Week 3: Executive Summary

Berlin, James A. "Chapter 6: The Renaissance of Rhetoric: 1960-1975". Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. 120-138. Print.

            Berlin begins his sixth chapter by explaining—what he believes to be—the three developments that focused on improving high school English instruction.  The first was the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958.  The NDEA was meant to, “improve school instruction in math and sciences, but by 1964 also included the study of literature, language, and composition—especially the later two” (121).  The second was the Ford Foundation’s “Basic Issues” conferences established in 1958.  These conferences were meant to, “examine the teaching of high school English” (121).  The third development was the appearance of the Commission on English which was founded by the College Entrance Examination Board in 1959.  The CEEB, “extended the work of the Basic Issues conferences, publishing Freedom and Discipline in English in 1965” (122).  I believe that Berlin mentions these three developments, among others, as improving high school English instruction because these developments focused explicitly on high school English instruction where I feel other developments we have previously read about dealt with post-secondary English improvement.

            The second half of the chapter consists of approaches Berlin thinks will improve writing strategies.  Berlin explains Jerome Bruner’s strategy by saying, “Teachers may supply information about writing or direct students in its structural stages, but their main job is to create an environment in which students can learn for themselves the behavior appropriate to successful writing” (123).  Another person that Berlin feels supports his improving high school English instruction cause is Warner G. Rice.  Berlin says of Rice’s stance on the subject, “Students should learn to write in high schools, and not much could be done in college for those who had not” (125).  Berlin also mentions the work of Albert R. Kitzhaber by saying that, “English departments needed to become cooperatively involved with high school teachers in developing better methods for teaching writing” (126).  I can see why Berlin chooses these men to support his cause.  I, too, feel that writing instruction should at least start in high school and be perfected in college.  As a future high school English teacher, I will try to live up to Berlin’s standards.

Week 1: Executive Summary

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).