Taking Stock of Literacy: The Possibilities
I believe that fostering a love of reading is critical to reading success. With all of the different forms of literacy and technology tools available in this digital era I am excited to learn how to use tools that require students to interact with each other in a meaningful way, and maintain the direct reading and writing instruction I know is critical for our students success. The connection that when a child enjoys reading they will read more is well supported within the literary field. “Social interaction is essential in learning to read [and] thinking and talking promote students understanding” (School District No. 44 North Vancouver, 1999, p.217). As I was watching the video Building Global Mindedness (Curriculum Services Canada, 2011) I watched the teacher foster student engagement and motivation through using relevant, real world topics that required students to be active problem solvers. I noticed how she was teaching direct literacy skills though having the students look at the different headlines but using a topic that was interesting.
In the online Ted Talks video ‘The Birth of a Word’ one of the goals for collecting a quarter of a million hours of video was searching for patterns and understanding the social impact on the development of language. The field of literacy research widely supports this relationship. Skull (2010) looked at reading and the influence of social interaction and dialogue, and found that higher reading achievement occurred with “the collaborative exchanges that promoted students’ active role in learning and increased participation as they engaged in the process of constructing and interpreting meanings from text.” (p.10). Reading 44 is a document that I have used to guide my literacy instruction for the last decade. It is only on of the many resources I use, but it is one of my favorites. You can take the lessons and do them with any piece of text and balance direct instruction with inquiry based topics. Social interaction is encouraged and many activities have a dialogue component built in. I use these strategies to guide my inquiry based problems the students create from our curriculum topics.
As the 21st Century Teaching and Learning website stated, “new knowledge in every discipline is increasing exponentially every moment….Students need to be metacognitively aware of themselves as learners, able to monitor their learning and set goals to push their learning forward. Today's classrooms need to engage students in their learning through authentic, relevant inquiry” (Curriculum Services Canada, 2011).
I am excited to learn how to use pod and web casts and many other forms of interactive technology to motivate and allow students to express and communicate in new ways. I want to explore what is lost and what is gained when we move towards this digital form of representation. The connection between reading and writing is critical for our learners but we must teach them to use writing in relevant ways. I see more online manipulation of text, as opposed to pen and pencil editing, now that students have access to word processing programs. I wonder how technology and web 2.0 tools impact writing instruction in the elementary program. As I progress through this course I hope to expand my knowledge base about writing strategies in the 21st century.
My personal goals for reading are exploring children’s K-7 literature and the various awards and reading clubs, and ways to connect with other students participating in the same programs, offered to students through our library. As an adult, I am in a book club and love being exposed to different books I would never choose to read but that I have enjoyed for a variety of reasons. Water for elephants, The Glass Castle and Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie are all books I thought were great but I would not have chosen myself. I hope to do this for my students through literature circles and conversation. My technology literacy/ multiliteracy exploration is ongoing. I hope to be exposed to different modalities and technology tools so that I can learn to use them and apply my learning. I have enjoyed learning how to set up a blog and wiki and would like to learn how to use a smart board and participate in a web cast. Sadly, I need to ask how to set up an in focus projector and don’t know how to set up a pod cast.
Our school has a higher than district average number of second language learners. I have learned to adopt a collaborative oral approach for working with classroom teachers and second language learners. When social interaction is built into lesson planning the process work that students do is modeled to readers of all levels in the class. “Classroom talk-both the teachers’ and the students’- is the means by which students learn and define the goals of instruction. In that talk, publicly shared use of strategies, concepts, and ways of thinking allow less informed readers to learn what one does as a reader and ways in which skilled readers interact with text to create meaning” (School District No. 44 North Vancouver, p.217). In the Reading Teacher article Creating Language-Rich Instruction for English-Language Learners Bauer and Manyak (2008) state “teachers should accompany oral explanations and teacher read-alouds with visuals, realia, gestures, and dramatization to illustrate key concepts and vocabulary. Teachers must find ways to activate and build students’ background knowledge through the use of visuals, demonstrations, and graphic organizers… When possible, hands-on experiences should precede the reading of text. (p.176). Although that statement pertains to the English Language Learners in the classrooms, the reality is most of our classrooms contain a range of reading levels. Working with a team teachers in the library is a gift. The classroom management that is required when group work occurs can be challenging but when the teacher and teacher librarian are collaborating there is more support for group process work and more language support.
As I have moved around to various schools I have seen many different socio economic and cultural influences impact the kind of program that can be offered. Many children do not know how to read and write in English in our elementary schools and without those baseline skills it is very difficult to engage students in higher-level concepts using the classroom and school resources. Technology has removed some of these barriers because children can access information in visual and oral formats quickly but I truly believe it is critical that we foster reading and writing literacy. There are no i pads at the grocery stores or the bank. The recreation guide may come online but patrons still need to be able to read the instructions. I do not think we can lose sight of the most important and basic form of literacy, which is reading and writing. As a teacher librarian I hope to work with a group of struggling readers and help them find interest appropriate text and support them learn to read and write.
A little analogy I will use and refer to through my postings is that I have moved to a new house, a "literacy" house. I like the house, I like the lay out and the neighbourhood seems nice. But I do not know the house yet. I do not know how it works when I am cooking dinner and the kids are zooming around on their ride toys. I do not know if the racoons can break into the garbage containers or whether the door makes too much noise when the children are napping. Just as I know literacy- I know how to teach children to read and write but I do not know how I can use technology to do this. I will continue to make connections between the articles and my own 21 st century literacy exploration. I hope to create some kind of visual image or poem at the end of this course to summarize my " literacy" house.
References
Bauer, E., & Manyak, P. C. (2008). Creating Language-Rich Instruction for English-Language Learners. Reading Teacher, 62(2), 176-178. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Curriculum Services Canada. (March 31, 2011) Snapshots of effective practice. Building global mindedness. Retrieved September 11, 2011
School District No. 44 North Vancouver,. (Ed.). (1999). Reading 44 a core reading framework. North Vancouver: c/o Leo Marshall Curriculum Centre.
Scull, J. (2010). Embedding comprehension within reading acquisition processes. Australian Journal of Language & Literacy, 33(2), 87-107. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
TED talks. (March, 2011). Deb Roy on The birth of a word. Retrieved September 11, 2011 from http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html.
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