Can you standardize literacy?

By February 1, 2016 BlogPost No Comments

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far this quarter in this class it would be that I was extremely narrow minded when it came to literacy. Maybe it was my western educational background, or the importance put on reading and writing at a high level by my parents, but I came into this class with a the confidence that I knew what literacy was. Reading, writing, profecieny, bam! that’s literacy for you! As we all know now it’s not. Literacy is a very complicated term because, as Kaestle and others have pointed out to us, it is dependent on context. Literacy can almost be seen as situational – in certain situations within certain cultures one can be deemed literate but that same person in another situation may be considered illiterate. While I understand that on a theoretical level, I’m really struggling with having such a loose definition for literacy.

We live in a world – well at least a country – where being literate has been deemed crucial. We’ve started to transition from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy where the marketplace is no longer contingent on the production of material goods but rather the production of ideas. In order to fulfill positions within this changing society being literate is extremely important. And if we can’t agree on a definition of literacy, can we ever standardize it? And if we can’t standardize it how will we teach the next generation? If you guys have any thoughts on this I would love to hear them – I’m obviously still working through mine.

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