cultural literacy essay

What Every American Should Know

Defining common cultural literacy for an increasingly diverse nation

Is the culture war over?

That seems an absurd question. This is an age when Confederate monuments still stand; when white-privilege denialism is surging on social media; when legislators and educators in Arizona and Texas propose banning ethnic studies in public schools and assign textbooks euphemizing the slave trade; when fear of Hispanic and Asian immigrants remains strong enough to prevent immigration reform in Congress; when the simple assertion that #BlackLivesMatter cannot be accepted by all but is instead contested petulantly by many non-blacks as divisive, even discriminatory.

And that’s looking only at race. Add gender, guns, gays, and God to the mix and the culture war seems to be raging along quite nicely.

Yet from another perspective, much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.

Imagine that this is true; that this decades-long war is about to give way to something else. The question then arises: What? What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been. And that awareness demands a new kind of mirror.

It helps first to consider some recent history. In 1987, a well-regarded professor of English at the University of Virginia named E.D. Hirsch Jr. published a slim volume called Cultural Literacy . Most of the book was an argument—textured and subtle, not overtly polemical—about why nations need a common cultural vocabulary and why public schools should teach it and, indeed, think of their very reason for being as the teaching of that vocabulary.

At the end of the book Hirsch and two colleagues tacked on an appendix: an unannotated list of about 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts that, in their view, “every American needs to know.” The rest (to use a phrase that probably should’ve been on the list) was history.

The appendix became a sensation and propelled the book to the top of the best-seller list. Hirsch became that rare phenomenon: a celebrity intellectual. His list was debated in every serious publication and elite circles. But he also was profiled in People magazine and cited by pundits who would never read the book.

Hirsch’s list had arrived at a ripe moment of national anxiety, when critics like Allan Bloom and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were bemoaning the “closing of the American mind” and “the disuniting of America”; when multicultural curricula had arrived in schools, prompting challenges to the Western canon and leading Saul Bellow to ask mockingly who the Tolstoy of the Zulus was, or the Proust of the Papuans; a time when Bill Bennett first rang alarms about the “dumbing-down of America.”

The culture wars were on. Into them ambled Hirsch, with his high credentials, tweedy profile, reasoned arguments, and addictively debatable list. The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion. (From a page drawn at random: Cotton Mather, Andrew Mellon, Herman Melville).

Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist. His list was a last gasp (or was it a fierce counterattack?) by a fading (or was it resurgent?) white establishment.

Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.

A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.

Yet that generational distance now also requires Americans to see that any such core has to be radically reimagined if it’s to be worthy of America’s actual and accelerating diversity. If it isn’t drastically more inclusive and empowering, what takes the place of whiteness may not in fact be progress. It may be drift and slow disunion. So, first of all, Americans do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his. In the balance of this essay, I want to unpack and explain each of those three statements.

Let’s begin with the claim that Americans do in fact need a list of what every American needs to know.

If you take the time to read the book attached to Hirsch’s appendix, you’ll find a rather effective argument about the nature of background knowledge and public culture. Literacy is not just a matter of decoding the strings of letters that make up words or the meaning of each word in sequence. It is a matter of decoding context: the surrounding matrix of things referred to in the text and things implied by it.

So, for instance, a statement like “One hundred and fifty years after Appomattox, our house remains deeply divided” assumes that the reader knows that Appomattox is both a place and an event; that the event signified the end of a war; that the war was the Civil War and had begun during the presidency of a man, Abraham Lincoln, who earlier had famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”; that the divisions then were in large part about slavery; and that the divisions today are over the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery and how or whether we are to respond to those legacies.

Likewise, another sentence often uttered in this anniversary year of the end of the Civil War—“Today’s GOP is the party of Jefferson Davis, not of Lincoln”—assumes that the reader knows what the GOP is and what the acronym stands for, who Jefferson Davis was, how he was different from Lincoln, why it is that Republicans call themselves the Party of Lincoln, and why it is that some people, in spite of that, see in the modern Republican Party the spirit of the old Confederacy.

Hirsch, as an authority on reading and writing, is concerned with traditional texts. But his point about background knowledge and the content of shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, people become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. They come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” They perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.

Lots and lots of particulars. This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an ideologically controversial point. After all, parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.

Hirsch was taken by some critics to be a political conservative because he argued that cultural literacy is inherently a culturally conservative enterprise. It looks backwards. It tries to preserve the past. Not surprisingly, Hirsch later became a fan of the Common Core standards, which, whatever their cross-partisan political toxicity today, were intended in earnest to lay down basic categories of knowledge that every American student should learn.

But those who demonized Hirsch as a right-winger missed the point. Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change. Indeed, in a notable example of the application of cultural literacy, Hirsch quoted in his book from the 1972 platform of the Black Panther Party:

10. WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE’S CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

He cited another passage, from the Black Panther newspaper:

In this land of “milk and honey,” the “almighty dollar” rules supreme and is being upheld by the faithful troops who move without question in the name of “law and order.” Only in this garden of hypocrisy and inequality can a murderer not be considered a murderer—only here can innocent people be charged with a crime and be taken to court with the confessed criminal testifying against them. Incredible?

These samples demonstrated for Hirsch two important points: First, that the Black Panthers, however anti-establishment, were confidently in command of American history and idiom, comfortable quoting the Declaration of Independence verbatim to make their point, happy to juxtapose language from the Bible with the catch phrases of the Nixon campaign, wholly correct in grammatical and rhetorical usage.

And second, that radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”

Hence, he argued, an education that in the name of progressivism disdains past forms, schema, concepts, figures, and symbols is an education that is in fact anti-progressive and “helps preserve the political and economic status quo.” This is true. And it is made more urgently true by the changes in American demography since Hirsch gave us his list in 1987.

The new America, where people of color make up a numerical majority, is not a think-tank projection. It may well be the condition of the people born in the United States this very year. But an America where nonwhites hold a majority of the power in civic life is much farther off. If you are an immigrant to the United States—or, if you were born here but are the first in your family to go to college, and thus a socioeconomic new arrival; or, say, a black citizen in Ferguson, Missouri deciding for the first time to participate in a municipal election, and thus a civic neophyte—you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.

That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power. And so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.

Of course, it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”

The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.

But why a list, one might ask? Aren’t lists just the very worst form of rote learning and standardized, mechanized education? Well, yes and no. It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.

Lists that catalyze discussion and even debate, however, are plenty useful. If you open up Hirsch’s list at random you’re certain to find entries that launch deeper inquiry and learning and that are helpful to know if you want to be a capable citizen. In fact, since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together. Consider, from pages 204 and 205:

Sharecropping Sherman Anti-Trust Act Sodom and Gomorrah Speak softly and carry a big stick Spirit of ‘76 (image) stagflation

I’ll name each of those entries, she’ll describe what she thinks to be its meaning. If she doesn’t know, I’ll explain it and give some back story. If I don’t know, we’ll look it up together. This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her.

And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy. Now anytime a reference we’ve discussed comes up in the news or on TV or in dinner conversation, she can claim ownership. Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.

The trouble is, there are also many items on Hirsch’s list that don’t seem particularly necessary for entry into today’s civic and economic mainstream. They seem pulled from the nineteenth-century McGuffey’s Readers that Hirsch nostalgically praises, drawing from English, Latin, and Biblical references that in the 1800s seemed timeless:

Shoot, if you must, this old gray head… Sic transit gloria mundi. Sing a Song of Sixpence (song) soft answer turneth away wrath., A

But it turns out items like this aren’t timeless. They were displaced, as time passed, by sayings and songs of people from other places.

Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life. A list for cultural literacy, like the Constitution, is not an antiquarian’s specimen to be left untouched. It is an evolving document, amendable and ever subject to reinterpretation. Americans need a list made new with new blood. Americans are such a list.

What, then, are the 5,000 things that an American in 2015 should know?

Before we get to that, it’s worth unpacking the baseline assumption of both Hirsch’s original argument and the battles that erupted around it. The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.

That’s certainly how the politics and media coverage of the early culture war played out. Dead White Men against Afrocentrists. Each side’s claim seen as a debit from the other’s. But that was a profoundly artificial dichotomy. As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror , the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.

The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility. Takaki’s “different mirror” is kaleidoscopic, reflecting at each turn the presence and influence of peoples generally excluded from traditional histories of American life—and reflecting too the way each of those peoples, whether Apache or Chinese or Mexican or West African, influenced other peoples in America.

