Literacy Now

Digital literacies are not solely about technical proficiency but about the issues, norms, and habits of mind surrounding technologies used for a particular purpose.

—Doug Belshaw, educational researcher

We often hear people talk about the importance of digital knowledge for 21st-century learners. Unfortunately, many focus on skills rather than literacies. Digital skills focus on what and how. Digital literacy focuses on why, when, who, and for whom.

For example, teaching digital skills would include showing students how to download images from the Internet and insert them into PowerPoint slides or webpages. Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

Digital skills would focus on which tool to use (e.g., Twitter) and how to use it (e.g., how to tweet, retweet, use TweetDeck), while digital literacy would include in-depth questions: When would you use Twitter instead of a more private forum? Why would you use it for advocacy? Who puts themselves at risk when they do so?

Think of the use of social media during the Arab Spring. People used social media in a way that went far beyond knowing how to click and deep into civic uses and navigating ways to communicate with others under the radar of a communication-hindering government. It was a way of both encouraging one another to remain critical and supporting one another through adversity in creative ways.

If you are familiar with educational researcher Doug Belshaw’s eight elements of digital literacies, I have just mentioned the civic, critical, creative, and communicative. The other four are cultural, cognitive, constructive, and confidence. This last one is important and takes time to build. (For more on the essential elements, be sure to read W. Ian O’Byrne’s sidebar.)

Real-world learning

Teaching digital literacy does not mean teaching digital skills in a vacuum, but doing so in an authentic context that makes sense to students. It means teaching progressively rather than sequentially, which helps learners understand better and more clearly over time.

Instead of teaching how to use a hashtag and how to tweet and retweet, I give my students meaningful tasks to help their learning. (Twitter plays a large role in my teaching, but the essential elements can be applied in many technological contexts.)

After students have the skill to use multiple platforms, I allow them the choice of which platform to use for the support they need, but I make sure they ask questions. When is it best to do a Google search versus ask a question on Twitter? Why would students tweet to a particular hashtag or person versus another? When they tweet to people from another country in another time zone, what kind of context do they need to consider? What should they add, remove, or modify in order to communicate better?

Critical connections

When we encourage students to use technology, do we remind them of the risks of placing their information online and give them choices of how much personal information to reveal? Do our students recognize the ways in which Facebook’s privacy settings continually shift without user permission, and what posting a photo today might mean for their future employment opportunities? Do students recognize the importance of password-protecting their devices and having different passwords across platforms?

We also need to recognize the risks of blogging/tweeting, which include opening avenues for abuse. We should not be throwing students into the public domain to discuss sensitive topics without having conversations with them on what they might face and which of these risks they are willing to take, how they would handle it, and how they might support each other. Then we should give them a private option if they so choose.

To be honest, I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy. It means discussing with them why they would post a real photo of themselves as avatars versus something more abstract. It means talking about audience—whom they are addressing and who are people who might accidentally come across their blogs or tweets. It means opening dialogue about why we write in public, to what end, and for whose benefit.

I place students in authentic situations as much as possible. When they tweet and blog, they have a public audience beyond our class. I ask students to tweet to other educators and learners (locally and internationally). They tweet about their burning questions and seek feedback on what they are working on for class. When working across cultures, we tackle questions of inequalities related to language use (English when my students aren’t native speakers but fluent) and infrastructure (the Internet is slower in Egypt).

Using judgment

It is important for students to recognize that although technology gives us a lot of power, it also restricts us in many ways, and we need to question how the affordances of technology modify our communication and our behavior.

For example, it is worth discussing the process of Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, it is usually a good enough first stop to learn about something. However, students need to know how it is updated. They need to recognize that there are back-channel discussions about what ends up appearing on the site. These discussions can be fraught with power dynamics, resulting in controversial issues appearing unbalanced as more powerful authors block alternative viewpoints.

Moreover, it is worth discussing how to enhance accessibility of students’ digital content. Are they cognizant of using fonts that are easy to read? Are they conscious of accessible color schemes? Do they know to provide alternative text to images?

Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing.

We can only begin to put the seeds of this critical literacy in our classes and hope students will transfer this beyond the classroom and into their increasingly digital identities and lives.

Maha Bali is an associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy, cofounder of virtuallyconnecting.org, and cofacilitator of edcontexts.org. She has her own blog and also writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2016 issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine.

“Thank you for letting me have a voice. No one has ever done that for me before,” was the first full sentence out of Alana’s mouth after the first Kids Tales Creative Writing Workshop. Alana was a shy girl and often kept to herself, but on the last day of her Kids Tales workshop, she called me over to her table and told me she never had her own journal before. She explained she only got to write in school and, even then, only about what the teachers assigned. Outside of school, she was shuffled constantly between her parents’ houses and rarely had a chance to voice her feelings. Kids Tales gave her that voice.

