Mirabelli’s Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers

Mirabelli’s view on literacy is different to that of traditional literacy due to looking at the issue from a waiter or waitress perspective. In the article Mirabelli states that most societal institutions defined literacy as being something categorized through test taking; this definition of literacy is what society deems as its formal educational standard. Without this society labels one illiterate because of the lack of “formal education”. Mirabelli’s view on literacy takes on the characteristics of waiting tables. This view allows a person to think outside the box and establish for themselves what literacy truly means. Mirabelli believes people should reexamine or redefine the way literacy is understood because even though someone works as a waiter or waitress it does not mean that they are less than or lack skill. Literacy is something that everyone can obtain and a job should not determine whether a person is or is not knowledgeable or literate.
“As earlier chapters in this book have noted, Gee (1991:6) a key proponent of this conception of literacy explains that to be literate means to have control of “a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’” (Mahiri). This section of the article explains what literacy means and how it pertains to a person’s ability to perform or carrying themselves in a specific setting. This fits