W

ithout doubt, the rapid advancement of information technology has compelled us to fathom the issue of literacy (specifically writing activity) in an intricate way.

Once conceived as an autonomous and independent skill, writing — the ability to encode meaning — has been radically redefined.

Easy access to technological devices such as the Internet and the Web everyone always encounters
in everyday lives has made them possible not only to decode what is written or printed, but also to respond them by encoding the new texts.

With the ubiquity of these material resources, writing is no longer deemed simply a mental activity that requires one to pour ideas into words on paper and create a coherent and “proper” text. In other words, it is not necessarily an active interplay between the mind and the text in intellectu.

Communication technologies have altered the way we view writing, prompting us to see writing as an activity shaped by one’s unique encounters with one’s societal experiences or what Pierre Bourdieu calls “habitus”.

Writing is then a form of social practice — a practice which is never devoid of values, norms and tradition one holds. It is never value-free, but is always loaded with one’s interests and values.

In fact, the presence of material resources has made the boundary of the dichotomy literate and illiterate has become somewhat blurred.

Further, as the mode of communication enacted through these resources is often a blend between spoken and written registers, the distinction between orality and literacy is equally blurred.

Viewing literacy from the novel vantage point, we can say that everyone facilitated with these resources are literate in the sense that both reading and writing activities are part of their daily routines they always perform.

Communication via written media has become our basic needs nowadays. It is inseparable in our daily activities. Texting, emailing and chatting in Facebook and Twitter, for instance, are indicative of a literate tradition.

Despite this advancement, the teaching and learning of writing in schools is unfortunately never contextualized in a broader literacy issues.

The view of writing is still reduced to individual proficiency in manipulating linguistic properties, with the social factors impinged upon writing process being downplayed.

It should be admitted that in the cyberspace era the teaching of literacy in most schools here still clings very much to a conventional wisdom, viewing the creation of a text as detached from the students’ social lives and from their engagement with material resources they are familiar with.

In this perspective the ways texts are created are assumed to be purely cognitive and inner-directed in nature. It has been widely believed that there are some sort of universal cognitive strategies that regulate the way one writes.

As such, the inability to write a coherent text is often attributed to cognitive deficiency.

What are then the implications of the redefinition of writing in the context of literacy as a social practice for literacy pedagogy?

To begin with, no single mode of written medium may fit the student writers. Because students may hail from a diverse literacy traditions that value writing conventions differently, the imposition of a single and standard norm of writing runs counter to the “habitus” of individual students.

In addition, the hybridity of textual realization should be acknowledged as a manifestation of different writing strategies the students employ in the process of text creation.

This is to suggest that hybrid texts the students produce should by no means be interpreted as a deviation from the established convention, nor is it a sign of students’ cognitive deficiency as has been assumed by cognitive schools of thought.

Finally, literacy means much more than simply the ability in encoding linguistic signs (i.e. the use of words, phrases, and syntax). Non-linguistic entities such as images, visuals, symbols and other semiotic entities have the potential to reconstruct the meaning of linguistic signs.

Redefining literacy in light of a social practice can help us to envision critical literacy pedagogy — a pedagogical practice which goes beyond the common understanding of writing as a purely cognitive activity. It transcends the notion of text construction as devoid of human agency.

Critical literacy views the use of language systems that build the texts not as intangible, value-free entities, but as a representation and embodiment of one’s identity and one’s selves.

As writing is also a process of knowledge-making, we cannot rule out the possibility that the choice of particular words and grammatical structures in the texts produced reflects one’s epistemological foundation of identity.

More importantly, the notion of critical literacy, if included in the school curriculum, helps to democratize knowledge in that the students are given spaces where they can freely experiment with what they believe to be true without being haunted by the suppression of one “correct” and standard form of knowledge.

The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University. He is also chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.