Illiterate?

Illiterate:

adjective

unable to read or write

• ignorant in a particular subject or activity

• uncultured or poorly educated

• (esp. of a piece of writing) showing a lack of education, esp. an inability to read or write well

*Definition taken from Apple Dictionary

I am having a difficult time with the ways in which many people use and interpret the word illiterate, and the ways in which literacy is defined. Too often they are only used to encompass academic literacy, and not other forms, such as cultural literacy. For example, in Sylvia Scribner's article Literacy in Three Metaphors, she writes

...in the coming decades literacy may be increased for some and reduced for others, accentuating the present, uneven, and primarily class-based distribution of literacy functions.

While I agree that specific types of literacy can be divided along class lines, and in turn the resulting functions of those specific types can be divided as well, it is inaccurate to say that lower-class peoples who lack formal education are less literate than those who have studied at accredited institutions, or spend their days in bourgeois environments. This ideas goes back to the example that I used in my first blog about the Ivy League Student who gets dropped into the middle of a west Oakland ghetto. Now I am not implying that one can not be literate in both realms, I am only suggesting that more often than not, individuals are not able to cross such thick class lines competently. The point here is that there are many ways to be literate. You can be academically literate, socially literate, culturally literate, and professionally literate. I'm sure there are other forms of literacy as well. Too often the discussion of literacy focuses only on academic and professional literacy and ignores social and cultural literacy. While I understand that the first two types have specific societal functions that allow for socioeconomic maintenance and advancement, it is unfair to say that the latter two are not valuable as well. I think it would be collectively beneficial for all of us to create a habit of defining what type of literacy we are discussing on more narrow terms than are often used. Is it fair to say that someone without a formal education that lives in a rural area and has farmed animals for 30 years is illiterate? If that man has managed to maintain a living for himself by being able to successfully raise, control, and slaughter animals he is obviously not uneducated. He is able to read the world enough to know what he needs to do to survive, and he is able to read the animals enough to ensure there survival, which in turn insures his own. A statement about this type of man's literacy would be more accurately put this way: "A man who has lived on a farm his whole life and who cannot read or write, is not literate in the textual arts, but is rich in the art of raising farm animals and survival." We should think about it...

Short Stories on the Languages I speak (in the order that I learned them):

Basic English: This is the language I learned when my mom and dad were teaching me how to talk. It consists of simple words like "ball" and "pink," "car" and "sky." This language taught me how to identify objects, things, places, and people with basic English words.

Daddy's Little Girl: As a young child my father adored and spoiled me. It taught me how to batt my eyelashes when I was asking for something, and to cuddle up on Dad's lap for approval. I learned that if I made my voice softer and smiled when I talked that my Dad would wrap himself farther around my finger. He passed away when I was 7 and I haven't used this language since.

Inner-city Working Class: This is the language of my immediate family, the one consider my main discourse. In this language I learned what it meant to be tired, and fired. I came to understand struggle and pride. This language taught me how to describe the hardship of being a single mother, and how to communicate my way out of trouble. Watching my mother care for my sisters, my nephew, my grandmother and I should me how to be firm and tough, how to not take no for an answer. It gave me the language of strength and determination, but also of frustration and anger. This is the "boot-strap" language that my mother taught me well.

Good little Christian Girl: My aunt used to take me to church with her when I was a child. Nobody else in my family went, so this was a discourse I only practiced with her and her congregation. I would put on my nice Sunday clothes and try make sure that I said words like "Sir" and "Ma'am" when I spoke with people in church. I tried not to speak out of place, although this one was hard for me. Praying was the most difficult part of this language for me. No one ever "taught" me how to say a prayer so when it came time for me to pray, I always felt very awkward. This language took a lot of effort for me to speak because I hadn't internalized it. It was like a mask that I put on every Sunday morning for 3 or 4 hours.

