Literacy and Education

James Paul Gee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138826021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317577218
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Literacy and Education tells the story of how literacy—starting in the early 1980s—came to be seen not as a mental phenomenon, but as a social and cultural one. In this accessible introductory volume, acclaimed scholar James Paul Gee shows readers how literacy "left the mind and wandered out into the world." He traces the ways a sociocultural view of literacy melded with a social view of the mind and speaks to learning in and out of school in new and powerful ways. Gee concludes by showing how the very idea of "literacy" has broadened into new literacies with words, signs, and deeds in contexts enhanced, augmented, and transformed by new technologies.

1
Introduction

A Story

Let me start with a story. I began my academic career forty years ago as a linguist studying the structure of language (“grammar”). At that time, thanks to the seminal work of Noam Chomsky, the fashionable thing to study was the basic design properties of language, the core grammatical properties that all human languages shared (Chomsky 1957, 1986). There was much less interest in meaning and in language in use. The study of language was then a pretty abstract affair.

Thanks to the “accidents” of life—mistakes made, lessons learned—years later I found myself employed in an applied linguistics program. The program happened to be in a School of Education. I knew absolutely nothing about education then. Early in my time there the Dean of the School of Education came up to me and asked me to attend a meeting about applying for a grant to research adult literacy.

As a generative (Chomskian) linguist I believed that only oral language was real language. Literacy was only a derivative and relatively trivial “code.” After all, oral language arose in humans long ago (Pinker 1994). It is a good part of what separated humans from their primate relatives. On the other hand, literacy is a relatively recent cultural invention (Olson 1996). Writing has been invented independently only a few times in history. All human groups have had oral language, but not all cultures have had literacy and not all have it today. In the not too distant past, in fact, literacy was rare within societies and across the world.

When I attended the meeting, I was surprised to find out there were any adults in the United States who were “illiterate,” let alone the supposed millions I was told were so or close to it. Since everyone in the U.S. went to school, how could this have happened? I assumed schools gave everyone an equal chance and at least ensured that everyone learned to read and write.

When I attended the meeting, I was as naïve as I could be. I thought that surely literacy would be a simple, straightforward topic of little depth (I should have known better, since many languages in the world do not even have a word for “literacy”). Surely, literacy was just a practical matter of no theoretical interest. It was not something real academics would study.

As I studied literacy the whole topic seemed stranger and stranger. Simplicity turned to complexity. Paradoxes abounded.

The Story Continues

Because I had been “coerced” to work on literacy and was trying to get any help I could, I ended up meeting Sarah Michaels, then working at Harvard and now at Clark University. My colleague David Dickinson (now at Vanderbilt) introduced me to Sarah.

Sarah showed me data she and others had collected on first-grade “sharing-time” sessions in schools. Sharing time is something teachers of very young children tend to do to start off the school day. It is sometimes called “rug time” or “show and tell.” At the time I could not have imagined anything seemingly less important.

Sarah and her colleagues had found that some African-American children gave sharing-time turns that were different from those of the white children in the classrooms (Cazden 2001; Michaels 1981; Michaels & Cazden 1986; Michaels & Cook-Gumperz 1979; Michaels & Collins 1984). These African-American children told what Sarah called “topic-associating” stories, while the Anglo children (and some of the other African-American children) told “topic-centered” stories.

Topic-associating stories were ones that appeared to move from topic to topic with no overt theme. The unifying theme had to be supplied by the listener. Topic-centered stories were ones that focused on and developed one unitary explicit topic. These were usually, in fact, not really stories but reports, such as an “event cast” of a trip to a swimming pool, or procedures, such as the steps involved in making a candle.

The African-American children’s sharing-time turns were not well received by their teachers. The teachers thought the children were rambling on and not making sense. The teachers in these classrooms had instituted a rule that each turn had to be about “one important thing” and felt the African-American children often violated this rule.

The teachers, it turns out, could seamlessly interrupt and interact with the white children and the African-American children who told topic-focused stories, though not with the topic-associating African-American children. In a sort of interactive dance the teachers helped the topic-focused children produce a piece of language that, while spoken, was explicit and topic-focused in the way we later expect school-based writing to be.

