How Cognitive Pedagogy Shapes Different Kinds of Literacy

The different types of literacies that we promote reflect writing pedagogies based on specific ideologies. One type of pedagogy, based on cognitive psychology or devoted to cognitive processes, has affected various types of literacies in different ways. Although, cognitive pedagogies are only one type of writing theories which influences the different kinds of literacies, understanding this particular type sheds light on how pedagogies and literacies interact.

C.H. Knoblauch claims that there are many different definitions of literacy and each indicates a specific ideology and agenda. According to him, there are four types of literacy: personal growth, functional, critical and cultural. Functional literacy provides everyday living skills, such as being able to balance a checkbook; Cultural literacy is awareness of heritage, such as knowledge of the U.S. Constitution; Personal growth literacy involves a person's self-actualization, such as awareness of self-esteem; and Critical Literacy is concerned with transforming social conditions, such as political activism.

Sometimes proponents of these different types of literacies have debates based on the underlying ideologies. Michelle Baliff agrees with Knoblauch, and also James Berlin, when she says that pedagogies are never ideologically innocent. For Baliff, the inner-directed pedagogies, expressive and cognitive are suspect because they don't sufficiently emancipate women.

E.D. Hirsh, on the other hand, supports cognitive pedagogies by claiming that it has revealed the way mental processes work. In his perspective, the advances in cognitive psychology help promote cultural literacy and functional literacy with Standard English and correctness as a goal. On the other hand, Ann Berthoff is also concerned with mental processes but argues that chaos is desirable in order to make meaning. It isn't solely an inner directed activity because meaning must be communicated to others. This perspective would be more concerned with personal growth, being able to make meaning out of one's experience, and critical literacy, being able to transform meaning into action.

Linda Flower also supported cognitive pedagogies but rejects attempts to oversimplify the processes into codifiable stages. Mental processes are always devised in the act of writing, and the goal is to help writers carry out this process more effectively-this perspective can easily be used in Functional literacy.