Dominique Van Gilst

EDUC 6306
Complex Literacies: Using A Variety of Disciplines to Understand Literacy

As a young learner, I struggled with reading due to a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that I

sustained as a thirteen-week early premature baby. This TBI resulted in memory retrieval issues,

as well as sensory and visual processing disorders. When I reached first grade, I could not yet

read text written on a page. If I had known what literacy truly meant as a child or adolescent, I

would have thought of myself as someone who could read, even before I was able to understand

printed text. As Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire points out, children make sense of the world,

before they are able to make sense of the word (Freire, 1987). As a young learner, I was taking in

my surroundings, and making meaning from what I saw, heard, and felt. I know now that while I

could not read in a literal sense, I was constantly reading facial expressions, art, and the world

around me (Freire 1987) to make meaning of what I was experiencing. Maintaining a

disciplinary perspective helps us understand literacy as a complex, but broad concept that

contains a wide range of disciplines, rather than thinking of it as simply reading and writing.

Cultural anthropologists have helped us to learn that literacy is ideological, and

dependent upon contexts in which people analyze and make meaning of their own lived

experiences (Street, 2003). Furthermore, James Paul Gee (1991), an American linguist,

understands literacy as a social practice that involves hierarchies based upon discourses, or

“identity kits”. Reading about making meaning through social interactions has opened up a new

world of information for me because it has allowed me to think more critically about what it

means to be literate, as well as which forms of literacy and communication are valued in our

society. Moreover, anthropology and linguistics have revealed literacy to be a social practice that
varies depending on contexts. My experiences as a camp counselor for people with disabilities is

a form of social literacy that I practice each summer. I began this work as an adolescent, and had

to understand various forms of communication that were unfamiliar to me, including some ASL,

vocalizations, and communication devices in order to interact with campers. As philosopher

Mary Hamilton explains, learning occurs “in day-to-day relationships between people in their

environment” (Hamilton 2010). Everyday, I was learning from the people I was working with

about new avenues of communication. Philosophy helps us understand that literacy occurs with

every small interaction students have with peers, adults, and so on. I have recently identified the

modes of communication I learned as texts that have allowed me to navigate the needs of others.

Understanding literacy through multiple disciplines allows for a wider view of literacy itself,

which can provide teachers with opportunities to see their students’ lives as texts that inform

their learning. This can lead to more generative conversations about multimodal texts in the

literacy classroom.

Thinking about my experiences in an educator role, I have realized that encouraging

multimodality provides students with spaces to leverage their individual genius that they all

possess (Muhammad, 2020), and allows them to utilize literacy as a form of resistance (Griffin,

& Turner, 2021). Change can occur as well when students participate in critical literacies.

Sociologist Vivian Vasquez has helped us to see literacy as an agent of change by describing

critical literacies as a lens in which children and adults can work towards “disrupting problematic

inequitable ways of being” (Vasquez p. 3, 2014). This means that literacy has an incredible

amount of power and must be seen as such in order to make the world a better place.

Muhammad, Griffin, and Vasquezs’ sociolinguistic perspectives assist in important

understandings of literacy as a vehicle for change in the classroom and world.

all students to participate in literacy means focusing on differentiation, and strength-based

pedagogies, which ties to the importance of what social semiotics author Gunther Kress calls

multimodality in literacy. Multimodal creations that are meaningful to teachers, students, and

communities are only a possibility if educators are willing to see and value their students as

creators of knowledge (Sealey-Ruiz & Haddix, 2012). Students have varied abilities,

backgrounds, cultures, and so on that provide them with the tools required to make sense of texts

in their world. Teachers having high expectations, and allowing students to use their background

knowledge will lead to more meaningful learning. Furthermore, mobilizing students’ identities

(Moya, 2009) as sources of information and important insight makes space for more inclusive,

community based learning in the classroom. Sociological lenses help us to understand literacy as

it relates to access and meaning making in the classroom, which further broadens the definition

of literacy.

When dichotomies such as societies' understandings of literate versus illiterate exist, as

well as narrow views of what it means to be literate (Johnston & Costello, 2005) it can be

difficult to see literacy as more than simply the acts of reading and writing. Deficit views of

children’s ability to participate in literacy practices lead to what Anne Haas Dyson describes as

the erasure of potential (Dyson, 2015). Maintaining a narrow view of literacy will limit teachers,

and promote deficit views of students. Educators must view literacy as more than the act of

reading and writing in order to see their students’ potential, and understand literacy as a whole. I

am lucky to be someone who has benefited from high expectations, and broad views of literacy

as a child. Without the support I received from my teachers and family, I would not be where I

am today. This is why it is essential for educators to think about the complex concept of literacy
through an interdisciplinary lens. When disciplines are interwoven, a more expansive view of

literacy can be implemented in the classroom.

References

Dyson, A. H. (2015, January). The Search for Inclusion: Deficit Discourse and the Erasure of

Childhoods. Research and Policy, 92(3), 199-207.

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). The Importance of the Act of Reading Chapter 1. In Literacy:

Reading the Word and the World (pp. 29-36).

Gee, J. (1991). What is literacy? In C. Mitchell & K. Weiler (Eds.), Rewriting

literacy: Culture and the discourse of the other (pp. 3-11). New York: Bergin &

Garvey.

Griffin, A. A., & Turner, J. D. (2021). Toward a pedagogy of Black livingness: Black

students’ creative multimodal renderings of resistance to anti-Blackness. English

Teaching: Practice & Critique.

Hamilton, M. (2010). Literacy in social context. In N. Hughes and I. Schwab (eds.),

Teaching adult literacy: Principles and practice (pp. 7-14). Milton Keynes:

Open University Press.

Johnston, P., & Costello, P. (2005). Principles for literacy assessment. Theory and Research into

Practice, 40(2), 256-267.

Kress, G. R. (2010). Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary

Communication. Routledge.
Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and

Historically Responsive Literacy. Scholastic.

Sealey-Ruiz, Y., & Haddix, M. (2012). Cultivating digital and popular literacies as

empowering and emancipatory acts among urban youth. Journal of Adolescent

& Adult Literacy, 56(3), 189–192.

Vasquez, V. M. (2014). Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children: 10th Anniversary

Edition. Routledge.