Sarah and her colleagues argued that these sharing-time sessions were early practice at literacy or literate language for children who could not yet read and write very well. This was not necessarily the teachers’ conscious plan, but it seemed to be the underlying goal in their practice.

When I looked at the sharing-time data, a number of the African-American stories stood out. They were long, robust, well-organized poetic stories. Unfortunately, the researchers had thrown these stories out of their data, concentrating on the shorter ones told by the African-American children. They did this in order “control for length,” since the white children’s sharing-time turns, in particular, were relatively short (because they were so concise).

It appeared to me that some of the shorter African-American turns were cases where children had been stopped by the teacher and told to sit down (for not talking about one important thing). Or they were cases where the child had started a story, but for one reason or another did not choose to finish it. The stories that were clearly finished seemed thematically based, but not loosely structured. While they were not like early versions of the sort of explicit, concise language we later expect in reports and essays, they were “literate” in the sense of being early versions of the literary language we expect in poetry and other forms of literary art.

Let me give you an example. Below I reprint one of these stories that I have used a number of times in my writings (e.g., Gee 1985). This is a story by a girl the researchers called “Leona,” a little girl about whom a good deal has come to be written by different people over the years:

The Puppy Story

I. Setting

Stanza 1

• 1. Last yesterday in the morning
• 2. there was a hook on the top of the stairway
• 3. an’ my father was pickin’ me up
• 4. an I got stuck on the hook up there

Stanza 2

• 5. an’ I hadn’t had breakfast
• 6. he wouldn’t take me down
• 7. until I finished all my breakfast
• 8. cause I didn’t like oatmeal either

II. Catalyst

Stanza 3

• 9. an’ then my puppy came
• 10. he was asleep
• 11. he tried to get up
• 12. an’ he ripped my pants
• 13. an’ he dropped the oatmeal all over him

Stanza 4

• 14. an’ my father came
• 15. an’ he said “did you eat all the oatmeal?”
• 16. he said “where’s the bowl?”
• 17. I said “I think the dog took it”
• 18. “Well I think I’ll have t’make another bowl”

III. Crisis

Stanza 5

• 19. an’ so I didn’t leave till seven
• 20. an’ I took the bus
• 21. an’ my puppy he always be following me
• 22. my father said “he—you can’t go”

Stanza 6

• 23. an’ he followed me all the way to the bus stop
• 24. an’ I hadda go all the way back
• 25. by that time it was seven thirty
• 26. an’ then he kept followin’ me back and forth
• 27. an’ I hadda keep comin’ back

IV. Evaluation

Stanza 7

• 28. an’ he always be followin’ me
• 29. when I go anywhere
• 30. he wants to go to the store
• 31. an’ only he could not go to places where we could go
• 32. like to the stores he could go
• 33. but he have to be chained up

V. Resolution

Stanza 8

• 34. an’ we took him to the emergency
• 35. an’ see what was wrong with him
• 36. an’ he got a shot
• 37. an’ then he was crying

Stanza 9

• 38. an’ last yesterday, an’ now they put him asleep
• 39. an’ he’s still in the hospital
• 40. an’ the doctor said he got a shot because
• 41. he was nervous about my home that I had

VI. Coda

Stanza 10

• 42. an’ he could still stay but
• 43. he thought he wasn’t gonna be able to let him go.

Thanks to those vagaries of life I mentioned earlier, I had done some work on “oral literature.” To anyone at the time familiar with the literature on oral literature (Bauman & Sherzer 1974; Finnegan 1967, 1977; Hymes 1981; Tedlock 1983), Leona’s story was a quite recognizable linguistic event.

Leona used aspects of the even then well-studied dialect of African-American Vernacular English (Baugh 1983, 1999; Labov 1972; Smitherman 1977). For example, the “naked be” in “My puppy he always be followin’ me” in line 21 (repeated in line 28): In Leona’s dialect this is a habitual/durative aspect marker. Here it means that the puppy habitually, as a matter of habit, as part of the puppy’s inherent way of acting, continually seeks to follow her (and thereby creates problems and eventually an opposition to the adult discipline of the home).

