Literacy without Limits: An Introduction

by Mark Wilis

The essays gathered here were written between 1994-98 for a series of graduate seminars in rhetoric and composition. I became a student again for a compelling reason that I did not fully understand at the time. I needed to renew my motivation as a writer. I began working as a newspaper reporter when I was sixteen. I had worked as a professional writer at the university for ten years. I was so imbued with the institution's voice that I felt as though I were losing my own. By taking graduate courses, one per quarter, I hoped to match writing requirements with some of my personal writing projects. When I look back at the essays, I see that I managed to do this, although the process was far more indirect than what I imagined in the beginning.

I discovered that the discipline of rhetoric and composition embraced a multitude of approaches to studying language and writing, including psycholinguistics, ethnography, and cultural studies. Amid such diversity, several of the discipline's recurring themes held my attention and provided a scaffold for my scholarly pursuits as a blind writer and disability rights activist. First among them was a concern for literacy as an ever-developing cultural practice. Second was the discipline's avowed commitment to educating people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. And finally, many authors in the discipline were exploring what had once been taboo in academic writing, using first-person perspectives and integrating personal experiences with academic research.

"Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Reader," one of the early essays, was written for a research methodology course. The process and products of the course were grounded in the American Psychological Association (APA) style, which strongly discourages use of first-person narrative. Nevertheless, I felt obliged to frame the essay in personal experience because the topic - understanding the literacy of blind readers and writers - was virtually invisible in academic literature. The essay gave me a conceptual framework for thinking about my own literacy in terms of literacy events, which anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath defined as occasions in which a written text may be accompanied by speech and immersed in social relationships with others. My essay's final phrase, literacy without limits, became the idea that motivated my subsequent thinking about literacy.

Literacy without Limits was more than just an idea, though. It was my praxis, what Paulo Freire called action-reflection. One week into the research methodology course, I was so far behind in reading and online busy-work, I was ready to drop out. The university's library databases and computer labs were inaccessible to blind students then. When my ten-year-old son Brendan listened to my frustration at dinner one night, he said, "Don't give up yet. I could read it to you." That was a literacy event in and of itself. With a partner like him, how could I back down? My course of study about literacy inevitably became my course of struggle to break down literacy barriers and participate with equal access in literacy's opportunities.

A month later, Literacy without Limits showed up on a placard at the University of Memphis. It was held by my sister Diana, a blind teacher completing a master's degree in special education. She was protesting a speech by the Governor of Tennessee dedicating a new, multimillion-dollar library that was completely inaccessible to blind students, wheelchair-users, and others with disabilities. That was a literacy event, too. The protest so embarrassed the Governor and university that the library's opening was postponed until its architectural and information barriers were resolved.

These essays document the development of my thinking about literacy and its barriers, negotiations, and social contexts. Some of the citations are dated now. Many of the barriers analyzed here have been solved, freeing up time and energy to confront new barriers. My literacy, to paraphrase Shirley Brice Heath again, continues to evolve in ever-shifting, protean shapes and modes. When I re-read the essays, their academic scaffolding falls away. What remain for me are the stories and the struggle.

My literacy studies confirmed something I knew intuitively but had not expressed in any formal way. I needed dialogue with other people to continue to grow as a writer. At its best, the dialogue has been an ongoing, boundless process, a rich ambient hum that continues to renew my energy and commitment to keep on writing.

Walter Ong, explaining the challenge of imagining an audience of readers, describes the process of writing this way: "This is a desperate world, a terrifying world, a lonely, unpeopled world, not at all the world of natural oral-aural exchange." Ong's is a bleak and isolating notion of literacy and its consequences. I want a literacy without limits, not one isolated from its social and naturally oral context. If writing were so divorced from talking, from real human relationships, I would have quit a long time ago. It would have been too lonely, too difficult, too little rewarded, for me to continue. Instead of Ong's context for literacy, I look to Paulo Freire's:

To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word…