Disabled Literacy?

            I thoroughly enjoyed reading “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative skills at Home and School” by Shirley Brice Heath. In this particular article, Heath analyzes the home literacies of families from three communities: Maintown (just the average American town), Roadville (a predominately white town that thrives on a mill), and Trackton (a predominately black town that thrives on a mill). While doing her research, Heath was focusing on how these three communities define certain childhood events. Although the full article is interesting, one area in particular really caught my attention. While talking about Maintown, Heath discusses the “Maintown ways”, which Maintown kids “were expected to learn….in these nuclear households” (52). Although these literacy steps would be great for a child who was considered “normal," what about those who were not or could not be considered “normal." I am talking about personal experience here because I did not speak until I was 3 or 4. As a result, despite the fact that I was basically reading when I started to talk, I would be behind according to these “Maintown ways." For example, I would not be able to “announce [my] own factual and fictive narratives” (Heath 53) because I was not able to talk.

            Deriving from my personal experience, I went down the rabbit hole of thinking about how the definitions of literacies would differ from those who suffer with disabilities that would disrupt their normal development. After all, those are visually impaired would not be able to “give attention to books” (Heath 52) because they cannot see the book or literacy material and those who are deaf cannot “listen and wait as an audience” (Heath 53) to a book. I do not want to be hard on Heath’s research: after all, it was published in 1982 and the field of disability studies was still in its infancy. But, this is a crucial lapse in Heath’s research that is so glaring to me. I had to do some primitive research into how those afflicted with disabilities define literacy and was able to find a good website called Perkins Learning. This website offers plenty of resources for those looking to improve the literacy skills of people with disabilities. According to this website, “literacy may call for options other than Braille or print” (“Literacy Students Multiple Disabilities Deafblindness”). Maybe the openminded nature that allows for multiple literacies also expands the definition for literacy. I guess the biggest takeaway from doing this little bit of thinking and research was that I want to keep looking into this. That way, more literacy theorists can realize that their research is not encompassing for everybody.

Work Cited
Heath, Shirley Brice. "What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School." Lang. Soc. Language in Society 11.01 (1982) 49-76. Web.