Serving Up Shrimp and Literacies by Beth Cutter Shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sauté it. . . . There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. . . . Benjamin Buford (“Bubba”) Blue to Forrest Gump in Forrest Gump In our family, we imitate Bubba Blue’s meditation on the infinite variety of ways people prepare shrimp anytime we want to telegraph the infinite variety of ways people define concepts they think “everyone” holds in common. Take communication, for instance. “You can communicate verbally, nonverbally, formally, and informally,” my husband might intone in Bubba’s drawl. “You’ve got written communication, visual communication, digital communication, business communication, social communication. . . .” What about knowledge? “You can gain knowledge by observation, experience, reading and listening,” I might start. “There’s personal knowledge, procedural knowledge, propositional knowledge, social knowledge. . . .” Likewise, when it comes to literacy, the definition depends on the context. You can be functionally literate, aliterate, biliterate. There’s cultural literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, and digital literacy. Across the field of literacy studies itself, researchers and practitioners often split between “a one-dimensional conception of print-centric reading and writing, as contrasted with the intersection of people, texts, modes, practices, and the varied meanings of literacy learning in different situations and cultural contexts” (Alvermann and McLean 3). In a state like Colorado, whose academic standards integrate the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, it makes sense to investigate how the Common Core authors frame literacy. In a section entitled Key Design Considerations (4), they stress a model that integrates reading, writing, speaking and listening and “insist” that instruction in these domains be “a shared responsibility within the school.” The Introduction also notes Just as students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas, so too must the Standards specify the literacy skills and understandings required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines. Literacy standards for grade 6 and above are predicated on teachers of ELA, history/social studies, 12
Statement Vol. 48, Number 2
Beth Cutter started as an English teacher in 1974 and joined CLAS shortly thereafter. A former school and district administrator, she now teaches in the College of Education at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her email is ecutter@uccs.edu.
science, and technical subjects using their content area expertise to help students meet the particular challenges of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language in their respective fields. (3) To continue the Bubba Blue analogy, in other words, there’s historical literacy, civic literacy, financial literacy, scientific literacy, numeracy. . . . The purposes of this article are to point out some of the ways each of these literacies differ, to encourage teachers of English language arts to clarify the literacies unique to their own discipline, and to advocate for discipline-based literacy practices. Writing In the “Teaching Reading and Writing in the Content Areas” course that I teach for an alternative teaching licensure program, candidates in math, science, or even social studies will sometimes say, “I plan to get together with English language arts teachers [on my team, in my wing, from my planning period] and ask for advice on how to assign and grade writing.” “A nice start,” I typically reply. “Those ELA teachers will appreciate your interest in writing and will be honored that you consulted them. They will gladly enlist your alliance in their battle for paragraph development and logical organization. However, your notion of literacy is – or ought to be – different from theirs.” To illustrate, I draw their attention to the Colorado Academic Standards approved by the State Board of Education in 2009 for most content areas and revised in 2010 for Reading, Writing & Communicating and Mathematics. I line up grade level Evidence Outcomes from different content areas and ask teachers to discuss what types of written assignments would prove that students had met them. Table 1 below illustrates the range of writing modes that one secondary student might need to produce for four separate teachers. As the math/social studies/science teacher candidates usually infer, the nature of writing in their respective disciplines might differ significantly from the nature of writing as their English colleagues teach it. While all content area teachers share a responsibility to prepare students for the literacy demands of college and/or the workforce, their roads diverge when it comes to what those demands are.