Literacy Now

The term “best practices” has become ubiquitous in educational policy due to legislation and reports related to the National Reading Panel, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The original intention of best practices was to involve teachers in making experience- and evidence-based decisions. These legislative acts mandated teaching practices that demonstrated positive academic gains using scientific research studies. 

However, the studies informing best practices often minimize the strengths of urban communities. The concept of high-leverage literacy practices (HLLPs)—which we studied in the context of high-performing, urban schools—attempts to fill gaps in the current literature on best practices.

HLLPs build upon and extend what the learner already knows, and are characterized by a purposefully sequenced, interconnected, and iterative progression of experiences that support cumulative and increasingly complex understandings of language and literacy protocols and usage.  

High-leverage literacy practices are always concerned with questions such as: What does the practice mean in terms of supporting a child’s learning? How is the practice connected to learning theory? To date, HLLPs have been identified in math, science, foreign language, and secondary language arts but, until our study, no HLLPs had been unearthed in early childhood literacy contexts.   

Kim, a high -performing, urban first-grade teacher from our study, enacted instructional decisions to create her classroom library that exemplify the three principles of HLLPs: purposefully sequenced, interconnected, and iterative progressions of experiences.

First, the student-created label system was purposefully sequenced. Kim carefully planned the learning experience, paired students, and provided challenging text sets with varying levels of complexity.

Second, the labeling activity was interconnected. Kim drew from multiple literacy skills to create an authentic learning experience. Students employed background knowledge, text features, and context clues to identify a common theme linking each text, and also designed, drew, and wrote the labels.

Finally, the student-created labels were part of an iterative progression of experiences. Kim offered multiple opportunities to authentically apply new knowledge, such as continual revising of the labels as new text sets were introduced.

This example highlights how HLLPs can be measured, sequenced, altered, and adjusted for other academic and personal outcomes. Teachers can observe and identify the points where students struggle within the activity. Additionally, the HLLP builds from one skill to another and can be repeated at various levels and progressions.

Kim’s use of authentic, student-created labels in the classroom library facilitated student ownership of their classroom and academic and socioemotional growth.  

Kindel Nash is an assistant professor of urban teacher education and the coordinator for the language and literacy master’s program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She earned her doctoral degree from the University of South Carolina. Her current research explores high-leverage early literacy instruction and its intersections with culturally sustaining pedagogies and critical race theory. Her work can be found in Teachers College Record, Equity & Excellence in Education, Language Arts, and The Urban Review.

Etta Hollins is the Ewing Marion Kauffman Endowed Chair for Urban Teacher Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was previously professor and chair of Teacher Education at the University of Southern California. She served on the prestigious Teacher Education Panel for the American Educational Research Association and has been an invited speaker for the American Educational Research Association, the Association of Teacher Educators, National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Council of Great City Schools, and the International Literacy Association. Hollins is regularly called upon as a consultant on the preparation of teachers for diverse and underserved students by colleges and schools of education, state departments of education, and school districts.

Leah Panther is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests include high-leverage literacy practices, urban religious schools, and adolescent literacy. Her current research project involves high-leverage literacy practices in urban religious middle schools.

Kindel Nash, Etta Hollins, and Leah Panther will present a session titled “High-Leverage Literacy Practices: Researching and Defining Literacy Instruction in Urban School Contexts” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

More than 80% of U.S. teachers are white, as are 80%–90% of students enrolled in U.S. preservice teacher programs.

Meanwhile, students of color compose more than 45% of the U.S. pre-K–12 population; by 2023, students of color will represent more than 50% of the U.S. student population. There is a significant divide between the demographics of the students in our classrooms and their teachers.

For decades, multicultural education and culturally relevant pedagogy have been fostering approaches to educational equity. Culturally relevant pedagogy, for example, aims to create inclusive instructional techniques and materials that align with students’ funds of knowledge—to make adaptations to a curriculum that is inherently not as relevant to students of color and those whose cultures are different from the white mainstream.

