-The New Literacy Studies-

Brian Street, the author of the article that we will be reading for Wednesday, does a fairly thorough job of highlighting the different models of literacy and how the study of literacy has evolved through the years.

 

So after our introduction to new literacy studies we’re confronted with these two different schools of thought on the subject: the Autonomous Model and the Ideological Model. Interestingly enough, the idea of the development of writing as merely a technical advancement has propped up a few different times throughout my educational career, along with the autonomous model that asserts that the study of literacy is inseparable from a broader analysis of one culture’s cultural and power structures.

 

And within these two schools is a continuation of the debate between oral histories and written histories, a debate that has popped up in almost every single WRD or History course that I’ve taken during my time here at DePaul. I’ve encountered a current argument from the staunch proponents of written histories, flowing along the argumentative lines of this: Writing allowed humans to become more analytical in their thought, and the histories that they wrote down were less susceptible to gradual change over the course of time. While this is certainly true in a sense, there also seems to be this intellectually and politically problematic way in which literacy in the ‘written’ sense is tied to this global divide between the ‘West’ and the ‘Third World’.

 

I guess my question is this: At what point do oral and written histories contradict, and is there a way in which you think that the two can be more effective than the other in their own ways? I admittedly come from the standpoint of standing alongside those that find slightly more value in written histories, so I’d be curious to see what others have to say about it!