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Literacy is a site of contention. Who has it, who wants it, who needs it, who gets it. Who teaches it, and how, and to whom. Literacy is never neutral, yet in many of our educational institutions, at all levels, we present it as though it were. Many--most?--of us, ranging from faculty in graduate programs in English to teachers in preschool, come to literacy education with the social origins and functions of our own literacy unexamined; we turn out college graduates and graduate students more or less certified as to their writing skills, recipients of as much coverage of the literature as we can manage, equally innocent of the place of their own education within social history. Innocent, too, of issues of pedagogy and praxis, which are often either ignored or rejected outright as unsuitable matters for discussion in departments where the hermeneutic project entails that the study and interpretation of texts are privileged over the production of texts or the study of the language in which texts are produced.
To the statement that literacy is never neutral, readers of CE may respond "of course" rather than "aha!" But the insistence that literature holds pride of place over "non-fiction," composition, and language study; the claim that a belletristic definition of literacy is indeed the neutral definition; the reduction of independent writing programs to courses staffed largely by teaching assistants--these rhetorical and political distinctions persist in many departments and institutions, or, with budget reductions, are exacerbated by competition for increasingly limited resources. In such environments, not only is the non-neutrality of literacy not acknowledged, but strong forces are often marshaled to ensure that literacy is kept in its place, ideal, uncritical, and safe. The three books under review here, though in quite different ways and with varying degrees of what Freire has called conscientization, bear witness to the non-neutrality of literacy and provide useful windows on the interactive roles of literacy, politics, and pedagogy.
The Discovery of Competence recounts the experiences of three teacher-researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Boston over a period of ten years, years in which the writers worked together either in actual collaborative teaching in the classroom, in reviewing and analyzing their individual classroom activities, or in planning and revising curricula for themselves...