Wysocki & Johnson-Eilola: Blinded

Wysocki, A. & Johnson-Eilola, J. (1999). "Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?" Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, pp. 349-368.

It is nice to see someone point out that literacy is much denser and more complicated than realized. It is messy, and the ol' saying, the more we know, the less we know is accurate as literacy arrives as "New Writing" (NCTE, 2008).

They write, "When we speak then of "literacy" as though it were a basic, neutral, contextless set of skills, the word keeps us hoping - in the face of lives and arguments to the contrary - that there could be an easy cure for economic and social and political pain, that only a lack of literacy keeps people poor or oppressed" (355).

Like the invention of a snowmobile to Northern landscapes, literacy is a tool, and once it is introduced, it has a rippling effect on the ecosystem of individuals that become literate (including the power game that language plays in all we do).

They continue, "And when we believe this - that poverty and oppression result from a lack of a simple, neutral set of skills we have trouble understanding why everyone and anyone can't acquire the skills there must be something wrong with someone who can't correctly learn what most of us acquired easily, in our early years in home or school." (355)

Literacy is a red herring, I agree, that is also a diversion of larger social and political situations, in which schools, those powerhouses of measurement, assessment and grading, use literacy as a major tool for advancing a society for tomorrow (This is why social justice makes sense to me -- teaching literacy as a means to create change is optimistic, as opposed to teaching literacy to prove one can be like those before them in history (IE: literary analysis as a means of writing assessment alone).

Literacy is used to "encompass everything we think worthy of our consideration (360).

Big quote: "The connotations of literacy...suggest a process of mechanical and passive individual reception: the book gives us who we are, the book sets the limits for who we allow into realms of privilege. If we understand communication not as discreet bundles of stuff that are held together in some unified space, that exist linearly through time, and that we pass along, but as instead different possible constructed relations between information that is spread out all before us, then...lviing becomes movement among (and within) sign systems (365).

I'm loving this article. Also, "Under this understanding of relationships, then, we could describe literacy not as a monlithic term but as a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions. Literacy can be seen as not a skill but a process of situating and resituating representations in social spaces" (367).

I wish to shout out to Alex Shulz who gave me the task of assigning his classmates an essay prompted by one word. This was brilliant, but it took me a few years to realize this. Connotation versus denotation. Every word has a story, but that story can not be assumed to be true for all story tellers ; ).