Document Type
Article
Abstract
As a field, literacy studies has a well-established body of scholarship examining how literacy promotes systemic change or could contribute to desirable revisions of existing systems. To analyze the underlying presumptions about knowledge, literacy, and change in this scholarship, the author categorizes it in four strands. All four strands of scholarship posit a relationship between personal and systemic change and a means by which literacy practices mediate this relationship. The author analyzes each strand's presumptions about how this mediation occurs to argue that literacy researchers can expand the field's conceptual tool set by focusing on what she calls experiential knowledge. In doing so, she shows that literacy mediates personal and social change through the interaction among three types of knowledge: procedural, conceptual, and experiential. As she demonstrates in the subsequent section, all four strands of literacy scholarship concerned with systemic change emphasize the role of personal change to some degree, and so deal implicitly with the three knowledge types.
Disciplines
Education | English Language and Literature
Recommended Citation
Gorzelsky, Gwen. "Experiential knowledge: how literacy practices seek to mediate personal and systemic change." College English 75.4 (2013): 398-419.
Comments
© National Council of Teachers of English.