NLS

So as I'm reading all these things about New Literacy Studies, I'm viewing them with the lens of a recent College of Ed. drop out. I didn't get far. I only "moved" back to Wells Hall... But I digress.

The lessons I learned during my time in the COE are still fresh in my mind, and I remember very clearly talking about NLS even if we didn't assign that name to it. NLS "represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focusing not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice" (Street 2003). There is a big shift to recognizing and accommodating students' differences and learning from what they bring to the classroom. This is more prevalent when talking about urban education. I wonder why, since students in upper middle-class schools can also have different types of literacy than what is considered literacy in the education world. Students can be literate in the social practices of different groups and clubs as well as in what I'll call public education literacy no matter what their social background is.

I like how NLS takes into account different types of literacy, but I just wonder why it seems to focus only on the literacy of those groups deemed repressed or marginalized. Street does mention "asking 'whose literacies' are dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant" (Street 2003), but I would argue that public education literacy is dominant in schools, and it marginalizes other types of social literacy. I think that's the case in all schools, regardless of location.

I even found that I marginalized different types of literacy while teaching even though I came from a background that encouraged taking different literacies into account. For example, there were students in my class who were literate in the practices of the football team culture (as was my mentor teacher). I am completely illiterate when comes to football. I didn't understand the concept of a first down until my freshman year at MSU. However, when teaching German, I only focused on literacy in German, and I never really tried to relate it to football. Did these student feel marginalized? I don't know, but it might have been easier for them to learn had I related it to football. Fortunately recognizing different types of literacies came with experience, and I was able to find a literacy that I was literate in, as well as some of my students - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So I was able to relate my lessons to this, and it seemed to help them learn. And this was in a very wealthy, upper middle-class school district.

I've even had my own type of literacy marginalized. I had someone tell me once that German isn't a different culture because all Germans are white. Since when does skin color alone define a culture? My own personal literacy in this area, I felt, was marginalized by someone from a characteristically marginalized literacy.

So my point is that any type of literacy can be marginalized, and I do like how NLS takes that into account, according to the ideological model of literacy presented by Street (2003), but I don't like that NLS (in my mind) focuses on the characteristically marginalized literacies.

P.S. On a completely unrelated note: What if we tagged our posts with the subject of the post? For example, I'll tag this post as NSL for New Literacy Studies. When we go back later in the semester, it will be easier to find posts related to certain subjects for future reference. Just a thought.