WEEK 3 Embodied Literacies: What Can a Literacy Be?

What if we believed that alphabetic literacy was actually getting in the way of certain understandings of the literate lives of our studentsnot just as a subject of study, but especially as a means of study? Halbritter & Lindquist 183 Literacy is one of those terms that, often, can mean a dozen different things or nothing at all. Literacy includes the reading and writing (composing) practices that contribute to meaningmaking. It is the ability to contribute to and navigate with a situated discourse. It is a social act imbued with power relations. There is a difference between literacy that makes or contributes something versus literacy that understands. When we name ourselves as literate beings, we identify with a range of literate practices: reading, writing, visual, technological, community, multimodal. In some ways, the literacy conundrumtoo many meanings or no meaning at all is influenced by the shift from literacy as reading and writing to literacies as a range of understandings and practices tied to particular social, cultural, and ideological contexts. It is this notion of literacies, plural and digital, that this weeks readings explore. The DALN piece, Narrative Theory and Stories That Speak to Us, offers the most direct definition of literacy. Selfe defines literacy as a broad range of reading and composing activities, including writing, that take place both on and offline but are always situated in dynamic and fluid social systems, laden with rhetorical choices, and shaped by historical circumstances, individuals lived experiences, and particular situations for writing (DeRosa, p. 3). Here, literacy includes reading and writing practices but also moves beyond them. Selfe also highlights contextthat we can only understand literacy as it exists and performs within social systems, historical circumstances, local experiences, particular rhetorical situations. Literacy narratives, then, are personal stories and accounts that focus on these broad literate practices, on language acquisition, literacy practices, and literacy values. Perhaps what I like best about this

Hitt piece is the focus on how literacy narratives construct literate selves; that is, narratives compose and construct literate being as the authors (or speakers) represent themselves. Halbritter and Lindquist build on, and depart from, this notion of literacy narratives, focusing more on the context (scene) of the narratives more than the process or product of the

narratives themselves. In this way, they are more concerned with literacy sponsorshipwho and what can be a sponsor. Different from Brandts study of literacy sponsorship, Halbritter and Lindquist ask, [W]hat if we didnt surrender to the inevitability of alphabetic transcription? What if we found a way to make Brandts audio recordings stick to those paper pages? What if we decided to value not only the hesitations and misstarts, but also the embodied performances of those we interview? (183). Through the use of digital literacy narratives, the construction of the literate self moves beyond the words that are said. By focusing on image and sound and scene, constructing the literate self becomes an embodied process that involves the relationship between body and voice and content and scene. This may not seem different from Selfes, but Halbritter and Lindquist bring a more intensive methodology: a four-step, prompted process that seeks to understand experiences of lived time (175). That is, theyre looking for literacies in the scenes where we might not always (be willing to) look for it. While the DALN focuses on single digital literacy narratives, and Halbritter and Lindquist focus on a process of four digital literacy narratives prompted and contextualized in specific scenes, Hawisher et. al value digital literacy narratives that are put into the figurative hands of the narrators themselves. The storytellers conceptualize, compose, and produce their own narratives about their writing processes, a process that echoes the idea that writing is embodied-activity-in-the-world, that it is consciousness in action, that it is saturated with affect and identity, that it is social as writers interact with others (people, sometimes animals, and even

Hitt things) (260-61). Im drawn again to the embodied aspect of writing because our literate activity can never be contained in the alphabetic. What if we believed that alphabetic literacy was actually getting in the way of certain understandings of the literate lives of our studentsnot just as a subject of study, but especially as a means of study? (Halbritter and Lindquist 183). I framed my response with this quotation

because it so poignantly points to the issue of constraint. If we frame literate activity only within the alphabetic, we are limited. Even if we think of writing as an example of alphabetic literate activity, that process is always composed of embodied processesthinking, outlining, typing, stretching, walking the dog, revising. Imagining all literacies, whether digital or not, as embodied points to the material realities of literacy learning. If literacy is understood within particular contexts, it cant exclude the bodily processes that will take up and produce these activities in very different ways. For me, then, constructing a literate self acknowledges all the composing practicesreading, writing, drawing, Tweeting, talking, walking, pacingthat contribute to the reception (understanding) and production (making) of discursive meaning.

Hitt Works Cited

Halbritter, Bump, and Julie Lindquist. Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship. College English 75.2 (2012): 171-98. Print. Hawisher, Gail E., Paul Prior, Patrick Berry, Amber Buck, Steven E. Gump, Cory Holding, Hannah Lee, Christa Olson, and Janine Solberg. Ubiquitous Writing and Learning: Digital Media as Tools for Reflection and Research on Literate Activity. Ubiquitous Learning. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. 254-64. Print. Selfe, Cynthia L., and the DALN Consortium. Narrative Theory and Stories That Speak to Us. Stories That Speak to Us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Ed. H. Lewis Ulman, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, & Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2012. Web.