What does it mean to be literate in this time and place?
What skills understandings and values do we teach to help them become a citizen of the US?
Here are some of my answers:
- the ability to work, understand, and accept Difference
- the separation of self (subject) from text (non-human actors)
- the ability to understand that text “does” work independent from intent
- the ability to shift knowledge work through several semiotic structured systems effectively
- to understand semiotic structures shift epistemological the work of that knowledge
- the ability to solve problems in a variety of semiotic systems
Some Questions from Cindy’s slides:
What new understandings of words like “test reading and composing” will students bring with them to university classrooms in the next decade?
What kinds of text will these students read? And how will they compose?
And are composition faculty grounded by their education in the environment of print prepared to work with these students in productive ways?
Are colleges and universities prepared to modify current curricula to accommodate and extend the literacy practices of students who consider digital environments to be the “normal” spaces for communicating?
Are we prepared to deal with students who compose texts not from words arranged on a page, but also from figitied bits of video, sound, still images etc?
“accumulating literacies” Brandt (1995)
partial and localized change David White (1995) and Lemke (1995)
Margeret Mead Culture and Commitment
- Postfigurative: change is so slow that the previous generation knows what is coming down the pike way of life is unchanging
- Cofigurative: Some form of disruption in a culture where the old are not expert. Knowledge is constructed by contemporaries
- Prefigurative: Without models or without present.
