Gina Molfetta

C&T 5037
What is Literacy?
9/24/14
In my job last year as a literacy tutor and now while getting my degree as a
literacy specialist, people often ask me what literacy is. I tend to give the short answer of
Its reading and writing, simply because I know that the answer I really want to give is
too long and scattered and I would probably lose that persons attention. So I will give
my real answer here. Of course literacy has to do with reading and writing, but it
incorporates so many other aspects as well.
For me, one of the best definitions (or partial definitions) of literacy comes from
Victoria Carringtons article, I'm in a bad mood. Let's go shopping: Interactive dolls,
consumer culture and a 'glocalized' model of literacy. She writes, Being literate is
about having the skills and knowledge with which to participate in and transform ones
social and cultural context (Carrington). This is a huge component of literacy because it
does not specify that the skills and knowledge are reading and writing, but instead
leaves it open to any skills and/or knowledge. This allows for literacy to be any activity
that you engage in and helps you to think and change the environment and context you
are in. This aspect of literacy is also where the idea of discourse comes into play. These
specific skills and knowledge that allow you to be literate in a certain area form a
discourse that you, and anyone else who is also literate in that area, can engage in.
Another quote that helps to capture my definition of literacy comes from Paulo
Freire. He writes, that literacy is a strategy of liberation [that] teaches people to read not

only the word but also the world (Willis). This idea helps to bring together the
traditional view of literacy as reading and connecting it with analyzing, interpreting, and
written and spoken language. When you learn how to read words, it opens up a nearly
infinite amount of information to you that you can then use to analyze and better see what
is going on around you. However, you must also learn how to read the different texts that
exist in the world, which is another aspect of literacy. This involves being able to take
your knowledge of traditional reading and transfer it to various contexts in order to
read different types of text. But overall, when you are able to read, your mind opens up
and you start to look at your surroundings and explore new things and see text, language
and literacy everywhere.
One of the newer ideas in literacy, and one that I am beginning to embrace, is the
idea that literacy and text are evolving like never before with our technological
advancements. No longer is text and literacy based solely around print on a paper, but
rather literacy can be a song, video, advertisement, app, text message, spoken words, etc.
Considering that literacy involves any type of written, spoken or visual images, text or
language, there is hardly anything in the world that wouldnt fall under the category of
literacy. That is an important point to remember in our teaching that we should embrace
our students interactions with any of these forms of literacy and encourage them to
continue exploring and further and deepen their own broad understanding and
development of literacy.