Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice

Abstract

This essay reflects on how the social practice model of literacy, an approach that defines reading and writing as situated, social practices, under-theorizes certain aspects of literacy, making it hard to account fully for its workings in local contexts. We trace this theoretical blind spot to the ways that the social practice model was formulated as a challenge to the “Great Divide” or “autonomous” models of literacy. We suggest that in rejecting a conception of literacy as a deterministic force, the revisionists critique veers too far in a reactive direction. By exaggerating the power of local contexts to define the meaning and forms that literacy takes and by under-theorizing the potentials of the technology of literacy, methodological bias and conceptual impasses are created. To open new directions for literacy research we suggest more attention be paid to the material dimensions of literacy. Drawing on the work of Bruno LaTour (1993, 1996), we seek to theorize the transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy = particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure. Finally, we propose a set of analytical constructs that treat literacy not solely as an outcome or accomplishment of local practices, but also as a participant in them. By restoring a “thing status” to literacy, we can attend to the role of literacy in human action. The logic of such a perspective suggests that understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting.

References

Barton

Hamilton

(1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. New York: Routledge.

Barton

Hamilton

Ivanic

(Eds.). (2000). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. New York: Routledge.

Barton

Ivanic

(1991). Writing in the community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Besnier

(1995). Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Boyarin

(Ed.). (1992). The ethnography of reading. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Brandt

(1990). Literacy as involvement: The acts of writers, readers, and texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Brandt

(1995). Sponsors of literacy. College Composition and Communication, 49, 165–185.

Brandt

(2001). Literacy in American lives. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cornelius

(1991). “When I can read my title clear”: Literacy, slavery, and religion in the antebellum South. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

10.

Crystal

(2001). Language and the internet. New York: Cambridge.

11.

Fishman

(1988). Amish literacy: What and how it means. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

12.

Gee

J.P.

(1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Falmer.

13.

Goody

(1986). The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Goody

(1987). The interface between the written and the oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

15.

Goody

(2000). The power of the written tradition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

16.

Goody

Watt

(1968). The consequences of literacy. In Goody

(Ed.), Literacy in traditional societies (pp. 1–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

17.

Graff

H.J.

(1978). The literacy myth: Literacy and social structure in the nineteenth century city. New York: Academic Press.

18.

Graff

H.J.

(1986). The legacies of literacy: Continuities and contradictions in western culture and society. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

19.

Hamilton

(2000). Expanding the NLS: Using photographs to explore literacy as social practice. In Barton

Hamilton

Ivanic

(Eds.), Situating literacy: Reading and writing in context (pp. 16–34). New York: Routledge.

20.

Hamilton

Barton

Ivanic

(1994). Worlds of literacy. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.

21.

Heath

S.B.

(1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press.

22.

Laqueur

(1976). Religion and respectability: Sunday schools and working class culture, 1780–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

23.

Latour

(1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

24.

Latour

(1996). On interobjectivity. Symposium on “The lessons of simian society.” Mind, Culture and Activity (http://www.ensmp.fr/∼latour/Articles/63-interobjectivity.htm).

25.

Lockridge

K.A.

(1974). Literacy in colonial New England: An enquiry into the social context of literacy in the early modern West. New York: Norton.

26.

Mace

(1988). Playing with time: Mothers and the meaning of literacy. Philadelphia: UCL Press.

27.

Olson

D.R.

(1977). From utterance to text: The literate bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 257–281.

28.

Olson

D.R.

(1994). The world on paper. New York: Cambridge University Press.

29.

Olson

D.R.

Torrance

(1991). Literacy and orality. New York: Cambridge University Press.

30.

Ong

W.J.

(1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.

31.

Ong

W.J.

(1986). Writing is a technology that restructures thought. In Baumann

(Ed.), The written word: Literacy in transition (pp. 23–50). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

32.

Scribner

Cole

(1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

33.

Street

B.V.

(1984). Literacy in theory and practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

34.

Street

B.V.

(Ed.). (1993). Cross-cultural approaches to literacy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Street

B.V.

(1995). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography, and education. London: Longman.

36.

Tannen

(Ed.). (1982). Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

37.

Tannen

(1985). Relative focus on involvement in oral and written discourse. In Olson

D. R.

Torrance

Hildyard

(Eds.), Language and learning: The nature and consequences of reading and writing (pp. 124–147). New York: Cambridge University Press.

38.

Vincent

(2000). The rise of mass literacy: Reading and writing in modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.