Group One:

Josh, K., Beth, Jessica

Describe author’s understanding of literacy

Label this framework

Apply the framework to interpreting something else other than literacy (technology, etc.) (or is it limited?)

            Form group

            Assign recorder

            Type in FrontPage

            Save as literacyframe (no spaces, no caps; short names)

            Save in h:wwwiup

Gee

1. Understanding of Literacy:

      “Control of secondary uses of language (i.e., uses of language in secondary discourse)” (8). 

            Discourses

                        Ways of talking and acting and thinking that identify a person as belonging to a particular social network. 

`                                   Primary

                                                “Acquired” Way of interacting with “intimates,” i.e., primary social network/culture

                                    Secondary: the way you interact w/ “strangers”

Control/Mastery

                        Acquisition (as opposed to Learning)

            Dominant Literacies

Powerful Literacies

2. Label this Framework

Sociocultural/Ethnographic, Postmodern—questions societal assumptions.  Constructivist—discourses are socially constructed.  Applied linguistics.  Rationalist.  Theory versus practice. 

3. Apply framework to another situation:

Sports: baseball as a discourse; you can Learn skills, but you can’t master them except through acquisition.  (Kobe and free throws)

Freire & Macedo

            1.Understanding of literacy

            A political action.  “Intertwined w/ knowledge of the world.”  No separation of concepts and actual existential, concrete experiences.  Empowerment.  Language and reality cannot be seen as separate entities (reading world precedes reading word, but then they continually feed off one another). 

            2. Label the Framework. 

            Marxist, Postmodern.  Pragmatic.  Phenomenological.  Humanist.  Dialectic.

3. Apply to new situation: Politics, social class, oppression.  Separation of classes goes against his framework; it is an unnatural, socially created phenomenon, which only serves the ones on top. 

Street

            1. Literacy/Illiteracy are very new social constructs, not actual states of being.  There is always a power dimension. (Literacy practices as a more accurate terminology.)  Literacy as an acquisition of a skill cannot be separated from it social/political implications; they are never neutral.  Multiple literacies make it necessary to understand the phenomenological experience of the people who employ any given literacy in order to gain perspective/understand it. 

            2. Constructivist.  Anthropological, phenomenological, ethnographic, postmodern. 

4. Applying framework to another thing: technology.

Young children, before they would be considered “literate” may be “tech savvy” enough to use computers and the Internet in sophisticated ways.  This issue raises similar questions of multiple literacies and helps demonstrate the idea that if there is only one “true” literacy, we must question who decided upon that one, and whose interests that serves, whose power that maintains.    

                        Side note: the spellcheck on this computer wanted to correct the word literacies.  So we as a group are forced to question whose interests are served by the concept of literacy as a noncountable noun, hence a thing that has no way of being seen as multiple. 

                            As a double side note, Frontpage would have it that we do not see noncountable in itself as a word either.  Makes us wonder...