In common usage, literacy is understood to be the ability to read and write and was ‘formed as an antithesis to illiteracy’ in 1883 (OED department, 1980).  More recently, literacy has been defined as a social practice.  The notion of a literacy practice implies patterned and conventional ways of using written language that are defined by culture and regulated by social institutions.  Different communities do literacy differently.

But none of this is simple.  What exactly does the ability to read, for example, entail.  2

What creates difficulty in understanding this text are words that have specific meanings in this specialist discourse such as ‘ideational’ and ‘ineterpersonal’, the linking of common words such as ‘grammatical’ and ‘metaphor’ to mean something more than a simple combination of the meanings embedded in each, the fact that the text is taken out of context, and the fact that as readers we may not have enough background knowledge to bring to bear on the text.  IF we can read the text aloud, that is decode the symbols on the page and produce them as sound, aloud or silently in our heads, are we literate?  Or does literacy imply an ability to derive meaning from the text?  If it does, then are people who cannot read Halliday’s text illiterate? IF they are illiterate, then how are they reading this book?  How much literacy makes one literate  How many communities of practice do we need to belong to in order to do literacy across a range of practices.    2

In languages which do not have a word for literacy (2), literacy is often translated as ‘educated’ or ‘schooled’, with notions of refined, learned, well-bred, civilized, cultured, genteel, lying just beneath the surface. 2 – 3

It should come as no surprise that these schools privileged middle class literacy norms over sophisticated forms of orality.  Moreover, the kind of literacy that is favoured bears little relation to literacy practices rooted in children’s lives and their communities.  Rather, school literacy is seen as a neutral technology and a decontextualized set of skills; what Street calls the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy (Street, 1984).  3

…work is increasingly polarized into symbolic analytic work and service work.  Symbolic analytic work, which requires problem solving and innovation, is dependent on elite literacies.  More routine service work which relies on a reduced functional literacy is less valued and is poorly paid.  4

the more privileged one is, the greater one’s chances are of becoming literate across a range of media and modalities.  5

[friere] helps us to understand that reading the word cannot be separated from reading the world.  13

Foucault’s work forces us to think about how all discourses, not just discourses of literacy, produce truth, how they are produced by power and how they produce effects of power.  14

Kress’s contribution has been particularly important.  His work (Kress, 2003) has drawn our attention to the ways in which our models of literacy continue to privilege the word.  Together with van Leeuwen, he has helped us to see that texts are increasingly visual and that we have to take seriously the relationship between words, images and the overall design of print texts which are becoming increasingly multimodal (kress and van Leeuwen, 1990, 2001).  16  Because texts are increasingly multimodal—a text on the internet, for example, may include written words, pictures, moving images, colour, fonts of different sizes, sound, speech, with the different message streams working simultaneously – it becomes difficulty to separate oracy from literacy.  I nevertheless try where possible to distinguish between making meaning with and from written and visual texts on the one hand and spoken texts on the other.  Moreover, maintaining a distinction etween speaking, writing and designing (with words and visuals) is important because of the different affordances (Kress 2003) of these signifying systems.  17

The word ‘reading’ although initially tied ot reading verbal texts has been applied metaphorically to other modes of encoding meaning.  So one can ‘read’ film, clothing, gestures, pictures, photographs, bodies and so on.  The word ‘writing’ is not as expansive in its use.  […] the word ‘design’, unlike the word ‘write’, does work across multiple modalities, multiple forms of meaning making or semiosis – you can design a text, a style of dress, a page, a poster, furniture, a room.  Design is a useful word to talk about the production of texts that use multiple sign systems.  18.

Design encompasses the idea of productive power – the ability to harness the multiplicity of semiotic systems across diverse cultural locations to challenge and change existing discourses.  24

The New London Group’s (2000) work on multiliteracies stresses that students have to be taught how to use and select from lal the available semiotic resources of representation in order to make meaning, while at the same time combining and recombining these resources so as to create possibilities for transformation and reconstruction (Cope & Kalantzis) 1997.  This is what the New London Group calls ‘design.’  25

Model of critical literacy  (a table)  Domination, access, Diversity, design. Domination without access maintains the exclusionary force of dominant discourses…so she goes with 12 options, design without access, diversity without access, etc.

Any one of domination, diversity, access or design without the others creates a problematic imbalance.  Genre through without creativity runs the risk of reifying existing genres; desconstruction without reconstruction or design reduces human agency; diversity without access ghettoizes students.  Domeination without difference and diversity loses the ruptures that produce contestation and change.  Reconstruction needs deconstruction in order to understand ‘the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production’ (Foucault, 1978: 94) 27.

may prove helpful to think of literacy in terms of taxonomy.  THe unctional literacy required to read nad write letters of an alphabet, and sound the words they form, serves as a stepping stone to more complex types of literacy.  1

just as we must learn to read and write the alphabet to develop functional literacy, so too must we learn how to “read” visual images, discursive practices, personal ethics, community actions, cultural events, global developments, and humanity in general.  What’s more while learning to read others online, we are also composing ourselves.  2

the word ‘reading’ has always incorporated a number of complicated meanings, from teh decoding of the alphabet, to the interpretation of complex instructions and descriptions, to the evelopment of entranced absorption in the fictional universe.  Not so long ago, however, the word ‘reading’ carried at least one permanent connotation: the turning of pages and the comprehension of print on paper (4).

engagement with text, even if much of it is still alphabetic, is now a more complicated affair.  In contemporary texts, words may be printed or sounded or both. P ictures, still or moving, may augment, contradict or replace words. In many cases, this communicative process continues to entail word recognition alongside the processing of information through other media.  And we still veyr often call it reading.  5

quoting David Barton and Mary Hamilton’s framings of literacy:

• literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events which are mediated by written texts.
• there are different literacies associated with different domains f life.
• literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships, and some literacies become more dominant, visible and influential than others.
• literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices
• literacy i shistorically situated
• literacy practices change, and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and sense making.  (Barton and Hamilton 1998; 7)  7

the historical situation of literacy as it manifests itself today involves an ecoogy in which print on paper is not the only route to making sense of texts, and in which not every reader has equal access to new media and technologies.  Even when we do define reading strictly as the processing of print, such print is no longer confined to paper but also appears on different kinds of screen.  8

attention is shaped by experience and fuelled by affect; it manifests itself in different parts of the body, in the limbic system of the brain, nad in the conscious processes of thought.  Attracting, sustaining and directing attention is a major thrust of any text, whether designed for aesthetic, informational or commercial purposes, or any amalgam of the three.  10

there are many questions to be addressed, even within the limits of a cumulation of singular experiences.  What ar ethe contemporary demands on attention?  How do we direct and maintain our attention?  What is the role of distraction?  What is the importance of passivity?  How do we learn to attend through different kinds of experience?  what do we learn to notice?  What do we learn to value?  As we get older, how easy is it for us to mutate from what we learn to do as young people?  10