Lana's Writing Suggests A Powerful Metaphor For Literacy And Literacy Learning: Orientation

By Author: Stephen Covey
Total Articles: 74
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We can't treat all adult learners, like most mandated curricula treats them, as if they've come simply to "brush up" on basic skills and recover what is perceived as lost educational ground because, for students like Lana, they are discovering altogether new educational ground, new uses for literacy, for language, and for writing as learning. We might also consider Lana's case in relation to research on trauma, particularly psychologists like Pennebaker (1997, 2004; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986), who examine the health benefits—physical and mental—of writing about trauma and traumatic experiences.

Finding that individuals who keep traumatic experiences bottled up and secret tend to suffer from more serious health conditions at higher rates than people who talk about their experiences, Pennebaker initiated the first ever psychological study of expressive writing in the mid-80s, research that he continues today Replica Omega and that points to the therapeutic value of writing to reduce depressive symptoms and the anxiety associated with the ...
... stress of emotional trauma. Pennebaker's long program of research is not widely known in adult education but, nonetheless, suggests that designing curricula that allow students, like Lana, to write about past traumatic experiences and phases in life would move us closer to an educational model addressing the whole person, the mind and the body.

Lana's writing also suggests a powerful metaphor for literacy and literacy learning: orientation. This metaphor builds on Neilsen's (1989) definition of literacy as the innately human "process of learning to be at home in the world" (p. 2). Our worlds—past, present, and future—are constructed (and reconstructed) through language; literacy (written, spoken, read, or heard language) can be conceived of as processes of orientation to our worlds. A powerful component to this orientation is learning the various ways that language has already oriented us in relation to state and social power structures, or, in Lana's words, how someone else's pen has already "swallowed [us] whole."

The writings in her learning journal reflect past situations using metaphors, similes, sarcasm, humor, rhyme, and other tropes typically associated with more experienced writers. "I like to write. I write down quirky little poems Omega Replica Watches and stuff. I've been trying to work on similes and...what's that other one...metaphors." Her poems focus on family situations and relationships, and the simplicity of her lines and rhymes creates tension against the complexity and paradox of the narrator's realizations. The things that consume all her time are the very things that provide meaning and happiness to her life.