rethink what it means to be literate and how one acquires literacy. To spend
more while remaining ensconced in present-day ideological perspectives that
view literacy and illiteracy as monolithic, polar opposites will lead, I would
suggest, to but a continuation of the present state of affairs, a status quo
marked by minority disenfranchisement, a high drop-out rate, and a continua-
tion of what I would characterize as an exclusionary literacy.

What is an exclusionary literacy? An exclusionary literacy seeks itself as the
model for what should be. Embedded in a modernist ideology, an exclusionary
literacy "claims transcendental and transhistorical status" ( Giroux, 1988). Sit-
uated centrally, an exclusionary literacy views itself as a universal form of read-
ing, writing, and language use. Discourse forms situated at the boundaries of
this centrally located form are designated as deviant, as lacking in rationality,
and as in need of eradication. Those situated outside the confines of the mono-
lithic, exclusionary literacy are designated as the Other, alien and troubled,
lawless and frustrated, and marked by an inherent failure to learn to read and
write, and an inability to use language appropriately. Also, although many do
step beyond blaming the individual for this failure, as does Barnicle, and move
to a recognition that institutions and institutional policies serve to perpetuate
the socalled literacy problem, few move beyond this level of critique and truly
problematize the very nature of literacy itself and, in turn, problematize how
literacy is acquired. An exclusionary literacy still designates the literacy prob-
lem as one that, in the words of James Paul Gee, "resides within individuals"
( 1989, p. 5 ). As a result, the solution to the literacy problem is sought "in terms
of what is going on inside individuals' minds, what skills they have failed to ob-
tain, and how they can acquire them." What we need to do then, as a society,
according to Barnicle and others, is simply teach people to read and write, and
of course, to use language appropriately. Literacy is then viewed as the decod-
ing and encoding of language, a skill, decontextualized from a historical, social,
and cultural context. This decontextualized, unproblematized view of literacy
does not question what is to be read, what forms writing will take, and what
language or dialect will be used in the process. Nor does this decontextualized,
unproblematized view of literacy consider the issue of student voice. A multi-
plicity of voices--those of women, men, girls, and boys, working, lower, mid-
dle, and upper classes, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans,
among others--need to be heard in order for individuals to participate fully in
the process of acquiring and, with hope, reshaping literacy.

By reorienting the focus of discussion from differences in individual per-
formance, that is, the inability to read and write, to a concern for the social /
cultural / historical context of literacy, those involved in reconceptualizing and
rewriting literacy move away from the assumption that individual performance
is related to individual talent, and turn instead to the recognition that success
or lack of success in school and the "failure" to learn to read and write may be
more directly related to the distance the learner's own discourse community is
from the discourse of the school, a discourse reflective of middle- and upper-

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