Literacy across the curriculum


The Centre for Literacy Fall 1992 Vol. 8 No. 3

Connecting literacy in the schools, community and workplace

Literacy lessons from history

[International perspectives on urban adult literacy was the theme of a UNESCO conference held at the U.N. in August. Two hundred fifty delegates listened to four days of presentations by researchers and practitioners from the industrialized and Third World. Many questioned the tendency to generalize from country to country and setting to setting. The first keynote highlighted below was given by historian Harvey Graff. ]

Following an official from Canada Post who presented the UNESCO conference organizers with copies of the now-famous lithograph of the "bird" representing literacy as a "flight for freedom," Harvey Graff, in his keynote address, suggested that this metaphor threatens to take us out of touch with the "foundations" of the issue.


Crisis and decline
Graff cannot remember when literacy was not a "crisis;" across centuries, he can trace a continuing discourse of crisis and decline. He distinguished three among many strands that inform the current debate -- first, the concept of elementary or basic literacy that underlies the testing drive to measure school literacy and functional abilities; second, the presumed connection between the condition of literacy and the condition of civilization (democracy, progress) when fears about literacy mirror fears about the social order; third, the concept of many literacies (beyond the traditional alphabetic) and the proliferation of new "literacies," to which in 1992 alone have been added "emotional literacy," "ecological literacy," teleliteracy," and "food literacy."

Each of these strands, Graff suggests, has its own developed rhetoric of crisis and decline, none freely interchangeable with the other. This understanding provides some sense of how difficult it is to deal with literacy. In order to reconstruct a workable model of literacy, he draws lessons from history pointing out myths that get in the way of clear thinking.
Among them are:

Myth: Subjects such as literacy, learning, schooling and education are simple unproblematic notions.

"Not so," argues Graff. This idea ignores the fundamental complexity of each and the heated debate that surrounds such questions as language acquisition, written vs. oral communication, or the relationship of literacy to social, economic, and political development. Even elementary alphabetic literacy is immensely complex. Yet we continue to talk about "simple reading and writing" adding to the sense of inadequacy often felt by those who did not master these skills in their childhood.

Myth: There is a simple dichotomy between rural and urban literacy.

On the contrary, there are twisted links between cities and literacy. At times, urbanization has been a cause of increased literacy; at times, not. Graff notes that historians have traced the progress of alphabetization in French cities between the 16th and 19th centuries. While the Revolution sparked a faith that the gathering together of people would foster the spread of education, the reality was that results were mixed and varied.

The factors include cultural composition and mix of classes as well as the size of the urban setting. Beyond a population size of 10,000-20,000, "literacy begins to slither backwards." Even within cities, levels differ from place to place with respect to economics, ethnicity, and gender.

Cities both push populations towards rising levels of literacy and simultaneously push them away. Usually, although not always, they do offer more opportunities, print is more ubiquitous, and work is available. On the other hand, cities often have overcrowded institutions, and fewer and less adequate ways of surviving. Evasion of compulsory schooling is easier, and at least in contemporary North American cities, it is easier to get information by means other than print.

Graff suggests that survival in the city may depend on the ability to "read the city" far more than on print literacy.

Myth: Literacy is neutral and beneficial.

No mode of learning is neutral. There are always biases with respect to transmission, e.g. the textual bias of school literacy. In making explicit written prose the model of literacy, we have downgraded the other modes of communication. Most of what we mean by school literacy involves a narrow conception of decontextualized words.

Overvaluing alphabetic literacy has had massive human costs. It has meant valuing the technology of the intellect over the human spirit. Rationalism has lead to the reification of the written over the oral, the schooled over the unschooled. Ironically, historians of science now suggest that invention and discovery often depend more on visual abilities. It will be difficult for us to expand our notions of literacy, Graff says, without understanding the broader contexts of communication.

That will only happen when we recognize that 19th century disciplines have outlived their usefulness, and break the traditional disciplinary barriers. He cites Henry Giroux's claim that reconstituting literacy means reconstituting the entire post-secondary endeavour. An historical educational calls for curricula that cultivate consciousness, remembrance and imagination. It is only within such a framework that literacy can be understood and advanced. [L.S.]


Suggested readings by Harvey Graff: