The New Literacy Studies and the Resurgent Literacy Myth

Abstract

The roots of the once "new literacy studies" lay in the 1960s and spread in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 2000s they were ascendant, with new journals like Literacy in Composition Studies and significant presence in journals, book publications, conference sessions, and course catalogues. The transformation of our understanding of literacy remains far from complete, and fundamental lessons remain to be learned. Accelerating in the twenty-first century, the same period witnessed the contradictory trend toward an uninformed battle between new literacies and old ones, and the endless proliferation of "multiple literacies. " The different bodies of writing and publicity seldom acknowledge each other. To a considerable degree, both the "new" and the "multi-literacies" are marketing campaigns serving corporate profit-making with the promotion of degrees, certificates, courses, consultants, how-to books, and now apps. The conflicts and contradictions are insufficiently appreciated. I date the foundations of the new literacy studies in the groundbreaking revelations, critiques, and reform proposals in the classic books by Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960) and Compulsory Miseducation (1964); Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970); and Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (1967), among others of that exciting time. Socially and culturally, there was a relatively small step to a next generation influenced by this literature but more academic. I helped to pioneer it with The Literacy Myth (1979, and subsequent historical works), a study of nineteenth century Canada in comparative perspective. Other authors followed in a series of interrelated books that together created a new field of study and interpretations of literacy in theory and practice. These constitute a collection of now-classic works across disciplines: psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (1981); anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983); anthropologist Brian Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984); and compositionist Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives (2001). Each derived from original research in historical or personal sources or ethnography. Together they form an intellectual foundation with international influence (see, among others, Galvao et al. and Duffy et al.) From a wide range of approaches and disciplinary orientations, the new literacy studies revised what I designated as "the literacy myth" with concrete research, clear logic of inquiry and interpretation, evidence, comparisons, grounded criticism, new hypotheses, and novel theories. The "literacy myth" dated from antiquity but was articulated and promoted by the "invention" of alphabets, especially the Greek alphabet; the diffusion of the printing press and movable typography; progressive elements of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; nineteenth-century institutional school reforms; and twentieth-century presumptions of the essentialist demands of modern civilization.