Ghetto Slang: When I was 11, my grandmother who had been my main caregiver (my mother worked all the time), moved out of our house. I had a lot of time alone after she did and I had no idea how to fill it...so I asked around. I started hanging out in the neighborhood more, venturing farther away from my house everyday. I realized pretty quick that I was not the only kid in the neighborhood that spent a lot of time alone. We all band together and started looking for things to do. When we realized there wasn't much, we started looking at the older kids in the neighborhood to see what they did with all their free time. They hung out under bleachers, used bad word, sprayed graffiti on public property, consumed mind-altering substances, fought with each other, and danced. Us youngsters thought that that life seemed much more interesting than sitting on a swing all day, so we started studying their language, how the communicated and interacted with each other, and began mimicking it...poorly at first. By the time we hit 8th grade we had it down pretty good though. We couldn't say an entire sentence without saying s*%t or f#@k, everyone was a dog, and we all pretended like we "hard core." In hind sight it was quite ridiculous, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

Kick-back Stoner Rock Babble: It's kind of humorous how I got into this scene. My freshmen year of high school I wanted to learn how to ride a skateboard so I asked my boyfriend at the time to teach me. In order to learn I had to hang out with him and his friends. They listed to rock music, bands like Sublime, and talked really slow, smoked a lot of....and wore Vans and Chuck Taylor Converse. Oh ya, and they were cute. I realized that I liked the music and the fashion in this scene better than the one I had been hanging out in so I jumped ship. I had to learn how to slow down, relax more, smile more, and say dude a lot. I still say dude a lot.

Punk Rock Back Talk: Toward the end of high school I started getting really angry. I became very aware of a lot of the things in my life that weren't picture perfect and began looking for people to blame. My mother definitely caught the brunt of it. Anyhow, I needed an outlet for all of my anger and aggression so I started listening to a lot of hard core punk rock and heavy metal. The more I listened, the more rebellious I became. Punk rock is built on the a foundation of rebellion and I channeled as much of it as I could. I hung out with people who had bad attitudes and were pissed off at the world like me, and we spent a lot of time talking about how much people suck. I became a total smart ass, and worked hard at perfecting my new found talent. It only took a couple of years to figure out that I needed to find a more healthy outlet.

Artist Chit-Chat: My next outlet became art. I had always drawn and written, but never took it too seriously. When I started to look at art as an outlet, I immediately wanted to learn everything about it that I could. I enjoyed drawing and painting traditional tattoo flash (skulls, roses, etc) so I started hanging out in tattoo parlors a lot and picking the brains of artists. I would literally bother them for information. I would follow them around the shop and ask them questions about their paintings like "what paper did you paint that on?" or "what brush did you use for that water color?" I annoyed a lot of people, but in about a year, I became fluent enough in new skool artistry, that I could carry my own conversations, as well as paint my own pictures. This was definitely a language that required a lot of foot work on my part to get in the door, but was well worth it. This is also a language that I will never stop trying to expand and perfect. It is my favorite one.

Mother in Love: When I first laid eyes on both of my children, it was impossible not to fall in love with them instantly, but expressing this love was something that I had to learn in some ways. I knew how to hug them and kiss them, but creating a life that reflected my love for them was more of a challenge. I had to clean up my act and learn the language of a responsible parent, living a responsible lifestyle. This was a complex process and more that I have time to get into right now.

Mother in Charge: As I said, loving your kids comes easy. Taking care of them when they are babies is somewhat (stress the word somewhat) fool-proof too. You have books to tell you how to take their temperature, feed them, change their diapers, but when they start getting personalities of their own and start talking and talking back, it becomes a whole new ball game. I'll admit, I had a hard time getting a grip on children's behavior at first. Remember, I spent a good portion of my childhood running the streets unsupervised, and in turn, lacked a frame of reference for how to create structure for a child. My oldest daughter was three when I realized I was slightly illiterate in the whole how to raise well-behaved, well-mannerd children world. So...I turned to Dr. Phil. Don't laugh. He was serious! And he (along with a whole lot of self help parenting books), helped me learn how to create the structure that my kids needed. I had to learn how to not yell all of the time, so that they would take me seriously when I did. I had to learn the art of negotiation. A lot of this language was about learning what not to say, and how not to talk, which was new to me. I couldn't argue like I was three, or they were going to treat me like I was three. My mother in charge language is one that is constantly being redefined, readjusted and tested everyday, but in some ways it is also the most rewarding.

