| I was introduced to the concept of
literacy animator in Oladumi Arigbede's (1994) article on high illiteracy rates
among women and school dropout rates among girls. According to Arigbede,
literacy animators view their role as assisting in the self-liberating
development of people in the world who are struggling for a more meaningful
life. Animators are a family of deeply concerned and committed people whose
gut-level rejection of mass human pauperization compels them to intervene on the
side of the marginalized. Their motivation is not derived from a love of
literacy as merely another technical life skill, and they accept that literacy
is never culturally or ideologically neutral. Arigbede writes from her experiences as an animator working with women and men in Nigeria. She believes that literacy animators have to make a clear choice about whose culture and whose ideology will be fostered among those with whom they work. Do literacy educators in the United States consider whether the instruction they pursue conflicts with their students' traditional cultures or community, or fosters illiteracies in learners' first or home languages or dialects and. in their orality? Some approaches to literacy instruction represent an ideology of individualism, control, and competition. Consider, for example, the difference in values conveyed and represented when students engage in choral reading versus the practice of having one student read out loud to the group. To identify as a literacy animator is to choose the ideology of "sharing, solidarity, love, equity, co-operation with and respect of both nature and other human beings". Literacy pedagogy that matches the animator ideology works on maintaining the languages and cultures of millions of minority children who at present are being forced to accept the language and culture of the dominant group. It might lead to assessment that examines the performance outcomes of a community of literacy learners and the social significance of their uses of literacy, as opposed to measuring what an individual can do as a reader and writer on a standardized test. Shor (1993) describes literacy animators as problerm-posing, community-based, dialogic educators. Do our teacher-education textbooks on reading and language arts promote the idea that teachers should explore problems from a community-based dialogic perspective? |