Developing Cultural Literacies

Leaders and policy makers love to stir up hype about the supposed 'literacy crisis' in the United States.  They cite statistics claiming high numbers of students are unable to read when they finish high school and lament how the quality of U.S. education is slipping behind other industrialized nations.  James Paul Gee (2012) claims this panic is unwarranted and misdirected, however.  He writes, "Most young adults do not have an "illiteracy" problem (80% of them can read as well or better than the average eighth-grade student); rather they have a "schooling" problem. (p. 31)" In addition to various environmental and social factors, Gee asserts that most young people are being underserved in schools due to a conflict between their home culture and the dominant school culture.  Gee specifically refers to conflicts with language and discourse.  He argues that schools privilege certain traditional discourses over others and students whose discourses don't adhere to the dominant model are often chastised and can have their cultures effectively denigrated by teachers.  Most of these linguistic differences happen across race, class and ethnic lines.  Schools and teachers, in Gee's opinion, must learn about and learn to value diverse literacies and discourses if they are to truly serve all students equally.  

There are obvious cultural divides affecting specific students with regards to issues like race and class, but all students face a cultural divide in the classroom regarding popular culture.  Media and technology advance at such a rapid pace, that even the youngest teachers in the classroom can find themselves on the other side of a great cultural chasm from their students.  Ernest Morrell (2004) argues that, in order to bridge this divide, teachers must integrate popular culture literacies into their curriculum.  He makes the case by stressing the following: popular culture is relevant to adolescent lives, consuming popular culture involves intellectually rigorous literacy practices, popular culture helps students make connections across academic disciplines, popular culture helps students learn to critically read the world, and including pop culture in the curriculum helps increase student motivation.

Henry Giroux (2011) agrees that teaching about and through popular culture texts is an essential part of critical pedagogy.  Giroux uses the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci to explicate the importance of studying the pedagogical and political nature of popular culture in schools.  Popular culture, Giroux argues, plays a "powerful role in shaping the desires, needs and identities of students (p. 64)."  Therefore, he believes, it is not enough for students to be schooled exclusively in print literacies.  They must learn to read critically the various visual and technological cultures that exercise control over their lives.  They also must learn to participate in these cultures meaningfully in order to be responsible citizens. 

David Buckingham (1994) writes about what this kind of pop culture literacy integration might look like in his book, Cultural Studies Goes to School.  Buckingham argues for not only analytical critique of pop culture texts, but also for student participation in writing about and creating pop culture texts of their own. He says the act of learning about pop culture should be a social process in which students learn to position themselves both socially and politically, as well as an investigative process in which the students become researchers of their own lived cultural experiences.

Buckingham writes, "It begins not with a body of 'critical' academic knowledge but with the understandings, and with the emotional and cultural investments, that students bring to the classroom.  Yet it also seeks to enable them to make those aspects explicit, to reflect upon them, and to question them.  In the process, it encourages students to examine the complex relationships between both the subjective and the social and between the concrete particulars of lived experience and the powerful generalities of theory. (p. 118)"

Both students and teachers must become researchers in the process of developing cultural literacies.  Morrell advocates for teachers to become ethnographers, collecting data on popular culture by engaging with mass media texts, paying attention to students' casual conversations around media and pop culture and asking students direct questions about their pop culture experiences.

In order for students to receive the kind of education that will truly prepare them to be active and critical citizens of the world, teachers must do the work of becoming more culturally literate.  I will conclude with Gee's closing words on the matter, "Such knowledge is power, because it can protect all of us from harming others and from being harmed, and because it is the very foundation of resistance and growth... It is a moral matter and can change the world. (p. 216)"

References

Buckingham, D., & Sefton-Green, J. (1994). Cultural studies goes to school: Reading and teaching popular media. London: Taylor and Francis.

Gee, J.P. (2012). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.

Giroux, H. A. (2011) On critical pedagogy. New York: Continuum.

Morrell, E. (2004). Linking literacy and popular culture: Finding connections for lifelong learning. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, Inc.