Summer-Fall 2001
C is for Crain: Mapping the ABCs
Photo by Diana Watters
PATRICIA CRAIN
Education
Ph.D. '96 Columbia U, English and Comparative literature
M.A. '89, M.Phil. '91, Columbia U
B.A. '70 Bennington College
Professional history
2000- assistant professor, English, U of M
1996-2000, assistant professor, Princeton
Honors and awards
McKnight Land-Grant Professor, 2001-2003
Bicentennial Preceptorship, Princeton, 1999-2000
Spencer Foundation Fellowship in the History of Education, Newberry Library, 1998-99
Professional activities
2001 Conference for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing: presentation on literacy and the history of U.S. election ballots.
Lead scholar, "Artifacts of Childhood: 500 Years of Children's Books," Exhibition, Newberry Library, Chicago
Major publication
The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America, Stanford U Press, 2000.
Work in Progress
"Alphabetical Disorders: The Origins of American Literacy"
"Who owns the letters of the alphabet? It sounds like a silly question, but courts around the world are grappling with it"
In her class "Literacy and American Cultural Diversity: The Politics and Poetics of Literacy," English professor Patricia Crain sends her undergraduates on "literacy walks" around campus, asking them to look at spaces, signs, and symbols through the "lens of literacy."
In Crain's view, literacy is in part "an exercise in looking": Learning to read, she says, "means first and foremost learning how to look." On their walks, her students relearn the alphabet, in a sense. They see how the alphabet in its many uses and configurations--in elevators, on street corners, at building entrances--shapes and defines their daily lives.
Students return from their walks with a heightened appreciation for the extent to which "literacy" is not just about reading books. Indeed, it is not a single skill at all but many--one reason why Crain much prefers the plural, "literacies," to encompass not only the multiplicity of languages and cultures but also a broader and more complex bundle of understandings of the world we inhabit every day.
Crain has made it her business as a scholar to study the alphabet in its successive historical incarnations as an instrument of socialization and acculturation. Smiling at the irony that a literary scholar should "narrow her expertise to the ABCs," she explains that studying the role of alphabetic instruction over the years--including the pictographic forms of letters in primers and picture books--can illuminate not only the history of language education but also the social and political landscape.
What's important is not the alphabet itself, she says, but "what gets recorded along with the alphabet"--systems of power and privilege, moral lessons, prescriptions for acceptable behavior, culturally embedded ideology and values.
Her own literacy is very important to her, says Crain, adding that she has spent much of her life lost in books. "I was always an ideal reader. I even loved postcards and road signs, anything with words. Eventually I began to wonder, What's reading for, anyway? How did we come to see reading as a central value?" And so she went back to the basics--the alphabet, and beginning instruction in reading--and began to critique the very thing she loved.
It wasn't until the eighteenth century, Crain notes, that the pedagogical alphabet emerged as a tool of mass literacy. "Seemingly neutral alphabetic figures" were freighted with all the baggage of a culture steeped in piety and bound by a rigid moral code. Literacy itself became a touchstone of virtue, social status, and good citizenship as what Crain calls the "tyranny of literacy" took hold. The man or woman of letters occupied a kind of exalted cultural status, and literacy became inextricably liked to mass consumption and the distribution and accumulation of wealth. It became a marker of class and status, and an instrument of social reform.
The price of literacy
Literacy comes with a price, says Crain. When students talk about their own experiences with literacy, many recount stories of what Crain calls their "loss of innocence about reading." The "primary reading experience" of childhood--being read to--is for some people a sweet memory, says Crain. But the process of acquiring literacy--learning to read and write--is fraught with peril. Given the high stakes (grades, gold stars, approval of teachers and peers) and the constant "diagnosing and labeling," some students experience real trauma.
When students learn that there is a "right" way to read a text, they "feel bullied because they don't get to have their own interpretation," says Crain, adding that the trick is to help preserve whatever magic remains of "early reading moments" by allowing students to "own" the text without unleashing a kind of interpretive anarchy.
Literacy as commonly understood and practiced has "an imperial aspect," says Crain. Given or withheld by those in power, it defines "who's in and who's out," who gets heard and who doesn't--just as access to computers determines who can and cannot participate in the new economy.
Crain even takes to task E.B. White's The Elements of Style, long considered the sacred text of American literacy, or what she calls "American plainstyle." There is, she says, "a certain smug, middlebrow 'we' that becomes the strict, monocultural model of [English] literacy" and that, in effect, trumps all other literacies.
Pointing to White's principles of "cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity" in writing, Crain notes that this "secular, pietistic" model excludes anyone whose "literacy" does not measure up, even suggesting a kind of moral lapse in anyone whose writing is "unclean."
At home in Minnesota
A transplant from New York, Crain has found Minnesota a congenial place. While occasionally lonesome for New York's "chaotic street energy," she is drawn to the public service mission of the University and to the state's populist temperament.
"The University of Minnesota is open and egalitarian," she says. "That's its point. It's not meant to train an economic elite."
As for teaching, it's one of Crain's greatest joys--and her service learning course was "one of the highlights" of her first year, she says. As a graduate student, Crain worried that she would dislike teaching. Today she says, "I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this. I feel downright sly."
The down side? Assigning grades. In the epilogue to her acclaimed book The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America, Crain shares the tribulations of grading: "Marking--what a word! what an activity!--makes me experience myself most vividly as ... a conduit for the institution's power over [my students] ....
"Encoded in these [letter grades] is the entire social contract of Enlightenment and nineteenth century pedagogy, with all of its assumptions about forming children and reforming society."