Jerome C. Harste

Talking Trade: Literacy Researchers as Practicing Artists

V>/ver the past two decades, educational scholars have seen major shifts in how literacy is viewed. One of these shifts has been toward conceptualizing literacy as a set of social practices (Street, 1995) that people embody and value. To disrupt current definitions of literacy, the valued practices that keep those forms of literacy in place must change. We, the authors, have significantly changed our social practices to include personal, systematic, and continuous study of the arts, so much so that we identify both as literacy researchers and practicing artists. As such, our understanding of literacy has changed. This article presents our thinking as artists and literacy researchers about meaning making, including our reflections on how working in the arts has impacted our perspectives on why the arts are significant to literacy practices. We do not suggest that we abandon what we already know about good language arts programs, but our frame is now different. We now ask, How might we understand literacy, not only through a literacy lens but also through an arts lens? What insights might be gleaned about literacy from careful study of ones social practices around the arts? As literacy researchers who are also practicing artists, we are developing a language to see differently; we have learned to talk trade, a way of talking and creating within disciplines, such as art. In so doing, we have embodied Greenes (2001) call to break with the taken-for-granted...and look through the lenses of various ways of knowing, seeing, and feeling in a conscious endeavor to impose different orders upon experience (p. 5). As artists who happen to be literacy researchers, we are brought together into a studied conversation about how the arts help us notice aspects of literacy that we had ignored previously.

Accessing the potential of the learner: Towards an understanding of the complexities of context

Not all that long ago, context was what surrounded the word on the page. Research was conducted about words in context versus words in isolation. Even when context lost that narrow definition, it was still considered a variable. Researchers manipulated the context by altering teacher attitude, instructional method, physical setting, or amount of background knowledge held by the student. Recently, however, context has come to be viewed not as a variable but as a complex web of events in which what has been, what is, and what is expected to be, transact to bound the learning experience. While context in reading includes such things as the words on the page (linguistic context), the physical and instructional setting in which the reading is taking place (situational context), and the larger social context of the interpretive community (cultural context), it also includes the history of literacy experiences that the learner brings to the literacy event. We expect there are other contexts as well. We believe that rather than being static, all the aspects of context are dynamic and transactive, that is, the elements of context combine in such a way that rather than form a compound in which the original elements can still be identified, a new entity is created that has unique properties and is greater than the sum of its parts. These new insights into context provide new insights into instruction. For example, we now understand that instructional activities are not