One of the major points that peaked my interest in this article is that our public education has been evolving ever since its inception (Pre-Revolutionary War). Blau posits the interesting notion that what a period in our nation’s history called literacy then is ever increasing and mutating to something more complex and possessive. Readers in today’s environment, Buau states, are called to do what the literary elite of every culture have always been doing. She states that critical literacy, the new literacy, is to be an “active, responsible, and responsive reader” who does not take a literary work and digest it at face value, but rather ruminates over the written piece.
Another interesting point Buel makes is that the new literacy, performative literacy, requires “a capacity for sustained focused attention.” Is this a current challenge in education today? Yes! I’ve found it incredibly difficult to select texts that require deep concentration because I know that students will struggle with focusing. This bias has been my biggest mistake. Buel’s point reminds me of a simple analogy. As in the gym one gains physical strength to lift heavy weights for a sustained period of time, so in the classroom one gains mental strength to take on difficult texts for a sustained period of time. Overall, there is a great need to address this task of sustained focus during reading. Blaming culture is a hot-button issue. Ipods, laptops, cell phones, and even televisions create a culture of sound bite information. In Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he addresses the death of a critical thought process when sustained thinking and reading cannot be found in a sea of mass information.
Yet a third very powerful point Buel makes about students growing in performative literacy is the notion that texts are hard and students MUST be willing to fight with a text. She uses the phrase, will versus wit. Most of my difficulties with teaching texts lies in this point right after the first one made. Students don’t have the will to work out the understanding of a text. Does this change when students pick their own reading selections? Will they even venture to choose a “less safe” text that they may have to struggle with? These questions are interesting in relation to my research in autonomy over the selection of texts. In the past, I’ve seen students choose the paths of least resistance and this often times lead to selecting lower leveled, easier texts that don’t challenge my students’ mental faculties or even engage them.
One area of skepticism that I have, and it may just be in the phrasing that Buel makes, is about readers needing a tolerance for literary ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty. Buel makes a claim that people who have seemingly simplified versions or morality, even to complex situations, are not expert readers. I see this as a value judgment on values. Buel cannot assume that a person’s morals and interpretation of a text based on a moralistic lens means that there is an ignorance. This message seems overly simplified in the discussion of complexity.
Overall, I think that Buel has some great points in this article that are very helpful in understanding the demands for this new literacy, critical literacy with an emphasis on performative literacy. Her points are intriguing. She lists several components to literacy and the issues of teaching literacy that I see affected regularly in my practice as a teacher.
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