a view informed by the problems of traditional literacy in a digital age

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Downloaded by [University of Gent] at 06:46 09 December 2011 Curing RECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGE TEACHING These laments are accompanied by a litany of cures. Arguing against postmodern and progressive educational philosophy, E. D. Hirsch (1988) stresses the importance of ‘our’ cultural heritage for education. He introduces the concept of ‘cultural literacy’ as an essential basis for learning and complains about the fact that in our contemporary education we have overstressed skills – and have too much naive faith in our students’ competence to learn general knowledge and skills based on a few examples of good practice, a few experiences (the founding father of this model is John Dewey). Skills – according to Hirsch – cannot be taught separately from knowledge. And Hirsch created a list. A descriptive and prescriptive list of the knowledge shared by literate people (American, in the case of Hirsch, who also stresses the importance of a national perspective on cultural literacy). So the cure for Hirsch is a simple remedy: we have to teach again traditional ‘myths and facts’, described as ‘the oxygen of social intercourse’ (Hirsch, 1988, p. xii). Cultural literacy – according to back-to-basics – creates a common ground for discussion, a shared knowledge. We want to argue that such a quick fix is impossible – and is inadequate for the complex problems we are confronted with. Stimulated by the back-to-basics movement, there have been lots of activities focused on the development of literacy and numeracy. However, these initiatives have very often been focused on traditional forms of literacy, and even have been critical of recent developments in media and digital literacy. The modern and postmodern forms of literacy were even represented as ‘enemies’ of traditional literacy. ‘Problematising’ Post-times A lot of trends in our Western society can be characterised by the prefix ‘post-‘. Postmodern philosophers describe postmodernism as the loss of belief in ‘grand narratives’ and the consequent disintegration of communication into ‘language games’ (Lyotard, 1979). Economists describe our post-industrial society as a culture in which manpower has been replaced by information and automatisation, from ‘manufacturing’ to ‘mentofacturing’, for which we need a new job class of ‘symbolic-analytic workers’. The world system of nation states is being transformed by the growing globalisation with important consequences, not only in terms of economy and commerce but also in the realms of culture and education. As a consequence of globalisation, modern national education can no longer be limited to cultural chauvinism. Of course, this will influence language teaching. The new media are likewise transforming cultures and politics. Time and space are compressed; new global networks create new identities; 125
Downloaded by [University of Gent] at 06:46 09 December 2011 Ronald Soetaert & Bart Bonamie ‘network’ has become the dominant metaphor of our times. And these new media are described as post-print. Indeed, changes in technology trigger changes in literacy. A dominant recurring metaphor is the border/boundary metaphor. In the field of education, the lack of consensus about what should be in the curriculum or be taught, is mirrored by a series of ‘border conflicts’ or ‘border blurrings’. A glance (in fact an Internet search) on the ‘titles’ of recent conferences and titles of books and articles, shows us how many ‘border blurrings’ are high on the agenda: between teacher/professor & pupil/student, between elite and popular cultures, between arts/media, between consumer and producer, between textual and audio/visual, between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’…. Our Language Teaching On-Line (LTOL) project focused on how the concept of literacy has been changed by these border blurrings. Problematising Literacy What is happening to literacy? Literacy will be deeply influenced by a few major shifts: an international, global and multicultural shift in our economy, politics and culture; a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary shift in the academic world; a technological shift in all that we do, how we work, play and teach …. Because of all these shifts, we are faced with very complex problems. We cannot work within the traditional categories. The content will be questioned or ‘problematised’ and so we need new ways of reconfiguring literacy. From a historical perspective, we learn how our definitions of literacy change over the years, inspired by the information and communication needs of a particular society. From this perspective, we learn how the print culture constructed a kind of literacy in the past, and how computer technology deeply problematises the concept of literacy. More than ever, we are confronted today with multiliteracies – but more and more the digitalisation of all communication and information unites all these literacies on the computer screen. Problematising Technology/Media Today, our attitude toward technology is very often inspired by nostalgia for the print culture in general and even the smell and looks of books, paper, pens, etc. This nostalgia at the turn of the Millennium makes us worry about recent technological evolutions. The technological revolution is said to make children blind to our print-based cultural heritage. But we should not take technology on board blindly, we should open our eyes to the fact that technology creates culture. We should realise that the media in which we are socialised very often make us blind to the cultural characteristics of their 126
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a view informed by the problems of traditional literacy in a digital age

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