Yes, America is foundationally English in its language, traditions of law, social organization, market mindedness, and frames of intellectual reference. But then it is foundationally African as well—in the way African slaves changed American speech and song and civic ideals; in the way slavery itself formed and deformed every aspect of life here, from the wording of the Constitution to the forms of faith to the anxious hypocrisy of the codes of the enslavers and their descendants.

Americans are all these things and more.

As the cultural critic Albert Murray wrote in his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans , the essence of American life is that it relentlessly generates hybrids. American culture takes segments of DNA—genetic and cultural—from around the planet and re-splices them into something previously unimagined. The sum of this—the Omni—is as capacious as human life itself, yet found in America most fully. This is jazz and the blues. This is the mash-up. This is everything creole, mestizo, hapa. In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history was equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story.

What’s happened in the generation since multiculturalism first became a bugaboo to some is that a generation has passed. And as Nathan Glazer has put it (somewhat ruefully), “We are all multiculturalists now.” Americans have come to see—have chosen to see—that multiculturalism is not at odds with a single common culture; it is a single common culture.

Yes, it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught. There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. Learning about the internment of Japanese Americans does not block out knowledge of D-Day or Midway. It is additive. It brings more complexity and fosters a more world-ready awareness of complexity.

Which brings us back to the list. The list, quite simply, must be the mirror for a new America. As more diverse voices attain ever more forms of reach and power we need to re-integrate and reimagine Hirsch’s list of what literate Americans ought to know.

It needs fewer English antecedents (“Trafalgar, Battle of”). It needs fewer elements of grammar (“ellipsis”). It needs fewer outmoded idioms (“tied to his mother’s apron strings”). It needs nods to how the language mutates (attaching “-gate” to any scandal post-Watergate). It needs new references that illuminate how Hindus worship, how Koreans treat elders, what pieces of African custom were grafted onto what pieces of Scots-Irish custom to form what kinds of Southern folkways.

It needs more than just words, because literacy in this mediated age is not only verbal. It needs images (braceros on ranches, ballplayers in internment camps). It needs symbols (“Don’t Tread On Me” flags and “99 percent” placards; quinceañera dresses and historically black sorority letters). It needs iconic sounds (Marine Corps cadence calls, a sustained Sinatra note). It needs the lingo of poor and working-class communities (Southie and Crenshaw) as much as the argot of elite precincts. It needs the most durable Internet memes (like the meme format itself), media metaphors (like “playlists” or “bookmarks”), and pop culture referents.

To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial. As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant hip-hop musical Hamilton reminds us, every voice contains an echo; every echo can be given new voice.

Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance so broad as to keep them dangerously isolated from their countrymen.

So we need a list. And not the list that Hirsch made in 1987. What, then, would be on your list? It’s not an idle question. It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.

Not long after his original book came out, Hirsch published the first of several editions of a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy . Here the list could be supplemented with explanations and pictures. What’s striking about the most recent edition, from 2002, is how multicultural it is compared to the first appendix. Where the 1987 list mentioned China but never Chinese Americans, the 2002 dictionary describes the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Still, it’s notable that the 2002 dictionary was the last edition published. We’ve moved on. The tempo of meme creation and destruction has become too fast for one person, one book, to follow.

That’s because the Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. As barriers to culture creation have fallen, orders of magnitude more citizens—amateurs—are able to shape the culture in which we must all be literate. Cat videos and Star Trek fan fiction may not hold up long beside Toni Morrison. But the entry of new creators leads to new claims of right: The right to be recognized. The right to be counted. The right to make the means of recognition and accounting.

And as the pool of potential culture-makers has widened, the modes of culture creation have similarly shifted away from hierarchies and institutions to webs and networks. Wikipedia is the prime embodiment of this reality, both in how the online encyclopedia is crowd-created and how every crowd-created entry contains links to other entries. (It also demonstrates that democratization can yield something much richer than a lowest-common denominator result.)

What does this mean for this omni-American cultural literacy project? For one thing, the list for these times can’t be the work of one person or even one small team. It has to be everyone’s work. It has to be an online, crowd-sourced, organic document that never stops changing, whose entries are added or pruned, elevated or demoted, according to the wisdom of the network.

Everyone should make his or her own list online. We can aggregate all the lists. And from that vast welter of preferences will emerge, without any single person calling it so, a prioritized list of “what every American needs to know.”

It also means that every entry on this dynamic list can be a node to another list. So an entry on “robber barons” (present in the 1987 list) should open up to “malefactors of great wealth” (TR’s line, not on the 1987 list) and “economic royalists” (FDR’s, not there either) and “the 1 percent.” There should be an entry on “Southern heritage” that links sideways to other euphemisms for white supremacy. Or an entry on “women’s suffrage” that links to other suffrage movements.

This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress. “Where should such associations stop?” he asked. “How many are generally known by literate people?”

His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.

Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries:

Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute

I chose some off-center items—Reconstruction instead of the Civil War, for instance, or the Federalist Papers instead of the Constitution—because the off-center concepts imply and necessitate command of the central ones. Others, like nativism, are both a specific historical reference and recurring motif in American politics. And “a sucker born every minute” is of course both a particular saying and a general emblem of a society that revolves around mass entertainment. What are your ten, and why? (And if you like, what are your next ten, and the next?) Share your lists with us online . Argue them out with friends and family and fellow citizens. The culture wars can give way to a conversation about the culture we are. And together, over time, Americans will author a definitive, unendingly edited guide to how to read, write, speak—and be—American.

This post appears courtesy of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas .

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E.D. Hirsch on ‘Cultural Literacy’

In 1988, E. D. Hirsch, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote a best selling book which argued that progressivist education with its focus on experience had let down America’s students by neglecting knowledge in the form of a shared body of information. The book included a list of 5,000 facts, dates, famous people, works of literature and concepts that every American should know. Hirsch was later to call this ‘core knowledge’. Hirsch makes a contemporary case for the teaching of canonical knowledge.

The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years stem ultimately from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that we should encourage that natural development of young children and not impose adult ideas upon the before they can truly understand them … He thought that a child’s intellectual and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of education … In the first decades of [the twentieth] century, Rousseau’s ideas powerfully influenced the educational conceptions of John Dewey, the writer who has most deeply affected modern educational theory and practice … Dewey strongly seconds Rousseau’s opposition to the mere accumulation of information: ‘Development emphasizes the need of intimate and extensive personal acquaintance with a small number of typical situations with a view to mastering the way of dealing with the problems of experience, not the piling up of information’ …

Dewey assumed that … education need not be tied to specific content. [However, in so doing he] placed too much faith in children’s ability to learn general skills … and too hastily rejected ‘the piling up of information’. Only by piling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex cooperative activities with other members of their community …

[It is a] universal fact that a human group must have effective communications to function effectively, that effective communications require shared culture and that shared culture requires transmission of specific information to children. Literacy, an essential aim of education in the modern world, is no autonomous, empty skill but depends upon literate culture. Like any other aspect of acculturation, literacy requires the early and continued transmission of specific information. Dewey was deeply mistaken to disdain ‘accumulating information in the form of symbols.’ Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that the symbols represent, can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community …

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves. Those who graduate from the same school have often studied different subjects, and those who graduate from different schools have often studied different material even when their courses have carried the same titles. The inevitable consequence of the shopping mall high school is a lack of shared knowledge across and within schools. It would be hard to invent a more effective recipe for cultural fragmentation …

To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world … That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, on which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years …

It is true that, under our present curricular arrangements, academic achievement is heavily determined by family background. But we cannot conclude from the present sate of affairs that deprived children would be predestined to low achievement under a different school curriculum …

Literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludes nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not usually one’s first culture, but it should be everyone’s second, existing as it does beyond the narrow spheres of family, neighborhood, and region.

To withhold traditional culture from the school curriculum, and therefore from students, in the name of progressive ideas is in fact an unprogressive action that helps preserve the political and economic status quo. Middle-class children acquire mainstream literate culture by daily encounters with other literate persons. But less privileged children are denied consistent interchanges with literate persons and fail to receive this information in school. The most straightforward antidote to their deprivation is to make the essential information more readily available inside the schools.

http://www.coreknowledge.org/who-we-are

Hirsch, E.D. 1988. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York : Vintage Books. pp. xiv–xv, xvii, 20–21, xiii, 115, 21, 23–24.

