Literacies of Self, Others, and Surrounding Ecologies
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Literacies of the (Situated) Self, Others, and Surrounding Ecologies
Charles Scott
ABSTRACT: I conceive of literacy as understandings of self, others, and surrounding physical, sociocultural, historical, and spiritual ecologies made possible through the skills of reflection, reading, dialogue, and writing in a collaborative, dialogical classroom. Students use these understandings to communicate meaningfully and effectively with others. Reciprocally, I suggest the acts of reflection, reading, dialogue, and writing themselves help deepen our literacies of self, others, and the world. Understanding and working with this reciprocity between our ecological understandings and our reflective, reading, speaking, and writing skills can be a vital component of our curricular and pedagogical approaches to literacy.
KEYWORDS: Literacy, ecological, identity, dialogue.
Introduction: Toward a More Integrated Concept of Academic Literacy
My focus in on our conceptualization of academic literacy; the principles I outline here emerge out of the theoretical underpinnings and my experiences in the Foundations of Academic Literacy program at Simon Fraser University. We sometimes think of literacy skills as those skills revolving around comprehension in reading, of rhetoric and oratory when speaking, and skills of vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and punctuation in writing. And these are all dimensions of literacy. But we also have sociocultural, historical, and spiritual dimensions to literacy, and scholars like Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) write about situated learning, while Anthony Giddens (1991) and Bonny Norton (2000, 2009) write about modernity and self-identity, narrative, and critical pedagogies in language learning. The field of literacy has been significantly altered by postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial contributions.
I suggest we can conceptualize literacy as understandings of self, of others, and of surrounding physical, sociocultural, historical, and spiritual ecologies, and that individuals can use these understandings to communicate meaningfully and effectively with others. I suggest that language contributes to the formation of, manifests in, or helps us communicate our understandings of the ecologies of self, others, and the world. As Alfred North Whitehead (1967) would argue, our study of language cannot remain an inert form of knowledge.
In turn, I suggest that manifestations of literacy in the skills of reflection, reading, oral dialogue, and writing can deepen understandings of self, others, and the world. The acts of reflection, dialogue with others, and writing themselves through their integrated practice help form and deepen our literate understandings of the world. Thus, I am suggesting reciprocity between our understandings of self, others, and the world, and our reflective, reading, speaking, and writing skills. The Foundation of Academic Literacy program at SFU is, at least in my mind, built on this fundamentally integrated approach to literacy, offering a more robust, rigorous, and comprehensive approach to the development of literacy.
We develop meaning through our self awareness and our intimate contacts with the worlds around us; we can then communicate that meaning through developed oral and written forms. I am outlining a dialogical approach in which literacy is developed in and through our interactions with ourselves, others, and surrounding worlds. The FAL program at SFU is based on such an approach, with an emphasis on dialogue as praxis. Bonny Norton (2009) has recently remarked on the significance of combining theory and practice. We need an effective, ecological, and critically engaged praxis of literacy which integrates theory and practice and the findings of that practice.
Why is Such a Concept of Literacy Valuable?
David Orr (1994) asks if literacy increases our vernacular knowledge, the knowledge of a place and its peoples, its geographies and histories, its politics and culture. A place-based focus in literacy education (Gruenwald & Smith, 2008; Smith & Williams, 1999; Theobald, 1997) is likely to impact curriculum and pedagogy, meaning, for example, that we would tear down the walls of our classrooms, and step outside into an education without borders to become familiar with the local as a means of moving toward the global. UNESCO contextualizes literacy within one’s relatedness to surrounding ecologies:
Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society. (LAMP, 2004, pp. 2-3)
Orr also asks, as did Whitehead almost 80 years earlier, about our fragmented knowledge. Do we see academic literacy as a separate discipline or do we take a systemic approach to see it as an inseverable and integrated part of knowledge creation? Orr proposes that we do not need more “successful” people, suggesting instead that we need “peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind” (p. 12). He also cites Thomas Merton, who, on being asked about his own literary success, famously advised with regard to material success: “Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted” (Merton, 2002, pp. 364-365). Merton goes on to suggest that the function of a university education is to teach a person how to drink tea—but concludes: “And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything—provided you see who it is who is acting” (p. 265).