I started Kids Tales, a nonprofit that runs creative writing workshops for kids ages 8–12, two years ago when I was in eighth grade. Starting in elementary school, I had the opportunity to participate in creative writing classes, workshops, and camps. When I got to middle school, I realized many kids don’t get the kind of opportunities I had. Many kids like Alana don’t have any educational opportunities outside of school. They don’t have the materials, the space, or the encouragement to write. When I started Kids Tales, and still today, my goal is for kids whose families don’t have the resources for writing experiences outside of school to get the opportunity to write and the chance to find their voice.

During a Kids Tales workshop, kids spend one week brainstorming, writing, and editing their own short story. At the end of the week, the stories are assembled in a collection and self-published as an anthology on Amazon.com.

The teachers in Kids Tales workshops are teenagers—one of the main components of Kids Tales workshops is that kids teach kids. Kids Tales teachers will tell you that getting to teach kids to write is an eye-opening experience. Teaching a weeklong workshop to 10 younger kids has a big impact on the lives of those kids, their families and communities, and even the world. Writing is one of those things that, once you inspire kids to do it, they never want to stop doing.

Kids Tales started out small in the summer of 2014 with two workshops in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. After seeing how much the kids in Milwaukee loved the workshops, we expanded for the summer of 2015 to Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC.

Kids Tales, an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit, won the American Field Service (AFS) Project: Change, Vision in Action award and taught a Kids Tales workshop in Colombia, South America in June 2015. We were lucky to be honored by the International Literacy Association in its inaugural 30 Under 30 list and were awarded the Milwaukee Business Journal’s Junior Eureka Award for creativity and innovation. It was a busy year.

Now to plan Summer 2016. Kids Tales will again be teaching in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Washington DC. We are working with the National Writing Project to expand to more U.S. cities. Kids Tales will continue our partnership with AFS and will teach Kids Tales workshops in more countries worldwide.

My dream is for all kids, in all corners of the world, to be published authors and hold in their hands their own book. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone should have the chance to tell that story. If you would like to learn more about Kids Tales go to our website, Kidstales.org. If you are a high school teacher and think your students might want to become Kids Tales teachers, please send us an e-mail.

Katie Eder is a 15-year-old award-winning author from Wisconsin. She founded Kids Tales, Inc., and is the executive director. She was recently honored as one of ILA’s 30 Under 30.

The printed word often is taken for granted. It’s everywhere you look—billboards, signs, our mobile devices. We rarely stop to think about its origin, that print once was a commodity, a symbol of privilege, holding a clear and authentic purpose: to communicate with one another over distance, over time, and across cultures.

The power of the printed word has become diluted through systematized and widespread dissemination of literacy in the Industrial Era, both in everyday life and in the classroom, dramatically changing the way children learned to read and write through phonics readers and handwriting books. It wasn’t long before these decontextualized and inauthentic forms of literacy were found virtually everywhere, used to teach children at large scale in the typical Industrial Era manner. In fact, using these resources, in addition to new at-scale resources such as basal reading sets and other prescriptive curricula, to scale effective literacy instruction to large groups of children is still commonplace in many classrooms today.

But what many have not realized is that literacy has lost a great deal of its authenticity by making it a decontextualized, rote chore, one with which many students comply but actually despise. I think there’s a relatively easy way to amend this through contextualized tasks that promote an authentic desire to communicate with one another—just as the printed word was originally intended.

As I began working with 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds this year, my primary objective was to foster a love of writing. Our school was new, having just opened in Palo Alto, CA, filled with fresh, bright faces and budding friendships, immersed in a town waiting to be explored. A writing project seemed like the perfect way to do it.

We conducted a study of Palo Alto, where we walked the neighborhoods, took pictures, asked questions, and even built a small three-dimensional model of the city, all culminating with a writing project that documented our findings.

“We’re going to make a magazine,” I told my students, “so we can share with our families what we’ve learned about our new community!”

“I want to write about City Hall!” one student exclaimed, sending my students into a flurry of chatter. Soon enough, all of our tablets were out and my students were flipping through pictures from our community walk, writing and drawing about buildings and other places they saw.

Although the project managed to unite us as a class, it also made it incredibly easy for me, as the writing workshop facilitator, to personalize for content, learning process, and ability level. I worked with some students on paragraph structure, sentence ordering, and identifying independent clauses and with emergent writers on word building, letter formation, and fine motor skills.

By gaining the momentum for a love of writing in this first project, we were propelled into our next learning arc when we studied stories. We partnered with a local nonprofit preschool and wrote stories for preschoolers who didn’t have access to as many books as we do. My students’ eyes, ears, and brains lit up when I read the list of names of children they’d be writing for, once again igniting the need to write for a real audience—and for an authentic purpose—within them.