Introduction: Cultural Literacy and Creativity

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• First Online: 03 November 2021

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• Tuuli Lähdesmäki 8 ,
• Jūratė Baranova 9 ,
• Susanne C. Ylönen 10 ,
• Aino-Kaisa Koistinen 11 ,
• Katja Mäkinen 12 ,
• Vaiva Juškiene 13 &
• Irena Zaleskiene 14  

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The introductory chapter explains the core concepts of the book: Cultural literacy and creativity. Cultural literacy is defined as a social practice that is inherently dialogic and based on learning and gaining knowledge through emphatic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction. Creativity is seen as stimulating cultural literacy learning through openness and curiosity to test and develop something new or imaginative. The chapter introduces the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (CLLP) and the research data: 1906 works created by 5–15-year-old children and young people who participated in the program in 2019 and 2020 in Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, and the UK. The authors discuss how the data is explored through data-driven content analysis and self-reflexive and collaborative interpretation.

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• Cultural literacy
• Content analysis
• Self-reflexive interpretation

Focuses, Premises, and Objectives

Literacy is a core skill for learning and development. It enables communication and dialogue within a community and allows people to engage in society. Since the 1990s, scholars and educators have approached literacy as more than the ability to read and write language-based texts. The concept of multiliteracies, introduced by the New London Group in the mid-1990s and since then broadly utilized in education policy discourses and national curricula, stems from a wider understanding of text by emphasizing multimodality in meaning-making: Language-based communication intertwines with visual, auditive, corporal, gestural, and spatial patterns of meaning. The need to rethink and redefine literacy also reflects the diversification of contemporary societies and the rapid development of information technologies during the past two or three decades. For the New London Group, the multiplicity of new communication channels and increased cultural and linguistic diversity demanded a new approach to literacy pedagogy (Cazden et al. 1996 ). Since the introduction of the concept of multiliteracies, the social reality in different parts of the world has become even more culturally plural or “super-diversified,” as Vertovec ( 2007 ) has described this change. In super-diversified societies, diversity itself is complex, multidimensional, fluid (Vertovec 2007 ; Blommaert and Rampton 2011 ), and characterized by the intersection of different social locations and positions related to culture, ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, gender, sexuality, and ability.

Since societies are diversifying, creating new challenges to communication, we need to approach the concept of literacy in a broader context. In this book, we explore positive responses to this context: The idea of difference and the ability to encounter, communicate, learn, and live together through empathic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction with others who may be different from us. We show how the concept of cultural literacy as a tolerant, empathic, and inclusive approach to differences can be taught and learned in schools through creative practices. Our focus is on meaning-making in children and young people’s visual and multimodal artifacts created in schools as an outcome of tasks aiming to foster cultural literacy learning. This interdisciplinary exploration is located at the intersection of different approaches to children’s creativity, art, and learning: We draw on research in cultural studies, communication studies, art education, and educational sciences.

Our approach to children and young people’s creative expression of cultural literacy relies on two intertwined premises about living together as cultural beings. First, in our view, creativity and imagination are essential features of humanity that particularly characterize children’s way of grasping the world. A considerable body of literature discusses the nature of children’s creativity and visual expression. While some scholars have explained this as either children’s attempts to draw what they know or what they see, recent studies give a more nuanced view of children’s creative processes in image-making and its various possible functions. For Deguara ( 2015 ), drawing can function as a constructor of children’s identity, communicator of the child’s self, processor of children’s knowledge, and a play process. In this book, we approach image-making and other artistic practices as modes of expression that allow children to develop their imagination, personality, dialogic relationship to others, and emotional responses in a creative way (see Lähdesmäki and Koistinen 2021 ); these practices help children to deal with and shape their mental images and understanding of the world in a constructive process of thinking in action (see Cox 2005 ; Deguara 2015 ). For many children, image-making and artistic creation are acts that connect their inner thoughts, emotions, and imaginings to the external world by intertwining their events and experiences that are personal to them with real-life episodes (Jolley 2010 ; Wright 2010 ; Deguara 2015 ). These entanglements of the inner and external worlds are impacted by the culture of the environment in which children create their images as well as by the imageries of contemporary popular culture (Toku 2001 ; Jolley 2010 ; Wright 2010 ). Image-making and nonlanguage-based artistic practices enable children to process what can be difficult to express in words through oral or written communication (Clark 2005 ; Deguara 2015 ). As an instrument, it is, thus, suitable for the teaching and learning of abstract topics such as cultural literacy.

The second premise of the book stems from an increasing need for respectful cultural encounter, mutual understanding, and constructive dialogue in today’s super-diversified, but polarized, societies (see Lähdesmäki et al. 2020 ). While many societies have become increasingly diverse social spaces where people can simultaneously identify with multiple different cultural and social groups, monoculturalist views and cultural purism have struck back. Western societies have faced a rise in populist, nationalist, and extremist movements that have incited xenophobic, anti-immigration, misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic political attitudes and actions. Western societies have commonly recognized cultural pluralization as a richness that, however, entails diverse challenges when the cultural encounter is not based on mutual respect and an interest in understanding differences. Cultural literacy learning is a key to advance tolerant, empathetic, and inclusive attitudes toward diversity.

For our book, we have four core objectives. First, we seek to strengthen a sociocultural approach to children’s expression moving away from developmental and cognitive approaches that have long dominated the research on children’s art to understanding children as active cultural agents. Therefore, we do not take a psychological approach (using art to discover the child’s inner conflicts), a behavioral approach (using art to examine the child’s thinking processes), a developmental approach (exploring the child’s visual expression at a particular age level), or an art pedagogical approach (helping children develop visual expression) (Nikoltsos 2001 ). In the 2000s, scholars (e.g., Anning 2003 ; Ivashkevich 2009 ; Atkinson 2009 ; Coates and Coates 2011 ; Deguara 2015 ) have noted a paradigm shift toward researching children’s art as a process of communication influenced by various sociocultural contexts. This research has shown how children are influenced by the culture(s) and societies surrounding them and how these influences can be perceived from their visual expression. Toku ( 2001 , 46) notes how the influence of culture and technology emerges in children’s drawings when they start primary school. While children and young people—as all people—feel the impact of their social and cultural contexts, they are not only passive receivers but also active creators of culture. The recent participatory approach to children’s art and culture has emphasized children as “social beings who are able, competent agents and active constructors of their knowledge and understanding” (Deguara 2015 , 12) and agents of their own learning, “actively defining reality, rather than passively reflecting a ‘given reality’” (Cox 2005 , 12) in their creative practices. Our research for this book is grounded in a contextual and sociocultural approach to children’s visual creation, seeing it as a valuable contribution to culture and cultural heritage (Venäläinen 2019 ).

Second, we seek to determine the potential and limitations of children’s creations as research material. Some of these limitations stem from the power relations involved whenever adults research children. We thus critically explore the setting in which the children produced our research material, and the position of the (adult) researcher, as an interpreter of children’s visual expression and as a knowledge producer based on the analysis of such data.

Third, we apply theoretical discussions on multimodality to explore children and young people’s creative practices. We follow Kress’s notion of multimodality as a “normal state of human communication” (Kress 2010 , 1) that is based on a “multiplicity of ways in which children make meaning, and the multiplicity of modes, means, and materials which they employ in doing so” (Kress 1997 , 96). In our research, we emphasize how different modes in meaning-making interact and impact on each other in a multimodal synthesis (Jewitt 2008 ; Walsh 2009 ). Due to this interaction, all meaning-making can be perceived as multimodal (Cazden et al. 1996 ).

Fourth, we seek to explore the role of dialogue and creativity in cultural literacy learning and to share new knowledge about how, through dialogic creative processes, children and young people can construct and deepen their understanding of a contemporary world filled with difficult challenges such as exclusion, intolerance, and climate change.

Concepts: Cultural Literacy and Creativity

The key concept of our research, cultural literacy, is a social practice that is inherently dialogic and based on learning and gaining knowledge through empathic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction. It has been defined as a process of engaging with cultures and a cocreation and expression of cultural identities and values (Maine et al. 2019 ; Maine and Vrikki 2021 ). Cultural literacy as such is not a new concept: It has been discussed in academia since the end of the 1980s. The first scholars (e.g., Hirsch 1988 , 1989 ; Hirsch et al. 1993 , 2002 ) of cultural literacy often perceived it narrowly, as knowledge gained through the exploration of cultural products, such as literature and art, and learning canonical cultural and historical facts and narratives. Hirsch ( 1989 ), who utilized the concept to argue what students need to fully engage in contemporary society, even lists 5000 “essential names, phrases, dates and concepts” that “every American needs to know,” as the cover of his book claims.

