Suzanne Rumsey's "Heritage Literacy"

Just today I received an email from a former student nearing the end of his student teaching experience. As Ryan expresses his interest in graduate studies in literacy, I remembered a long-ago interest I had in literacy and decided to explore literacy again. I came home to find that the new issue of College Composition and Communication had arrived and one article was on literacy. Because of Ryan, I read Suzanne Kesler Rumsey’s “Heritage Literacy: Adoption, Adaptation, and Alienation of Multimodal Literacy Tools.”

I like the article. Rumsey begins by sharing an interview/visit with an Amish neighbor Mary and her thirteen-year-old daughter Elaine. Although the two of them are devout Amish, the sixth grade Elaine attends public school until the eighth grade when Amish finish their formal education. Elaine likes and feels comfortable in school as Amish. She does all the work other children do including computers. Her mother approves because she knows computers are valuable for those who work outside the Amish community, and Mary clarifies, “. . . you have to be able to communicate with other people too.”

Rumsey then discusses four “types” of literacy portrayed through this interview.

1.“Elaine is engaged in mainstream academic literacy practices” (575).
2.“Elaine is learning computer literacy to some extent” (575).
3.“Elaine exhibits. . . . Amish literacy, or the reading and writing of texts particularly associated with the Amish way of life and beliefs within their ‘immediate community” (575).
4.“Elaine also exhibits. . . ‘heritage literacy’” (575).

The rest of Rumsey’s article explains what she means by “heritage literacy.” Rumsey defines heritage literacy as “how people transfer literacy knowledge from generation to generation and how certain practices, tools, and concepts are adapted, adopted, or alienated from use, depending on the context” (575).

She illustrates and elaborates on heritage literacy with the extended metaphor of quilt making in her own family for four generations of women from her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and herself. Her great-grandmother was Amish but left the church as an adult, and Rumsey demonstrates how those Amish roots pass down through generations, exemplified through quilting—a literacy of heritage.

She states, “Literacy practices pass back and forth between generations; the old inform the new, the new impact the old” (577). And she further clarifies that “heritage literacy shows interdependence between generations as the new generation depends on the old for their intellectual inheritances, and the old depends on the new for innovations and adaptations, as well as adoptions of literacy traditions” (578).

With her quilt examples, she shows how the color schemes and patterns still reveal an Amish identity and a sense of Amish order even if the family has not been Amish for three generations. She also explains how quilting exhibits multimodality because it uses several modes to create meaning—text, pattern, color, visual, image, and space.

Rumsey points out that heritage literacy takes place outside of school settings, that it is most often informal learning. She briefly uses cooking and family recipes as an example of heritage literacy where rarely are their formal instructions but observing, modeling, practicing through trial and error.

So Ryan and his wife Rachel are establishing their own family heritage literacy with their own little ones as they both reach back to their past generations to shape the lives of the next generation.

Of course, I couldn’t help but think of turning the” heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6).

This article also emphasizes for me again the value of the Literacy Me-Quilt assignment we do in English 450 Rhetorical Studies. The inspiration for the assignment comes from a quilt my own Grandmother Birdie Keller made for our wedding gift. The students are to create at least nine quilt blocks representing different literacy moments in their lives. After completing the quilt, they write a reflective essay explaining the significance of that experience in their lives.

This is a good article to renew my interest in literacy studies.

Rumsey, Suzanne Kesler. "Heritage Literacy: Adoption, Adaptation, and Alienation of Multimodal Literacy Tools." College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 573-586.