Wrapping up Incorporating the Literacies

Doug Peterson’s blog, Doug off the Record is yet another blog that delves into the technology debate within the education system. From his previous posts (click to see), he is clearer a supporter of technology within the classroom. In one of his recent posts, he shares a link to an article titled, "Why banning technology is not the answer". 

The beginning of this article says something truly brilliant:

"There is something about human nature that draws us towards dichotomous patterns of thought; an all or nothing, us or them style of thinking in which an option is either good or it is bad. In such a model complexity and subtle nuance with multiple possible outcomes and routes towards a goal are ignored. The field of educational technology is one where such a pattern is evident and recent ban on technology by a Sydney school shows how this style of analysis can have a significant impact on student learning."

This Manichean tendency to view teaching paradigms either as progressive and modern or backward and traditional permeates contemporary educational discourse. I wonder how these ‘21st century literacies’ are not just a repetition of  progressive liberal thought - are the literacies merely reflective of another parochial paradigm which masquerades as reformist?

To answer my own question is the least useful way possible, I don’t so and I do think so. I think, over the years there has been a genuine effort within education system to adapt to contemporary society. The incorporation of technology, cultural education, and financial literacy for the everyday, is illustrative of a paradigmatic change. However, one can make the argument that the factory model of education still persists. Akin to classical Fordism, the educational system produces subjects within a set confinement of parameters, to be incorporated within the contemporary structures of late capitalism.

Slavoj Žižek’s short video on the institution of  university is quite an interesting corollary:

The university as an ivory tower that that churns out experts, who have expert knowledge, is an old banal dilemma. In the same vein, the school churns out citizens, ready to be consumers within capitalist society. The 21st century literacies are just another type of consumerism that indoctrinates subjects into the all consuming capitalist machine. This is nothing new either in this proposition - very banal in fact - the institution of school has always been the place to train citizens in the proper decorum of society; the school is glue between the social contract which precariously holds the social order together.

From: http://www.richgibson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/

How will I incorporate the literacies?

The literacies to me, means to think. The goal of education is to produce thinking citizens. Whether this thinking is guided by a moralist, ethical lens, I have no control over. What is moral to one, is not moral to another, perhaps there is some universal moral core that is taught in the hidden curriculum (to obey government), but this is another topic... As I have mentioned on previous posts, before thinking can begin, the proper environment must be established. Democracy within the classroom is the best model for fostering thinking students. Through a democratic classroom, everyone's voice is heard and everyone's voice is equal. Establishing a democratic classroom requires a skilled teacher, who recognizes the individuality of each student. There is no ready-made guide to creating a democratic classroom; each class will have its idiosyncrasies that the teacher has to account for. 

How will I get my students to think? This is a very tricky question. It is the classic catch 22 scenario in which the moment you delineate a concept of critical thinking, you have stripped away any criticalness. As an English teacher, we already actually have the literacies encoded into our field, but they are referred to as ‘Schools of Thought’: Marxism is a mix financial literacy and global literacy par excellence, Post-colonial theory covers environmental, global and multicultural literacy; Postmodernist theory covers media and technological literacy; and perhaps philosophy covers moral and mental health literacy. Of course, constituting the literacies within schools of thought is not an efficient or effective framework of thinking through the complexities and interrelationships between these categories.

I am an English teacher and main vehicle I use to teach with is language. When we read the text, what we really desire is to deconstruct the meaning within the text - we want to denaturalize what has been naturalized by history, institutions, and society at large. A methodological approach to deconstruction is to apply these schools of thought, Marxism, post-colonial discourse, postmodern theory, psychoanalysis, to the text in order to examine and unearth the meanings within the language. Subsequently, a thorough deconstruction scrutinizes the framework in which it has been placed into. There is nothing ‘natural’ about these schools of thought, but rather, they have arisen out of historical conditions. There is nothing natural about having a conception of history, it too is another manmade idea. This is the horizon of criticalness I find myself subsumed within.

The point of literacies to be critical - to question everything, even the question itself. Within my discipline, I incorporate the literacies as best I can through the examination of language. Without language, no literacy exists. Without literacy no language exists.   

There has been a certain way to write, to speak, to think, to be taken into consideration. There is a pre-structuring to our thoughts and perceptions; the metalanguage that lurks behind the signifier.  One has to discuss Marx in a certain light, Fanon in another. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, etc. are talked about in a particular way. Writing about these men requires a particular language. It is this framework, the ‘meta,’ which critical literacy seeks to dismantle and obliterate. To veer away from convention is where literacy is born. 

My summative answer then to the question, 'how will I incorporate the literacies?' is to teach unconventionally. To be critical of what isn't critical. In English, history, and the humanities at large, we examine the interior and exterior of language to begin a critical discourse.