Literacy Education and Diversity

Models of Literacy

In light of what is considered to be an ongoing public, professional, and academic debate over what literacy is, what it looks like in the classroom, and the best practices for students' literacy development and academic achievement, it is important to understand how literacy as a vehicle for communication is defined and enacted in education and school. Two dominant models of literacy have shaped national and global conceptions of literacy: autonomous and ideological.

The autonomous model is the traditional view of literacy as a neutral and prescribed set of skills related to reading and writing. Adherents of the autonomous model regard the ability to read and write printed books as the singular and socially accepted form of literacy. This traditional concept of literacy has become the official or mainstream version of literacy informing traditional education and schooling. From this autonomous model perspective, a literate person is an individual who can communicate in efficient and functional ways by understanding the printed word in a book. By extension, the idealized set of print-centric practices involved in literacy instruction usually occur in formal, one-dimensional, and sanctioned learning and teaching settings like the school and classroom.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a theoretical movement in literacy research that offered a more diverse concept of literacy. Researchers were beginning to look more closely at different ways in which people made meaning and communicated within their various communities and discourse groups. This ideological movement has [Page 1410]been described as the “social turn” where multiple forms of literacy and diverse ways in which individuals become literate are taken into account. This sociocultural view of literacy reflects an evolving movement away from a prescriptive and singular approach to one that is plural and diverse and is shaped by the identities, multiple texts, and linguistic and discourse practices of learners' communities. From this ideological standpoint, literacy is not limited only to printed text, nor does it occur only in formal school settings; instead, literacy takes place in the home, community, work, school, popular culture, and can be simultaneously physical and virtual, and local and global.

What Counts as Literacy?

With the expanded definition of literacy comes a broadening of how literacy education and diversity are approached in research, theory, and practice. Diversity in literacy education is now viewed in terms of a range of theoretical lenses, contexts (sites, environments, and communities), skills (strategies and tools) and groups (cultural, social, racial/ethnic, academic, etc.). Such a contemporary view allows educators to move away from a narrow approach to literacy, as traditional reading and writing of printed text, to literacies as multiple, socially and culturally based practices that individuals and groups use to communicate.

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