Literacy Debates

Gee brings power in society into the discourse about literacy, and the political atmosphere he describes  encourages the types of approaches to education in place due to economic gaps. The basic skills centered learning and what Gee calls a more innovative approach depends on the attitude formed toward students from different economic backgrounds. From what I have observed, school districts with more funding tend to focus on the education of the student, tend to trust students, and students who excel are encouraged to take on more challenging tasks and coursework. School districts with less funding focus more on discipline than education, are suspicious of students, and students who do well are as neglected as students who need more guidance in certain subjects. Additionally, the students from the latter category are often accused of cheating when they accomplish tasks with more ease than expected and are asked to "show their work" in situations where the students from the wealthier districts are simply assumed to be "gifted." From Gee's perspective, this is a matter of education failing to democratize. There is also the component of lowered expectation for the districts and schools where students are not expected to do well. One example from my own experience deals with a standardized writing test that was designed to determine how students will place into high school English classes. We prepared for this test in our English class before entering high school, and our class happened to have a particularly enthusiastic and innovative teacher (from this you can safely assume that she was new and ended up leaving education after a few years). She informed us that our school had a lower set of standards than others for assessment and that she refused to grade us based on those lower standards because she found them patronizing. It was perhaps the first moment in my education when a teacher interrupted her performance to give us information about where we, as students, stood in society. Subsequently, the recognition of situations where the expectations of different kinds of literacy were apparent to me allowed me to analyze my own circumstances, or as Gee states: "One does not learn to read texts of type X in way Y unless one has had experience in settings where texts of type X are read in way Y" (41).

Methods in Intercultural Rhetoric: Focus on Discourse Analysis and Text Linguistics

In “Social Languages, Situated Meanings, and Cultural Models” Gee refers to language varieties as social languages (registers) and discusses speaking as an act that reveals who we are and what we are doing. Different social languages express different versions of the speaker, which is in conflict with the notion of a stable and constant self with a central identity. This observation in linguistics appears to me as a shift away from the sense of self in modernism. Theresa Lillis’s article “Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and ‘Deep Theorizing:’ Closing the Gap Between Text and Context in Academic Writing Research” contains moments of this struggle with postmodern identity. In example 7, a writer states that when writing in English, one has to imagine how an English person would write. The insider perspective demonstrates the identity split that is on the surface for non-native speakers as opposed to Gee’s example of Jane, who did not recognize the difference in language she brings to various situations. The writer in Lillis’s example composes while aware of the identity that is temporarily taken on in order to produce writing that fits in as the work of an English-speaking person. As an outsider, one’s social identity is easier to make conscious, for everything in the environment is a reminder of this status. As the social identity interacts and intersects with the writing identity, the writer brings many complexities to the composition. How much a non-native speaker of English brings in his or her social languages into speaking and writing depends on the context. In some communities, practices like code switching are acceptable, but if the student is isolated from that environment in their personal, academic, and/or professional life, one identity shifts to make room for a new one. The new identity hopes to communicate more efficiently within its present environment. The language constructs not only identity but self-perception. Given the privileged status of English on a global scale, self-worth is directly connected to how well a student imitates that idea of an English person in Lillis’s article. The speaker or writer measures up his or her own identity in society based on the ability to adjust in communicating with an audience that views him or her as an outsider.