This may sound like a whole new way of planning writing, but getting started is quite simple.

Start with resources you know. Lucy Calkins’s Writing Workshop model is great for creating the structure for a real-world writing workshop. When I began teaching writing, I followed a curriculum and found that it gave me a framework for strong lesson structure and helped me plan with the end in mind while constantly assessing through conferring. With time, I slowly removed my own curricular scaffolding, and you can, too, as you become more fluent with planning and preparing real-world writing workshop lessons, unique to the environment around your classroom. These structures then support both you and your students, even in the face of new content and opportunities that can arise only out of real-world serendipity. It is through this serendipity that you can bring the outside world into your minilessons, and your minilessons into the outside world.

Somewhere, literacy lost its purpose in the classroom. Educators forgot that literacy not only is a means for greater opportunity down the road, but also has a greater social purpose: It allows us to connect with one another, to develop empathy with the outside world, and to make sure that each of our voices are heard. In this manner, serendipitous literacy is everywhere; you simply have to find the right serendipity.

Paul Emerich France, an ILA member since 2011, is a K–5 educator, National Board Certified teacher, reading specialist, and freelance writer. On his blog, InspirED, he writes stories from the classroom as well as commentaries on current policy and social justice education.

One of the sadder things I've ever done happened last year on the last day of school before winter vacation: I had to retire one of my favorite books, a staple of my annual read-alouds, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson.

I did not retire the book because of its Christmas/Christian backdrop. Or its savvy rendition of the birth of Christ. When Robinson wrote the book in 1973, society called it “Christmas Vacation,” while today, we have a winter break. Some 40 years after publication, the book seems more appropriate for Sunday school classes than a public school classroom, but that isn’t my problem.

To me, this content is no different than some of the religious aspects that appear in Beyond Lucky, Buddha Stories, or Martin de Porres. If anything, these books allow children to explore different cultures and belief systems, an important component to foster understanding amongst our universal brotherhood.

Actually, the issues are in the non-religious content.

Imogene smokes cigars—this is a big deal. Remember the days when kids stood out by the loading docks or on the corner of school property to smoke, some as young as age 12?  I'm sure in 1973 a girl from a broken home (likely not a term used then) might actually smoke publicly, cigars or not. Today, smoking is taboo. Period.

What agenda did Robinson have behind that portrayal of Imogene? A discussion could help the reader define the context of time and the embodiment of the character. What were the implications behind Imogene’s smoking? Today’s schema likely alters the comprehension Robinson had foreseen. By teaching the book, I run the risk of introducing students to risky behavior.

My favorite part of the book is between chapters 5 and 6, when the Herdmans throw a fit about the gifts Jesus received, claiming they received better gifts from the fireman (or child welfare, if you've seen the movie).  This event was a prelude to the annual writing assignment in class on favorite Christmas/Holiday/winter memoir.

I started by showing frankincense to students; it’s not only a new word to students but also an idea the readers can rarely visualize.  Frankincense is the resin burned to “be in the presence of God.” I told the students my story of fogging the church with frankincense during midnight mass in 1991. Right in the middle of mass, the church had to be evacuated because I did not pay attention to the gap in the burner that “fueled” the coals, and the intense smoke set off fire alarms.

This is an indirect, far more innocent, connection to Imogene smoking in the girl’s room. Her smoking inadvertently foiled the Ladies Aid pageant preparations, “causing” their applesauce cake to burn up, setting off the fire alarms in chapter 6.

Speaking of Imogene, what about her sneaking a peek at health records?  That has illegal invasion of privacy written all over it.  What might have occurred as an inappropriate joke (and bullying) in her day now has serious employment, privacy, and legal implications.  Although still funny in the book, I had to question what message I was sending to student in today’s privacy-protected culture.

There are also a number of sensitivity issues. Material like this doesn’t fly in schools with restorative practices or Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. The Herdman’s comments towards children like, “Your dad's in jail,” and the child welfare issues like dad jumping the train and mom working two shifts at the shoe factory just to avoid their kids—how often do we see/hear this kind of material in reading today? The heresy! Then there is letting a child sleep in the bureau drawer….

Such lines, intended to be funny, are likely to incite “questionable content” complaints these days. I had to retire the book.

Suddenly, under the definitions of text complexity, this book is now hard!  When readers cannot see the humor or the theme buried within the story, the book becomes boring.  I can teach strategies to read the book, but I cannot give them the background I have, or maybe you have, to enjoy the book.  I (we) grew up in different time.  I loved being a shepherd or Joseph in Christmas pageants.  It was a part of my life—a long time ago.