The idea of becoming culturally literate by learning selected facts and features of one’s own and/or others’ culture, history, and heritage has serious limitations. First, it does not recognize culture within a society as an inherently plural, constantly transforming, and fluid social construction based on interaction between diverse people (Otten 2003 ; Abdallah-Pretceille 2006 ). Second, the emphasis on factual knowledge of culture, history, and heritage as a key element for cultural encounters may direct people to perceive others as stable representatives of their culture or community. This may lead to cultural stereotyping, making it more difficult to see people as individuals, and even bring about prejudices (Abdallah-Pretceille 2006 ; Portera 2008 ). Third, learning facts and features is not cocreation of knowledge: It does not encourage learning with or from others who may be different from us. As Messelink and ten Thije ( 2012 , 81) note: “The ability to gain knowledge in interaction allows individuals to search for similarities and successfully operate in intercultural (…) contexts, regardless of the cultural backgrounds present.” Cultural literacy teachers should seek to promote this tolerant, empathic, and inclusive attitude in social interaction and gaining knowledge with others (Maine et al. 2019 ).

The concept of creativity is embedded in our approach to cultural literacy. In our view, cultural literacy is learned in a process that allows new ideas and views to emerge, as well as knowledge of differences and similarities, one’s own and others’ cultural values, and how to encounter, interact, and live together with others. For us, cultural literacy learning is about dialogic cocreation of (or attempts to cocreate) knowledge that can be stimulated by concrete creative practices, such as making an artwork together.

In our approach, creativity, the act of creating, and its outcome, creation, are linked but not equivalent concepts. Dictionaries often define creativity as an individual’s ability. It is seen for instance: “The ability to produce original and unusual ideas, or to make something new or imaginative” (Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary 2020 ) or “the faculty of being creative; ability or power to create” (Oxford English Dictionary 2020 ). In scholarly literature, the concept has been discussed in a more nuanced manner, emphasizing the complexity of its connotations in different historical periods and in scholarly contexts ranging from aesthetics to philosophy and from psychology to logic, to mention just a few (Pope 2005 ). The scholars have often concluded that creativity involves the production of novel, useful, or valuable ideas and/or products (Mumford et al. 2002 ; Mumford 2003 ; Pope 2005 ). These views home in on the act of creating. Taking this act as a point of departure for creativity, Mumford et al. ( 2002 ) have listed two sets of processes that are involved in creative work: Activities leading to idea generation (ideation) and activities needed to implement ideas (implementation). More recent scholars have criticized the views that equate creativity with creative work and its outcome. This “dynamic definition of creativity” (Corazza 2016 ; Walia 2019 ) focuses on ongoing processes in which individuals seek to produce novel and useful ideas or products but may not always succeed. Hence, Corazza ( 2016 , 265) has claimed that “the dynamic interplay between inconclusiveness and achievement must be subsumed by the definition of creativity.” Walia ( 2019 , 239) continues this idea by noting how “creation can be judged only when it has concluded, whereas creativity is active throughout the process and may not even end after having led to creation.”

Many adults consider children’s art as an example of fascinating self-expression and genuine and spontaneous creativity uninfluenced by cultural norms (Nikoltsos 2001 ). This imagined genuineness and spontaneousness has found its way into discourses of modern art. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, various artists and artistic groups have been inspired by children’s visual expression and admired its creativity (Fineberg 1997 ). In this book, we acknowledge the creative ability of all people, including children, and understand children’s visual and multimodal expression as a way to process, seek, and possibly find novel and useful ideas and outcomes. We do not seek to evaluate the creativity of the children’s visual and multimodal artifacts that form the core of our data. For us, creativity is not a feature of a person or a product but a dynamic process that stimulates cultural literacy learning through curiosity and openness to something new or imaginative. Artistic creation provides children and young people an arena to practice creativity, meaning-making, and “engage their minds, hearts and bodies” (Wright 2010 , 2). This engagement itself may be the new outcome. Indeed, various researchers have connected creativity and empathy, to emphasize that art can evoke empathetic responses and understanding of other people’s points of view (Lähdesmäki and Koistinen 2021 ).

The Cultural Literacy Learning Programme, Data and Methods

As a response to the increasing need for respectful cultural encounters, mutual understanding, and constructive dialogue in today’s super-diversified societies, the DIalogue and Argumentation for cultural Literacy Learning in Schools (DIALLS) project developed a Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (CLLP), that was implemented in over 250 classes in Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, and the UK in the school year 2019–2020. The program was built by an international group of scholars and teachers and it was aimed at three age groups: students aged 5–6, 8–9, and 14–15. In the implementation of the program, the age span in the groups was a year or two wider in some classes. The program and its pedagogy was based on the concept of cultural literacy defined above: Its builders saw dialogue, argumentation, and interactive creative practices as tools for encountering differences, expressing one’s own cultural features and values, and learning cultural literacy. In each age group, the CLLP included 15 lessons addressing different themes, ranging from one’s cultural attachments to being part of a community and engaging more broadly in society. These themes fell into four groups: Living together (explored by talking about celebrating diversity, solidarity, equality, human rights, democracy, and globalization); social responsibility (focusing on social and civic competences, sustainable development, and active participation); belonging (discussion on home); and the core attitudes for cultural literacy learning (tolerance, empathy, and inclusion). These themes were selected for the CLLP through a clustering exercise of a broad array of concepts and terms highlighted in scholarly literature and education policy documents on cultural literacy and intercultural dialogue (see DIALLS 2018 ; Lähdesmäki et al. 2020 ).

The lessons in the CLLP were based on classroom and small group discussions that were stimulated by wordless picture books and films. These books and films had been selected by the project researchers in an attempt to promote the tolerant, empathic, and inclusive encounter of differences and to reflect multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual social landscape of places, people, and ways of living in Europe and its neighboring regions. Using the books and films in the CLLP enabled “an exploration of the critical and creative thinking processes involved in meaning-making, which is viewed as a dialogic process between readers together and between text and readers” (Maine 2015 , 5). Moreover, each lesson in the CLLP included a creative task in which the students were encouraged to explore with visual or multimodal means the ideas developed during classroom and small group discussions, and to explain the content of their creation in a caption.

The learning process in the CLLP was based on multimodal communication in which one mode of communication became interpreted and explored through another. The wordless picture books and films were given meaning through words in oral classroom and small group discussions. The students then explored these meanings through creating (mostly) visual artifacts (which often included written text), for which the students (or their teachers as mediators of the students’ voice within the youngest age group) wrote a brief separate explanation, a caption. These artifacts and their captions form the core of our data.

The intertwinement of visual and linguistic modes in our data reflects the central feature of children’s creative practices: They are typically based on the interplay of two or more semiotic resources (Deguara 2015 , 4). Particularly in young children’s creative practices, visual and oral modes may be difficult to distinguish. As Kinnunen ( 2015 ) notes, drawing can be perceived as a kind of dialogue between the marks made on paper and orally narrated thoughts. Some scholars (Siim 2019 ) have emphasized that children’s visual creations cannot be interpreted outside the narrative context and explanation of the artifacts given by the children themselves. We analyze our data based on our understanding that children’s creative practices are multimodal. The captions in our data function as a key to the meanings that the children themselves have affixed to their artifacts. In interpreting them, our aim is not to trace the children’s thoughts: We believe this is impossible. Following common communication theories, we interpret the data based on “decoding” the signs which the students have “coded” to the artifacts within the various contexts in with they participated in the CLLP (see Rose 2001 , 16). This decoding can, however, only occur between us as interpreters and the artifacts as a complex sign.

The lesson plans in the CLLP represent the pedagogical ideal for cultural literacy learning. Respectively, its implementation represents the pedagogical reality, in which the aims and ideals of cultural literacy learning were put into practice in various social and cultural contexts that differ between countries, regions, schools, and classes. The teachers received at least 18 hours of face-to-face professional development on the core ideas of the CLLP. We expected teachers would need 30 hours of working time to prepare and reflect on the lessons. The teachers were encouraged to creatively implement the lesson plans in their classes. Some of them applied the lesson plans more freely, while others closely followed the guidelines. The CLLP pedagogy was based on dialogic teaching emphasizing the co-construction of meanings among students and between them and their teachers: The teachers modeled how to engage democratically in the dialogue (Maine and Čermáková 2021 ). As in all teaching and learning, this pedagogy included distinct roles for teachers and learners. In the CLLP, the teachers were expected to model the discussion on the themes in the lesson plans and give students instructions for the tasks; the students were expected to participate in the discussions and follow the instructions. The implementation of the CLLP was, thus, intertwined with various issues of power that impacted on what was expressed, how, and why in the artifacts.

