BY HARVEY J. GRAFF
Professors, lecturers, graduate teaching assistants, and especially presidents and provosts often repeat the word “literacy.” But they almost never pause to define or constructively criticize it.
Why does it matter? That is a question I ask each of us to ponder. The Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung put it aptly:
“What would happen if the whole world became literate? Answer: not so very much, for the world is by and large structured in such a way that it is capable of absorbing the impact. But if the whole world consisted of literate, autonomous, critical, constructive people, capable of translating ideas into action, individually or collectively—the world would change.”
Definitions of “Literacy” swing wildly from basic reading and writing, the means of accessing and making meaning, and communicating that meaning across different bodies of content and symbolic systems, to confusing those unifying shared elements with a discipline’s or a given topic’s substance. I have made lists of hundreds of “literacies” —from health to financial, digital, and race, among others.
This ranks high among the contradictions that ripple across almost all campuses. Misconstruing, misconceptualizing, and misusing “literacy” embodies many of higher education’s failings, from dependence on ahistorical myths to presumptions of never-ending crises.
In the place of today’s “let a thousand literacies bloom” and the marketing of many of those literacies—“financial literacy,” for one—I propose the rethinking of literacy and literacies across disciplines and other divisions.
To advance constructively, theoretically, empirically, and humanely, literacy needs to be framed as historical, comparative, and critical. Teachers and institutions should end their sometimes reckless celebration of the “new” and the “many literacies.” I propose five paths to revised and renewed literacy studies.
- Literacy and literacies are relational and dialectical.
The conceptualization and investigation of interrelationships must replace the presumption of dichotomies and divides among the endless promotional “literacies”—from each language to economics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. The explosion of many, multi-, and multiple literacies without an explicit search for their definition and relationships, including their dialectical shaping and reshaping of one another, risks the loss of recognizable forms of literacy in theory and practice. We must trace relationships among literacies and languages across media and modes of comprehension and expression, from the alphabetic to other symbolic, visual, spatial, embodied, and performative relationships.
- Historical awareness is fundamental.
Conceptions and practices of literacies are historically constructed, established, institutionalized, revised, and transmitted. This awareness moderates the common overemphasis on change and underestimation of the power of continuities.
- Context gives meaning to literacy and creates the grounds for its study and practice.
The most effective path to avoid the conundrums and contradictions that result from formulaic notions of progress and decline in the historical study of literacy lies in the specification of context. Fundamentally, literacy has no meaning outside distinct social, temporal, and spatial locations, which are neither local nor global. They are defined by their connections to and differences from other settings.
- Translation is inseparably intertwined with matters of literacy.
Literacy involves making and communicating meaning across media and modes of understanding and expression from one person or set of persons to others via the symbol and sign systems that constitute languages. Acts of reading and writing that cross time and space and link disparate groups are usefully viewed in terms of the theory and practice of translation. This facilitates placing literacy in its proper comparative communicative contexts. It also reduces the need to invent redundant neologisms such as transliterate, translingual, and transnational, which proliferate the varieties of literacies and segregate rather than interrelate them.
- Negotiation provides an especially human approach to the study and practice of literacy and literacies.
In recent years, literacy studies scholars have sought new concepts and metaphors for reading, writing, and beyond. Elizabeth Moje and her colleagues favor navigation as a “term of distinction.”
My focus is broader; it aims to include but go beyond schooling. I find the concept, theory, practice, metaphor, and notion of negotiation more fitting, flexible, relational, and deeply human than notions of navigation or hybridity. It parallels translation. Negotiation is not deterministic, essentialist, limited, or oriented toward a finite goal; it is more adaptive and can be individual or group-centered. Negotiation claims a central place in new studies of literacy.
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This post draws on my new book Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history at the Ohio State University. He was the inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and founded the university-wide interdisciplinary initiative LiteracyStudies@OSU. His monographs on literacy include The Literacy Myth, The Legacies of Literacy, The Labyrinths of Literacy, and Literacy Myths, Legacies & Lessons, among others on children and youth, cities, and interdisciplinarity. His autobiography, My Life with Literacy: The Continuing Education of a Historian. The Intersections of the Personal, the Political, the Academic, and Place is forthcoming.
