Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. "Chapter 7: Unpacking Literacy." Literacy: a Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 123-37. Print.
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s paper “Unpacking Literacy” in chapter 7 of Literacy: a Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, begins by questioning what is literacy? and how reading and writing can work with or against one another for the sake of literacy. Scribner and Cole address the “writing crisis” (123) by asking 1. If there really is a writing crisis and 2. Of what concern is it? A national concern in need of vast amounts of resources to rectify the crisis or rather, which I feel they believe is more appropriate, “adjust our educational goals to new ‘technologies of communication’ which reduce the need for high levels of literacy skill” (124). The authors go on to question literacy in correlation with cognitive consequence, i.e. the writing down of the alphabet and, therefore, the spread of literacy. Did this help literacy and hinder our memorization skills and thought process or did this enhance literacy as well as “lay the basis for development of new categories of understanding and new logical operations” (124)?
The majority of the chapter is concerning the literacy practices of the Liberian Via people. Within the Via people, three languages are read and written: Via, English, and Arabic. However, some members of the Via people only read and write one of the languages or a combination of the three. Only high ranking members of the via people can read and write in all three languages. Scribner and Cole explain that the main form of literacy education for the Via people is not traditional schooling, but rather, informal letter writing among other known Via. Scribner and Cole go on to explain the literacy of the Via by saying that the, “learning consists of committing the characters to memory and practice in reading” (130). Within the Via community, there is a hierarchy for things that are written down and in what language they will be written down in. For example, English is used to, “record court matters and to maintain official correspondences with administrative and political functionaries” (129); Arabic is used learned for Islamic religious and legal reasons (129); and Vai is used to communicate to a friend, family member, or neighbor about anything (129). Scribner and Cole end the chapter by explaining that, “what writing is and what it leads to, appears in light of comparative data to fail to give full justice to the multiplicity of values, uses, and consequences which characterize writing as social practice” (137).
