So we will continue to pursue the goals of this course, with you all taking more and more of the responsibility for leading us toward those goals. I want to use this for Week 5 reading response prompts, too. This will be brief. We started with ideas about theory and practice because those are the twin focuses of the course. I think we discovered that those concepts are bound together in synergistic, interactive, interrelated ways, that they mutually affect and shape one another.
Functional literacy is necessary for all others.
The other two categories, though both always building on functional and cultural literacies, are more advanced levels of literacy. We are still conceptually unsure about our use of this concept. They are not. They are constructed categories, meant to help us conceptualize the idea of literacy and how those ideas affect our work as teachers. But rhetoric is a very complex concept, as our few readings so amply demonstrated.