My definition of literacy was basic before reading "The Ethnography of Literacy" by John F. Szwed. My exposure to literacy meant understanding what is read, mainly in books, and communicating by writing, to a selected audience not chosen by me but by someone in the academic profession. This essay open my eyes to many more possibilities in literacy and I found myself agreeing with many of the suggestion Szwed has presented throughout his paper. His summary and response approach to the root causes of the world challenges every day in measuring literacy and defining what literacy really is.
All the factors that come into play when measuring and defining literacy are alarmingly way, to inconsistent. His suggestion was one of engagement into the social aspects of literacy by researching the who, what, where, and why, behind the words written on paper or any other type of material.
His suggestion to break the study patterns and discover the reality of literacy, we hopefully can measure accurately its progress and use it as a tool to enlighten or lives in many ways.
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