Literacy, Postliteracy, Modes of Expression….and a real Guitar Hero!

Posted on | September 29, 2008 | 7 Comments

I like people who hold strong views and who are able to debate their views through force of intellect. Joe Nutt, who most definitely falls into this category, and who holds strong views on questions of language and literacy, on the purpose of education and on the place of technology in education (amongst many other interests), recently replied scathingly to my post on The Premiss of Postliteracy in which I quoted Doug Johnson, who defined:

“…….the postliterate as those who can read, but chose to meet their primary information and recreational needs through audio, video, graphics and gaming.”

Joe was unimpressed; he feels that any incursion into ‘postliteracy’, however defined, will always come back to the fundamental base of language:

“The Argentinian government ran a visual literacy programme to encourage families to watch TV more selectively. One of its aims was to encourage children to criticise and evaluate visual media. How else can any child do that except via language, spoken or written?”

Also:

“I”ve just received an invitation to a leading ICT event from a “thought leader” which was full of sense errors (not typos) a GCSE English candidate would be expected to correct. Is that being postliterate…or just illiterate?”

Wouldn’t we love to know who the ‘thought leader’ is? Joe has expanded on this theme in his latest post – Educational Technology Debate Hotting Up.

I could almost smell the smoke rising from between Joe’s lines in his comment. However, I just don’t think that a couple of anecdotes about a futile piece of social engineering by the Argentine government or an illiterate invitation from one self-styled guru really persuade to the extent that Joe evidently hoped that they might.

I believe Joe seriously understates both the nature and the criticality of these ‘other’ literacies (perhaps literacy is the wrong term to use here, but the semantics are less important than the substance of the argument). To criticize and evaluate visual media is one thing – to be able to create an imaginative and meaningful piece of video, for instance, is quite another. It is self-evident that a facility with language, written or spoken, will be the basis of a critique of a video episode. However, ‘literacy’ in video can only be demonstrated through the creation of video itself.

The world has moved beyond the point where one’s visual literacy can only be made manifest through the mediation of ‘professionals’ – anyone today can choose to express themselves in video without intermediation. Writing a script requires language, of course – and I agree that this will always be the fundamental literacy – it cannot be any other way. However, the expression of visual literacy requires that the script (or the mere idea) be turned into a piece of video – a quite separate, though linked, ‘literacy’. The same script can be turned into a very good or a very bad film; the same play can be dramatized brilliantly or incompetently depending on the skills of the director, actors, etc – I have sat through enough piss-poor productions of Shakespeare to prove that point to my own satisfaction.

Thanks to chrisinapsych4 for the pic.

Whether or not these other modes of expression can be defined as postliterate really doesn’t matter one way or another to me, but the process of democratization of expression that is inherent in the development of the Web means that we now have available to us low-cost tools that allow us to express ourselves creatively in media that were previously unavailable to most because the barriers to entry were too high.

Charlie Leadbetter, speaking at SLF last week, imagined the conversation that the young man in the video above – funtwo – might have had had he turned up at the BBC to suggest they make a 5-minute video of him playing his own version of Pachelbel’s Canon, in his bedroom, with low production values, with a cap down over his face, and so on. He would not have made it beyond the doorman, and yet his little piece of homemade video has been viewed 49 million times. More important than the number of people who have watched and listened to this video is the fact that we can watch a quite brilliant piece of guitar playing that, in an earlier age, would not have been possible to view.

This young man is expressing himself in music and, less importantly, in video – whether we want to call these modes of expressions ‘literacies’ is a point to be debated. What is not debatable, I feel, is Joe’s point that all of these come down in the end to words, to language. They do not. And schools, currently, relegate such ‘modes of expression’ to a place that is far below the ‘basic’ skills of literacy and numeracy (I won’t add “and science” here, since science is not as well treated as it ought to be in school either).