Leona uses poetic devices that are the hallmark of oral literature across the world (devices apparent in adult form in Homer and the Bible, which started as oral stories, see Finnegan 1977; Foley 1988; Havelock 1976; Hymes 1981; Ong 1982; Pattison 1982; Tedlock 1983). These devices include repetition, stylistic variation, and syntactic and semantic parallelism, all of which are readily apparent in Leona’s stories. By the way, saying that someone is in an “oral culture” does not mean that they and other members of their culture are not literate. It means only that their culture retains a strong allegiance to thematically based, culturally significant face-to-face storytelling.

For example, notice how in Stanzas 3 and 4 Leona introduces the puppy and the father in parallel ways, first opening Stanza 3 with “my puppy came” and then opening Stanza 4 with “my father came”. Leona then attaches four events to each of these entrances; she assigns four acts to the puppy and four pieces of dialogue to the father. This is one of many devices that create an opposition between the youthful puppy that wants to go free and the adult world that wants discipline.

Leona uses a device characteristic of African-American storytelling (and the storytelling of some other cultures). She uses non-narrative material to key the listener into what the “point” or basic theme of her story is. In her case (in this and others of her stories) she does this by exiting the main story line just before her story is about to end and giving the listener some non-narrative information. This non-narrative information is the sort of information Labov called “evaluation,” namely, material that signals what makes the story tellable or what its point is (Labov 1972; Labov & Waletsky 1967).

Thus, in Stanza 7 we are not given story events (this happened, then this happened), but generalizations (e.g., note, too, the repetition of the habitual/durative “be” and the repetition of “go”). This stanza clearly tells us—which the habitual/durative marker has already signaled—that the theme of the story is the conflict between the puppy (and Leona as a child?) continually wanting to go free and having, by adult dictate, to be chained up (unfree) [recall the hook earlier in the story]. It is this conflict that must be resolved for the story to be resolved and it is resolved in the last stanzas when an adult authority figure (the doctor) dictates that the puppy cannot “go” (free). [In more adult narratives, evaluation material is often spread out throughout the story, though Leona, as other young children, tended to concentrate it right before her conclusion.]

The teacher worried about whether or not the puppy was dead (put to sleep), where exactly the puppy was now, and over exactly how much time these events took place. But these concerns are beside the point in such oral-literature stories. Such stories exist primarily to carry themes and develop themes, themes of importance to their tellers and their cultures. They are meant to be exaggerated in ways that bring home those themes (e.g., the hook in the beginning of the story). Leona’s theme here—that young things have to follow adult rules (here represented by parents, schools, and doctors) as part and parcel of growing up—is a primordial theme for children and adults in many cultures.

So Leona has given the teacher a quite recognizable linguistic performance (“oral literature”). Her performance was rooted in a long history of African-Americans going back to Africa. It is a type of performance once prevalent in many other cultures, though done in somewhat different ways in each. It is also a type of performance that, via figures like Homer and Chaucer, is the foundation of Western written literature. Of course, Leona was a young child and, thus, early in her apprenticeship to this cultural verbal style, though obviously well on her way.

One thing that went on in classrooms like the one Leona was in was that children like her were misled by the ways in which teachers (and many academics) use the word “story” to cover both narrative verbal texts with plots and oral texts more akin to reports or the news (e.g., going swimming or making candles). In fact, following the original sharing-time terminology I have continued this unfortunate tradition here.

Leona thinks the teacher really wants a story and gives her a culturally embedded version of one. But the teacher is actually after a news-like report through which she can scaffold early school-based literate language in the “expository” style (i.e., linear, sequenced, concise, explicit, non-poetic, non-literary, expository language). All children need practice in many different styles, of course. But such a lack of clarity about goals, practice, and what language means creates a fundamental unfairness.

Leona and what she is doing are being misrecognized. She is being seen as deficient when she is enacting a culturally known, important, and impressive way of being, making meaning, and using language. She is not being seen as an African-American storyteller. Furthermore, she is not being helped to recognize the ways with words the teacher expects. The teacher assumes she already knows what is wanted—what the “rules of the game” are—and does not tell her. Many of the “mainstream” children (white and black) in the classrooms had engaged in sharing-time-like reports to their parents at dinner time, another now well-studied phenomenon.

A deep problem here is that Leona is a very young girl. She is being told by an authority figure, as part of her early socialization into schooling, that she does not make sense. This is not because the teacher is a bad per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Literacy
• 3 The Social Mind
• 4 Digital Media
• REFERENCES
• INDEX