Multiple Literacies

While I still believe that literacy means to be able to read, write, and communicate, I believe to be literate goes farther than that. In David Bloome and Patricia Enciso’s article “Looking out across Columbus: What We Mean by ‘Multiple Literacies,” they outlined what schools need to do to prepare our students for society:

• Recognition of the diversity of ways written language is used by people across social institutions, communities, and social situations;
• Recognition that students must understand both how to adopt extant literacy practices and how to adapt them to new situations and needs;
• Recognition that students must understand how literacy practices connect social institutions with each other, local contexts with national and global contexts; and,
• Recognition that how literacy practices are structured and how they provide meaning constructs social relationships among people and social groups, as well as provides social identities to individuals. (298)

Written language is used differently depending on the social contexts the individual is in. For example, a person will say a greeting differently depending who he or she is greeting. If the person is greeting his friend, they might say “hey, what’s up?” However, his greeting might be different if he is greeting his teacher (“hello Ms. Smith, how are you?”) Also, different dialects are used. You can usually tell when someone is from a different part of the region. Schools should celebrate these different dialects instead of trying to soften a person’s accent.

Schools should also teach students how to use existing literary practices and use them in different situations. Bloome and Enciso use the example of ordering breakfast at a restaurant. The literary practice for a restaurant is that the waiter or waitress seats the customers and hands them a menu. He or she than asks for the order. The waiter or waitress puts in the order and when it is ready, he or she brings the order out to the customer (298). This literacy practice can be adapted into different situations, for example, ordering to-go, or a restaurant that doesn’t have a menu to look at. Schools should teach the student how to adapt this practice into different social contexts that they might encounter.

There are many different tasks or activities that children do that have numerous literacies attached to them. One example might be picking out an outfit in the morning. A child wakes up and starts her morning out by picking out the outfit. Many different variables go into making this decision. For example, it is snowing outside. The child may opt to wear snow shoes, warm pants, a long sleeve shirt, a sweater, and a jacket. Also within this task, the child might want to match his colors. Therefore, the child has to decide what red matches. He or she might also want to wear a scarf, gloves and a hat. Making this decision involves relating different choices together. The child didn’t wear sandals and shorts because it is snowing outside and because it is snowing, he chose to where a jacket because it is cold outside. Schools should teach how different literacies are inter-connected to each other.

How people use literacy practices can construct their social identity and schools should prepare students on how to use literacy practices. An example of this is joining a swim team. In order for a person to be on a swim team, they must know how to swim all four strokes (freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly). They also need to know how to do a swimmer’s dive and a flip to lower the time to do another lap in the pool. This knowledge results in literacy of swimming and therefore the person will be allowed on the swim team. This results in a social identity of a group and as an individual.

Bloome and Enciso’s four tenets of literacy should be adopted by all schools. This will prepare the individual to celebrate diversity of literacy and to adopt literacy in different social settings.