subtext

Ok, a bit more on Myers’ “Changing Our Minds.” Once I got used the “/” slashed categories of literacies he was using I began to enjoy him. I like the idea of as we move from one literacy to another we lose as well as gain. The proximity of a more oral culture, the immediacy of the engagement between the parties to communication are lost or at least tempered as a signature literacy culture becomes dominant. If I did not read him incorrectly, he also seemed to allow for the continuance of aspects of one literacy to continue and play out even as another literacy had become dominant. It seems that the problems between the analytic literacy and what he proposes as the new emergent literacy ( translational/critical or was it transactional? I like translational better), is that the new literacy has not become dominant or at lest not become part of the kind of literacy employed by the dominant class. It is not yet hegemonically embedded to seem natural. He does, as Anne wrote, seem to be a bit insistent about how the new literacy should be implemented, or perhaps he is just suggesting ideas. I could be conflating what I have been reading for my Curriculum theory class with Myers, but it seems that a reading/writing workshop approach lends itself quite well to the translational/critical literacy because of its foregrounding on the reader and writer as readers and writers, reading and writing as a process, and the importance of a wide ranging acceptance of divergent voices (as opposed to the monolithic academic writing voice).