For what it’s worth, I disagree with the use of the term ‘postliterate’ to describe the emergence of these other modes of expression (emergent in the sense that they are now more easily accessed than they were before). Language is the basis for most of what makes us human – we think, we communicate, we plan our lives through language. But we do need some way of describing the many other ‘literacies’ that, despite the fears of some, cannot supplant language, but do offer us ever-broader routes to genuine and meaningful self-expression.

Technorati Tags: joe nutt, doug johnson, charlie leadbetter, funtwo

Category: creativity, education, elitism, knowledge, language, learning, literature, music, science, technology

Comments

7 Responses to “Literacy, Postliteracy, Modes of Expression….and a real Guitar Hero!”

Jenny Luca
September 29th, 2008 @ 3:31 pm

This was a topic under frequent discussion at Learning 2.008 John. Doug Johnson calls it postliteracy, others call it digital literacy or 21st Century literacy. Clarence Fisher and others were asking the question, is it not just literacy? Sure, it’s different from our print based focus of the past, but it’s where we are today. I’m a Teacher-Librarian and I recognise that my students respond to visual media today far more than they do print based and I am trying to find ways to integrate the visual medium into my library space. I find myself charged by the visual medium and avail myself of stimuli off YouTube to spark my students interest in curriculum offerings. I have been moved by their digital creations that express meaning so eloquently without words, but through pictures that create a metaphor. It seems to me that as we deal with a highly visual world we will find our definition of literacy changing. When it becomes normative practice in our understanding of how we function we will become accepting that this is the literacy of our age.
Corrie Bergeron
September 29th, 2008 @ 10:42 pm

Your conversation (and the linked video) got me going:
http://sddc.blogspot.com/2008/09/connections.html
Alan Coady
September 29th, 2008 @ 10:48 pm

This is an excellent and thought provoking post, John, and one I feel I’d like to reflect upon before responding further (very out of character). In the meantime, I looked up the etymology of “literacy” – (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=literacy) and came upon the amazing fact that, in the English language, “illiteracy” predates “literacy” by 223 years. What does that say about us?
Tania Sheko
September 30th, 2008 @ 11:47 pm

So many things to think about here. Just one comment from me. I was discussing visual literacies with my 18 year-old son who is completing his final year at school , and he said that he asked his English teacher if they could study film as well as text, and she replied no. The reasons she gave are interesting. She said that, the weaker students were less likely to be able to critically evaluate film. They would just sit back and switch off, then just recap the story rather than use any higher order skills. Doesn”t this say that visual literacies are complex and need to be taught as early as possible, that teaching should scaffold these literacies, and even that different genres, such as film, should be used more often for discussion and written response? I know students who struggle to read between the lines and make inferences while watching films, or even reading comics. This can be very debilitating in life; it doesn”t boost self-confidence when you”re the one who doesn”t know what’ going on while others are laughing about some kind of irony. This is not even touching on the learning that would occur if students create the film themselves.
Hilery
October 1st, 2008 @ 12:10 pm

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has drafted the following definition: “‘Literacy’ is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in the wider society.”
I have seen too many young people falter because of poor ‘literacy’ (i.e reading and spelling) skills; too many students who have become demoralised because they approach learning in a way that their teachers don’t understand; too many who regard themselves as failures for their differences in style and abilities. It is time we embraced the new technologies that enable us to demonstrate our knowledge and understanding, to creatively comment upon the world and our experiences with the tools available. If a child can’t learn the way we teach, then we must teach the way the child learns. If a person expresses him or herself more comfortably in a visual or auditory or kinaesthetic medium than in a linguistic one, then – hooray – at last the tools are there for all to use.
A literate person can mediate his or her world by deliberately and flexibly orchestrating meaning from one linguistic knowledge base and apply or connect it to another knowledge base. The definition of literacy is dynamic, evolving, and reflects the continual changes in our society: not least the very real political challenges to the status quo as epitomised by the rapid dissemination of such videos as Leadbeater showed – and the one you posted about a few weeks ago, John, of Women in Art. If these examples aren’t about communication, variety and participation I don’t know what is.
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January 1st, 2009 @ 2:31 pm

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