Cynthia Selfe: "First, I think we need to continue to resist all projects and systems that serve to establish an overly-narrow, official version of literacy practices or skills. Such projects and systems simply serve to reward the literacy practices of dominant groups and punish the practices of others. They serve to reproduce a continuing and oppressive cycle of illiteracy, racism, and poverty in this country and in others.

This means that on every curriculum committee we serve, in every standards document that we contribute to, in every outcomes assessment that we participate in, on every syllabus that we construct-we have to lead the way in insisting on a diverse range of literacy practices and values, rather than one, narrow and official form of literacy. We have made a start at this effort in the standards document of the NCTE, but in the CCCCs we need to go much further in helping both future teachers and those already in classrooms understand why this work is so important and what implications their successes and failures may have."