Literacies are plural

I’ve argued that skills cannot be learned in a vacuum, that they’re highly contextual. Now I want to go one step further. In a similar vein to the SOLO taxonomy I believe there’s a continuum from skills through competencies to literacies. As individuals can abstract from specific contexts they become more literate. So, in the digital domain, being able to navigate a menu system when it’s presented to you — even if you haven’t come across that exact example before — is a part of digital literacy.

The problem with standard views of digital literacy is that they equate literacy with a ‘skill’ to be learned. This is known as the ‘unitary’ view of literacy. As Hannon points out, those who hold this position believe that “the actual uses which particular readers and writers have for that competence is something which can be separated from the competence itself.” (Hannon, 2000, p.31). On the other hand, the pluralist view believes there to be many different literacies:

We should recognise, rather, that there are many specific literacies, each comprising an identifiable set of socially constructed practices based upon print and organised around beliefs about how the skills of reading and writing may or, perhaps, should be used. (Lankshear, 1987, quoted in Hannon, 2000, p.32)

Going back to that conversation I had as a student teacher, part of the problem I had with the in-service trainer who wanted to focus merely on ‘skills’ was that he didn’t seem to recognise that literacy practices are not neutral when it comes to power, social identity and political ideology. As Paulo Freire (1968) pointed out, to wash one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means, in effect, siding with the powerful.

What does this mean in practice? It means that we should recognise a multiplicity of literacies, and especially in the digital realm. It is easy to paint a utopian picture of what can happen when learners connect to information and to one another via digital tools. There’s plenty of rhetoric about learning and jobs being available to all through the internet. What is often missing is the recognition of the multiple literacies needed to not only turn desire into action, but even to know what is obtainable.

In the next chapter I want to examine this idea of there being multiple literacies and look at what they are and how we might help develop them in others.