Various scholars have explored the impact of school on children’s communication and creative expression. These studies argue that the school context effectively unifies the children’s cultural and communicative resources by moving them from being communicative agents of their own worlds alone to also become communicative agents of their society and culture (Kress 1997 , 2000 ; Deguara 2015 ). The school context—including teachers, peers, classroom practices, and curricula—either explicitly or implicitly emphasizes certain values, perceptions, and expectations that influence children’s visual expression (Einarsdottir et al. 2009 ; Deguara 2015 ). Some scholars (Fargas-Malet et al. 2010 ) have seen this “acculturation to school” as the main shortcoming of research utilizing children’s drawings as data: Children may create images that they think will please the teacher or researcher.

Our data includes hundreds of artifacts, mainly multicolored drawings but also a small number of collages, three-dimensional sculptures, short films, and photographs of roleplaying. Most of the artifacts were created individually, but many were made in small groups of 3–6 students, and some by the whole class connecting individually created pieces as a collage. When counting these individual pieces as separate works, the number of artifacts in our data increases to 1906 (Table 1.1 ). The CLLP teachers photographed the artifacts and sent the photographs and captions to the researchers. The teachers also completed a brief survey including some background information indicating the country, students’ ages and genders within the groups, and teachers’ description of the progress of the lesson, particularly if some changes to the lesson plan were made. These forms are included in our data. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 impacted on the implementation of the CLLP and thus our data collection. Due to the exceptional conditions, not all teachers were able to implement each lesson. Some of our data was created during lockdown when students were learning at home. In this book, some artifacts arising from the subthemes of democracy, globalization, and active participation are not analyzed separately but within the broader themes of living together and social responsibility. Due to the exceptional conditions caused by the pandemic, the CLLP was extended in some countries with an additional lesson in which the students reflected on how COVID-19 had impacted on their social environment and explored ways of practicing empathy, tolerance, and inclusiveness in pandemic conditions.

Our research is based on data-driven content analysis utilizing both qualitative categorizing of the data and quantification of its core features and visual elements (see Rose 2001 ) and a self-reflexive and collaborative interpretation of what the artifacts mean within their context in the lesson. By self-reflexive interpretation, we mean acknowledging our position as researchers and considering our cultural and social contexts, from which we look at and interpret images (Rose 2001 , 15–16; Passerini 2018 ). Besides, our interpretations have been formed in close collaboration, open dialogue, and sharing of views within our team during the research process.

After this introductory chapter, we proceed to the core theoretical aspects of our analysis. We start by exploring a sociocultural approach to the research on children’s visual expression, including the issue of power. Next, we move to multimodality as a way in which students make meanings in our data. The subsequent four chapters each focus on different thematic aspects of cultural literacy learning: Attitudes of tolerance, empathy, and inclusion; living together; social responsibility; belonging; and practicing tolerance, empathy, and inclusion during the pandemic. We start these chapters with a critical discussion of their themes and core concepts—and, in the last chapter, an overview of the pandemic conditions—followed by the data-driven content analysis and interpretation of meaning-making around the themes in the artifacts. When the data allows it, we also compare how the different themes are dealt with in different countries and age groups. To avoid methodological nationalism (creating artificial national categories), we do not systematically pinpoint the home country of students unless we consider this information relevant to the discussion. In our analysis, we also pay attention to how the artifacts are influenced by global popular culture and imageries of children’s culture that circulate symbols and images from cartoons, films, storybooks, games, or digital environments (see Toku 2001 , 52; Coates and Coates 2011 ; Deguara 2015 , 83). We end with a chapter summarizing our core results and showing how they expand the understanding of children’s creative and multimodal meaning-making processes. In the concluding chapter, we suggest avenues for future research and ways to improve cultural literacy learning through creative practices.

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Lähdesmäki, T. et al. (2022). Introduction: Cultural Literacy and Creativity. In: Learning Cultural Literacy through Creative Practices in Schools . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89236-4_1

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Creating a Theory of Cultural Literacy Essay

Cultural literacy is described as the capacity to connect oneself with cultures not because of rote learning but due to an extensive understanding of the expressions and informal elements of a particular culture as well.

Even though history, language, and literature are helpful ways of attaining an extensive understanding of culture, it is inadequate if somebody desires to obtain the cultural literacy position. It is uniformly, if not more, essential to be capable of communicating using the general idioms and references of the culture which people of that culture practice.

Schweizer (52) formed Cultural Literacy Theory where he claimed that for people to value a text and acquire real literacy, they should not only have the necessary reading skills, but also have background understanding which hails from a general background of the real information which is mutually essential. This basic understanding allows people to present their different diagrams of the world to the book or content they are reading and hence understanding the content better.

For instance, in the American comedy program, “The Simpsons,” people who do not possess cultural literacy have a lot of challenges understanding several jokes, but if they abruptly create jokes regarding Indian society, several American viewers would be mutually confused, for example.

Another instance may be traced back in the 18 th century when the United States was attempting to influence France to hold its cause in the War of Independence; several educated envoys were requested to go to Paris but they were fruitless (Schweizer 52).

In the long run, Benjamin Franklin was requested to pay a visit to Paris and even though he did not speak or was familiar with the French language, he understood and perceived the French culture. These two examples indicate the way cultural literacy varies from the common rote learning.

The culture shock can be considered as the opposite of cultural literacy. This happens when a person from some culture comes across a person from a different culture or the settings of that culture. Since people create several assumptions on a daily basis in their native culture, they do not always recognize the sum of subliminal conclusions that they are creating until they are abruptly forced to deal with different cultures.

Currently, several assumptions unexpectedly turn into things which should be considered deliberately. This may be traumatic, thus, several people succeed in those differences but others find it difficult to handle.

Globalization indicates that cultures should be merged more recurrently, not merely on a social stage but on economic, business, and political stages as well. For instance, businesses sometimes find themselves working with some other businesses which have different cultures. This may bring about misinterpretations and discomfiture on the two sides. Several cultural difficulties can be resolved given that some efforts are made and this may give a definite advantage for businesses which are effective in this field (Hirsch and Kett 13).

However, various companies aim to strengthen their cultures instead of understanding the other cultures of different companies which is termed as cultural hegemony. For instance, some companies may implement a subsidiary in China and disregard local activities in support of enforcing their own process and systems, which may have various benefits but may eventually bring about friction and less productivity.

The majority of people all over the globe are mainly concerned about the United States’ cultural hegemonic supremacy and aggressively opposing it.

Literate culture has become the most valuable issue in American democracy. Citizenship is automatic in case someone understands the basic information and the linguistic rules which are required to speak, write, and read successfully. Cultural literacy contains the only certain path of opportunity for needy kids. Advanced literacy alone allows the houses to be constructed and companies to be efficiently managed (Hirsch and Kett 13).

Cultural literacy is not just a big problem to the companies or people working across countries around the world. As culture literacy between countries is becoming very essential, it may as well be a big issue between generations, people, or communities from various divisions of the same city.

Some parents do not understand the modern music which their children listen to; this is an issue which is partially due to cultural literacy. Some can contend that no one can have complete cultural literacy, since to act that way would mean that they have to learn every single culture existing on the globe. It is thus essential that culture literacy is straightforward and applicable to the requirements of the people (Hirsch and Kett 13).

Those who oppose the idea of cultural literacy, have just got it backwards through neglecting the common culture significance and common support for knowledge. These privileges are not probable to pass by the benefits which go together with understanding the way to position expressions within their correct contexts, the way to read text within a web of references, the way to place occasions on a sequential timeline, and the description of ideas like “Idealistic” or “Orwellian.”

Cultural literacy is inappropriate in the fact that it may not really bother other people and it may bring disagreements. It is a big concern to the people who are wealthy or earning higher incomes than others. Some households that can pay for better schools, can be assured that their children are instilled with the type of cultural fluency which others are attempting to influence us.

The more people debate the cultural literacy insignificance in the society or people’s life, the more they downgrade the control of this knowledge to the region of a socio-economic privilege, thus, donating to solidifying of social stratification and decrease of social mobility (Schweizer 53). Cultural literacy shows possession and it indicates movement of knowledge within firmly join coteries.

The state of cultural literacy makes it hard to ‘cope’ to be culturally literate, since cultural literacy is empirical instead of anything which can be understood from a book. Those people who are superior to others easily cope with different cultures, but the only means to turn into real cultural literature is to become submerged in different cultures and progressively come to learn them.

There is, debatably, no easy means for the process and people who attempt to find an easy way merely delude themselves into considering that they are culturally literate.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Eric and Joseph Kett. The new dictionary of cultural literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. Print.

