Little Boxes: Is Literacy the Same for Everyone?
As a child of the nineties, I grew up in an era where excellence in education was defined by one’s ability to read textbooks, listen to lectures, learn facts, and regurgitate those facts on quizzes and tests photocopied at the beginning of the school year. Every school year. Every student. We all had the same prescribed education. We were all expected to become literate in the same way as one another via the same lessons our predecessors had endured for years prior. This process brings to mind a satirical song from the 1960s called “Little Boxes,” written to mock the development of suburbia. One of the stanzas reads as follows:
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes,
And they came out all the same.
And there’s doctors, and lawyers,
And business executives;
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky,
And they all look just the same.
I should offer a disclaimer here: I cannot criticize every educator from my past as being part of the machine that cranked out a lesson here and an exam there, expecting us all to come out of our little boxes as doctors, lawyers, and business executives. I am very grateful for teachers who inspired me to learn and instilled a passion for education within me. However, looking back I can’t help noticing the mundanity that prevailed in educational institutions during my adolescence. Even still today, society tends to define literacy as the ability to read and comprehend print texts. Literacy is viewed as one standardized little box within which everyone is placed. In Unflattening, Nick Sousanis refers to this human tendency toward mundane standardization as Flatland, a universe whose citizens “exist as no more than shades, insubstantial and without agency” (p. 21). Sousanis argues that we are so conditioned to think, live, and act in a certain way that we no longer see beyond the rut in which we exist. We become so entrenched that we lose the ability to understand why we are thinking, living, and acting in our set way. When it comes to defining literacy, many of us our living in Flatland.
Literacy is not one little box. In reality, it is made up of a great many boxes varying in shape and size, and each person will be placed into a wide variety of these boxes during his lifetime. Gee (1999) refers to these boxes as Discourses. He defines a Discourse as a “sort of kit made of words, things, values, attitudes, and so forth from which one could build…meanings” in a specific context (p. 33). So how do these Discourses tie in to a discussion of literacy? Simply stated, the ability to understand a Discourse is to be literate in that Discourse. Therefore, literacy cannot be bound only to the discourse of academic print text.
Fig. 3 contains a video that explains primary and secondary Discourses. Throughout our lives, we will become literate in multiple Discourses, and our understanding of and ability to work within a specific Discourse depends largely upon the culture in which the “kit” is opened. Donna Alvermann (2001) writes that “cultures are ways of ‘doing’ life, not simply products of life” (p. 678). Literacy is not only a mental activity; it is also a cultural activity. Students are not all literate in the same secondary Discourses because each student lives, reads, communicates, and functions in a different culture. As educators, we must create a culture of inclusivity that welcomes the diversity in literacy our students bring into the classroom. Realizing this is the first step to escaping Flatland, to tearing down our little boxes.
So, what does this celebration of diversity look like, and how can we accommodate it in our classrooms? We need to help students to develop a metaknowledge of Discourses (Fig. 3). Practically speaking, we may not have the luxury of discovering the individual interests of each of our students in order to construct a curriculum specifically tapered to those interests. Therefore, we must guide our students to understand how they learn. Today, receive most new information via multimodal texts. Roswell and Burke (2009) define multimodality as “an understanding of different modes of communication (visual, acoustic, spatial) working together without one being dominant” (p. 106).
With this in mind, it stands to reason that students who are literate in multimodal texts will excel in a classroom mimicking the same culture. Introducing multimodal texts into daily lessons will open a host of opportunities to learn that some students may not gain from simply reading a printed textbook. In a case study performed by Roswell and Burke (2009), Peter is a student who struggles in reading at school but astounds Roswell with his “advanced vocabulary and in-depth appreciation of content” in regard to his favorite video game (p. 110). He showed an adept knowledge and ability to read informational texts in order to learn more about the specifics of the game. Breaking out of the little box that places sole importance on print text allows us to glimpse the importance of multimodality in the classroom. As educators, we need to bridge “the gap between the digital realm of literacy and the traditional.” Otherwise, we “are only scratching the surface of [our] students’ learning capabilities” (p. 117).
It is time to reconfigure our thinking when it comes to adolescent literacy. We must unlearn old mundane ways in order to learn new approaches to literacy in the classroom. We must break out of the little boxes because we are not all just the same.
References:
Alvermann, D. (2001). “Reading adolescents’ reading identities: Looking back to see ahead.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 676–690.
Gee, J. P. (1999). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method.
[Little Boxes]. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://carajolo.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/and-theyre-all-made-out-of-ticky-tackyor-are-they.html
[Multimodal Composition] (n.d.) Retrieved from http://scalar.usc.edu/works/digital-writing-portfolio-4/concept-2
Reynolds, M. (1962). “Little Boxes.”
Rowsell, J., & Burke, A. (2009). “Reading by Design: Two Case Studies of Digital Reading Practices.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(2), 106–118. doi:10.1598/jaal.53.2.2
Scott, J. “Gee: What Is Discourse?” (2014, November 14). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEB4rAZanpM
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
