Cultural literacy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cultural literacy is the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions and informal content which creates and constitutes a dominant culture. From being familiar with street signs to knowing historical reference to understanding the most recent slang, literacy demands interaction with the culture and reflection of it. A knowledge of a canonical set of literature is not valuable when engaging with others in a society if the knowledge stops at the end of the text — as life is interwoven with art, expression, history and experience, cultural literacy requires the broad range of trivia and the use of that trivia in the creation of a communal language and a collective knowledge. Cultural literacy stresses the knowledge of those pieces of information which content creators will assume the audience already possesses.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- E. D. Hirsch Jr. (1987). Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-43095-X.
- Christenbury, Leila "Cultural Literacy: A Terrible Idea Whose Time Has Come" The English Journal 78.1 (January 1989), pp. 14-17.
- Broudy, Harry S. "Cultural Literacy and General Education" Journal of Aesthetic Education 24.1, (Special Issue: Cultural Literacy and Arts Education,Spring, 1990), pp. 7-16.
- Anson, Chris M. "Book Lists, Cultural Literacy, and the Stagnation of Discourse" The English Journal 77.2 (February 1988), pp. 14-18.
- Zurmuehlen, Marilyn "Serious Pursuit of Cultural Trivialization" Art Education 42.6 (November 1989), pp. 46-49.
- Simpson, Alan "The Uses of "Cultural Literacy": A British View" Journal of Aesthetic Education 25.4, 25th Anniversary Issue Winter, 1991), pp. 65-73.
- Reedy, Jeremiah "Cultural Literacy and the Classics" The Classical Journal 84.1 (October 1988), pp. 41-46.
- Murray, Denise E. Diversity as Resource. Redefining Cultural Literacy (Alexandria, Virginia) 1994.