Schweizer, Bernard. “Cultural Literacy: Is it Time to Revisit the Debate?” The Nea Higher Education Journal (2009): 2(4): 51-56. Print.

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"Creating a Theory of Cultural Literacy." IvyPanda , 1 Nov. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/creating-a-theory-of-cultural-literacy/.

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Creating a Theory of Cultural Literacy." November 1, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/creating-a-theory-of-cultural-literacy/.

1. IvyPanda . "Creating a Theory of Cultural Literacy." November 1, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/creating-a-theory-of-cultural-literacy/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Creating a Theory of Cultural Literacy." November 1, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/creating-a-theory-of-cultural-literacy/.

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Cultural literacy, what every American needs to know by E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Houghton & Mifflin, Boston, 1987, 251 pp

1988, Systems Research

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Preorder my new book and get $400 of bonuses, cultural literacy: does knowledge need to be deep to be useful.

A common critique of school is that it leads to shallow memorization of facts. Deep understanding and practical skills are often pushed aside in favor of trivia, quickly forgotten after the final exam.

The most typical reaction, at least from those endorsing the value of education, is to deny the charge. Yes, we all remember dull or seemingly pointless classes. But school provides the necessary foundation for deeper thinking.

What makes E. D. Hirsch’s controversial bestseller, Cultural Literacy , interesting is how it inverts this defense of education. The shallowness of school isn’t a failing but a virtue! Deep understanding and mastery of universal skills are overrated. Instead, we need to supply students with a large supply of background knowledge, often shallow, that allows them to participate in literate culture.

Why I Enjoyed This Book (Even If I Don’t Entirely Agree)

I enjoyed this book, in part, because my intuitions run directly counter to it. I’ve always felt that deep understanding and practical skills are the principal reason to learn anything. That schooling focuses on so much useless, high-culture knowledge has been a major source of my ambivalence towards it.

Most educational proponents defend studying superficially useless topics on the dubious basis that this work will later transfer to other skills. Thus, we have people arguing that reading Shakespeare makes you more empathetic, listening to classical music makes you smarter, or studying military history will sharpen your business acumen.

Yet we now have mountains of psychological evidence that suggest no such thing happens. There are no “mental muscles” that strengthen through general practice. For learning to be useful, the content needs to be useful.

What makes Hirsch’s book surprising and insightful is that he strenuously agrees. Most skills won’t transfer. Most school learning withers to a hazy association in the years after graduation. Reading Shakespeare and memorizing dates won’t ever help you fix a car, program a computer or decide on a corporate strategy.

If school knowledge tends to be shallow and impractical, why learn it? Hirsch argues that such knowledge is needed to participate in literate culture. You need to learn these things because they allow you to read publications like The New York Times or The Atlantic . You need it to understand the allusions embedded in business memos and corporate speeches.

In short, the value of useless, poorly remembered trivia is that it enables access to the social realm of educated society. Those who lack this knowledge, primarily those whose family background provides less of it, are handicapped in participating in elite culture, thus shutting off their economic advancement.

Why Knowledge Matters

Say you wanted to start reading in another language, which words should you learn? The obvious answer is that you should start by learning the most common words. You’d also want to prioritize volume over depth. Knowing the origins, connotations, and usage quirks of a single word wouldn’t help nearly as much as having tons of shallower word associations at your fingertips.

Every word you don’t already know impedes your understanding of a text. If you have to look up one or two terms in an essay, that might be tolerable. But twenty? Fifty? Reading might not be worth the effort if you have to look up half the words. Better to watch television instead.

We all intuitively understand that basic literacy requires a vast amount of verbal knowledge. Depth in a handful of chosen words won’t substitute. Neither will the ability to look things up on the fly.

But understanding texts depends not just on word knowledge but on world knowledge. You can’t read an article about American politics, for instance, without some idea of what the Senate is, why people care about who is on the Supreme Court, or that “the White House” refers to the president.

Hirsch’s argument is that we underrate how much knowledge is needed to understand a newspaper or popular nonfiction book. Just as fluent reading requires knowledge of tens of thousands of words, fluent understanding requires thousands of cultural facts that cannot be derived from direct experience.

What Knowledge Matters?

What background knowledge do we need? Hirsch’s answer is empirical: look around and see what knowledge writers assume everyone already knows. That’s what you need to teach.

Hirsch also argues that curricula need to be standardized at the national level. He writes fondly of previous efforts to stamp out linguistic diversity within early nation states and argues that a similar cultural assimilation process needs to continue. Ultimately, Hirsch thinks we need a strong national culture based on shared references if we are to cooperate effectively.

This focus on deliberately cultivating a shared, jingoistic mythology in America has attracted Hirsch the most criticism. Certainly, some have argued that it’s exactly this stamping out of diverse perspectives that is one of modern education’s greatest sins.

I’m not an American, and so I read this section with detached bemusement. In interacting with some Americans, I’ve often been disappointed at how sparse and distorted their knowledge of the broader world is. This isn’t any American’s fault. A side-effect of being from a large country with a dominant media presence is that it’s rarely necessary to consume information not explicitly prepared for a domestic perspective. In this circumstance, unless you take active steps to inform yourself of international views, you won’t encounter them.

While I found the nationalism embedded in Hirsch’s argument distasteful, I thought his idea of making this knowledge explicit to be very interesting.

One challenge I’ve had in learning other languages is, inevitably, you lack not just linguistic knowledge, but cultural knowledge. I find it much easier to read Chinese science fiction than period novels. In part, this is because the average Chinese reader is expected to know quite a bit about medieval China already, which I don’t. In contrast, science fiction relies mostly on the scientific knowledge that I already possess.

I would love to see a list of Chinese (or Korean, or Spanish) common knowledge, such as that presented in the back of Hirsch’s book for an American audience. Even an imperfect list would help clarify what most people can be expected to know already, and what knowledge would need to be spelled out for even a literate audience.

Final Thoughts on Cultural Literacy

In high school, I read Shakespeare. Each year, a chunk of the English curriculum was devoted to going through, in detail, one of his plays. If I recall correctly, I think I studied A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Romeo and Juliet , Othello , and Hamlet .

I’m not a huge Shakespeare fan. I don’t feel like I learned much about human nature or life in any broader sense from those works. If that had been the goal, I would have preferred a course on psychology or philosophy. But, I can say that if a reference is made to one of those four plays, I have a reasonable chance of remembering it.

But here’s the problem: Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays. I never studied The Tempest , King Lear , or Julius Caesar . I think I’ve watched movie versions of Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing . Beyond this, my knowledge of Shakespeare references is limited. This, in turn, limits my ability to see through opaque cultural references that allude to them.

Hirsch’s solution in this case seems practical. A crash course in Shakespeare reviewing the main plot points, characters, themes and sayings from the most commonly read plays would benefit me. We could skip the painful group readings, with high-schoolers stumbling through sixteenth-century English, and get straight to the point.

Something similar has been a goal of mine for awhile. As I’ve spent most of my learning time in the sciences, my humanities knowledge is often weaker. One of my favorite ways to rectify this problem is to listen to survey courses on history, philosophy and literature. These overviews aren’t sufficient for reaching any deep insights. Still, they serve their purpose in providing the background knowledge needed for further reading.

In my mind, Hirsch has done a service in pointing out the value of this kind of knowledge.

However, in other respects, I depart from Hirsch. Half-remembered factoids might be good for filling out the Sunday crossword puzzle, but it’s inert for any other practical problem. Useful skills necessitate depth, detail, and hands-on experience in a way that book learning rarely makes sufficient.

I also think Hirsch neglects the dynamic effects of literate knowledge. Hirsch argues that high-brow publications presume background knowledge because it smooths communication. But I think it’s equally likely that writers use opaque metaphors and allusions as a way of restricting their audience.

There’s an associative quality between writers and their audiences. A writer is keen to be not just widely read, but to be read by the right kind of people. Literary allusions are not neutral facilitators of conversation, but tools for restricting text to certain audiences.

This restriction isn’t necessarily conscious snobbery. In-groups of all sorts constantly invent slang, inside jokes and references in order to separate themselves from outsiders. Members show off by conspicuously displaying their mastery of in-group lore. This can create an arms race where in-group texts become increasingly impenetrable to outsiders, on purpose—anyone who doubts this need only to browse some Continental philosophy or fanfiction subreddits.

When considering skills and knowledge that are directly useful for solving problems, this arms race seems less relevant. Yes, escalating knowledge requirements to be an effective programmer can make it harder for programmers to keep up. But at least we get better-written code as a result.

