A Final Reflection - Theories/Models of Literacy

What has been most memorable in this course for me has been learning about digital literacy and multimodal composition, and how they are slowly changing the way we teach our students in the 21st century. Because I am both a student and an educator, these concepts are really relevant to me. As a student, I spend a ridiculous amount of time online dedicated to social networking and conducting research. As a teacher, I use the internet on a daily basis to research teaching practices, educational resources and communicate with others in my field to trade points and opinions. In fact, my classroom has an up-to computer system completely equipped with a document camera, Smartboard and printer. It is the only teaching style I am accustomed to because from the moment I started teaching, this technology has been available to me and I rely on it all the time. I cannot imagine teaching any other way, especially in our world, which is constantly connected online and exposed to tons of information. It was refreshing to see writers such as David Warlick, Bronwyn Williams and Cynthia Selfe advocate digital literacy and recognize that our teachers should be providing students with opportunities for multimodal composing.
Having to write an essay on my literacy learning experience was particularly meaningful for me because I really had to think back about the literacy practices that I underwent as a student and how they have shaped who I am as a student today. At first, this assignment seemed relatively easy. I figured it would be easy to sit and recall these memories, and when I did, I began questioning the literacy practices that my teachers we taking and wondering what kind of reader and writer I would be if I had had different experiences. I began thinking about how my literacy experience has influenced my own teaching practices. What similar methods do I use that l learned from my teachers? How has education and curriculum changed over the years? In what way am I sponsoring my students' learning? Finding the answers to these questions did not prove to be as simple as I had anticipated. But taking the time to reflect on my literacy past turned out to be very significant for me. I learned that my literacy sponsors had a great deal of influence on who I am as a reader and writer today.
When I would think of literacy, the first image that would pop into my head would be a hard cover textbook. I think that image speaks volumes about what constituted as literacy in my world. But after taking this class, my views have changed dramatically. Literacy is a much more complex idea and one that comes in many forms, genres and modalities. I am also more open to expression through literacy, and seeing how my students' work can blossom by embracing this idea. I want to continue learning more about digital literacy and the methods I can follow to support this concept. Like the scholars I read in this course, I believe in preparing my students for the future and without technology, I can't imagine doing that.

Bronwyn T. Williams "Shimmering Literacies"

When taking a Digital Literacies course this past summer, I couldn't help but feel a bit guilty when working on my final "paper". I was asked to create a video about anything I wanted and it needed to be 3 to 5 minutes in length. The video would then be showcased during our final class in front of all of my peers and would be uploaded to Youtube. By creating a "how-t0 read to your children" video, I would be creating an instructional video that would fullfill the course requirement but also be beneficial the work that I do. I admit that upon learning about this assignment, I felt a sense of relief about not having to write another paper that would eventually loose itself in the hard drive of my computer. And although I knew nothing about video production, I felt confident enough about the computer skills I already possessed and knew that they would help me in the making of my first online video.

Making my 5 minute and 54 second video took approximately 14 hours. It was a far cry from what I had imagined it to be. I learned from the moment I sat down to make it, that like writing an essay, it wasn't as simple as sitting down and starting to write the first sentence . Like much of the writing I do, creating a video required that I conduct some sort of research, write an outline and edit and revise. In fact, I followed all of the steps mandated by the writing process. I also began to pay significant amount of attention to all the variety of texts that I used.

I became obsessed about the images, sounds, and words I used and the role they played in the whole structure of the video. My guilt in creating the video stemmed from actually enjoying something that I was devoting so much time to and with the fact that it would be published through an avenue that would make it accessible to millions of people.

Shimmering Literacies demands that as teachers, we recognize the time and value of the online literacy that so many students are engaging on. More than ever before, students have become part of online communities that share their same interests and where they can participate in conversations with many audiences, across many different genres. This has given literacy and pop culture a whole new meaning. Where literacy was once defined as reading and writing printed texts, it has now become part of whole new domain of resources including print, sound, images and video. Students have begun using these modalities to critique, analyze, recreate and respond to a variety of texts. As a result, students have developed their reading and writing outside of the school environment. In today's society, teachers cannot afford to ignore what this new development.

The article makes reference to several television shows that have extended interaction with its audience by providing a wiki, message boards, forums and websites where people can comment on characters, plots and even write their own parts of the show. These are just an example of the variety of opportunities that pop culture and digital literacies can offer. Aside from the ability to distribute these texts to a mass audience, this new literacy provides one of the fastest methods of production and publication.

Incorporating popular culture with these new online technologies can revamp our teaching of literacy, and can continue to cultivate our students' growing participation in multiple modes of communication.

Remember Writing, Remember Reading

When we were asked to complete an assignment where we had to recall our literacy learning experience, mixed opinions could be heard from the students of our class. Some had envisioned this assignment to be relatively easy in only having to recall their own reading and writing experiences. Others were immediately stricken with panic at the thought of being unable to recall enough memories of their childhood literacy experiences. Personally, I found myself in the latter situation. I had never taken the time to look back at my learning and consider how it happened or why it occurred the way that it did. However, once I began probing myself with questions about the history of my learning, I was floored with all the memories of instances when I encountered reading and writing as a child and how important these were in transforming me into the person I am today.

Deborah Brandt's chapter Remember Writing, Remember Reading explores the literacy history of forty adults she that she interviewed from 1992-1993. These interviews produced accounts that brought forth many memories and attitudes towards reading and writing. One thing that Brandt immediately discovered was the positive association that most people had of reading. Many had pleasurable moments in their childhood where books were considered highly valuable, and often given as gifts during special occasions. Families also encouraged their children to read and took part in activities like story time before bed and the reading of religious texts such as the bible. These became part of family rituals and traditions that were carried on for years. Another interesting fact that Brandt found was that these families typically purchased books and magazines, rather than borrowing books from the library. Considering these people came from middle-class working families, purchasing books demonstrated the value placed on books and their possession over literacy. Books owned could be kept of years to come and passed down from generation to generation.

When Brandt began asking questions about writing, her interviewees attitudes began to shift. Writing brought sullen thoughts of discomfort, loneliness and indifference. Most people had not considered writing to be a fruitful activity. Unlike their happy dispositions about reading, writing brought negative memories and in some cases rebellious ones. Harry Carlton recalled writing all the bad words he knew, while Jan Halstrom remembers writing on the library wall. It was apparent that writing did not receive the same sponsorship that reading had during their childhood.

After taking a moment to review my paper on my literacy experience, I realized that the experiences and the sponsorships I encountered during my childhood shaped my own teaching methods. I am interested in reading the essays written by my peers to see what kinds of learning they underwent and how their own literacy was made accessible

Thoughts on Selfe

Cynthia L. Selfe’s article The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing centers on the concept that eductors must teach their students a variety of methods of composition in order to participate in a world that is constantly changing. Her article’s introductory paragraph opens up describing what could be seen on a college campus. She refers to students communicating through various technological forms and even references the Ipod Nano as the gadget that no student could live without. But this article, which was published in June of 2009, is already outdated when you consider the changes that the Nano has undergone in the two and half years since this article was released. It is now half of its original size and has picture and video recording features. This in itself is proof that as time passes, our world is evolving and we must prepare our students for those changes. In this case those changes call for the teaching of multiple composing modalities.

By providing students with just one method of composing, we are limiting their ability to communicate with different communities, which in the long run will hinder their intellectual development. Teachers who place all their focus on writing, are asking their students to ignore the values of other cultures who don’t necessarily see text as the lone system of expression. Selfe particularly refers to Hispanic and Native American cultures that see aurality as an immensely significant system of expression. Storytelling, songs, poetry, and speeches are just some of the literary practices that are important in these cultural communities, and which have been largely undermined in the twentyieth century.

English Departments all over the country have chosen writing as their primary system of compositional rhetoric because silent reading and text analysis have become dominant practices in American universities. Selfe clearly states in her article that her argument is not to ask educators to prefer one method of composing rather than the other, but to promote the use and respect of multiple modalities so that students can engage in the discourse of different communities. What is interesting about Selfe's article is that while it is makes this case for expression, she uses several examples of aurality by asking its reader to detach itself from her written text and visit webpages that feature audio poems and audio essays. These features help facilitate her argument while at the same time, modeling the use of multiple modalities.

Response: Just Girls

When I read the first chapter of Margaret Finder’s book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High, I couldn’t help but relate the reading to my own experience and make connections that I would have never made without this reading. What stood out to me most was the reading’s resonating theme: that who we are and who we turn out to be is a direct representation of the literary experiences we have in during our adolescent years. Margaret Finder states that “literacy was a means of self-representation...the girls used literacy to control, moderate, and measure their growth into adulthood” (23). This is to say that girls use literacy to help shape their identities and help fit the female role that has already been designed for them by our society.

One example that comes to mind is own action of keeping a diary from the age of about eleven years old. Somehow (and I attribute this the teenage programs I watched on television) I had developed the idea that all girls had a diary in which they wrote their most intimate secrets, poured out their frustrations and expressed their undying love for six grade boys. I went as far as begging my father to purchase a diary for me at a local store, and then proceeded to write in it every night before going to bed. This diary became clear method of helping me cope with the changes I was experiencing as I entered my adolescence years. This diary became a top-secret book that I would sleep with under my pillow in fear that my older brother would expose the issues I was experiencing to my parents. It also became the center of many of our fights as he who would do anything he could to get a hold my diary, read my private thoughts and then use the information to blackmail me. This great concern of keeping my diary hush-hush was quickly forgotten about the minute I went to school. It was then that the diary took a whole new position. I used the diary to attract the friendship of other girls who saw the act of keeping a diary as sense of freedom and maturity. And although my friends has little interest in writing in the classroom, this did not apply when it came to writing in my diary, to which they gladly contributed. Though I didn’t see it that way then, the diary became sort of like our own written conversation where we would respond to each others writing. I remember going as far as writing poems and drawing images that went with my poetry. In one particular time, my friend Lila and I began writing a story whose main character was based on our own lives. Being the owner of this book gave me a sense of power among my peers that I believed I used to develop the perception my friends had of me . This is something that Finders talks about when she states that “early adolescent girls turned to literacy as a tangible form of power” (24). But this was a very different perception from the one my parents had of me, who could not come to terms with the changes I was enduring as I entered my teenage years.

Can You Read This?

A few of weeks ago, our class was discussing the definition of literacy. We agreed that literacy has more than one meaning. Literacy includes decoding, comprehension, phonological awareness and much more. But stop and think for a moment, what process does the brain of a literate person undergo whenever it reads a text? Why can some people read this? Why can't others? This online article talks a little bit about the following emails many of us have received:

#1

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghi t pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

#2

If you can read this you have a strong mind: 
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Response to Warlick

I've heard all types of predictions about the end of the world and while these can be frightening, David Warlick's assumptions about technology in the 21st Century were truly astounding to me. For one, his mention about a device where we can display student work digitally and then roll it up whenever we like is definitely an something to dream about. In Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, Warlick wants to make it evident that literacy is changing rapidly in the 21st Century, a fact that is inevitable and one that we must dutiful prepare our students for. In fact, it is changing to so fast that many of his assumptions about certain inventions have become real. Today, we call these ipods, iphones, and ipads. But Warlick's intent is not to frighten his reader, but rather to culture him on this new phenomenon and ask that it be embraced so that it serves to develop our students.
While Warlick is a clear proponent of technology, he still maintains his notion that the relationship between the teacher and the student is a special one that must be conserved in the midst of all these technological advancements. While we must utilize these tools to better the development of our students, we should never loose sight of their learning.