literacy education

The school curriculum is not neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations, struggles, and compromises among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. A good deal of conceptual and empirical progress has been made in the last 2 decades in answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one arti-fact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught–the textbook. In this article, I discuss ways of approaching texts as embodiments of a larger process of cultural politics. Analyses of them must focus on the complex power relationships involved in their production, contexts, use, and reading. I caution us against employing overly reductive kinds of perspectives and point to the importance of newer forms of textual analysis that stress the politics of how students actually create meanings around texts. Finally, I point to some of the implications of all this for our discussions of curriculum policy.

Since the widespread adoption of the printing press, we have been writing with and for machines. However, the ways in which and the extent to which machines could participate in acts of writing have changed over time. We have now reached a point where machines play an active role not only in the reproduction and distribution of writing, but in its production and, even, at times, in its creation and composition. As we find ourselves more and more writing with and for machines, there is the possibility that compositional functions once assigned uniquely to humans can be outsourced or automated. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which my 2016 electronic literary work, “At, Or To Take Regret: Some Reflections on Grammars” (https://nickm.com/taroko_gorge/at_or_to_take_regret/) draws attention to the issues, implications, and possible consequences of compositional automation for the teaching and learning of college writing and the ways in which this and other works of electronic literature can be used in a contemporary college writing course to discuss the affordances and functions of writing in different medial environments. The paper engages with the work of Annette Vee, Stuart Moulthrop, N. Katharine Hayles, Franco Berardi, and Michael Halliday in its consideration and discussion of the changing value(s), definitions, and functions of literacy and literacy education in the early twenty first century.