In contrast, when the knowledge learned is known, in advance, to be useless, it risks simply moving the goal-posts. If the goal is to maintain cultural exclusivity, the “literate” will define a new stratum of discourse that is intentionally elevated beyond the masses.

The signaling theory of education remains underrated, in my view, because few educational theorists seriously grapple with it. Hirsch does an excellent job pointing to the value of mastering shared cultural knowledge, regardless of its direct utility for solving problems. But I still believe usefulness should be the benchmark for education as a whole.

What are your thoughts? What role do you think education has in forming the necessary, shared background knowledge of a culture versus deeper understanding or practical skills? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Cultural Literacy

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America’s literacy problems stem from children’s lack of knowledge about the common culture—not their lack of mechanical skills—according to a book scheduled for release this week by the Houghton Mifflin Company.

In Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, E.D. Hirsch Jr., a professor of English at the University of Virginia, argues that American schools are producing students who—in the words of one community-college teacher cited in the book—think Charles Darwin discovered gravity, J. Edgar Hoover was a 19th-century president, and Mark Twain invented the cotton gin.

Mr. Hirsch argues that true literacy cannot be divorced from subject-matter knowledge, and that schools must return to a much more traditional, facts-oriented curriculum that systematically teaches children the information they need to know.

His book, which includes an extensive listing of information that literate Americans hold in common, is an expansion of earlier essays that earned him both high praise and harsh criticism within the education community.

The book’s publication comes at a time when more and more states are turning their attention to the problems of adult illiteracy. And its themes may provide ammunition for those, such as U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, who have advocated the return to a more traditional K-12 curriculum as one solution to that problem.

“Literacy is far more than a skill,’' asserts Mr. Hirsch, but requires “large amounts of specific information.’'

Literate Americans share a discrete body of knowledge, he contends, that is not being imparted to all schoolchildren. Its absence among many individuals has resulted, he says, in widespread “cultural illiteracy.’' (See excerpts on page 68.)

He submits that schools can and should play a central role in determining the nature of this shared information base, and in developing an “index of cultural literacy’’ that could help guide the creation of curricula, tests, and textbooks.

Knowledge List

With the assistance of two colleagues at the University of Virginia, Mr. Hirsch has compiled a tentative list of nearly 5,000 historical dates and events, geographical names, famous people, bits of patriotic lore, words, phrases, book titles, and texts, which he maintains literate Americans know. The list could serve as a starting point, he suggests, for what students are taught.

Eventually, the 64-page appendix of facts and figures will form the index for a “dictionary’’ of cultural literacy.

It includes such diverse items as the date 1776, acid rain, Johann Sebastian Bach, “familiarity breeds contempt,’' Florida, and the text of the Gettysburg Address. (See related story on page 55.)

According to Mr. Hirsch, the list reflects a high-school level of literacy. But he adds that people’s knowledge of this core content is sketchy and imprecise, rather than deep.

For example, he writes, “Only a small proportion of literate people can name the Shakespeare plays in which Falstaff appears, yet they know who he is. They know what Mein Kampf is, but they haven’t read it.’'

Nonetheless, he argues, this “middle-level information’’ distinguishes the literate person from the illiterate, and is the “homeland of the common reader.’'

Without shared national information, attitudes, and assumptions, he states, U.S. citizens would not have a “common basis for communication’'—a scenario that he views as increasingly possible, given the growing diversity of American society.

According to Mr. Hirsch, one-third of all Americans are now illiterate and many more have literacy skills that must be improved.

Although the level of literacy required to prosper in modern society has been rising throughout the developed world, he writes, “American literacy rates have not risen to meet this standard.’'

Schools’ ‘Failed Task’

Responsibility for the state of cultural literacy, Mr. Hirsch maintains, rests squarely with the schools.

“The new illiteracy is sometimes excused by the argument that our schools are now educating larger portions of our population,’' he writes. “The point is that we are not educating them.

“We undertook the great task of universal education precisely in order to produce a truly literate population, but we have not succeeded in that task in recent years.’'

As evidence, he points to more than a decade of declining reading and verbal scores on both the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, even among the country’s best educated and most “advanced’’ youngsters.

Preliminary field tests from a NAEP project on the literacy and historical knowledge of American 17-year-olds, for example, reported that two-thirds did not know the Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900; three-quarters did not know what “reconstruction’’ meant; and half could not identify either Joseph Stalin or Winston Churchill.

‘Educational Formalism’

Mr. Hirsch blames primarily a philosophy of education that he says has eschewed facts in favor of more generic skills development.

"[E]ven now,’' he notes, “the goal of teaching shared information is under attack by the latest version of educational formalism, the ‘critical thinking’ movement.’'

Pushing students to engage in higher-order thinking skills is fine, he asserts, but not at the expense of denigrating factual knowledge.

“The polarization of educationists into facts-people versus skills-people has no basis in reason,’' he writes. “Facts and skills are inseparable.’'

In particular, he advocates that vast amounts of cultural information be systematically imparted to youngsters in the early grades. If students still lack important elements of the knowledge base by grade 10, he notes, “they will rarely be able to make up the loss.’'

According to Mr. Hirsch, the mere existence of his list “will help people perceive that our previous reluctance to identify core information has seriously hindered the effective teaching of literacy.’'

“It’s not the list that is dangerous to serious education,’' he asserts, “its explicitness is dangerous to the inadequate, skills-oriented educational principles of the recent past.’'

‘Cognitive Overload’

To support his views on the ties between literacy and content knowledge, the University of Virginia professor points to recent research in the fields of reading and psychology.

According to this work, vast stores of vocabulary, word associations, and skills enable competent readers to rapidly process new information and place it in pre-existing frameworks or “schemata’’ for understanding the world.

Lacking such knowledge, poor readers experience “cognitive overload,’' Mr. Hirsch states. They are forced to process so much new material at one time that it quickly overburdens their short-term memories, making their reading “slow, arduous, and ineffective.’'

Estimates that a chess master can recognize about 50,000 different patterns of pieces on a chess board probably apply equally well to cultural literacy, according to Mr. Hirsch. “Interestingly,’' he writes, “that is the approximate number of words and idioms in the vocabulary of a literate person.’'

“There are, of course, many more than 50,000 items stored in the full text of long-term memory,’' he adds. “A basic vocabulary of 50,000 schemata serves merely as a quickly accessible index to a much larger volume of knowledge.’'

Mr. Hirsch’s arguments are particularly timely, given the current educational climate.

Secretary Bennett has consistently advocated that schools return to a more traditional curriculum that emphasizes the great texts and traditions of Western Civilization.

According to the Secretary, today’s students do share a common core of knowledge, but it is composed of popular culture, such as the names of television and rock stars, rather than literate culture.

In the last few years, several states—including California and Texas—have approved comprehensive statewide curriculum frameworks to clarify what students should be learning in particular courses.

In addition, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Mr. Bennett last month recommended that the National Assessment of Educational Progress provide state-by-state as well as national data on how students perform in core subject areas.

That proposal would require broader consensus among states than currently exists about what the core knowledge base should be in grades K-12. When NAEP was first designed in the 1960’s, the idea of state-by-state comparisons was explicitly rejected for fear that it would lead to a national curriculum.

Writes Mr. Hirsch: “The counterreform of the 1980’s seems bent upon a return to a more traditional curriculum. This welcome course correction demonstrates the underlying good sense of the American people, who have launched a grassroots movement to advance that reform.’'

Two-Part Curriculum

But according to Mr. Hirsch, a national core curriculum—as traditionally envisioned—is “neither desirable nor feasible.’'

What is needed, he contends, is a two-part curriculum that is “traditional in content but diverse in its emphases, that is pluralistic in its materials and modes of teaching but nonetheless provides our children with a common core of cultural information.’'

Mr. Hirsch dubs this bifurcated model the “extensive’’ and “intensive’’ curriculum.

The content of the “extensive curriculum’’ is traditional literate knowledge—the information, attitudes, and assumptions that literate Americans share. It consists of a “minimal description of elements that should be included in every child’s schooling, no matter what form the schooling takes.’'

Any school can find ways to incorporate this minimal content into its courses, Mr. Hirsch argues, “given a determination to do so and coordination among grade levels.’'

In contrast, the “intensive curriculum’’ consists of the in-depth study and fully developed understanding of a subject, “making one’s knowledge of it integrated and coherent.’'

The flexibility in methods and content that applies to the intensive curriculum, he asserts, “ensures that individual students, teachers, and schools can work intensively with materials that are appropriate for their diverse temperaments and aims.’'

