This was harder than it looked. When we began working with our understandings of the terms material, literacy, and epistemology, we started to see exactly how difficult it is to make neat separations. For one thing, we need to differentiate between material and medium, which we tackle later on in the post. For another, we need to sort out exactly how literacy differs from epistemology, especially when they seem to both imply knowledge. And what exactly is knowledge, anyway? Certainly it differs from information--Brown and Duguid clearly show us that.

 

This writing assignment proceeded as a dialogue on Google docs, where each author responded to, affirmed, and critiqued the preceding ideas. Sometimes our understandings of these terms broadly diverged; in other cases, the differences were minimal. What follows is our effort to synthesize a response to this prompt, where five voices constitute a fairly coherent narrative.

 

What is Literacy?

 

Literacy is the interpretive, knowledge-making practices of communities and individuals. It is individual because each person has different levels of literacy and their own specific range of practices, while it is communal because people learn literacy by engaging in literacy practices alongside other members of the community and is a process that can be aided by the newcomer’s meta-cognitive awareness of how these practices relate to others in which she has or does engage. Literacy is not limited to just print literacy, although that is what it is most commonly associated with. It can also be “visual literacy,” “digital literacy,” “social literacy,” etc. Additionally, literacy is not simply the static co-construction of knowledge that occurs when a reader looks at a published text; it can also be dynamic, as in an online chat, or a collaborative blogpost, where the readers are also writers and can actively respond to and shape another person’s text.

 

What is Materiality?

 

Contained within literacy practices is the materials that are used--the tools for cognition.  The practices of a community is contingent upon the kind of material being used because the material affects the way knowledge in that community (its literacy) is distributed across members and communities, but also how that knowledge is constructed--what will the user be able to know and understand through the affordances of the material? The material seems to enable and constrain particular literacy practices and how we understand/make sense of those practices. However, should we also consider how the materials themselves might allow/constrain certain types of literacy practices regardless of the community that uses them? And if this is the case, might it cause certain communities to favor certain materials, since they are more conducive to their particular literacy practices? These are questions we consider.

 

We think an important distinction to consider is the difference between material and medium: how are they alike? How are they distinct? Consider this: everything is not a medium--some sort of use and message would need to be inscribed upon a material to become a medium.  So, when we discuss the choices of material, we are choosing the best conduit for our message--but different materials have different constraints and affordances; the constraints/affordances of a material affects how knowledge will be transmitted, but also how knowledge will be constructed.

 

What is Epistemology?

 

To read a text is to interpret a text, to try to make sense of what it means. When we talk about reading, we don’t simply mean the recognition of alphabetic characters that form words. Texts need to be processed and integrated into our understanding of the world in order to have some kind of meaning to us on personal and communal levels. Our role in this scenario entails that we serve within literacy networks as constructors and co-constructors of knowledge based on information we encounter. Thus, we agree that literacy, in many ways, implies epistemology, which asks the meta-cognitive questions about how people in such networks create their literacy, or community-specific knowledge and practices. Material also influences epistemology, since being able to manipulate physical materials allows us to make mental connections that we might not have been able to make if we did not have those material tools, as Gladwell implies.

 

Synthesis: 

 

Over the course of our conversation, we came to understand that we were, at times, conflating the material with medium. Thus, we found it necessary to define material as “tools for cognition,” and to recognize that different materials enable and constrain knowledge construction and transmission. This process of constructing and transmitting knowledge makes up the literacy practices of individuals and communities. Individuals develop varying sets of literacy practices through their participation in a range of communities, and communities of practice form around a shared set of literacy practices and preferences for/uses of particular materials. In that the materials used by individuals and communities afford certain types of literacy practices and not others, we’re left wondering whether multiple communities make use of materials in similar ways, and whether communal preferences for particular materials are guided by the literacy practices those materials enable.These questions about communal preferences for and uses of materials, what knowledge-making practices the materials enable, and how materials and practices differ across communities seem bound up in epistemology, which we’ve defined as “the over-arching questions about how knowledge and practices are created.” Just as our knowledge-making practices are bound up with the materials we use, our meta-cognitive awareness of how and why we construct and transmit knowledge is also tied to the material.  Thus, materials guide both our knowledge-making practices and our epistemological understanding of how knowledge and practices are constructed within and across communities of practice.