inform the critical thinking necessary to allow for exchanges between peoples. I’m not speaking of that which motivates business, a capitalist ethos, but that which informs a civilization in which shared ideas may prepare us for a shared future. We cannot stand alone. Education has to make us all participants in a shared future using all the best pedagogical techniques, but not by the complete excision of all that has gone before, informing our civilization today.
* * *

Works Cited
Flesch, Rudolf. Why Johnny Can’t Read – And What You Can Do About It. New York: Harper
& Row, 1955. vii-xiii, 13-21. Print.

Lisle, Bonnie and Sandra Mano. “Embracing a Multicultural Rhetoric.” Writing in Multicultural
Settings. Eds. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 1997. 12-26. Print.

Rodriguez, Richard. “The Achievement of Desire.” Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for
Critical Thinking and Writing. Eds. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen and Bonnie Lisle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. 469-482. Print.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration, 4th Ed. New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1983. 57-77. Print.

---. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. 6-21. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal
Composing.” College Composition and Communication 60.4 (June 2009): 616-645.
Print.

Villanueva, Victor Jr. “Of Color, Classes and Classroom.” Bootstraps: From an American
Academic of Color. Urbana: NCTE, 1993. 91-118. Print.

Williams, Bronwyn T. “Everyone Gets a Say: Changes in Audience.” Shimmering Literacies:
Popular Culture & Reading & Writing Online. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 29-61. Print.

Winterowd, W. Ross. “To Read.” The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford UP,
1989. 57-83. Print.

---. “To Write.” The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford UP,
1989. 103-146. Print.

The Hills are Alive: Aurality and Multimodality Composition as a Semiotic Resource for Making Meaning… or the Sound of Music

Thoughts on Cynthia L. Selfe’s, "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing"

In the search for “making meaning and understanding the world,” Selfe suggests that “we pay attention to aurality” (618) (to “that which relates to the ear, the sense of hearing”), as well as writing, “and other composing modalities.” In the twenty-first century, according to Selfe, writing is not a stand-alone method of compositional communication. Instructors must recognize the students’ cultural influences, giving credence to those influences, and allowing for an understanding of how they are reflected in the academic efforts, especially in college composition classrooms, made with those influences in mind. Selfe maintains that students have “fundamental issues of rhetorical sovereignty: the rights and responsibilities…to identify their own communicative needs and to represent their own identitites” (618), adding, “the irony of making an argument about aurality in print is not lost on [her]” (619). Having accepted, in principle, the concept of multiple modalities in composition it may further be argued that the idea of presenting such a composition is still contingent on starting with one or another of the modalities as a stand-alone. Perhaps the idea for a presentation would start with a photograph album to which titles or an abbreviated script may be appended. At that point one might add sound and/or music. Or, one may start with a script to which would be added visuals, audio (including voice-over, sound effects and music). In each case the presentation would entail the starting of the project with an idea that would be organized with a script and the concordant modalities to heighten the effect of the entire opus. The caveat is that well-structured multi-modal presentations require a great deal of planning and effort and the conjoining of the various disciplines can, in some cases, lead to what may be best described as confused results. Nurturing the idea of multiple disciplines in presenting an essay is laudable. Encouragement by the teacher is a small enough price to pay, but is effort alone to be rewarded? Does this make the onus for failure more debilitating? Instead of an harmonious sound of music would there be a discordance that brings originality screeching to a halt?
* * *

Zen: Denying the Theoretical in Favor of the Experiential

Thoughts on Louise M. Rosenblatt’s, "The Reader, the Text, the Poem"

Rosenblatt avers that, “the reader’s attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experience…. [and] meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them” (11). As I assayed absorbing Rosenblatt’s theory I was reminded of the Zen concept which “de-emphasizes theoretical knowledge in favor of direct, experiential realization.” It appeared as though everything to which Rosenblatt referred, as in “the text is the stimulus…so that elements of past experience…are activated” (11), illuminated the Zen mechanism that functions in all of us. The argument is further reinforced by Rosenblatt’s elaboration that, “the essence – of language is the fact that it must be internalized by each individual human being” (20). These concepts extend to the listener where the speaker’s “nonverbal cues…through emphasis, pitch, inflection, rhythm, and…facial expression and gesture” are those which help to “decode” the text. All of these are virtually instinctual human reactions based on a lifetime of experience. Our experience defines us and what we perceive and understand. Where Rosenblatt sparks a new idea is that in which the reader “finds it necessary to construct the speaker (emphasis added)…as part of what he decodes from the text” (20). But, even so, the idea of Zen as a modus operandi, if not the method, works for even the reader because his understanding of the author, the “transaction between the reader and the author’s text,” is predicated on the reader’s ability to concretize his idea of the speaker. This concretization is again a transactional one based on the reader’s “past experience” and his “present state and interests” (20).