Class and Literacy

I have always been interested in literacy.  I didn’t use the term “literacy,” but I wanted to learn more about it.  I remember wondering how it is we learn to read.  I had been doing it so long that I could not remember the specifics of how I learned.  I also wondered what it was like not to be able to read.  I grew frustrated with trying to look at a word and not read it.  It just didn’t work.  I pestered my  young cousins with questions like “what does this word look like to you?” and “what do you think this means?”.  My only responses were annoyed looks and “leave me alone.”  Over the first two summers of college, I worked as an Americorps intern for a literacy program designed for elementary aged children in low-income areas.  During the junior year at the University of Oklahoma, I did research on literacy instruction.  It was these experiences that opened my eyes to literacy as it was connected to class (in this case economic class). Scott Paris stated in his Reading Research Quarterly article, “Reinterpreting the Development of Reading Skills:” “learning to read… is the foundation for learning and academic achievement (184).” It is difficult for students who cannot read or cannot read well to do well in school (so they are affected by class in an educational sense).  In a society that privileges books over other forms of texts, that requires advanced writing skills for almost any “middle to upper class” job, how are these individuals to affect the material conditions in which they live?

And what about the individuals who can read, and write, but not in the way typically required in “academic” discourse?  Donna LeCourt says “Writing is a social practice, not only a place from which to explore classed identity but also that which classes identity” (38, emphasis in original).  I have worked at a writing center and taken classes in which styles and dialects other than EAE are discussed as being just as valuable, but I have witnessed more often students struggling to sound like what they assume the academy wants.  And their assumptions are correct. In her article, LeCourt provides examples of “heuristic prompts” that students in other classes were given.  Her examples include questions such as “‘What in your home life has influenced you the most in terms of language and how you use it?”; “What in your academic life has influenced you most in terms of language and how you use it?’ and ‘Was the language you used at home different rom the language you used in school?’’ (35).  Later on that same page LeCourt provides a summation of one student’s perspective.  She writes, “language use = class difference = cultural difference, that oppositional rhetorics seek to expose” (35).  This student, Diane, is frustrated by her “inability to practice correct and grammatical skills” (qtd in LeCourt 35). Diane provides a great example of how language use and literacy practices are used to point out difference, and not just to acknowledge it, but to mark it as “other”.  Rarely in our culture does “different” mean just that.  Usually it means “different, but in a worse way,” occasionally “different, in a better way.”  I see academic literacy practices today as trying to erase difference, not be elevating students’ individual languages and dialects to the same level as academic language, but by eliminating them.  True, this view is based on my own limited readings and experiences, most of which are from working with students from small-town Oklahoma or inner-city OKC or Tulsa who were disappointed because they had been marked down for “writing how they speak.”  From my experience in the writing center, especially colloquia, and my short time in graduate school, I have seen that a lot of great material is being generated on class, race, gender, and other forms of “differences,” but I think there is a long way to go to overcome traditional literacy practices.