The New Literacy Studies - Sean

In Brian Street’s “The New Literacy Studies”, the author seeks to gain insight into the new strategies and policies being used in today’s schools to impart literacy onto the minds of young students. He begins, first, by outlining other studies and theories put forth by various scholarly papers, but goes on to focus primarily on his own theories. The two theories, or models, he proposes are called “The Autonomous Model of Literacy,” and “The Ideological Model of Literacy.”

The Autonomous Model basically deals with the fact that literacy seems to act and change autonomously of most other types of influence, and that spoken words seem to flow naturally to written language in various cultures. He cites various high-profile researchers and their writings to back up his model. He even cites a passage that links empathy with literacy. The Idealistic Model focuses on literacy as some sort of practice fraught with ideological beliefs that drive the illiterate to try and gain literacy in order to reach their lofty ambitions, seeing literacy as one way to attain them.

Street concludes his writings by addressing the implications of his two models as they pertain to future research on the topic, which essentially gives various theorists some general ground on which to base their more concise theories. He then relates his theories and other idea he quotes from a variety of writings directly into discourse and ethnography, then moves to clarify “context” in linguistics and ethnography as well, arguing that analysis of literacy in sociological situations requires a broader view of “context” in which the literacy is being analyzed.

Overall, I was a little irritated that the author didn’t state his own opinions very often, and instead simply restated the opinions of others and how they might relate to his models. His passive nature throughout the piece did not assist in arousing my curiosity about the subject, and seemed that he was rehashing points made by others.