#9. A Literacy Narrative about Literacy Narratives, Part 2

This post is a continuation of my post from last week, which you can find here. I will finish discussing the three influences from my "Theories of Writing & Literacy" seminar in 2021, which led me to becoming the compositionist I am today. 

1. The first influence would be the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, also known as the DALN. You can find the website for the DALN here. When I was first doing research for the course final project, I remember initially being confused about why the DALN existed in the first place. Why would anyone want to collect student literacy narratives? (1) My brain made the connection soon enough. As an English major I was (and still am) very interested in narratology and folklore studies, and in the same way that folklorists go out and collect folk tales to put into archives for future research, I see now that the DALN serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, the DALN's search engine isn't great (I don't think they have the funding to improve its functionality) and thus it takes forever to search through different documents in the archive. Another limitation that might be confusing for potential researchers is that not all DALN submissions are literacy narratives, and the archive features many submissions that include other academic genres. Regardless, I still think it is a good starting point if someone is interested in doing research on literacy narratives. 

If not for the DALN, how else would someone accumulate such a large collection of literacy narratives? Two years ago, I began reading To Live by Yu Hua, a Chinese novel structured as a story within a story, where a folklorist meets the protagonist of the book and is told his life story. Since reading the book I have romanticized the job of the folklorist to some extent. While he isn't the main focus of the narrative, he briefly talks about his wanderings around China collecting folk tales, and I find myself envious of this freedom. Rather than going around collecting folk tales, perhaps a role for a "compositionist-folklorist" would be to meander around one's college campus collecting literacy narratives through an IRB-approved study. As poetic as this sounds, this is probably not feasible for many people and I guess the DALN is the next best option.

2. The second influence that I stumbled upon while I was doing my research would be Kara Poe Alexander's article, titled "Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: 'Master' and 'Little' Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre," which also strongly appealed to my interest in narratology. Alexander's article was published in 2011, and as this blog is dedicated to older works published within the field of composition studies, I admit that my last two or three blog posts haven't really reflected this focus. At the same time, since my interest extends into the 2000s, I think the date of publication of Alexander's article is close enough to my desired time period to merit a blog post. I promise that for the next post, I will get back to the blog's original focus. However, since this is my blog at the end of the day, certainly I should be allowed to break the rules sometimes? 

Similar to what I mentioned for the DALN, I think I was so intrigued by Alexander's article because of its relevancy to my understanding of folklore studies. To explore this connection further, I went to the UC Davis library last week and checked out Vladimir Propp's 1928 book Morphology of the Folktale. From a social sciences perspective, Propp's book is interesting because he opens the book by creating a research space (in reference to Swales' famous model), where he argues that previous folklorists have not created an effective categorization scheme to organize large archives of folk tales. In occupying the space, Propp argues that folk tales can be effectively taxonomized according to their structure, and that there are 31 "functions of the dramatis personae" (in other words, actions carried out by characters in the narrative) that serve as the basic components of all folk tales. To give a quick example, one of these 31 functions includes events where "one member of a family either lacks something or desires to have something" (p. 35). Propp argues that every folktale is comprised of an assortment of these different functions. 

Copy from the UC Davis library.

While Alexander does not explicitly mention the work of Vladimir Propp, I would argue that her article essentially offers a similar morphology of the literacy narrative. In conducting her study, Alexander is attempting to challenge Harvey Graff's concept of the literacy myth, which refers to "the belief...that the acquisition of literacy is a necessary precursor to and invariably results in economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and upward social mobility" (Graff & Duffy, 2007). After collecting a large sample of literacy narratives from her own institution, she conducts qualitative coding and argues that all literacy narratives can be structured according to eight different functions (2). While Alexander finds that what she calls the "success" function (areas in a narrative where students associate literacy with societal success) is the most frequent code in her data, she also concludes that the majority of codes were indicative of "little narratives" that counter and demystify the literacy myth. Though I can see why this article resonated with me as an English major, the article also does have a strong multidisciplinary bent, as Alexander at the end of the day was ultimately conducting ethnographic research. Larger societal impulses shape human attitudes, behaviors, and experiences around literacy that are reported in literacy narratives, and Alexander's article reinforces the notion that it is important for instructors and other stakeholders to have an awareness of this reality.

3. Related to the last point, the third influence was that Alexander's article was the first IMRaD article I have ever closely analyzed. Though up until that point I was primarily writing for a humanities audience, I caught on quickly to the idea that such papers required researchers to identify a gap in existing knowledge. Not only this, but I was very taken by the end of the article, where Alexander offers some pedagogical recommendations for instructors based on her findings. This connected with me because at the time, I was thinking about applying to PhD programs in literature, and I was struggling to come up with a research idea that would support a strong application. I think this hardship was due to the fact that I wanted my academic studies to have some concrete impact on the real world, and when it came to studying literature, I didn't really understand the point of studying something that wasn't applied (3). While I understand that writing pedagogy in the college writing classroom is a fairly niche topic, I appreciate that my scholarly efforts can inform practice and improve education, even if they only constitute a small contribution. 

This is my updated literacy narrative, and I hope to upload this text to the DALN sometime soon. Five years from now, when I am graduated with my PhD, perhaps I will endeavor to write a third narrative. This piece has renewed my interest in doing a study focused on literacy narratives. While my QE and dissertation are going to be focused on a topic related to AI and response to student writing (this is not yet something that I have discussed on this blog, but it might deserve a post at some point), perhaps a side project is in order? 

Notes

(1) - It is important to note that the DALN includes literacy narratives from all sorts of positionalities, not just students. 

(2) - For the sake of brevity, I will decline to define all of these functions here. If one is interested, they can refer to Alexander's article (cited in the References section below), where she provides a convenient chart that provides the definitions. 

(3) - I am not throwing shade at English PhDs, I genuinely struggled to find a topic that I wanted to study and I think this was just a "me" problem. It goes without saying that the humanities are important and people should study them. To say a little more, I wanted to study something related to Marxism and literature, and when I was doing research on English departments, I couldn't find any professors who specifically focused on these topics. Later on, after I had started my current PhD program, I found out that the topic of Marxism generally went under the umbrella of critical theory, and looking back, I remember finding that there were a lot of professors who specialized in critical theory. Perhaps it was my own ignorance that led me onto the path I am today! 

References

Alexander, K. P. (2011). Successes, victims, and prodigies: "Master" and "little" cultural narratives in the literacy narrative genre. College Composition and Communication, 62(4), 608–633. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23006908

Graff, H. J. & Duffy, J. (2007). Literacy myths. In N. H. Hornberger, Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer. 

Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale (L. Scott, Trans.). University of Texas Press.