Which brings us to a literacy of the self.
A Literacy of the Self
There is no one more expert in the lives of the students than they themselves. New to the university, many of these students feel tentative about their learning and knowledge, but they are not tentative about their own lives and the identities they have formed before coming to our classrooms, if given the chance to explore them. Sue Starfield (2007) notes that the typical academic genres of critical essay writing and tests can set up asymmetrical power relations and stress passive voice construction in writing, especially at times when students are feeling vulnerable and uncertain. Working with personal narrative helps students hold on to or re-claim a sense of power and purpose. As well, this exercise offers an opportunity to develop further an ever-emerging self-awareness. One of the focal areas of our narrartive assignment is “What is your subject?”—a worthy focus for any writer. This process is what Ivanič and Simpson (1992) call the writer’s task to “find the I.”
What we are doing in the FAL program is developing a legitimated, possibly hybrid self (especially for ESL students), a sense of authority, what Ivanič and Simpson (1992) call the “committed ‘I’” (see also Tang & John, 1999). The committed “I” is an engaged rather than narcissistic sense of self. Out of this committed “I” emerges the voice—or voices—of the writer, which Donald Murray (1987) defines as “the writer revealed” (p. 183). The voices the students develop may be multiple, varied, and outside the margins of convention, and they are reflections of self-awareness, including an increasing awareness of being situated in the ecologies which surround them.
We also give students opportunities to share with the class writings that they have found particularly meaningful and powerful in their own lives. Students revel in this activity and share poetry, lyrics from songs, passages from favorite authors in both fiction and non-fiction, sharing a variety of materials, reflecting both personal interests and sociocultural differences; in my classes I have had everything from lyrics from John Lennon and Johnny Cash to Henry V’s speech at Agincourt, from Li Bai’s Tan dynasty poetry to Octavio Paz’s poetry from 20th century Mexico, to the recent writings of Iranian student dissidents. This exercise legitimates both student values which have informed their lives and the variety of forms writing can take and which students can incorporate in their own writing. It also allows students to develop literacy in the contexts of and interactions with different languages and cultures, and maintains heritage languages (see, for example, these scholars with regard to discursive variety (Giltrow, 2005; Hornberger, 2003a; Hyland, 2004; Ivanič, 1998).
We also cover areas the common concerns of literacy, such as the elements of writing: essay organization; paragraph construction; topic sentences; thesis statements; beginnings, middles, and ends; syntax; grammar; punctuation. None are neglected, but none of these drive the program. They serve as tools for writing, not as its masters, and are learned in the contexts of developing literacies of self, others, and the world. These emerge as the vehicles by which we convey our messages effectively and meaningfully; when the students feel they have something to say they are then more committed to being able to say it in ways which reach others effectively and meaningfully.
A Literacy of Others
An obvious reality is that our classrooms are communities of learners who can connect meaningfully with each other, support one another in a variety of ways, and engage with and come to understand different epistemological perspectives. These opportunities help students appreciate and legitimate multiple identities, perspectives, and life stories. We cannot afford an illiteracy of the other, even when curricular reform includes minority perspectives: we still need recognition of any and all others, and the recognition of otherness.
… monological approaches to curriculum reform, hegemonic or minority, merely lead us down the path of cultural illiteracy of the other—an illiteracy we cannot afford in a world context of deepening globalization and interdependence. We cannot afford a continued blissful ignorance of groups that are different from our own—a practice that is still perpetuated in the dominant school curriculum. (McCarthy, Giardina, Harewood, & Park, 2005)
Students work with each other in a variety of ways. They read and peer edit each other’s work, engaging in conversations about the writings, what they reveal, and in what ways they can relate to each other’s experiences. The students make marvelous peer editors because they can readily empathize with each other’s experiences and challenges; they are very supportive of each other, and this helps legitimate their experience, perceptions, and ideas, furthering a development of voice. Students also write biographies of each other, and we challenge them to develop biographies which offer more in-depth examinations of the other person’s formative experiences, and their values, beliefs, ideals, hopes and dreams. Developing these more intimate biographies helps them develop literacies of others and otherness. We need to be able to develop communities of those who have little or nothing in common (Lingis, 1994).
