Well, after reading two books on project-based learning, I'm shifting my CDAT lens towards thinking about literacy. I'm excited about all that PBL holds for my students next year, but I'm still apprehensive about the language arts part. I'm hoping that this next text can help me to conceptualize ways to incorporate a variety of literacies into my instruction.
The next few posts will be my notes on this book:
Kajder, S. (2010). Adolescents and digital literacies: Learning alongside our students. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Just reading the prologue, an NCTE policy brief, has started me thinking about the nature of literacy instruction. I'm quite familiar with these ideas on literacy, but it's always worthwhile to revisit them.
Myth: Literacy only refers to reading.
“Literacy encompasses reading, writing, and variety of social and intellectual practices that call upon the voice and the hand” (ix)
Myth: Academics are all that matter in literacy learning.
Literacy is important in identity development and students should be exposed or well versed in a variety of discourses.
Myth: Literacy instruction is the responsibility of English teachers alone.
Each academic content has its own vocabulary. Adolescents need explicit instruction in the literacies of each specific content.
Myth: School writing is essentially an assessment tool that enables students to show what they have learned.
Writing can be a way to assess student learning, but it’s also a “means by which students learn and develop” (x)
According to NCTE, teachers needs to explicitly teach a variety of content-oriented literacies, give opportunities to write and reflect on their current understandings and questions, and help students to negotiate multiple and complex discourses. Adolescents are already well-versed in a variety of social and technological discourses that school don’t always acknowledge or build on those literacies. Motivation is of huge importance, for students who are not motivated may not demonstrate their full abilities to read and write. In order to increase motivation, teachers can provide lots of choice and self-selection of texts and writing activities. Responsive and caring classroom environments also increase motivation and help to “demystify” academic literacies. Lastly, monocultural approaches to teaching literacy increase the achievement gap. Instead, literacy instruction should be multicultural, providing rich opportunities for students to bring their own cultural discourses into the academic discourse.
In a lot of ways, I think PBL inherently creates opportunities for a variety of discourses and literacy instruction. The nature of creating authentic, real world projects allows for many types of reading, speaking, listening, and writing. By working in teams (especially in a diverse school), students are kind of forces to explore their own discourses and think about literacy from a multicultural perspective. (And I think in a world lit/world history class, there are even more opportunities for exploring other culture's literacies.) These kids from Mike's class will already school me in their techonological literacy, so I'm anticipating that I can really embrace their prior knowledge and use it as a spring board to talk about literacy.
I am a little apprehensive (and that's probably too strong a word) about explicit literacy instruction. I worry that with the shuffle and excitement and newness of projects, as well as the mountains of content-oriented standards, that literacy instruction may fall to the way-side. Although students will be reading and writing extensively, NCTE is clear that students need explicit instruction in content literacy. I think this is where we failed our current sophomores on the Gateway-- we focused a lot on the content and a lot on traditional language arts literacties, but didn't really do a good job of teaching kids and letting them practice technical writing. I feel strongly that we need to make this a priority this year-- and not just because of the Gateway, but because it's a important 21st century skill.
No comments:
Post a Comment