constructing knowledges: constructing literacy
In “Ideology, Literacy, and Radical Pedagogy in Composition Studies,” Sidney Dobrin reconsiders some of the history of the field’s engagement with theories that tie literacy to broader questions of social and ideological import. As Dobrin presents them, these “Literacy Debates” have required of composition scholars that we understand literacy as more than a transhistorical and universalized body of discursive skills; more specifically, “compositionists have also begun to examine ways in which social ideologies influence not only how we teach writing and how students learn writing but also how we conceive of the very nature of what literacy is” (119). Broadly speaking, the field’s definition of literacy has moved from one that “traditionally distinguished between those who could read and those who could not” (127) to a definition that emphasizes both the cultural and contextual nature of literate practice (133-6) and points to the possibility of deploying radical pedagogies that would teach discursive practices that can be used for critique of unjust social arrangements (137-8).
Dobrin calls some composition scholars to task for perpetuating a discourse of crisis in literacy studies. This discourse of crisis allows for the pathologizing of individuals who are seen as not possessing whatever necessary definition of literacy is being argued for (129-30). Dobrin reads this series of literacy crises as indicating more about the field’s disciplinary and ideological commitments than about any real crisis in literate practice. As Dobrin explains,
… ultimately, literacy debates are defined by strategic maneuvers more so than [by] moral or ethical positions…. In their writings about literacy, scholars frequently mistakenly associate the systemic nature of discourse with the moral and ethical effects they hope to achieve. Frequently in our discussions about literacy we mistakenly attempt to devise pedagogies that we hope to serve as local panaceas for an ethical crisis of literacy that we have constructed from traditional theories of literacy. (129)
In part, this passage stands in line with Dobrin’s larger critique of the pedagogical imperative that stands to limit composition studies as an intellectual enterprise. Insofar as I agree with this critique, I find Dobrin’s analysis of the field’s literacy debates a fruitful one. However, this passage also points to a possible shortsightedness in Dobrin’s critique. While Dobrin’s analysis here focuses primarily on a question of the relation to theory to practice (here, the question being how our theories of literacy should dictate pedagogical practice), I read Dobrin here also critiquing the pattern of crisis-theory-pedagogy that emerges from his reading of the literacy debates. I would argue, in contrast, that the (re-) definition of literacy is an important task specifically for the ways in which it can further composition’s ideological, theoretical, and pedagogical work. That is, while Dobrin critiques such moves for being “strategic maneuvers,” I would argue that is exactly their strategic quality that makes them valuable for the field.
Implicit in my argument, then, is the belief that defining terms such as literacy is always ideologically loaded (this is the key premise underlying works such as Raymond Williams’s Keywords) and thus has important implications for composition theory and pedagogy. Dobrin errs in his critique cited above in that he emphasizes the constructedness of the literacy crisis rather than the ideologically strategic quality of such constructions. The shift in emphasis which I would urge on Dobrin would draw attention instead to the ways in which constructing a crisis and posing a solution thereto becomes a key part not just of theoretical and pedagogical work in composition studies but of its ideological commitments as well. In doing so, composition scholars and pedagogues open the opportunity for staking a claim for understanding literacy (or any contested terms, for that matter) in ways that make defining them arguments for particular ideological stances within the field. As an example, we might look to a work like Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, which in arguing for a multiliteracy approach for computer instruction in composition explicitly argues for a critical stance toward technology and the (often obscured) questions of power that come with its inclusion in the composition curriculum (a move which Adam Banks similarly makes in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology). By drawing attention to the discourse of crisis rather than to these strategic moves, Dobrin elides the question of how such (re-) definitions might be employed to further ideological commitments both within composition studies and without, in its relationship to other institutional and social interests.
Filed Under 7007, composition, pedagogy, praxis, reading, theoryComments
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