Diversity
"Literature in Culture and Cognition,"
by Patricia Bizzell.
In Enos, Theresa. A Sourcebook for Basic
Writing Teachers. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1987.
134-6 .
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(Reproduced for classroom use only)
Hirsch sees the acquisition of cultural literacy as crucial because
it confers "not just linguistic knowledge, and knowledge about the topic,
but also, and more important, knowledge of what others also know and expect
about the topic, about the form, about the writer, and about the world"
(28-29). Without such knowledge, student writers are prey to crippling writing
anxiety "because there is . . . no dependable readership and no sense of
membership in a literate community" (46). In order to confer the knowledge
necessary to this membership, Hirsch strongly urges that writing instruction
remain within English studies. "Every teacher of writing should ideally be
also a teacher of literature in its broadest sense" (45).
Arguments
for cultural literacy, however, whether they define this literacy as
intellectual method or as knowledge of shared texts, typically do not
acknowledge that the method and the knowledge are specific not only to Western
culture, but to this culture's privileged social classes. Hence students may be
deemed culturally "illiterate" because they originate in social
classes that value other forms of cultural literacy. In other words, there are
multiple cultural literacies as well as multiple
literacies.
Indeed, literacy in a particular form of English is usually associated with a
particular kind of cultural literacy. This is the main point made by research in
literacy as a social practice.
This point
also helps to explain why arguments over the necessity of acquiring academic
literacy can become so heated. I think that it is accurate to conflate what I
have called academic literacy and literacy in the culture of the privileged
social classes. To my previous definition of academic literacy as mastery of
Standard English and critical thinking, I need only add some components of
cultural knowledge." The problem then is whether the acquisition of
academic literacy, because it carries with it the political power of its origins
in the privileged social classes, will crowd out whatever other cultural
literacies
students bring to school, unfairly devaluing and perhaps eventually extirpating
them.
Some
American academics have addressed this question in terms of only one component
of academic literacy, namely, the mastery of Standard English, and have argued
that to require Standard English does deracinate students from social groups in
which it is not the common tongue. For example, James Sledd
has denounced such requirements as political oppression." This line of
argument, however, often tacitly acknowledges the cultural component of academic
literacy even if the argument focuses explicitly only on forms of the English
language. For example, Geneva Smitherman is
obviously afraid that native speakers of black English will lose much more than
their own language if required to abandon it in school." David Olson has
agreed that " 'standard' English is not a general model of the mother
tongue but rather the specialized instrument of the description and explanation
functions of literate prose." Dominated by this special form of prose,
schools come to define knowledge as that picture of reality appropriate to [its]
requirements" (86). Olson believes that this leads to the devaluation of
other forms of language and knowledge.
We do have
plenty of evidence that when academic literacy is presented as simply the
"best" or "only" form of literacy to students from socially
less privileged groups, students who value other forms of literacy, that these
students tend to resist academic literacy and to fail in school." This
outcome is not surprising in view of the fact that to accept academic literacy
on these terms would also be to reject the students' home cultures, their ties
with family and friends, everything that malwa their
lives meaningful.
According
to one school of thought I have surveyed here, however, these are not the only
terms in which to understand academic literacy. If we follow the thinking of
researchers on literacy as a social practice, then we might wish frankly to avow
that academic literacy has privileged social origins but that this very
connection with .political power is what makes it worth having. In other words,
we might emphasize the social context of academic literacy and its specific
social purposes.
What we
don't know is whether academic literacy so presented could be acquired without
deracination. We do have some evidence from bilingual education that it is
possible to become comfortable with two different cultural literacies
if these are acquired in social situations where both are highly valued."
There is also some evidence that bilingualism/biculturalism confers the
awareness of language as language that some literacy researchers attribute to
literacy in general. For example, in the work of bicultural schoolchildren and
in English novels by nonnative English speakers, Jane Miller has found
. . . a stance toward language on the learner's part
which allows him to reflect on its nature and on its use. This, it is suggested
[by psychologist Margaret Donaldson], is essential if he is to move towards
literacy and towards what [psychologist Lev] Vygotsky
sees as the genuine manipulation of concepts. He will leand
to me his language for creative thinking rather than depending on the categories
proposed by the language of his everyday experience."
Metalinguistic awareness, or
an awareness of how thought and language interact, may be the one ability upon
whose value all the various schools of thought on literacy agree.
Debate continues about whether literacy
of any kind, or academic literacy, or simply mastery of written Standard
English, is necessary to mature cognitive development. But if we attempt to
define functionally the kind of literacy whose lack has aroused this debate in
the American academy, we might reasonably conclude that metalinguistic
awareness is its principal component. Functional literacy in America, literacy
that confers a reasonable degree of educational
and economic success and political participation is that
literacy which enables critical reflection not only on the different
relations between thought and language that obtain among our various social
groups, but also on the educational, economic and political uses to which these
differences may be put.
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For educational purposes only.
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