Culturally relevant pedagogy is a way to bridge the gap between the dominant, white mainstream culture of schooling and the diverse students who aren’t members of that culture. In doing the important work of culturally relevant teaching, teachers don’t often consider the systemic workings of our dominant white society that continue to make schools a place where instruction, materials, and curricula have to be adapted in order to meet the needs of diverse learners. Critical Whiteness Studies suggests that meaningful change for equity in our schools can come about only when we dig into the entrenched issues of race, racism, and white dominance that undergird schooling in the United States.

Carrying the Critical Whiteness Studies mantle is no easy task. It requires white teachers to reflect on their own racial identities in a society that systematically privileges their race. It requires examination of how schools are included among institutions in the United States that maintain and replicate a hierarchy of power that benefits whites.

These are not easy or comfortable topics to discuss. Building understanding about these issues should be part of ongoing professional development and learning for both preservice and inservice teachers. According to ILA’s Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals 2017 (currently in draft stage and available 2018) professional development on issues of race, racism, and educational equity can help teachers challenge “their own cultures, belief systems, and potential biases” and engage in “reflective practice” with other teachers.

One approach to Critical Whiteness work is forming antiracism professional book study groups. These book groups can be facilitated in a variety of contexts and formats and can use a range of texts, including nonfiction, fiction, and multimedia resources. Book groups offer a space for in-depth and ongoing learning, reflection, and discussion that creates possibilities for meaningful change. 

Autumn M. Dodge is an assistant professor of literacy in the Department of Education Specialties at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Her teaching and research interests include Critical Whiteness work through studying white teacher identity and antiracism pedagogy, leveraging literacy for LGBTQ+ advocacy, disciplinary literacy, and literacy and pop culture in education.

Autumn M. Dodge will present a session titled “Antiracism Education Through Teacher Book Study Groups” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

“This will be the first book I ever read,” shouted one of my seniors. I had left him little choice; he could either read or not graduate. A week earlier, a 10th grader made the same comment. When asked how she made it through so many years of school without reading a book, she explained, “English teachers ask for quote analysis, and it’s really easy to do that without reading the book.”

I’ve heard many similar confessions throughout my 18 years of teaching. Many of my students are reading five to six years behind grade level. I have seniors about to graduate high school who do not meet the literacy demands needed to fully function in society.

Kelly Gallagher (2009) defines readicide as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” He attributes this genocide to two main factors: high-stakes testing (which often leads teachers to value test-taking skills over reading proficiency) and limited authentic reading experiences.

Gallagher’s theory echoes observations and experiences from my own teaching career. I’ve seen English classrooms with no books, or only tattered copies of classic titles. The urban high schools where I teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are becoming book deserts.

Even when books are available, some administrators and educators do not allow students to read during class out of fear of losing valuable learning time. I believe that when students are allotted time for free voluntary reading, they become better readers, score higher on achievement tests, and expand their content knowledge.

Teachers can use free reading time to supplement textbook learning. For example, when studying the Holocaust, students might choose to read Elie Wiesel’s Night: a teen’s account of his survival from the Nazi death camps. Another example is Cindy Neuschwander and Wayne Geehan’s Sir Cumference and the First Round Table, which offers creative explanations for geometry concepts.

I understand that building a strong classroom library can be difficult with budget restrictions. Teachers can try borrowing a class set of novels from the public library, browsing secondhand bookstores, or applying for grants from education nonprofits. I have received $1,000 in book grants from donorschoose.org every year for the past five years.

Ray Bradbury captured the importance of voluntary reading when he said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Concerned educators—it’s time to take action. Let’s reverse readicide.

Karin Kroener-Valdivia is an 18-year English teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District in California. She is also National Board Certified and a UCLA Writing Project Fellow.

When I started teaching first grade, I used an old 35mm camera to capture daily experiences, document learning, and create materials for students. Eventually I learned to hand the camera over to my students to let them capture and share their learning experiences. But beyond some surface level conversations, I never spent much time focusing on the image as a text to be read and understood. As a novice teacher, I didn’t appreciate the importance of developing foundational visual literacy skills and dispositions.

