Interdisciplinary Influences on a Personal Conception of Literacy

Shannon Klein

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

EDUC 606: Literacy Theory, Research, and Practice

Dr. Alesha Gayle

April 10, 2022

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My prior conception of literacy hinged entirely on my experiences in school and in teaching, as

I came to teaching immediately after an undergraduate degree in English. As I reinterpret and

reimagine my perspective on literacy, sociolinguistic theorists I encountered during TESOL courses

and philosophers whose work I first read as an English major have expanded my definition of literacy

behind a definable set of skills and practices. The interdisciplinary perspectives of sociolinguists and

philosophers pushed me to consider questions about the creation and negotiation of meaning within

literacy, as well as how power, positioning, context, and interpretation constitute key and inseverable

aspects of literacy. While my initial perspective on literacy aligned closely with an autonomous view

of literacy, I now view literacy as a social, active, and dynamic process with the purpose of making

sense of, keeping up with, and influencing your world and others’ worlds. However, as I continue to

engage with multifaceted and diverse perspective on literacy, literacy education, and education more

broadly, I predict that this definition will continue to evolve just as what it means to be “literate” will

continue to evolve to match our ever-changing world and contexts.

I believe the development of my view of literacy stems primarily from reconsidering my

definitions of texts and authors through a lens of the theoretical ideas Roland Barthes’ lays out in “The

Death of the Author”. Barthes contends that the author and beliefs surrounding authorial intent or

purpose have no bearing on the meaning, analysis, or interpretation of the text (Barthes, 1977). As a

result, the reader or audience of the text constructs meaning, and texts become opened up to “an

indefinite plurality of meanings” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 169). Instead of viewing literacy as an

individual process between a reader and a text’s singular meaning, or a writer and their text which

contains a singular meaning, I realized that students need literacy instruction that is more open-ended

and that takes into account the ways that the participatory nature of our world creates constant

opportunities for recontextualization (Per Linnell, 1998) and reinterpretation of texts. Students must be
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prepared to engage with constantly changing forms of texts, a skill known as transcultural literacy

(Kostogriz & Tsolidiz, 2008). Another important focus of literacy instruction for students in an

increasingly participatory world includes the utilization of digital tools and platforms as well as

multiple and multimodal sign systems (Price et al., 2021) which are implicated in the majority of

students’ everyday literate practices outside of school contexts. Literacy instruction must resist

standardization because students and the contexts in which they need to employ literacy are in no ways

standard or uniform.

Most schools practice a narrow, autonomous version of literacy which values narrow

definitions of what it means to read, interpret, and analyze texts, and prioritizes a singular

interpretation or meaning of texts, isolating students’ meaning-making practices from their own

contexts and conditions around them. These practices assume a singular meaning within a text and

singular responses to analysis questions, pushing students towards a literacy that narrows instead of

expands their thinking, resulting in students who are not prepared to utilize criticality to determine the

ways in which discourses or sociocultural context impact the meaning and impact of texts (Fish,

1980). Students need to be supported in exploring the plurality of meanings within a text, as well as the

contextual factors that allow for and impact multiple meanings. As an integral part of this need,

teachers must use students’ funds of knowledge as a foundation for creating their own understandings

of the word and the world (Freire, 1987) through student-centered instruction on interpretation and

context. Considering these philosophical perspectives led me to realize the fallacy of viewing literacy

as a set of static and formal skills. Instead, I now view literacy as an adaptable framework of tools and

processes that can be employed for different purposes in different contexts using different materials.

In addition to these philosophical influences, theories from sociolinguistics centered on power

and positioning within communicative acts have led me to consider the ways in which each act of
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literacy is, in essence, an act of communication. Hyme’s (1974) model of the communicative event

includes consideration of the factors of setting, participants, ends (expected outcome/goals of

participants), act sequence (form/content), key (tone/affect), instrumentalities (medium, dialect,

register), norms of interaction and interpretation, and genre (type of communication). Students must be

supported to be able to critically identify and utilize these factors to use literacy as a way of exerting

power over their own position. Positioning theory from social psychology focuses on how individuals

use discourse to locate themselves and others in relation to each other (Moghaddam and Harre, 2010).

Positioning theory has implications for working towards equity within education because students

must be able to use critical literacies to push back against oppressive power structures within and

outside the classroom. These theories helped me realize that literacy instruction should focus on

equipping students with the agency and skills they need to position themselves as they want or need to

within their worlds. Goffman’s (1981) theory of footing, or the ways in which we position ourselves

and those around us through our production or reception of communication, highlights how literacy

practices intersect with power, and the ways in which students’ literacy practices serve to give or take

away their power in relation to others. These sociolinguist theories underscore the dynamic nature of

literacy and of texts, and how contextual factors are instrumental when considering literacy.

These theories as well as the interdisciplinary ideas I read each week in my classes continue to

cause me to continuously reflect on and reconsider my views of literacy. However, I embrace this

constant evolution of how I view literacy because I acknowledge that in the same way students’

literacies must prepare them to engage in the changing contexts and discourse they engage them,

educators’ view of literacy must also remain dynamic and responsive to social, cultural, and political

shifts. I believe that as I continue on in my studies and in my career as a literacy educator, my

knowledge of literacy and what skills are needed to allow students to engage with and impact their
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worlds will shift constantly. With this in mind, I choose to consciously resist forming my own

definitive view of literacy, and instead remain open to perspectives I have not yet heard, knowledge I

have not yet gained, and a future world I do not yet know.
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References

Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In S. Heath (Trans.), Image, music, text (pp. 142–148).

Fontana/Collins.

de Certeau, Michel (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall. University of

California Press.

Fish, Stanley E. (1980). Is There a Text in this Class? Harvard University Press.

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. Bergin & Garvey

Publishers.

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach.  University of

Pennsylvania Press.

Kostogriz, A., & Tsolidis, G. (2008). Transcultural literacy: Between the global and the local.

Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 16(2), 125–136.

Linell, P. (1998). Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualizations and the lending of voice in

professional discourse. Text & Talk, 18(2), 143-158.

Moghaddam, F. M., Harré Rom, Nilsson, L.-E., & Brante, E. W. (2010). "Do I Have to Say Yes?" A

Positioning Theory Perspective on Prioritizing and Dividing Work in School. In Words of

conflict, words of war: How the language we use in political processes sparks fighting (pp.

31–46). Praeger.

Price-Dennis, D., Sealey-Ruiz, Y., Mahiri, J., & Rogers, R. (2021). How Can Racial Literacy Inform

Teacher Education in the Digital Age? In Advancing racial literacies in teacher education:

Activism for equity in Digital Spaces (pp. 35–50). Teachers College Press.