High Stakes, Mistakes, and Staking Claims : Taking a Look at Literacy Grosses mises, méprises, mainmises : Regard sur la littératie

Literacy is an elastic concept, theoretically. In lived experience, it’s like an elastic, too: a tool for keeping things tidy and in place — and one that can snap back and leave marks if one doesn’t have the “right” grip. Conventionally defined, literacy refers to competence in reading and writing and implies a kind of at-homeness with symbols and ways of doing and thinking. More than that, it refers to how readers orient themselves relative to the messages around them. A rhetoric scholar who looks closely at the suasive qualities of language, I spend a lot of my time looking at how everyday texts call upon certain kinds of literacy and response. And I keep interdisciplinary company. A topic of considerable academic interest, discussions about literacy have arisen from many disciplines, for example, the natural sciences (Halliday and Martin 1993), the human sciences (Schieffelin and Gilmore 2000; Bourdieu 1991), education (Apple 1995; Fairclough 1989; Lemke 1995; Shor 1992, 1999), rhetoric and composition studies (Bazerman 1994; Bartholomae 1986; Bizzell 1992), media and communication studies (McLuhan 1964; Ong 1982), and language and literacy programmes, broadly defined (Gee 1996; Graff 1979, 1987; Kaestle et al. 1991). Whatever their terminologies, literacy scholars question the social life and valuation of knowledge — and the very definition of literacy, itself. They have pushed the meaning of literacy beyond, simply, the acquisition or mastery of particular skills and now consider literacy a context-bound and slippery phenomenon. Those working in the area (Graff in particular) have questioned the assumption that literacy is socially progressive, that it necessarily correlates with a more democratic and stable world. Many have examined formal education’s role in replicating power structures and dominant knowledge. In connection with this critique, many (like Pratt 1992) study the critical literacies, or new forms of literacy, that emerge from spaces of struggle and oppression. Those forced to conform to a dominant literacy system have offered powerful insights into the connection between literacy and identity in spaces of confusion and subordination (Englund 2002; Hoffman 1989). Writers like Deborah Cameron (who examines the social phenomenon of “verbal hygiene”) question, too, the complaint tradition, that is to say, the belief in and fear of declining literacy, the conviction that we’re all going to hell in a handbasskit (my error intentional…). And while literacy used to be closely tied with its etymological root, letter, textual analysts are now questioning this allegiance to the written word, theorizing literacy in other, formerly neglected, modes of communication, like the oral (Ong 1982), the visual (Barthes 1977; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), and the technological (Taylor and Ward 1998; Tuman 1992). In keeping with literacy’s interdisciplinary environment, this special Literacy issue of Ethnologies includes pieces from authors working in the fields of folklore, education, art and design, rhetoric and discourse analysis, and women’s studies. They examine closely such legal texts as the Canadian Multicultural Act, showing how literacies are multiple and involve one’s orientation to everyday texts — they are not something one “gets” or “arrives at” (Reid and Nash). One paper (Labrie) describes how mental images — ways of reading the world — help us make sense of things in our everyday life. Others explore the literacy of reading concrete, material images — autochromes of an early twentieth century Aboriginal family (Skidmore) and daisies on Body Shop T-Shirts (Goldrick-Jones). One writer (Taylor) illustrates how, in a university composition course, a student’s marginalized position allowed for a particularly sophisticated critical literacy. In one ethnographic study, an author (Bélisle) reflects on the role of personal experience in motivating writing amongst young people in a …