Carolyn Mamchur points out that writing involves and is enhanced by the intricacies of communication and community:
It includes the exploration and examination of language. And, most importantly, it necessitates the exchanging of ideas and sharing of compositions. Out of that exchange grows a sense of trust, of responsibility, of risk taking, of group cohesion. This learning is an intimate process involving the development of skills which enable students to improve communication in the tenth grade, in first year of college, in fortieth year of life. (Mamchur, 1984, p. 26).
As Suzanne de Castell and Allan Luke argue, students and teachers can and must learn to negotiate authority and meaning in the classroom, and it is this very dialogical encounter which enables and maintains “ … the exchange of meanings between teachers and learners, between readers and writers—an exchange that enables both cultural transmission and cultural renewal” (de Castell & Luke, 1987, p. 427).
A focus on the other also better enables students to come to terms with multiple texts and contexts, as these are represented in both the lives and experiences of others and any written literature they encounter (Johns, 1997; Starfield, 2007); writing becomes what Candlin and Hyland (1999) refer to as a “social act” which takes place in the contexts of engagement.
A Literacy of Surrounding Ecologies, from the Local to the Global
We can also offer students opportunities to move out in widening spheres of engagement to encounter immediate and more removed physical, sociocultural, historical, and spiritual ecologies: to not only become aware of these ecologies but also of the messages they send forth (Buber, 1947/2002), and then to respond to them both orally and in writing. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) theory of the ecologies of human development situates development as occurring within and in response to a series of “nested” ecological systems, from relations within the family to relations with immediate surrounding communities, and out to relations with culture and historical formation.
We are here offering students an opportunity to develop identities which are ecologically placed; that is, they see and may well define themselves in and through their relationships with these various spheres: an ecological self. In a world that is ever more connected, changing, and complex, it would seem irresponsible not to help students develop ontological orientations that are, in whatever ways, ecological. Moreover, in a globalized world, students need to understand—and, to whatever degree possible, control—these ecologies, and not just be unconsciously swept along by the forces which swirl around communities both large and small. We live in a world now where there is what McCarthy, Giardina, Harewood, and Park (2005) call a “complex flow of humanity across presumptive borders” (p. 89). Students need to be able to navigate skillfully, and not feel overwhelmed by, the intersections of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity.
In the FAL program, we have students engage with the ecologies surrounding them, allowing them to write about whatever interests them academically, which more readily allows them to make the connections which integrate their various forms of knowing. We are attempting to establish integrated literacies which can develop in and through reflective, meaningful writing and the sharing of writing in these dialogical settings. The writing and the interactions about writing serve as vehicles for a deepened awareness of self, others, and the world—which reciprocally leads to writing that is richer and more meaningful. As well, the students are now increasingly concerned with the skills required in making their writing more fully express their meaning, more academically sound and rich.
Literacy Skills: Reflection, Reading, Writing, and Dialogue
Students need to be able to develop the ability to reflect: to think and to feel deeply, to develop reflective attitudes and practices as part of a more critical engagement with their texts, with others, and with things and events in their surrounding worlds. Toni Morrison (2008) argues that solitude is essential to the armamentarium of a literate person; we must not be, as she says, “alien to [our] own company” (p. 189). Reading needs to include not only coursework but also the literature of a culture, including popular literature such as magazines and newspapers: the common stuff of a culture. Writing, obviously. We start off with autobiography, move to biography, and then to explorations of the world. At each stage, the writings are revised more than once, and we work with the students to help them more fully discover their subjects and the inevitable connections between subjects. At each stage, students acquire the identities of biographer, ethnographer, and researcher, deepening their encounters with self, others, and enveloping worlds. In the FAL program, students and instructors engage through dialogue. They share their understandings through conversation and peer review. Our pedagogical approach is one of responsiveness; there is the ethos of encounter.