Learning to be Literate - Reading and Thoughts

This week for our seminar session, we were asked to choose a chapter to read from The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences and blog about it. As the list went around the class and finally came to me I jumped at the excitement of seeing Chapter 30 "Learning to be Literate". During my undergraduate studies I became quite passionate about literacy, working hard in my literacy courses, becoming a teaching assistant for a Literacy Development course. Working under my mentor professor, who became like an idol to me, was a dream and my passion for reading and writing (what I understood literacy to be) was a natural connection to my own personal interests in the subjects. Little did I know, my time working for my mentor professor would change my perspectives on literacy quite drastically, and would spur on a research project of my own in rural Mexico. While my mentor's literacy research interests lie in what is called "new literacies" my interest in culture and travel intermixed with my research goals and I began to look into "community literacy".

Community literacy is the idea that while an individual may not know how to read and/or write, there are still numerous ways he or she is literate--texts that are not written. I documented many "texts" and literacies while living in a small rancho outside Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico during two summer internships. One idea that was prevalent among the men of the rancho especially was that they didn't need to know how to read or write, even their names. Looking back genealogically at parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who also never knew how to read or write didn't limit the family's knowledge on how to farm, how to sell crops, and other "tricks of the trade". Farming was a text, or an umbrella for many texts to fit under, where the families of the rancho were more than literate and I would be considered illiterate. Students I taught in the local primaria knew how to cook, tend children, farm, sell Coca Cola, keep house, etc.; things that didn't require reading or writing, aka traditional literacy skills. So it was with this experience in mind that I chose to read the afore mentioned chapter on "Learning to be Literate", interested to see what take on that word "literate" would be.

Smagorinsky and Mayer start off giving a background on the term "literacy" and it's Latin roots. This definition talks about literacy as specifically being written letters, however they do acknowledge that the first written languages didn't come until approximately 5,500 years after the human brain was fully cognitively developed. I think this is significant to point out because it shows--and the authors recognize--that literacy can come in more than one form. I was pleased to see them acknowledge literacies such as mathematical literacy, digital literacy, and even moral literacy. For the purposes of their article, however, the authors decided to stick with the traditional definition of literacy being directly linked to reading and writing, though they do finish off their introduction by stating that, "[the] ratcheting up of literacy expectations demonstrates that definitions of literacy change across time, as do the standards that should apply to students at different ages of development and schooling" (Smagorinsky and Mayer, 2014, p. 606).

The authors bring to their argument the notion of primary (biological) and secondary (learned) skill sets and categorize literacy as the latter. Traditional literacy is often taught in formal educational settings and is largely a precursor for other academic subjects. While my time studying family and community literacy didn't look at traditional literacy, I think I can agree with Smagorinsky and Mayer in their assessment of literacy, any literacy being a learned skill. Thinking back on those generations of farmers who found no need to read or write because they "just knew" how to farm, I can see that while they may feel they were born knowing how to plow, plant, irrigate, and harvest corn, that simply cannot be true. They were taught, even as small children. Watch the video below to see how preschool students are taught emotional literacy.

The better portion of this chapter from The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences looks at research to do with how students learn to read and write. These studies include topics such as reading fluency (recognizing phonemes, decoding words, and assessing word meaning), reading comprehension (engaging prior knowledge, prose structures, inferencing), and writing. Setting aside my time teaching and researching in Mexico, I have also spent the last three years as a teacher in the United States and I can attest to the importance of teaching these skills to make better readers and writers; especially when literacy rates in schools are used to measure things like the number of prison beds in the future (that's real folks #stateofUtah).

I wis this article (and more) would focus on being "literate" in a broader sense, not disregarding so many of the things we learn at home or from our communities before or during our formative schooling years. That's not to say I don't think reading and writing are imperative in today's world. I am an avid reader and I love to write, I tried to instill that same love in my former students, but I also tried to encourage them in their hobbies and interests, knowing that it too was a literacy in a unique and different medium. I feel like it is a careful thing to try and balance, the importance of reading and the importance of acknowledging that there are a variety of ways to be literate in this world, no matter how old you are or where you live.