National initiatives for education promote competence in understanding, evaluating, and using diverse media formats for teaching and learning. These initiatives recognize shifting literacies and the need to embrace digital and media practices in the classroom. As digital spaces continue to change, and as more young students participate in these spaces, visual literacy skills are becoming increasingly critical.

Visual literacy is the ability to recognize, understand, and interpret static and moving images and produce visual messages. Primary students are inundated throughout the day with visual messages, but how much time do we spend explicitly teaching them how to think about, analyze, and question the visuals they see? Visual literacy involves not only making factual observations, but also critically analyzing content, appreciating composition techniques, understanding the author’s intention, distinguishing points of view, identifying fake or misleading content, and recognizing the ability of visuals to influence and persuade.

Primary teachers can start developing visual literacy through the analysis of photographs and book illustrations. Online resources, such as the National Archives’ archives.gov, or the Annenberg Learner’s learner.org provide practical and systematic ideas for analyzing images and videos. Additional resources include CEO of Southwest Educational Consultants Frank Serafini’s resource analysis guides, The New York Times online column What’s Going on in This Picture and the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies’ “Every Picture Has a Story” lesson plan.

The next step is for students to create and analyze their own visuals. When I was teaching, I quickly discovered that photography was more powerful when I put the camera into the hands of my young students. I noticed them talking differently about the shots they composed and the strategies they were using to choose pictures for projects. As the years went on, I found new tools and ways of engaging my students with visual literacies. Instagram became a particularly useful platform to have students compose their own digital photo or video for discussion. Asking my students to become both the creators and critical consumers of visuals led to deeper discussions, insights, and connections to what they were exposed to online.

Below are a few ideas for incorporating different aspects of visual literacies across the curriculum using a tool such as Instagram. I chose ideas for a primary-grade classroom (K-6), but all ideas and questions can be adapted and modified to meet the needs of a secondary audience. Furthermore, in order to maintain confidentiality and protect students online, I would recommend a classroom Instagram account that is monitored and maintained by a teacher.

Vocabulary instruction: Give students a word of the week and have them search the school for visual representations of that word. They can post the image to a classroom Instagram page with an appropriate hashtag and brief caption, or create a GIF or Instagram boomerang video. Inspire other classrooms to upload their visuals as well and investigate the multiple representations and meanings of words. This is a great way to encourage and develop different perspectives, explore visual relevancy, and study social media behaviors. Questions might address angles, lighting, composition, setting, movement, filters, and focus.

Visual and embodied storytelling: Using the collage feature, have students tell a story in four frames or recreate the plot of a story visually (bodies, illustrations, still animation). Ask readers to interpret and retell the story in the comments. Remove a picture or rearrange the images. How does the story change? As an alternative, ask students to create and post a tableau (living picture) as a single image. Dramatic tableau offers students a way to physically embody learning and explore content. Capturing the still image and posting online invites others to interpret the scene in the comments section. Questions might include: How do the interpretations differ from what you intended? How did your facial expressions and body positions tell the story or convey the message? In visual storytelling, students consider body movements, expression, background, camera angles, lighting, movement, objects, actors, and setting.

Book hooks & advertisements: Ask students to film or depict a scene from a book that will hook readers and leave them wanting more. As a culminating product, ask students to create an advertisement for a classroom event or concept. Challenge them to create a brief video clip in less than 60 seconds that conveys meaning about a favorite book or upcoming event. This task requires knowledge of audience, text comprehension, composition techniques, the art of persuasion, and the use of symbolism. Questions might include: Who is your intended audience? What persuasive techniques did you use? How did you frame the shot or choose the scene? If it was a book, why did you choose that part as the hook? For audience members, how did the hook move you? What captured your attention?

Capture science inquiry: Use photo blogging as a way to collect data for long-term investigations or capture science experiments. For example, students might track the growth of a plant over time, or changes in the sky at different points of the day. Questions could include: What’s the importance of lighting and camera angles? How does changing the position of the camera or point of the view impact data collection? How should we caption the images to accurately represent the investigation? Through Instagram, students will have a record of their experiments and a way to document growth, change, and unusual occurrences over time.

