Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis

In “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis” John Trimbur writes that phrases such as “Johnny Can’t Write” are powerful because “they condense a broad range of cultural, social, and economic tensions into one central image” (p. 277).

But why do we care about Johnny’s writing abilities?

Trimbur argues that literacy “transformations” via cultural shifts bring about crisis. He writes:

 Literacy crises are always strategic: They perform certain kinds of ideological work by giving a name to and thereby mastering (rhetorically if not actually) cultural anxieties released by demographic shifts, changes in the means of production, new relations and conflicts between classes and groups of people, and reconfigurations of cultural hegemony. By representing literacy in crisis, the discourse of literacy externalizes these deeper structural changes and shifts in the political balance of power and refigures them in the problem of language and education--of learning how to read and write (pg. 286).

Trimbur tells us that the literacy crisis discourse waxes and wanes. Likewise, the achievement gap discourse comes and goes. I tracked the achievement gap discourse over a couple of years in the Boston Globe. Over a four-year period (1999-2003), the Boston Globe ran an article about the achievement gap every 7-10 days. I noticed a rise in the instances of the achievement gap discourse as Massachusetts moved closer to requiring its MCAS test for high school graduation.