ENGL3741: Literacy and American Cultural Diversity

Literacy and American Cultural Diversity combines academic study with experiential learning in order to collectively build more engaged, more complex understandings of literacy, educational institutions, counter-institutional literacy programs, the grassroots and nonprofit sectors, and the struggles of a multicultural civil society in a putative democracy. We will ground our inquiry in government studies, as well as sociological, historical, and educational writings. Standard literature, such as a memoir, a selection of poems, some short fiction, and a novel will further open up our twin themes of literacy and multiculturalism – as will less “official” literature, such as manifestos and the transcribed stories of immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized communities. We begin with the basic understanding of literacy as reading and writing, noting that, according to the National Survey of Adult Literacy, 46% of Americans scored in the lowest two levels of a five-tiered literacy test. What does this mean? Are such tests accurate or otherwise helpful? What about your basic literacy? As you read this syllabus, you’re making use of basic abilities that you’ve likely been practicing most of your life through formal schooling, daily routines, recreational pursuits, and work-related duties. But there’s more. On another level, you bring knowledge to your reading (some conscious, some unconscious), and the ideological field supplies you with assumptions about the role of literacy in your development, the role of a university course in your plans for your personal and professional life, and your position in a society that constantly raises the standards of literacy, basing success on your ability to keep up. Thus the very word “literacy” calls into play many beliefs we have about our class system, our cultural life, economic and political structures, and educational institutions. Accordingly, our analysis will move beyond basic “reading and writing” to wider concepts of literacy in our society, investigating issues that have much to do with our role as public citizens involved in shaping our individual and collective future. In tandem with our “classroom” work, our service-learning work in the community (see Your Practicum as Literacy Workers, below) will enable us to develop more “tangible” understandings of the ways that literacy, educational theories, practices, and the construction of knowledge and skills through educational policies provide a “map” of the shifting socioeconomic, cultural, and political terrains of the U.S., the institutional inequities that result from these arrangements, as well as the justice work needed to transform those inequities.

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