Shallow Literacy, Timid Teaching, and Cultural Impotence

Abstract

s a discipline, we have known at least since we started reading translations of Bakhtin in the 80s that acts of literacy depend on much more than a set of linguistic decoding and encoding skills. Instead, speakers and listeners, readers and writers are in dialogue with other individuals, with their discursive histories, and with cultural values and institutions. In 1983, Shirley Brice Heath’s seminal Ways with Words invited us to consider that literacy is always historically, socially, and culturally situated and that the dominant discourse practices in American schools can misinterpret and fail to engage the discourse practices of those who learn to speak in economically or racially marginalized communities such as Trackton and Roadville. A decade earlier, linguists such as William Labov and Geneva Smitherman helped us begin to see that low-prestige dialects of English such as Black English Vernacular had sophisticated grammars and were informed by a complex set of cultural values. Yet in 1996 Lynn Z. Bloom could still write in a leading NCTE journal: “Yes, freshman composition is an unbashedly middle class enterprise” that rewards such values as self-reliance, responsibility, respectability, decorum, moderation and temperance, thrift, efficiency, order, cleanliness, punctuality, delayed gratification, and critical thinking (655). Yet as a profession we require our students to spend millions of dollars every year on prescriptive grammar and usage handbooks that rarely bother to nod to the complexities of language use in their rush to encourage students to write as if they are all aspiring New Yorker essayists. And, yet, as a discipline, we still embrace—in practice if not in theory—the Shaughnessy partyline that the best we can do is be culturally sensitive to students’ diverse literacy backgrounds as we assimilate them to our understandings of academic and professional discourse. Despite decades of scholarship that invite us to move beyond an understanding of literacy as more than a neutral set of basic skills, the discipline of rhetoric and composition remains largely impotent to challenge the dominant view of literacy because our teaching is timid, because in our composition programs, in our rhetoric classes, and in our disciplinary practice we fail to embrace the basic understanding of literacy as situated in our lives, in our students’ lives, and in culture-at-large. Why are we so tentative? We know that privileged forms of discourse—including the academic discourse practices that give us status in our schools and our society—have contributed to the marginalization of women, people of color, working class people, people living in poverty, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people, and those physically and mentally abled in other than the