Deal 1Cassidy DealProfessor Julie CookEnglish 11031 November 2013Discourse and Literacy: A Way to tie it All Together“If internalized as a psychological tool…discourse can then facilitate or hinder specific activity.” (Holliday, Wendy; Rogers, Jim. 259)To look at Discourse and literacy as a type of tool can really challenge the way you see things and open your mind to a new way of thinking. If Discourse is a tool that helps us ‘hinder specific activity’, then how does that tie into literacy? When Discourse is thought of as a tool it can be defined as the person’s ability to pick up on hints in a social group that later allow them toadjust and fit into the same social group they were once observing. Then how would literacy tie into all of this? Literacy can be thought of as how WELL you adapted and picked up on the hints.Just because you can pick up on specific traits of a Discourse and follow other people’s actions, does not mean you are a part of the Discourse just yet. You have to be able to not only fit in physically or socially, but also be able to take their values and opinions into your way of thinking.“Recently researchers and librarians have called for a more situated approach to information literacy, one that addresses how people seek, evaluate, and use information in the context of disciplines, work settings, and other communities of practice.” (Holliday, Wendy; Rogers, Jim. 258)Deal 2“Do you have any idea what this man is talking about?” I whisper to my new friend Lacey as my Chemistry teacher continues to go on and on about the periodic table and memorizing the first two rows of elements. She looks over at me and starts to laugh, “Of course Iknow what he is talking about. Science is probably the only thing I can make sense of!”. All I could think was, “This is going to be an interesting semester, considering how much I HATE science. How will I ever survive?”. Looking back on that semester I do not think I did too horribly. It took me a while to adjust to the way we spoke around the classroom and lab, but I adjusted and soon enough it was like I had been doing experiments my whole life! When you arefirst coming into a classroom, job, or any other unusual setting you are not expected to understand every term that is used and how to act in that situation, but the way you take the situation and adapt to it is a different story. I never noticed how I changed and adapted to the way things worked in that semester until now when I start thinking about Discourse and the way we fit into certain social norms. I started to use certain terminology so the other students could understand me. I also started to dress differently because of the safety hazards during labs. Slowly but surely, I was fitting into their Discourse. I picked up on the lingo in the classroom, I dressed to fit the procedures, and I started to actually think like a scientist instead of a regular high school student. “Although in our teaching practice we recognize that there are multiple pathways to get there, there seems to be reduced to reading and writing, reflecting a reductionist and autonomous view of literacy.” (Parr, Michelann; Campbell, Terry A.)Deal 3If we restrain our idea of literacy to just reading and writing and we see that as the only way to further our education or to meet an objective then we will be limited to what we can truly achieve and how we see things. Literacy is a broad term that cannot and should not be ‘defined’ by one simple definition, but we do have an idea of what literacy is and how we use it. Literacy is generally falsely portrayed as how well a person can read and/or write and we attempt to test a student’s ‘literacy level’ with standardized tests. Discourse, which we are all familiar with, is described as “being the right who and doing the right what” and it generally describes what literacy is. Therefore, I think literacy should be defined by how well you can fit into a Discourse and adapt instead of the general definition used in literature. “Being critically literate is about challenging and crossing borders that separate individuals as well as groups. As students desegregated the lunchroom, they became border crossers, bringing together the Discourse of the classroom with theDiscourse of the lunchroom. Students fashioned new identities as classroom work with critical literacy practices led to an interrogation of lunchroom norms.” (Heffernan, Lee; Lewison, Mitzi. 108) In the excerpt above you were introduced to a group of students that ‘desegregated’ the lunchroom to intertwine two different Discourses. I read an article about a group of third grade students that created a project to bring all of the students in the lunchroom together. The students realized that instead of the whole classroom sitting together and talking like they did during class, they all segregated and sat with their usual friends. Boys and girls did not usually sit together and they would reunite after lunch was over. This is a common and harmless thing that you will notice in almost every school, but why do we do this? The lunchroom presents yet another Discourse that we have to adapt and fit into. The students’ reaction to this everyday thingDeal 4and their decision to challenge this brings me to the conclusion that they are more ‘literate’ than majority of the people I went to high school with, because they have the ability to intertwine different Discourses and challenge borders that we put up. Literacy and Discourse simply go hand in hand. When Discourse was first brought up into class I had no clue why we were talking about it or what it had to do with a college English class. Until I started reading in on other articles and actually taking the time to look into Discourse and literacy for this assignment I still did not start to put the pieces together. Now that I have pursued trying to tie the two together it all makes sense to me! It is kind of like one of those “Ah ha!” moments where the light bulb goes off in your mind and you can finally make all of the mental connections.Deal 5Works CitedHeffernan, Lee; Lewison, Mitzi. “What’s Lunch Got to Do With It? Critical Literacy and the Discourse of the Lunchroom.” (2005). Page 108. Web. 29 Oct 2013. Holliday, Wendy; Rogers, Jim. “Talking About Information Literacy: the Mediating Role of Discourse in a College Writing Classroom.” (2013) Page 259. Web. 30 Oct 2013. Moje,