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).