Street's Anthropology Section

This week I was interested in the Anthropology section of Street and Lefstein’s book, Literacy an advanced resource book. I wanted to talk about the ideas found in two different but related quotes from this section.

“Literacy can be roughly defined as communication through visually decoded inscriptions” (56).

Literacy various widely in form and content across societies [sic] contexts of use. Levels of prestige, communicative norms, identities of users, and social dynamics all shape literacy in particular ways in each society or community” (56).

Similar to each of these quotes is the generality with which they attempt to define the concept of literacy. I think this is a good approach but one that can also be problematic. I agree with the idea that literacy is a socially defined activity, but where I see this view as problematic is its implications for teaching. Maybe this comes from my desire to legitimize my profession…but wherever the impulse comes from, I worry that if everything is “literacy” what is it that I am trying to teach students. This may be an oversimplification of the idea, but I think this is a valid question for teachers to ask. I think that we commonly focus on a specific set of literacy practices to teach which seems to work. I think Street is correct that defining literacy is difficult because it is such a diverse and loaded term. But that is the fascinating part of studying it…even if legitimizing exactly what it is becomes difficult. Re-reading this post I’m not sure if it makes sense…hopefully it does to some degree.