Skill is a dexterity or ability that comes from your knowledge and aptitude, and manifests itself in being able to do something well. Writing is a skill, but it is also a literacy. In fact it constitutes a set of literacies. Literacy goes beyond skill. Lankshear and Knobel (2006) argued for the 'embeddedness' of literacy within wider social practices. Their reasoning is that the act of writing involves more than the reproduction of a sequence of letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. Words in isolation mean very little - it is the context within which they are located that invests meaning. My recent post on blogging as literacy hopefully illustrates this logic. Literacy is therefore more than a skill. It is the capability to be able to interpret meaning within context. I often give the example of learning to drive to explain this concept.
When I learnt to drive in England, I learned all the basic skills needed to be a (reasonably) safe motorist, and thus to earn my driving licence. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre is still emblazoned upon my memory. Stopping at traffic lights, knowing what the colours of the lights mean, and reading the road signs, are all essentials of driving. But many of the skills I learnt are peculiarly British. Driving on the left hand side of the road is only common in a few countries around the world. When I found myself driving my family around France for our holiday a few years ago, I realised that my driving skills were not enough to be fully proficient. I was driving on the other side of the road for a start. We had to drive counterclockwise around roundabouts, and trying the interpret some of the road signs was taxing to say the least. It was also confusing to note that drivers there kept their indicators on whilst overtaking other vehicles - something we don't do in the UK. It took a week of driving around France before I began to feel comfortable. I had by then begun to developing some of the literacies - the cultural and social awareness of the new country I was staying in - and was starting to appreciate some of the nuances and social mores of driving in France. The same thing happened to me when I drove for the first time in America. There you find very few roundabouts, but you do encounter many four way road junctions. Here the unwritten rules are quite interesting, and I had to discover for myself what sequence people are expected to follow to drive across the junction when there are no traffic signals. Lankshear and Knobel cite the work of Freire (1972) who claimed that literacy was not only reading the word, but also reading the world. Authentic learning comes through immersion within the culture. This clearly resonates with the explanations above.
Digital literacies are characterised through the appropriate interpretation and use of digital media and technology. Literacies of this kind are acquired as the learner engages with the culture, mediated through the tools. You learn through social engagement online for example, that typing words in UPPERCASE represents shouting. It's a part of the social etiquette (or 'netiquette') of using social media, e-mail and texting tools. Many of these literacies are learnt serendipitously - through encountering problems and solving them while using digital tools. The question we should now ask is, should we be teaching these literacies more formally in schools, colleges and universities, and if so, how will we go about it?
References
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006) New Literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.
Image by Freefoto
Reading the World by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment