What I'm Reading: December 2016
I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.
-Maya Angelou
Allen, N. (November 2016). So Many Literacies. The Council Chronicle (NCTE), pgs. 10-13.
This article summarizes author Lauren Rosenberg's work developing writing skills with adult learners. Rosenberg questions the label "illiterate" for those who cannot read or write yet.
'Illiteracy' suggests illness, and not just individual illness but some kind of social illness. Our culture frames the nonliterate as being lesser. It's important to get away from the idea that a person who doesn't have the benefits of reading and writing has something wrong with them.
Her approach for working with adults is to use their personal narratives as a way to develop their reading and writing skills. These students saw themselves not only as victims of circumstance, but also as agents for change. Through their writing, they were able to "re-story" their lives.
It takes us back to an idea that originates in narrative psychology. You can use writing to reexamine and even correct an impression. You can change how you see yourself, and how others see you. You can correct the narrative that's been used against you and that's portrayed you in a way you don't want to be portrayed.
Through this very personal literacy experience, students were also able to build their reading and writing skills.
Hogan, J. J. (December 2016). Troubling a "Cultured Hell": Empowering Adolescent Voices through Youth Participatory Action Research. Voices from the Middle (NCTE), 39-41.
Jamie Jordan Hogan is an instructional coach and former middle school English teacher. To engage her students, she guided them to conduct action research on a topic they were passionate about during their research writing unit. No topic seemed to be off the table; students elected to research race, class, sexuality, and immigration policy, as examples. Hogan questions why teachers do not embrace this approach in English classrooms.
The burning question for us as educators: What are we so afraid of? Is it a fear of a personal conflict? A fear of judgment? A fear that we may be obligated to confront our own individual prejudices and biases?
The teacher applies the steps of action research, including developing a driving question, creating an action plan, facilitating data collection, and presenting their findings. Students used a variety of digital and traditional tools to conduct their research. Face to face communication, such as peer dialogue and interviews, were critical for success. The outcomes, beyond their final products, was a feeling of empowerment as learners.
Students do not want to be mere passersby in their own education. They want to make their mark and have an active voice in the communities in which they live.
O'Byrne, W. I. (November/December 2016). Scaffolding Digital Creation. Literacy Today (ILA), pgs. 14-15.
A literacy professor offers three steps for moving students from consumers to creators of digital content. O'Byrne sees many educational activities today positioning students in the former role. However, to be able to truly understand the web, he feels it is critical that students understand how content is created as well as the active role they might take.
For students...their ability to best use these literacies is central to our collective future. Educators should continue to show that they can work with students to understand and prepare them for these digital spaces and beyond.
The pathway of consumption to curation to creation is one way teachers can provide the necessary support for students to build with and use digital literacy applications. Voicethread, Pinterest, and Hypothes.is are three tools referenced in the article.
Souto-Manning, M. (2016). Honoring and Building on the Rich Literacy Practices of Young Bilingual and Multilingual Learners. The Reading Teacher, 70(3), 263–271.
Similar to the first article in this review, the author points out the negative connotations of referring to students with labels couched in deficit-based foundations, such as "English as Second Language (ESL) learners".
All of these labels—LEP, ESL, ESOL, ENL, and ELL—have one thing in common: They position children as being inferior or having deficits.
Souto-Manning prefers the term "emergent bilingual" to describe students who are already fluent in one language and learning English - an additional language - in school. Through this mindset, these students can now be seen as having an advantage. A powerful strategy for incorporating students' different backgrounds within instruction is ensuring literature that is read aloud and available in classrooms represents a diversity of cultures.
Literacies, Reframed
So much of our literacy curriculum in schools today is focused on skill development and strategy acquisition. Do students have the ability to decode unfamiliar text? Can they use context clues to understand a new word? Are students able to organize their ideas from what they have read and what they know into a cogent article or essay? All are important to know and be able to do. Yet they are not the function of reading and writing. They are the tools that open the door to literacy. But an open door is only the beginning.
The purpose of reading and writing can be broken down into one of two main purposes: to entertain and to acquire and transmit knowledge. Often (at least for me anyway), I read and write for a mix of both purposes. For example, when I read a work of excellent fiction, I usually end the book with a better understanding of myself and others. Likewise, when I write pieces such as this, I am frequently considering my audience and how I can keep them engaged in reading to the end (you are still with me, right?).
All of these articles summarized here promote literacy as more than just learning how to read or write. These practices can be life-changing. Illiterate adults learn to reframe their identities through writing. Adolescents discover the power of language to explore wonderings relevant to their lives. Students start to see themselves as producers of knowledge instead of merely consumers. Immigrants are positioned as experts within the context of school, seeing their bilingualism as an advantage instead of a deficit.
These topics are often explored in the current literacy journals and published research. I subscribe to many of these resources because the standards do not adequately address them. By becoming more knowledgeable, we can serve our students even better.