Last week I, along with five of my peers, performed a literacy dig on a public bus. We rode the bus for about half an hour, observing a) the physical environment including the layout of the bus and any artifacts, b) the people on the bus and what they were doing, c) spoken conversation on the bus, d) vocabulary, written or spoken, unique to the bus, and e) evidence of literacy on the bus, i.e., what reading and writing are required in this environment.
I specifically focused on the type of speech present on the bus. In general, it was difficult to grasp the complete content of conversations over the roar of the engines, but taking the tone of conversations together with body language and ritual forms of hailing, the bus is clearly a place where "regulars" catch up with each other and compare notes or seek connections with newcomers. There were, for example, a man and a woman with a baby in a carriage covered with bath towels (it was very cold that day). The man stood attending the carriage while the woman sat some distance away. A second woman inquired about the baby (age, gender, name) before going on to describe her own children. Somewhat unsolicited, she offered, "They grow up too fast. I got a fourteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old." The man, evidently aware of the social literacy required in this environment offered responses that seemed calculated to provoke the least amount of further conversation without giving offense. While he was not particularly eager to share personal details about the child with this second woman (who, he may have noticed, wore work boots that must have been four or five sizes too large for her, the interpretation of which fact I leave to the reader), he was apparently aware that the bus is an environment where people are expected to share, a place that is only semi-public where physical proximity and coincident schedules mandate a certain level of intimacy.
There were another two women sitting in adjacent seats although there was ample room for them to find a less crowded arrangement. Although I could not fully make out the content of her speech, the tone of the woman sitting in the aisle seat suggested that she was complaining about something. The woman sitting near the window (and consequently boxed in by the first woman) slumped away from the first woman with her head leaning against the glass. Toward the beginning of this conversation the second woman dutifully indicated her interest with monosyllabic comments. As the conversation went on, these signals of interest became less and less frequent though the other woman's speech did not abate as a consequence. It would seem that the woman in the window seat, like the man above, while not particularly interested in the conversation, understood the expectation that she participate to some degree. I thought initially that her drop in interest-signaling was calculated to discourage further conversation, but the cheerfulness with which she offered her parting salutation suggests to me that she simply realized that the other woman was content to go on with or without much response and that her interest-signaling need not be frequent to keep the conversation going and avoid awkwardness.
At this point a man boarded the bus with grocery bags and sat down opposite the woman with the oversized boots.
"Hey, how are you?" she asked.
"Cold." was the response.
"Other than that?" From there what had initially seemed a terse interaction opened into a lengthy and warm session. The conversation initially focused on work. The woman had recently started a new job which she hastened to add started at $7.50/hour. "A job is a job." was the response. And this was the general subject of the conversation, work and money, with an overall tone of commiseration tempered by a stoic disposition toward labor. The two compared their work schedules, how to get overtime pay, how much money they each spent on Christmas gifts, the best methods of transportation to and from home, and how long they had been employed at certain jobs (eighteen years at his present job which fact seemed to inspire a new sense of reverence from the woman). The conversation then turned toward the health of family members with the woman detailing the recent death of her father and the man offering his stepmother's dementia. Again, there seemed to be a certain degree of pride in the adversity they faced though this pride did not manifest itself as any sort of one-upmanship, but rather as a sort of comradery. In this instance one sees most clearly that the bus offers not only a means of conveyance, but also a social support system.
But beyond being socially literate about the forms of interaction expected on the bus, what other types of literacy are required in this setting? Upon consultation with my peers, we observed that although the bus was plastered with warnings, notices, advertisements, maps and timetables (which require a very particular type of reading), these artifacts did not seem to be used by the habitual rider. In fact we speculated that the types of literacy most immediately useful in this setting would be the use of maps or timetables which utilize visual literacy and numeracy more than traditional literacy, as well as the ability to read the landscape. In particular, reading the landscape for propriety logos (i.e., the "golden arches" or the eponymous bell of Taco Bell) might be the most practical form of literacy.
That thought might be enough to raise the hackles of any Language Arts teacher, but if more proof is needed that traditional forms of literacy are strange in this setting, consider the quizzical looks I received. I did not stand out in any particular. I was not particularly well- or poorly-dressed. I was not very young or old, or thin or obese. I was not in any way remarkable to look at except that I was writing down my notes. Try as I may to look perplexed, as if I were trying to remember that last item for my shopping list, or to look engrossed, as if I were writing a letter to a friend, try as I may to somehow normalize the behavior of writing, people just kept staring at that notebook.
No comments:
Post a Comment