1980s
- Originally, “reading was viewed primarily as a mental ability” (22). Additionally, scholars tended to focus only on school-based literacy. In the 1980s, NLS began as scholars moved toward a more ideological view of literacy and observed literacies outside of school. Gee describes the work of the following scholars:
- Scribner and Cole (1981): Scribner and Cole studied the Via and shoed that “literacy in and of itself led to no grandiose cognitive abilities. And formal schooling ultimately led to quite specific abilities that are rather useless without institutions which reward ‘expository talk in contrived situations’” (26). They also came up with the term literacy practices.
- Brian Street (1984): Street named the autonomous and ideological models of literacy. He argued, “Any technology including writing, is a cultural form. It is a social product whose shape and influence depend upon prior political and ideological factors” (40).
- Ronald and Suzanne Scollon (1981): “The Scollons argue that what is at issue in the use of language is different ways of knowing and different ways of making sense of the world of human experience” (48). Acquiring new literacies, then, means acquiring new world views as well as new identities (52).
1990s
- The mind learns by experience. “However, the mind does not store experience raw. When we have an experience (in the world or via media), we pay attention in certain ways. We foreground certain elements as important, we background other elements as less important, and we ignore some elements altogether. We edit our experiences via our attention (where we focus and don’t) and store them in the mind in this edited format” (77). “We act in our heads in goal-based and problem-solving ways. Human learn best from experience…We need to gain a variety of different experiences, store them, find patterns and sub-patterns in them, and gradually find generalizations based on these patterns, though often fluid generalization open to change as we gain more experience” (78).
- At the same time, “language regulates or regiments or cuts up experience for us humans” (80). Our social groups “ensure we have certain sorts of experiences, edit them in certain ways, and use them for planning and action in certain ways” (82).
- Thereby, literacy learning is both in the mind and social. The mind is a social product.
Literacy Tool Kit and Transfer
- “such tool-kits define for us an alternative notion of ‘transfer’ of learning. As a person moves to new Discourses and new activaties, it may be that the tool-kits they demand for mastery contain similar or related tools and skills as earlier Discourses and activities a person has mastered (116-7).
Key Words
- Literacy: “the study of literacy is about how talk and text are socially distributed as founding elements of our social lives and institutions” (13). “Literacy is almost always fully integrated with, interwoven into, constituted part of, the very texture of wider practices that involve talk, interaction, values, and beliefs” (60).
- Linguists: “spend their time studying what language is and what it does” (13)
- Grammar: “a set of common tools (ways of using words) that [speakers] can put to use to make meaning” (14)
- Dialect: “a style of language that reflects the common grammatical resources that a social or geographical sub-group of English speakers use” (15).
- Literacy practices: “people learn by practices and what they learn by practices are specific skills embedded in the practice. Different types of literacy and different uses of literacy allow people to practice different skills and, thus, become good at different things” (27).
- Literacy myth: literacy makes people civilized, more analytical and able to use abstract thinking (Havelock and Ong)
- Autonomous model of literacy: the belief that “literacy (or schooling, for that matter) has cognitive effects apart from the context in which it exists” (39)
- Ideological model of literacy: “attempts to understand literacy in terms of concrete social practices and to theorize it in terms of the ideologies (beliefs and value systems) in which different literacies are embedded” (39-40)
- Embodied cognition: “the human mind does not learn by storing generalizations and abstractions. It learns via experience” (76)
- Situated practice: “When we hear a word or read a text, we simulate experiences in our head to give the word or text a specific meaning relevant to the context in which it occurred” (79-80)
- Discourse: “ways of using language, acting, interacting, valuing, dressing, thinking, believing, and feeling (or displaying values), as well as ways of interacting with various objects, tools, artifacts, and technologies, in certain sorts of spaces and at certain sorts of times, so as to seek to get recognized as have a specified socially consequential identity” (93)
- Primary Discourse: Discourse learned from family and at home
- Lifeworld Discourse: Discourse we have with the everyday, common public; no specialty in this Discourse
- Secondary Discourse: Specialty Discourse outside of family
- New literacies: “new tools within their associated practices…They are new literacies in two senses: first, they very often involve new uses of oral or written language melded with other modalities like images, actions, and sounds. Second, they involve new forms of decoding and producing meaning from symbols or representations” (108)
- Literacy Tool-kit: The tools and skills…devoted to making (‘writing’) and taking (‘reading’) via the use of technologies for encoding and decoding meanings” (116)
- Affinity space: organized around a common passion; variety of participation and production/consumption options; includes mentorship; distributed knowledge builds community; personal motivation is highly valued