Defining Literacy From a Sociocultural Standpoint: Using Past Experiences and Cultural Viewpoints to Understand the World
When examining the essential question, what does it mean to be literate, we come to realize that we need to examine literacy in a sociocultural context, since the answer varies widely between cultures. Therefore, in order to answer the essential question, we must first identify the context. In the introduction to his book, Literacy and Education, James Paul Gee (2015) stated that, “All human groups have had oral language, but not all cultures have had literacy and not all have it today. In the not too distant past, in fact, literacy was rare within societies and across the world” (p. 2).
While literacy was rare not long ago, and is still rare in certain cultures, we, as members of the western world think of literacy as a necessity and a requirement to society as a whole. According to David Olson (1996), members of western society include literacy in our primary Discourse. He stated, “We see literacy, as do most other literate peoples, as central to ourselves as cultured, indeed as civilized, people” (p. 6). The requirements for literacy in western culture are twofold: we must be able to interpret situations using past experience, and we must be able to incorporate varying cultural experiences to understand the world.
Being able to interpret the world using past experiences is integral to the being literate. Gee (2015) referenced Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed when he stated, “One cannot learn to ‘read the word’ (make sense of text) in some domain unless one has learned to ‘read the world’ (make sense of what the text is about) in that domain” (p. 47). In this statement, Gee is expressing the view that “reading the world” is crucial to “reading the word”, as they are dependent on one another.
In an interview with Paolo Freire (1985), Freire explained this concept when he stated, “The act of reading cannot be explained as merely reading words since every act of reading words implies a previous reading of the world and a subsequent rereading of the world” (p. 18). Gee (2015) addressed this concept of “reading the world” further by stating, “When we hear a word or read a text, we simulate experiences in our head to give the word or text a specific meaning relevant to the context in which it occurred” (p. 80). David Sousanis also agrees that we use past experiences to understand the world when he stated, “We understand the new in terms of the known” (2015, p. 81). Gee, Freire, and Sousanis would agree that being literate in western culture requires us to be able to apply former experiences as context for new situations.
Being able to utilize former experiences to comprehend the surrounding world is not the only facet that is necessary for literacy. The ability to consider alternate viewpoints and include culturally different perspectives is also required to be literate. One example of these different cultural perspectives is when Gee writes about the differences in student sharing time between African-American and white students in the classroom. Gee (2015) writes, “Some African-American children gave sharing-time turns that were different from those of the white children in the classrooms” (p. 3). Gee continues on to further explain the differences between the stories told when he explains that the African-American children mostly told “topic-associating” stories that appear to have no overarching theme and instead jump from one topic to another. On the other hand, the Anglo children mostly tell “topic-centered” stories, which focused on a central topic (Gee, 2015, p. 3). Just because these African-American students told “topic-associating” stories rather than the expected and accepted versions of “topic-centered” stories, this does not mean that the African-American children are “less literate” than the white children. Cultural variations account for the different storytelling styles. The teachers in these classrooms from which the “sharing-time” stories are taken did not value the African-American students’ stories as highly as those from the Anglo children.
However, later in his book, Literacy and Education, Gee (2015) stated, “Diversity of many different sorts is essential for collective intelligence in school and society” (p. 20). Assuming that teachers in western cultures are literate, they should have been able to understand that the African-American students’ stories were just as valid as those from the white children, they were just presented from a different cultural background. Sousanis (2015) perpetuated that diversity is crucial to literacy when he stated, “In recognizing that our solitary standpoint is limited, we come to embrace another’s viewpoint as essential to our own” (p. 38). Another example to support this idea of diversity being necessary for literacy comes from Simeon Dreyfuss (2011), who stated that when a problem is observed from alternate viewpoints, sometimes what results is, “A deeper understanding of differences and how to usefully embrace them” (p. 75). As teachers, promoting literacy in the classroom should include some of Paolo Freire’s ideology. In an interview in 1985, he once said, “A classroom of students is not a social class as such, but is made up of individual students who bring to class with them various social class backgrounds” (Freire, 1985, p. 16). The ability to recognize and appreciate cultural differences that lead to variations in perspective on the world creates western literacy.
In order to be literate from a western cultural viewpoint, it is essential that we utilize past experiences and also to embrace alternative culturally diverse viewpoints in order to formulate a more comprehensive understanding of the surrounding world. It would seem that westerners on the whole, are fairly adept at the former part of literacy, but more work is needed on the latter to create a more literate society. In Olson’s book entitled The World on Paper, he stated that, “Cultures with less literacy have come to see the value western cultures set on literacy as self-serving, as a form of arrogance” (Olson, 1996, p. 2). It is interesting that even though “Literacy is a relatively recent cultural invention” (Gee, 2015, p. 2), western society has already ingrained this idea of literacy as being so culturally essential to the extent of alienating “less literate” cultures. If we can learn to appreciate and incorporate diverse viewpoints into our interpretation of the world, then we should be able to rise to a new level of literacy. To quote Sousanis (2015), “We undo boundaries through the awareness that ‘it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited” (p. 42).
References:
Dreyfuss, S. (2011). Something Essential About Interdisciplinary Thinking. Issues in Integrative Studies,29, 67–83. Retrieved from https://oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/AIS/Issues-in-Interdisciplinary-Studies/2011-Volume -29/05_Vol_29_pp_67_83_Something_Essential_About_Interdisciplinary_Thinking_(Simeon_Dreyfuss).pdf
Freire, P. (1985). Reading the World and Reading the Word: An Interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts,62(1), 15–21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41405241
Gee, J. P. (2015). Literacy and education. New York: Routledge.
Olson, D. R. (1996). The world on paper: the conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
