Szwed's "The Ethnography of Literacy"

In “The Ethnography of Literacy” by Szwed he explained literacy and how we can study and improve it. The quote from the article “The capacity to read and write is causally associated with earning a living, achieving expanded horizons of personal enlightenment and enjoyment, maintaining a stable and democratic society, and historically, with the rise of civilization itself” I find very interesting and true. People want to be able to read and write to better benefit themselves in their lives. It is shown that being illiterate is thee single root cause of poverty so its very important to gain these skills in life. The cause for the failure of literacy can be blamed on several different things such as poor teaching, over-sized classrooms, competition with the new media, and society. All of these circumstances I feel you can see in your everyday classroom and need to be worked on and improved. Also people as a whole don’t fully understand what literacy is. It is entirely possible that teachers are able to teach reading and writing as abstract skills, but do not know what reading and writing are for in the life and future of their students. It is important not just to teach students skills but make sure they know the reason behind learning these skills and why they are important. If we don’t teach students why these skills are important they wont be interested in learning them and wont feel it is necessary to continue working on these skills. The goal of education is to produce a society of people who are equally competent at these skills but there is yet to be a society who have effectively reached this state. So we should reevaluate what we are doing in the classroom in order to reach this. Not only do we have problems with defining literacy but we also have problems defining the activities of reading and writing. Definitions of reading and writing must include social context and function use as well as the reader and the text of what is being read and written. A reader is more motivated to read something that they find interesting to themselves. There are five elements of literacy which include text, context, function, participants, and motivation. All five of these elements are needed to become competent in literacy. There are two groups of literacy public and private literacy. This is the difference between what one reads and writes at work, at school, and elsewhere. If there is a gap between these two domains there can be serious consequences. People need to be continually working on their literacy in order to become good at it. When you leave a classroom and don’t take anything from it into the real world then there is no point of even going to school. As an individual you need to take what you learn in the classroom and use it in your everyday life in order to keep learning and gain new skills. Ethnography is a study where there is a need to keep literacy within the logic of the everyday lives of people, to avoid cutting these skills off from the conditioned which affect them in direct and indirect ways. When using ethnography you use real cases and individual examples in order to gain the strength of evidence that comes with being able to examine specific cases in great depth and complexity. I wonder if this would be the best way to do our research to help people understand literacy.