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Literacy
without Limits
The essays
gathered here were written between 1994-98 for a series of graduate
seminars in rhetoric and composition. They document the evolution of
my own thinking about literacy as a blind reader and writer. Mine is
a multi-textured literacy that could be characterized by what anthropologist
Shirley Brice Heath called ever-shifting, protean shapes and modes.
It is motivated by an ongoing struggle for a literacy without limits,
a literacy unbounded by social, political, and economic constraints.
Literacy
without Limits: An Introduction
When I re-read the essays, their academic scaffolding falls away. What
remain for me are the stories and the struggle. (2004)
Whooping
Cranes, Family Values, and the First Amendment
Whenever I hear a sanctimonious debate about censorship and family
values, I think of Whooping cranes. In my family, the gawky, audacious,
elusive and endangered birds are synonymous with the First Amendment.
My parents never read the eloquent Supreme Court opinions penned by
Holmes and Brandeis, but they believed in the First Amendment freedoms,
and would have welcomed the Great Dissenters to our dinner table. After
I became a parent, our family values about obscenity came to be codified
as the Grandma test: if you would feel weird saying it in front of Grandma
at the nursing home, you shouldn't say it in public in front of strangers.
(1994)
Literacy,
Orality, and Cognition: An Overview
The significance
of questions about cognition across the oral/literate continuum extends
beyond the domains of the antiquarian, the historian of ideas, and the
anthropologist. Noticeably absent from the orality/literacy literature
are discussions of people with disabilities for whom written texts are
a barrier. (1994)
Listening
to the Literacy Events of a Blind Reader
Social anthropologist
Jack Goody posed a thought experiment that was meant to illuminate the
essentially visual nature of literacy. "Imagine (though it is a
fanciful task) Kuhn's book as an oral discourse." Listening to
such a discourse would preclude the process of recursive scrutiny of
text to detect, compare, and resolve inconsistent meanings. It is a
literacy skill that Goody and others regarded as the cornerstone of
critical thinking. Goody's fanciful problem haunts me sometimes because
it is not fanciful for me. Listening to The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions is precisely how I read the book. (1994)
Somewhere
Over the Multicultural Rainbow, Bluebirds Fly
A discourse community
can be more than the vocabulary, rules, and rituals needed to enter
it. It also can form around the passion and commitment of people who
need discourse with one another because their lives depend on it. Disability,
adaptability, flexibility -- these are the heart of the conversation
I have joined. What it means to have a disability, for me, is what it
means to be alive. (1994)
When
the Blind Lead the Blind: Literacy, Authority, & Collaborative Learning
Long ago, I decided
that I do not need to carry the symbolic weight of this type of metaphor.
Moments of doubt not withstanding, I am sure that blind people do not
need to be led to their literacy or to the authority of their knowledge.
As a member of that unique knowledge community called "the blind,"
I know how we can guide one another and lead sighted people along the
way. Collaborative learning is one of the paths. (1994)
Disability
as Praxis
Paulo Freire's
Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides a framework for understanding
both the alienation and the humanity to be found in the existential
experience of having a disability. As cultural experience, disability
is ripe for Freire's process of critical investigation, and it presents
possibilities for human transformation. A culture of disability lives
in the human power to adapt and accommodate, to make and remake ways
of living to meet diverse needs and capabilities. Adaptations and accommodations
are significant cultural products; making them and negotiating them
are the praxis of everyday life for people who have disabilities. (1995)
Searching
for a Literacy without Limits in the Zone of Proximal Development
My fitful, uneven
progress toward new ways of reading underscores this point about oral/aural
literacy: it is not simply a shift in sensory perception (from vision
to hearing) or information technology (from print to audio texts). Reading
an audio text, no matter how carefully it is recorded, is not the same
as reading a printed text. Oral/aural reading involves complex cognitive
processes (Lev Vygotsky's higher mental functions). The development
of these processes requires transformations, rather than simple extensions,
of processes involved in speech events and recognition of visual signs.
Developing the skills necessary for a different type of literacy is
not innate, and it is not guaranteed by the availability of adaptive
technology. An adaptive device, crucial as it may be, is only a tool
in the larger social process of adaptation. (1996)
Osip Mandelstam
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A
Word is the Search for It
In the autumn of 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote a seditious poem
that sealed his fate. He composed it on the elusive plane
of thought and language that psychologist Lev Vygotsky called
inner speech. Mandelstam never committed the poem to
paper. He recited it aloud to only a handful of friends. But
it quickly burned the ears of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
The head of Stalin's secret police knew the poem by heart
and recited it with sadistic relish. Vygotsky may have heard
it, too, although there is no evidence that he betrayed his
friend. Using the "enforced subtlety" of subtext
and secret writing, poet and psychologist shared a proscribed
life of the mind in the shadow of Stalin's Great Terror. This
essay is a search to recover something of that life: the knowledge
that a word removed from motive is a dead thing. (1998-2001) |
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