What is Literacy?
Literacy is how “people generate, communicate and negotiate meanings, as members of Discourses through the medium of encoded texts” (Lankshear & Knobel, pg 50). This “negotiating meaning” piece is vital, as being able to write or read is pointless if one cannot use these skills to communicate and make meaning. “The bottom line for literacy is that it enables meaning-making to occur or ‘travel’ across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded texts of one kind or another” (Lankshear & Knobel, pg 40). Literacies enable us to make connections with other people and ideas. We must focus our thinking and teaching from the just the skill to the application. Knowing how to use Microsoft Word is a good skill, but being able to apply this skill to create a resume to land a job is a prime example of negotiating meaning of literacies.
Changes in literacy have been seen in education, industry and through sociocultural ways brought on by new technologies. These new technologies have enabled us to communicate and develop our own social languages. “Changes in social practices involve both the emergence of new practices and the transformation of old ones” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011, pg.27). Graffiti is a prime example of a social practice that has evolved over time.
Literacies can be understood as ways in which people create and communicate their own meanings and through which they can understand the meanings conveyed by others. This sometimes occurs in places and under circumstances that we rarely consider, but are no less germane. Graffiti, for example, and its use in certain groups and subcultures, is an example of a literacy in practice. Similar to previous systems like the hobo signaling codes, its shapes and markings are usually inscrutable to the untrained viewer but can communicate crucial information to an viewer who is knowledgeable about its meanings. Sometimes, this information is as mundane as the tagger’s nickname and hometown, but in some cases, the communication encoded within the text can be much more interesting, as in the case of gang-affiliated graffiti, which can be used to claim turf and warn off rivals. As police departments crack these codes and become literate in their underlying meanings, they can use these same communications to track and gain intelligence on gangs, gang relations, and individual members.
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New Literacies. Berkshire, England: McGraw-Hill Education.