Literacy in American Lives - Deborah Brandt

By Keith Weller, U.S. Department of Agriculture [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Brandt introduces the term sponsors of literacy and defines these as "agents who support or discourage literacy learning and development as ulterior motives in their own struggles for economic or political gain"  and identifies that "sponsors can be benefactors but also extortionists - and sometimes both in the same form" (26 & 193). She draws explicit connections between literacy and economic development and shows how 21st century work in the US values trafficking in symbols - particularly verbal - for production.

Along with revisionist historians, she identifies "pull" and "push" factors in the material and cultural conditions that impact literacy practices and their spread (or not), and a non-exhaustive constellation of entangled factors includes "religion, imperialism, occupations, population density, slavery, urbanization, commercialization, democratization, schools, politcal stability, transportation, trade, family relations, and various pressures of supply and demand" (27).  She ultimately finds that the problems of literacy as a social issue (material and technological conditions involved in such practices) can and should be incorporated into what counts as basic literacy instruction, and teachers should take a historically conscious approach.

Implications Brandt notes in her conclusion include:

• Literacy is being sponsored in much different ways than it was in the past.  Sponsors are more prolific, diffused, and heterogeneous. People used to move literacy, but now literacy moves people.
• The diversification of work, especially parental work, brings various kinds of materials, instruments, and other resources into homes where they can be appropriated into teaching and learning.
• The patterns of literacy sponsorship in a parent's lifetime may bear little resemblance to the patterns in his or her child's lifetime, and the same with teacher and student.  Technological changes around literacy has had the fastest and most disruptive impact from a generational standpoint. Changes in the ways that literacy is sponsored force changes in the methods, materials, motivations, and very meanings through which writing and reading take shape.
• The insinuation of market forces into the meaning and methods by which literacy is learned pose crucial ethical and policy questions for public education. The more that economics play a hand in sponsoring literacy development, the more that racial discrimination in that system hurts literacy development. American public schools have not adequately confronted the tensions inherent in the recent transformation in literacy, especially the insatiable appetite of capitalism for more, better, faster, cheaper literacies.

Her approach to literacy leads into both new literacy and critical literacy approaches to teaching, with some of her process of tracing connecting to new materialist research approaches. Her ideas of legitimate literacy practices is also reminiscent of Bourdieu, and the idea of tracing lends itself to materialism from Latour.

#literacy #race #market #ideology #material #transcultural

Linguistic Utopias - Mary Louis Pratt

 
2013 "Festival of Languages" signs in Kazakh, Russian, and English in the Kazakh village of Aksu, photo taken by author

 
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.”  The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature.  Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987.  48-66.

Mary Louis Pratt draws on Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’ and the three features that define such communities to move away from a linguistics of community to describe her model of a linguistics of contact.  ‘Imagined communities’ are seen as ‘limited’ or having boundaries in some way, ‘sovereign’, and ‘fraternal’ or able to create solidarity based on membership.  These communities may or may not represent or be able to deliver these promised features, but they are imagined to be so (Pratt 49).  A linguistics of community assumes homogeneous members and language use (usually also assumed to be a single language) among members as legitimate or divergent language use within that community.  These linguistic forms of analyses are not false, but they are limited.  In contrast, she defines a linguistics of contact  as the following:

Imagine, then, a linguistics that decentered community, that placed at its center the operation of language across lines of social differentiation, a linguistics that focus[es] on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups, between persons of different and multiple identities, speakers of different languages, that focus[es] on how such speakers constitute each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in language (60).

This idea provides a foundation for translingual and transcultural ideologies and also identifies the conditions or dispositions for critical literacy.

#linguistics #empire #race #translingual #transcultural