Prior to my TE classes, I would have defined literacy as simply the ability to read or write - that is how I’ve always defined it. When hearing statistics or even people talking on the street, literacy is always used in a way like, “Such and such city has a 76% literacy rate”, and it seems that no one ever questions what that means. Even I never before took the time to think about the fact that maybe there is more to literacy than reading and writing; I just blindly accepted this common misconception and moved on. It wasn’t until we made the concept maps in January that I really began to think about what literacy actually means, and I decided that yes, reading and writing is important, but that there’s more. On my map, I had drawn literacy as being broken down into four pieces: reading and writing were two, but I also included speaking and listening. But even then, I had no idea that there could be so many different types of literacies. While making my concept map, I was still thinking of literacy as a single entity. I believed that people and students could have different levels of literacy, and could be literate in different ways, but I was still putting all literacy into a single category. Even the definition I posted on our wiki reflected this idea to some extent. My definition posed two requirements for literacy. The first was that one could read and write. The second component dealt with an individual having some level of competency in a certain area. So although this does incorporate and acknowledge the fact that literacy involves more than reading and writing, I still had not broken away too much from that traditional definition. My definition of literacy really began to change when we started to research the various literacies that were provided as choices for our project. That is when I began to see that there are different ways to be literate, or different branches of literacy. I still believe that the four areas I had included in my literacy concept map still exist within various literacies, and that they are important skills that apply to everything that we do, but now I see them as components within literacy, rather than defining literacy themselves.
These ideas only became more evident to me while I was researching emotional literacy for the project, and in learning how to use glogster. Emotional literacy can deal with any of those four areas I was discussing before – reading, writing, speaking, and listening – although some may be more appropriate or relevant than others, but it also deals a lot with a whole range of things that I had never even considered before as being part of literacy. For example, emotional literacy has to do with acknowledging, interpreting, and controlling one’s emotions, along with being aware of other’s emotions as well. We then make choices based off of all of this information that can and does affect our daily lives. Before learning about this literacy, I would never have thought of skills such as these – acknowledging, interpreting, and managing – to be such a huge part of a type of literacy. The same goes for my thinking about digital literacy. Before I might have said that being digitally literate means you’re good with computers, but now I see digital literacy as the ability to not only use various technologies, but to be able to create them, navigate around them, interpret or understand the information that is being provided through them, etc. I now see digital literacy as just as intricate and challenging a literacy as emotional literacy.
I think that providing effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means to give students the tools they need to be successful when approaching various literacies, in a variety of ways. These tools are of course not only reading, writing, speaking, and listening, but also interpretation, analysis, explanation, and others mentioned above. Tools cans be specialized toward a particular literacy, while others are more widely used. I believe it is important to allow students the opportunity to practice using these various tools, and to see how they relate to one another and work together to accomplish a greater goal – literacy. As far as providing this to diverse learners, it is the teacher’s job to make the content relatable and interesting for the students. It is also the job of the teacher to recognize the fact that each group of students will be different, with unique needs and abilities, and to consider these when creating lessons and completing day to day activities. Learning about emotional literacy, and developing my own digital literacy, has actually reinforced these ideas for me. Through studying emotional literacy, I have learned that each person had different emotions and reactions to various things or events, but also that we all interpret and act upon emotions and feelings. Each person’s emotions and how they deal with them and carry them out is so individualized, so unique, that we see that there is no single “rule” we can follow for acquiring emotional literacy. In the same way, while creating our glog, we realized that digital literacies too are very individualized, and that is one of the things that make them so great. I can view five different glogs, or even review a technology that I am really familiar with, and still get something new out of them, because each one is so unique and different. Even if they include similar information, the way it is set up and presented is diverse enough to allow the viewer to learn something new. Comparing these ideas back to the classroom, there is no one correct “rule” or “way” to implement effective literacy instruction. Although it is important to provide students with necessary tools, and to guide them, when it comes to being successful, it all depends on the teacher’s knowledge of their students, and their ability to specialize that information for their particular group of students.
After learning about emotional literacy, I believe it to be so important for students to be able to not only recognize their emotions, but to be able to label them, understand them, and also manage them. Doing these things will help students to be aware of how they are affected by their emotions, and how we can properly control them in order to allow us to make smart choices. There are so many issues in our society today that occur because people cannot handle their emotions – not only children and students, but adults as well. By informing and educating children in emotional literacy from a young age, they will gain skills that they can carry with them through life, in order to help them understand and interpret themselves and others, and to make choices that will strengthen rather than deteriorate their everyday life.
As for digital literacy, with each passing year our world is becoming more and more technology based. This being the case, it is extremely important that we have the skills and tools to be able to navigate and understand various transformations to an increasingly digital world. As I mentioned above, we can use skills such as interpreting and managing to help us understand various digital literacies. But I think that the most important thing we can give our students for success in this area is practice and exposure. By allowing them to explore, similar to what we did for this project, students are able to take their learning into their own hands and create something new and meaningful. By becoming involved in their learning, I believe students embrace concepts better, and they can then use their new knowledge and skills gained to help them make new discoveries in the future.
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