Yet, in all, the Herdmans are the heroes of the story. They are the ones that change the most.  Their story defines modern day redemption to some extent.  As readers we cannot help but to forgive the Herdmans for their behavior, even under the context of Christmas, a time of renewal. Robinson teaches us not just the meaning of Christmas but the meaning of life: to find love by looking into the eyes of the poor. I mean, really. How can one not wonder what the Herdmans were really thinking when they gave their Christmas ham as a gift?  Or Imogene desiring to be special, innocent, and pure?  Her portrayal of Mary simply served as a vehicle to reveal the true heart and character Imogene possessed. Is this not the innocence we want for everyone?

I wonder if I am sheltering my students. Should I bring The Best Christmas Pageant Ever out of retirement?

Justin Stygles is a sixth-grade teacher and literacy specialist in Western Maine. He has taught at a variety of levels for 12 years and is currently working with Corwin Literacy about effect, emotions, and transactional reading.

My dream had finally come true! After endless hours of writing and studying, I earned my doctorate degree in Reading and Language. I was ready to settle into a new career as an assistant professor of literacy at a university in fall semester. How would I impart what I learned to the next generation of teachers tactfully? I wondered about this goal as I prepared coursework for five classes for the upcoming semester.

New Possibilities in the Collegiate Classroom

The prospect of putting together a substantial experience for the teacher candidates made me slightly nervous. Sacrificing personal time during the summer to thoroughly read texts and create syllabi and learning activities for students was necessary. In plainly written lesson plans, I developed assignments deliberately that would require students to do more than memorize facts in texts and regurgitate rationales for why the best teaching practices or theories were adopted. A signature assignment was created to encourage students to read current research in the field of education. This assignment would change the way my students and I viewed the integration of research into a literacy methods class.

The Professional Journal Article Defense assignment was created to help teacher candidates defend the use of current research in an intermediate classroom. The teacher candidates are allowed to choose an idea that was published in The Reading Teacher, Teaching Exceptional Children, or the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy to complete the project. The teacher candidate is expected to read the contents of the article, integrate the information into a current lesson that will be taught during a field experience in a public classroom, and obtain three student work samples to describe how the idea helped children learn a new skill or strategy. My intention was to create an assignment that would prepare teacher candidates to convince any parent or administrator why the research-based idea is beneficial to the school curriculum.

Trial and Tribulation

The teacher candidates enrolled in the class were initially horrified by the project’s content. They expressed their fears openly in class and were not afraid to share their disbelief that the project was possible to complete. The teacher candidates were equally unsure about collecting work samples to describe how an idea from a journal can be integrated in a lesson plan to help children learn. I assured them that they engage in the practice more frequently in the program than they realize. Similar tasks are completed when the teacher candidates visit www.teacherspayteachers.com to purchase materials to teach lessons or when they visit www.pinterest.com for ideas to create lively holiday bulletin boards for the class. The task of completing the Professional Journal Article Defense assignment is no different from informal tasks they complete each semester.

However, the assignment requires teacher candidates to seek scholarly resources to borrow ideas and report the results of its integration into instruction. For example, teacher candidates are responsible for providing a written explanation of how each work sample (e.g., written quiz or composition) demonstrates how the children were able to complete the task successfully.

I was pleased when the teacher candidates were able to push aside skeptical thoughts and find outstanding literacy, motivation, or math ideas from the research journals to integrate into class instruction. For example, one teacher candidate found an article that encouraged educators to allow children to define causes and effects of events in expository texts. In order to help children understand the definition of each term, the teacher candidate used the research to provide them the opportunity to reenact several stories in the presence of their peers. The class was encouraged to identify the cause-and-effect component in each scenario. One child demonstrated how an individual who does not get enough sleep (cause) can become very tired (effect).

Although the teacher candidate did not collect samples of this initial task, the idea influenced her to present more scenarios to the students to identify how causes and effects can show that relationships exist between concepts, objects, or humans. The children were later encouraged to independently read sentences and identify the cause and effect in the sentences. For instance, the students were asked to use their knowledge of relationships to identify the cause and effect in the following sentences:

• The blizzard hit the city, so all schools were closed.
• You should brush your teeth often so you don’t get cavities.
• I fell off the bike and scraped my knee.

The teacher candidate was able to collect work samples demonstrating the students’ understanding of causes and effects in written texts. The teacher candidate acknowledged that the content in the journal article motivated her to engage students in active simulations to learn the concepts in the class. As a result, the activity increased student involvement and academic progress of the participants.

The Professional Journal Article Defense assignment not only promotes reading engagement, but also supports an educator’s effort to purposely adapt research ideas from established scholars. More important, teacher candidates are encouraged to think carefully about why their ideas should be included in the curriculum. The study of research should be welcomed in literacy methods classes because it motivates participants to share with others why the idea is beneficial to the school curriculum. We should encourage the next generation of teachers to fully indulge in reading and adoption of contemporary research.

Claudia Gates is an assistant professor at literacy at Minnesota State University Moorhead.