Literary literacy?

Definitions of literacy tend to cohere around two contrasting paradigms, which co-exist to some extent in many classrooms. One sees literacy as an “autonomous” (Street 1993, 5) property or ability of the individual, and literacy teaching as concerned with “functional” matters: remedying deficiency and developing competence in “literacy skills”. This competence is often defined by external authority. Originally meaning “a person of erudition”, the term litteratus gained a connotation of minimal competence during the fourteenth century, when a layman who could read a prescribed verse from the Psalter in Latin would gain benefit of clergy and avoid the death penalty (Clanchy 1993, 234). In 1997, the UK government’s National Literacy Task Force was charged to “design a strategy” that would ensure that “all children leaving primary schools … will have reached a reading age of at least eleven”. (The Task Force apparently did not regard a child’s “reading age” as related to an average below which a number of children of that chronological age must statistically fall.) The subsequent Literacy Strategy presented a framework for teaching within which, according to Bearne and Cliff Hodges (2000, 9), “teachers had to make space to meet the needs of individual students’ development, interests and preferences”.

The other paradigm of “literacy” also has a long history, which retains some of the original sense of erudition. It involves reading the world and reading the word (Freire 1985) and connects personal response with social awareness. William Lovett, one of the leading Chartists, made detailed proposals in 1841 to replace learning by rote with “a closer connection of words and things”. Lovett wanted to go beyond “the mere teaching of ‘reading, writing and arithmetic’” to the working classes to remove “the obstacles to their liberty and impediments to their happiness which ignorance still presents” (quoted by Simon 1972, 245). The spirit of this informed the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies espoused by the New London Group (Cazden et al. 1996), whose concept of “Multiliteracies” signified both “the increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioural, and so on”, and to “the realities of increasing local diversity and global connectedness”. Effective citizenship and productive work, they declared, “now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries” (Cazden et al. 1996, 64).

Nearly 25 years after the literacy projects outlined above, English educators continue to investigate the multiple possibilities and practices of reading/literacy, as the articles in this issue demonstrate. Margaret Mackey acknowledges that digital affordances of interactivity and multimodality have moved the goalposts of reading so profoundly that sometimes they seem to have changed the whole game. However, she argues that the psychological functions of reading remain constant and independent of mode. She explores four categories of reading – early learning, recreational reading, literary reading and deep reading – and asks for a humane and invested conversation about reading practices to establish priorities that incorporate the best affordances of analogue and digital.

David Lewkowich contributes to such a conversation by his account of the “thought chronicle” he asks his pre-service teachers of English to create. These chronicles are responses to readings they have studied in their curriculum/methods course. Students are encouraged to use a variety of forms, composing responses in media different from that of the original text. This multi-modal personal record makes for affective as well as intellectual engagement. Producing multiple interpretations and thinking symbolically, students grow as readers to reflect upon the nature of literacy itself.

Margaret Merga reveals the “invisible” educative work of teacher-librarians. Her research in 30 Australian schools demonstrates ways in which these professionals identify struggling readers, provide individual and group support, help students find personally engaging books, and act as advocates for library time and reading generally. Teacher-librarians also read to older children (who often relish the experience), facilitate silent reading time, and – given the current association of literacy with test results – help prepare students for high-stakes testing.

Ghazal Kazim Syed explores citizenship education through literature in Pakistan. He selects three aspects of citizenship – identity, rights and duties – as the basis of semi-structured interviews with 26 undergraduates about their reading of four novels studied in the English department of Sindh university. Syed’s respondents make sense of the novels through their personal experiences and observations. A male participant compares class oppression in A Tale of Two Cities to the “wadera” system experienced in his town, while a female reader of The God of Small Things relates the experience of Velutha to her mother’s discrimination against the Hindu peasants who worked on her father’s land.

Brenton Doecke and his fellow researchers enlarge the concept of “literary” to encompass reading as “a social [rather than merely individual] pursuit, something that occurs in the spaces between people”. They observe a joyful poetry class in a sixth grade class in Brazil, a year 9 verse fiction class in a Melbourne secondary school, and a year 12 class in an elite Melbourne private girls’ school who are discussing a short story. These students, like Syed’s, encounter issues of social life through joint engagement with the characters and scenes of the literary text. They thus make their own connections between the “personal” and the “public”.

Such reading can be (in Mackey’s terms) deep: reflective and insightful. Like the thought journals of Lewkowitz’s students, it involves affect and the possibility of emotional growth. The teacher-librarians reported by Merga who read aloud to “struggling” readers “so they’ve got access to literature” are also engaging their students in the affective pleasure of meaningful reading. Taken together, these papers construct a wider view of what we mean by “literary” and by “literacy” than these terms usually connote.

Andrew McCallum’s review of David Stephens’ and Karen Lockney’s edited collection Students, places and identities in English and the arts: creative spaces in education concludes this issue. Stephens and Lockney see English as an inspirational subject that can help young people understand who they are as people – both in terms of their individual identities and in relation to their local and global communities. As McCallum remarks, the study of language and literature will open young readers to the complexities of life as lived, no matter what the official curriculum demands. A useful thought when discussing literacy.