Create personal primary artifacts in social studies: Digital photography serves as a way to document a particular period of time. Students can create their own primary documents and track events that occur in the classroom and school across the year through images and captions. “Every Picture has a Story” is a great starting point for discussing primary artifacts and how they preserve moments in time. As students create their own primary artifacts, they are learning about historical context, evidence-based reasoning, and storytelling. Questions might include: Whose story is being told? How does body language and facial expressions impact the story? How might someone interpret your artifact ten years from now? How might your peers in the next classroom/school interpret your story? Students in older grades might discuss cultural differences in interpretations.

Create your own Fake News: In her blog post “Media Literacy is Critical,” Susan Luft describes the importance of developing critical literacy skills and ideas for integrating visual messages. Extending on her ideas, ask students to create two copies of an image they created, but with two different headlines (one true and one fake). Have the readers investigate the context and ask their peers questions like: How did you determine authenticity? What is misleading? What was the purpose of the fake news? Or, ask students to capture the image from two different angles. How does the angle change the context of the photo or tell a different story? What is our ethical responsibility? How do interpretations differ? 

These digital tools and social media apps create opportunities to involve students in visual literacy and social media practices that are ubiquitous in our digitally mediated world. As teachers, our job is to search for ways to bring students interests and tools into the classroom. Instagram and similar Web 2.0 tools are just another way to incorporate visual literacy into the curriculum.

Stephanie Branson is a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida, pursuing literacy studies and elementary education with a special focus on digital literacies and teacher development. Connect with her on Twitter to find upcoming literacy Instagram 

Over the course of seven weeks and two separate visits to an elementary school in Kampala, Uganda, I learned that the gift of books is only the first step toward helping students become readers. When I brought books into their classrooms, everyone—including the teachers—was excited and grateful to receive them. But as there was no infrastructure in place for their regular use, after the initial introduction, the books were not made available to the children.

Books, I came to understand, were viewed as valued gifts, an extraordinary rather than an ordinary part of school learning, and were held in locked cabinets.

Addressing this issue became my challenge. How could I integrate books into the school program in a sustainable manner, considering the pressures of the state-mandated curriculum and focus on exam preparation?

Thanks to the global literacy fund of the British Columbia Council of the International Literacy Association, I purchased 22 contemporary, colorful, attractive nonfiction books to enhance the curriculum. A Ugandan teacher provided me with a list of topics in the academic subjects they needed to cover for exams: electricity, magnets, bones, the brain, the digestive system, cell division, and the Rift Valley.

I also helped students develop the skills they needed to learn from books. To provide an example, I filmed sixth-grade students in a Vancouver school as they browsed, read, and talked about library books.

With my books and videos, I returned to Kampala for the third time and put into action the following plan:

• I introduced new nonfiction books one by one, class by class. The class practiced how to choose a book and how to share what they found interesting about the book.
•  I showed the demonstration videos of children interacting with library books. The class discussed the video afterward, and students were encouraged to ask questions.
• I helped create a timetable. After consulting with the teachers, I scheduled a detailed book circulation system into the weekly timetable. The collection, which included fiction from my first trips along with the new nonfiction books, traveled from class to class twice a week for 30 minutes.

I happily witnessed the effect I was hoping for. The books were regularly distributed to students with sufficient time allowed for reading and discussion with one another and their teachers. The books were freed from locked cabinets and they became a regular part of every student’s school experience.

My hands-on experience as a book donor progressed from simply providing books to consulting with teachers and children to integrate classroom libraries into the daily curriculum. I learned that the implementation of resources is a key factor in improving literacy.

How did the learners do on those critical final exams? Very well, I am pleased to report.

Honey Halpern has taught for more than 30 years in elementary and secondary schools and faculties of education in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, Canada. Her experience has mainly been with reading programs and courses. Most recently she has been helping out in a school in Kampala, Uganda, where she works with the children and their teachers to improve reading and writing skills.