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 RECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGE TEACHING complex kind of literacy. In this phase of the process we tend to conceptualise these skills as being additional, but they are rapidly becoming elementary in our society (as rudimentary as the print-based skills). Indeed, the skills and the ability to use computers to improve learning, productivity and performance have become as fundamental as more traditional skills. Yet, we want to stress the importance of relating digital literacies with traditional literacies but then we should reconceptualise the print-based literacy not as ‘natural’ skills but as part of a culturally constructed literacy. We need to review our understanding of literacy skills for today’s students. Indeed, they will be working in a different workplace – in a new digital world. Just as students of the past needed support in learning the essential skills of functional literacy (pen, paper and books), students of today need to learn how to manage computers (word processors, databases, the Internet). Language plays an important role in this literacy revolution. So we can summarise the problem by asking three simple questions: o How do new genres change our definitions of literacy? o How are language and language teaching altered by the digital revolution? o How do teachers behave during these revolutionary times? In the next two parts of this article we focus on language and literature (teaching) and the role of teachers in the digital world. Language and Literature in a Digital Age What happens to language and culture on the computer screen? How do computers change our literacy? How have language learning and teaching been influenced by digitalisation? Before dealing with these questions, we would like to ask a fundamental question: how did our discipline change? The recent digital revolution should be embedded in what already happens in our discipline: the study of language and literature. Our view is inspired by a simple question: are we only going to use the Internet to teach culture in a traditional way or can we capitalise on its potential to give students access to new kinds of culture(s)? Problematising Our Profession Our profession – language and literature teaching – is in crisis, at least described from a traditional perspective or compared – as in back-to-basics – with an ideal and probably idealised past. We share these troubled times with other disciplines, because this crisis is embedded in a complex postmodern culture and is part of economical, social and political 129
Downloaded by [University of Gent] at 06:46 09 December 2011 Ronald Soetaert & Bart Bonamie developments. Very often, anxiety in a culture is caused by a fundamental technological change. In education, too, we are confronted with some major changes: democracy has changed education, even classrooms have become more democratic owing to a learner-centred perspective. Efforts to create national and international standards have proved to be very complex and probably ineffective. But why are language and literature in particular under such heavy pressure? Because the core of the discipline – books, literature, the literary canon, traditional writing and reading – is under heavy attack: ‘Perhaps the real question for literary study now is not whether our students will be reading Great Traditional Books or Relevant Modern ones in the future, but whether they will be reading books at all’ (Lanham, 1993, p. 3). Indeed, it is not surprising that ‘we should demonstrate more than the usual anxiety at the advent of emerging technologies. In our weakened state, what will these technologies do in English? To text? To books? To research? To teaching?’ (Moran, 1998, p. 203). Piling up information is not the ideal easy solution for the complex problems in cultural literacy, rather it is part of the problem. Hirsch’s list consists of the core knowledge possessed by the common reader. We would like to add that Hirsch assumes the select ‘common reader’ of elitist knowledge. But how will we decide what exactly will be included and excluded from the list? Whose list are we defending? What exactly do we mean by the common reader? What exactly do we mean when we say ‘cultural literacy’? Is there a list that is not cultural at all? Hirsch’s list is a myth from the past (in which the ‘list’ and the ‘common reader’ are presented as natural phenomena, not as cultural constructions). Learning the appropriate cultural literacy was an opportunity for people belonging to a certain class, or people wanting to become a member of that particular class. A past in which the literary canon was the king’s road to all teaching – language teaching in particular. In back-to-basics there is a deep nostalgia for the return of ‘the Arbiter’: ‘he who knows what’s good and why, and can place every form of cultural expression in its natural order’ (Bérubé, 1998, p. 93 citing Bloom, 1994). Elitist discourse may reduce all popular or alternative culture because the arbiters of this elitist discourse do not participate in the discourse of those communities. But the new networks and communities also create a productive discourse: a space for creating a new culture and a new elite or probably new elites. Problematising Art/Technology The critical reception of art very often creates a dualistic art/artefact distinction between high and low. When we focus on ‘taste’, we realise that 130
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