Hidden Literacies

Literacy and Literacies

The field of literacy studies involves a range of disciplines and methodologies: how literacy is acquired (pedagogical), what its effects are (sociological), and how it is put into practice today, whether by college students or office workers (composition & rhetoric). Some of the most eye-opening research on literacy is historical. Exploring the acquisition, effects, and practices of literacy in different time periods and settings—in addition to being fascinating in its own right—breaks down the tendency to take the contemporary for granted. Realizing, for instance, that early American school children learned to read and to write in completely separate endeavors—and that many people, including most girls, were taught only to read, not to write—makes it clear that there’s nothing inevitable about today’s kindergarten classrooms, where boys and girls learn phonics and form letters in a mutually reinforcing way. Such classrooms are an expression of our current culture and a product of particular histories.

And there’s much more to historical literacy than what happened in schoolrooms. After all, access to schooling has been far from universal through most of American history. For countless people—especially those poor and marginalized—reading and writing were skills learned informally, practiced in ways no teacher ever authorized, and valued for reasons entirely their own. An enslaved man writing out a record of his purchases. A Native American woman keeping a household account. An incarcerated man penning a letter for his friend in Cherokee. There is no curriculum that will reveal just what such writers were up to, nor can the experience and assumptions of highly literate people today serve as reliable guides. The texts themselves—the material artifacts of moments of thinking and writing—have something to teach us precisely because they differ from dominant norms; and, precisely because they differ from dominant norms, they are a challenge to read.

We (Hager and Wyss) are literature scholars, and so are the contributors who have joined with us to create Hidden Literacies. We hold that these kinds of texts—even though they aren’t conventionally “literary” (they aren’t poems or tales) and may seem more properly the domain of historians—require the kinds of analysis in which literature scholars have been trained. They don’t speak as plainly as other kinds of historical documents do; they demand interpretation on multiple levels. Yet even we who are trained in textual interpretation must remember to approach these sources with humility, must recognize the limits of our abilities when it comes to reading baskets, prayer sticks, and other markers of culture and identity. Although we are highly literate, there are some literacies in which we are yet novices. 

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