According to Mr. Hirsch, the concept of a two-part curriculum “avoids the idea that all children should study identical materials.’'

“It also resists,’' he says, “the lure of a core curriculum, if that proposal is taken to mean that all high-school graduates should study, say, Romeo and Juliet. A common extensive curriculum would ensure that students have some information about Romeo and Juliet, but in their intensive curriculum they might study The Tempest or Twelfth Night in detail.’'

Nonetheless, he writes, “American schools should be able to devise an extensive curriculum based on the national vocabulary and arranged in a definite sequence.’'

“This aim,’' he contends, “could be accomplished with a great diversity of schoolbooks and teaching methods. Although the methods of conveying cultural literacy can and should vary from school to school, an agreed-upon, explicit national vocabulary should come to be regarded as the basis of a literate education.’'

Textbook and Tests

The most effective way to reform the curriculum, according to Mr. Hirsch, would be to increase the proportion of nonfiction and traditional myths and stories included in the reading materials for grades K-8.

“What are needed,’' he argues, “are reading texts that deliberately convey what children need to know and include a substantially higher proportion of factual narratives.’'

In higher grades, where teaching is done by subject matter, Mr. Hirsch maintains that continued systematic attention to the national vocabulary is needed.

In particular, he argues, schools should teach more survey courses that cover large movements of human thought and experience.

He proposes that publishers and educators reach an accord about the contents of the national vocabulary and a good sequence for presenting it. One option, he suggests, is to convene a group of educators and public leaders to develop a model grade-by-grade sequence of core information.

Their recommendations would carry “only the force of personal authority,’' he notes, “which is sometimes effective, sometimes not.’'

He also suggests the creation of “general knowledge tests’’ for three different stages of schooling, each based on an agreed-upon body of information. Again, it would be up to each state or local district to use the examinations.

But he argues that even if such tests were not compulsory, their mere existence would “exert a normalizing effect on the extensive curriculum.’'

“If school administrators knew that some of their students might want to take one or more of the tests, they might adjust their curricula accordingly for all students,’' he writes.

“Similarly, the mere existence of such tests might encourage publishers, as a matter of commercial prudence, to include in their textbooks the core information upon which the tests were based.’'

‘Hidden Curriculum’

Mr. Hirsch anticipates that his opinions will be roundly criticized by those who view them as undemocratic or intolerant of minority cultures.

But he argues that the question of specific content “can no longer be ignored’’ in American education.

According to Mr. Hirsch, somebody in each classroom already is deciding what material children should learn in the name of “skills acquisition.’'

“All too often it is content for which our children will have no use in the future,’' he asserts.

The challenge, according to Mr. Hirsch, is to bring that “currently hidden curriculum’’ out into the open, and to “make its contents the subject of democratic discussion.’'

A version of this article appeared in the April 01, 1987 edition of Education Week as Cultural Literacy

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Literacy Narrative Explained

Literacy Narrative Examples for College Students

A literacy narrative is quite simply that: it is a story of how you became literate and how it has affected your life. To create a literacy narrative, you just need to find your story and use  descriptive text  to bring it to life. Learn how to write a literacy narrative through exploring original and famous examples.

Breaking Down a Literacy Narrative

A literacy narrative is a personalized story of your relationship with language. Not only do literacy narratives discuss memories, but they also walk through a person’s discovery, trials and triumphs with reading, writing and speaking a language.

This doesn’t have to be English either. It could be your experiences  learning a second language  and the impact that it has had on you. The point is simply to tell the world about your struggles and growth with language and communication. Literacy narratives can have different  themes , topics, styles,  moods  and  tones  that you can work to make your own.

Key Features of a Literacy Narrative

To start, a literacy narrative is a personalized story.

• Hook:  Begin with a hook  to draw the reader in. This could be your first experience with books or how reading and writing define you.
• Focus: Rounding out your first paragraph, you’ll want to give a short thesis that tells the reader the whole point of your story.
• Meaning: Throughout the remainder of your narrative, you’ll use stories and  vivid descriptions  to explore the meaning of this journey to you. You might discuss how your poetry has grown or your love of reading has turned into writing.
• Challenges: Explore the challenges that you’ve faced in your journey and how you’ve overcome them, along with how your ideas and thoughts have transformed.

Example: Relationship with Words

Explore how to write a literacy  narrative essay  through an original example for college level students. The following example is written by  Jennifer Betts .

Words were like a puzzle that I couldn’t quite solve. Listening to the teachers read the jumbled-up letters on the page, I was fascinated by how they could easily bring the pictures to life. The first day that I truly became literate, it was like another world opening up. My fingers couldn’t find books fast enough. My relationship with words has been a powerful, fantastical and even sometimes disastrous journey.

I would like to say that I’ve always known the power of words, but that simply isn’t true. The power that a word can hold jumped at me like a thief in the night the first time I encountered my own personal bully. They took the words that I’d proudly written and made them less meaningful than trash. However, it was that bully that forced my reading and vocabulary to grow. They made me realize the power that a few sentences could hold in an instant. Like swords in battle, they can quickly cut and decimate your opponent. Mastering the tactics of battle, you turn from the opponent to the victor. The need to be the victor drove me to books. And books opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking.

I have that bully to thank for leading me to the  children’s book  Harry Potter. The moment I slid open those silken pages, my eyes couldn’t devour them fast enough. The story pushed the limits of my vast imagination and truly allowed me to soar. The moment the journey was over, I missed it. And there hasn’t been another book since that has truly satisfied that high.

While I had dabbled in writing my own love stories a time or two, my need to find another fantasy that consumed me like the Harry Potter series pushed me into trying my own hand at writing. The moment my fingers hit the keys, the words just started pouring out of me at a rate that even I couldn’t control. Who knew that the shy, introverted child had so much to say?

While my relationship with written words are the things of dreams, my plunge into speaking often has disastrous consequences. Never have I been a good public speaker. In school, it was the day that I dreaded. Despite my preparation, I would trip and stumble to the podium only to repeat my performance in my carefully planned words. While they say practice makes perfect, in my case, practice has made mediocre. But to get the world to hear your words, sometimes you need to find the courage to speak them.

Even if the delivery isn’t perfect.

Though my journey with words started in frustration, it turned to fascination and wonder in a minute. Even with many years of reading under my belt, I’m still humbled by the power that a single word can hold if used the right or even the wrong way. Sharper than knives or softer than a silk, finding the right words is always an interesting journey.

Famous Examples of a Literacy Narrative

Literacy narratives can make an impact. Going beyond a short essay, a literacy narrative can even become an entire book that explores your literacy journey. To get your creative juices flowing, look at a few excerpts from famous examples of literacy narratives.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.

In “ The Writing Life ,” Annie Dilliard uses short essays to explore her journey with literacy and writing. Using her own unique style, Annie helps you to explore how and why she is a writer and what a rough and exciting journey it can be. You follow how writing can be torturous and transcendent all in the same moment.

Literacy Narrative by Kiki Petrosino

I wish to put my blackness into some kind of order. My blackness, my builtness, my blackness, a bill. I want you to know how I feel it: cold key under the tongue. Mean fishhook of homesickness that catches my heart when I walk under southern pines. And how I recognized the watery warp of the floor in my great-grandma’s house, when I dreamed it. This is what her complaining ghost said: Write about me.

Culture and writing and how culture affects writing are explored in “ Literacy Narrative ,” a personal essay by Kiki Petrosino. Kiki uses her experiences as a black woman and her history to show her relationship with words. She explores how her African American heritage drives her writing and how, through her journey with  descriptive poetry , she intermingles her poetry and race to create a compelling work.

Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott takes you through a hilarious and witty ride to finding her story in “ Bird by Bird .” Through showing you her journey into becoming a writer and finding literacy, she tries to help others find their own story in this  personal narrative . Starting with some words of wisdom from her father, this literacy narrative takes you through her entire journey with writer’s block and pushing your limits. This is a great example of the impact and depth that a literacy narrative can take.

Finding Your Words

Everyone has a literacy story. It can even be how you don’t like to read. In college, you often have to explore your personal literacy story through an essay. Using these tactics and examples, you can dive into the fun world of  personal expression  and exploration. If literacy narratives aren’t your jam, you might give poetry a try. There are several  poetry genres  perfect for personal exploration and introspection, too.

https://examples.yourdictionary.com/literacy-narrative-examples-for-college-students.html

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Literacy — A Reflection of Culture Shock in Scholarship Boy by Richard Rodriguez and Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch

A Reflection of Culture Shock in Scholarship Boy by Richard Rodriguez and Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch

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Published: Oct 17, 2018

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