Thought-pondering Intellect: This language had been the most challenging for me to learn, but also the most invigorating. I gave up trying in secondary school in the 7th grade. After that I just went through the motions of showing up to class. I had no one to enforce my school work, so I just didn't do it (trust me, I realize now how not smart this was). The point is, I never really knew what education, and professional and academic literacy could do for me. I started back in school in community college. I gave school all of the energy I had because I wanted to 1) be a good role model for my kids and 2) do whatever I could to improve our quality of life. I started getting good grades and it excited me. It gave me confidence in myself that motivated me to work harder. This confidence was the gateway to my actual learning. The more work I did, the more I learned. The more I learned, the more I realized I wanted to learn. Once I realized I wanted to learn and what academia could do for me, I realized that I was pretty illiterate in the academic world so again, I stared following people around, reading all the books I could, and paying close attention to the way other people around me spoke and interacted, the vocabulary they used. I began trying to mimic the way intellectuals wrote, and talked, and I still do. It's not that I want to consume my self with pretentious academic babble, but I do want to be able to speak articulately and function competently in intellectual and professional setting.

This is the first time I have ever considered the idea that I speak more than one language. In exploring this thought I realized that I speak many. More than I have listed here. It kinda makes me feel like a shape shifter or something. I never realized how much energy it takes to learn how to act and interact in a new setting and somehow after this exercise I feel accomplished :)

*Image taken from http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/Training/Infolit/infolit/communicate2.jpg

Word for the Day: Empowerment

Empowerment: 1) To give someone authority or power to do something. 2) Enabling someone to do something. 3) To Make someone stronger and more confident, esp. in controlling their life and claiming their rights. (*Definitions taken from Apple Dictionary)

When I think of literacy, the first word that comes to my mind is empowerment. Literacy empowers people. It empowers them to do all kinds of positive things like communicate with others, teach themselves, learn from other people, defend themselves, know when to defend themselves, and help others defend themselves. It can also empower people to do negative things too, like take advantage of people. Literacy helps people do simple day-to-day things also, like buy groceries, pump gas, and drive. If a person cannot read, or doesn't speak the same language as their surrounding society, then even these simple things become extremely difficult.

The catch to literacy is that it is not something that you can achieve overnight, or in one classroom, or with one teacher. We as humans, in a communicative and social world, must constantly refine and redefine our literacy capabilities and skills. What often goes overlooked is the fact that someone can be extremely literate in one setting, and be extremely illiterate in another. For example, if you drop an Ivy League Doctoral Student in the middle of a West Oakland ghetto, chances are he or she will not have the cultural literacy to know how to act, or interact. In his or her professional realm, they are considered highly literate, but in the middle of the ghetto, they become illiterate really fast.

Unfortunately all too often, it is the people who lack formal education that are viewed as illiterate. This thought is not accurate by any means though, and what needs to be discussed more, is that everyone has the ability to read, they just read through different mediums. Some read through words, others through actions, some read visually and other read auditorially. The languages people use to interpret what they are reading vary as well. Some people read the world in Spanish, some in English, some in ghetto slang, some in professional yuppie. The list could go on indefinitely.

The only way to achieve true literacy is to learn how to read and communicate with all types of people, in all different settings, all around the world. This is an impossible task due to the size and complexity of our world, but I believe it would be in everybody's best interest to constantly work toward this abstract goal. The more we can all move between spaces in a competent and understanding way, the more empowered we will become in ensuring that our needs, and the needs of those around us will be met.

*Image taken from http://www.robinhardy.net/images/hands_empowerment_circle.jpg

Test Run

This is just a test run to see if I did this whole set up thing correct. Blogging is new to me so bear with me.