Literacy Now

As we prepare to convene for the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits in Orlando, FL, this July, we must not ignore the horror that the city faced over a year ago at Pulse nightclub, when LGBTQ individuals celebrating at Latin Night were massacred by an armed man. The tragedy, which took the lives of 49 people, will be written in American history as one of hatred and horror.

We cannot pretend that the oppression LGBTQ individuals face, especially LGBTQ individuals of color, is unique to the past. Our society and our schools frequently replicate homophobia and transphobia through policies, curriculum, and instruction. If we are to honor the lives of those lost at the Pulse nightclub shooting, then we must do better by our LGBTQ students. 

We are educators, and to ignore the power we hold to shape inclusive and supportive environments for LGBTQ students would be to relinquish professional responsibility. The attack on LGBTQ individuals isn’t relegated to the Pulse nightclub. The Trump Administration's efforts to curtail protections for transgender students represents state-sanctioned discrimination. But oppression doesn’t come just in the forms of a presidential pen stroke and a loaded gun; the silencing of LGBTQ voices within our classrooms and curricula is another, more implicit, form of oppression. 

As literacy educators, our classrooms must honor the rich panoply of voices and experiences within the LGBTQ community. Like all human beings, LGBTQ individuals live in the spaces intersecting multiple identities that include race, religion, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sex, and other identities.

Overwhelmingly, the victims of the Pulse massacre were Latinx LGBTQ individuals. The field of young adult literature is increasingly reflecting this intersectional reality with texts that center on lesbian Muslim protagonists like If You Could Be Mine (Algonquin) and Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel (Algonquin) by Sara Farizan; narratives focusing on Latinx LGBTQ experiences like Adam Silvera’s More Happy Than Not (Soho), Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Simon & Schuster), Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (Riverdale Avenue), and Charles Rice-Gonzalez’s Chulito (Magnus); LGBTQ African American stories like Jacqueline Woodson’s After Tupac and D Foster (Speak) and The House You Pass on the Way (Puffin); and LGBTQ immigration stories like Paul Yee’s Money Boy (Groundwood). 

These are just some texts that honor the multiple identities and experiences LGBTQ individuals live. Yet our classrooms have not caught up. To relegate LGBTQ content to one or two texts during the span of a curriculum is to send the message that LGBTQ voices only matter minimally and only at a certain time in the year. To exclude LGBTQ texts is to send the message that LGBTQ voices do not matter at all. 

Let us not forget the names and stories of those whose lives were tragically cut short on June 12, 2016. Let us honor them every day by centering these marginalized voices.

Cody Miller is the ninth-grade English language arts teacher at P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, the K–12 laboratory school affiliated with the University of Florida’s College of Education. In addition to teaching, Miller is a Ph.D. student studying English education at the University of Florida. His teaching and research focus on the various ways students construct their identities in ELA classrooms, with a specific emphasis on how young adult literature influences students’ worldviews and meaning-making capacities.

Cody Miller, along with Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko, Danling Fu, and Jungyoung Park, will be presenting a panel discussion titled “Check Your Pulse: Creating LGBTQ-inclusive Classrooms Through Literature Studies” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17. For more information, download the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits app or visit ilaconference.org/app.

Students are constantly learning and growing, embarking on new endeavors and overcoming challenges all throughout their schooling. Here are five books about new beginnings that will help inspire students of all ages who may be hesitant to pursue a new opportunity, who are forced to start over after an unexpected loss, or who are simply looking to begin anew.

Putting Books to Work: Bear and Bird

Putting Books to Work: Fish in a Tree

Putting Books to Work: Wonder

Putting Books to Work: The Thing About Jellyfish

Putting Books to Work: Transgender Pioneers

Clare Maloney is an intern at the International Literacy Association. She is currently seeking a BA in English from the University of Delaware.

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.

The mysterious philosopher in Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World defines Lego as the "most ingenious toy in the world." When Sophie rediscovers a bag of abandoned Lego blocks in a closet, she remembers her childhood and the thrills of endless possibilities offered by this clever toy.

With Lego blocks, the same pieces can be assembled and reassembled into objects, prompted and limited only by one's imagination. Thus, a castle today becomes a spaceship tomorrow, and a spaceship may easily morph into a fire engine by reassembling the same pieces in a new configuration.

However, Lego is much more than a building toy that comes in defined packages with step-by-step instructions, calling for the replication of an already imagined or popularized object.

For example, offer a collection of random Lego blocks to a group of students with the daunting and challenging task of creating a new written language system. They can come up with their own Lego alphabet, where each specific block or piece represents a sound or sounds in speech. Thus, students can also develop new modes of "writing" with these Lego symbols, as the blocks may have various ways to be connected. These types of activities also offer opportunities for engaging classroom discussions about the ways language work or how languages develop.

Creative Lego constructions can also be used as instructional tools to illustrate abstract concepts or ideas. Instead of using PowerPoint slides—which are often oversimplified, poor visual aids—consider building a three-dimensional object that best represents, for example, the ideas and workings of Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development or any other concepts related to a given academic field. Also, asking students to explore abstract or symbolic concepts with the use of Lego blocks engages their whole body and provides opportunities for collective creativity and collaboration.

As a storytelling device, Lego can also enhance visual and multimodal literacy skills. I often ask students to create scenes or illustrations for the stories they explore in the classroom. Sometimes they will use Lego blocks to create a version or adaptation of an existing story or to build scenes from new stories they've created. With simple, easy-to-use applications and tools, students can create virtual or physical picture books with the use of Lego. Similarly, an inexpensive tripod and a smartphone can allow students to use stop-motion animation to produce and share short films or movie trailers for books.

In addition, Lego's visual building manuals are among the best guides to aid the process of assembly. They function as a universal language without the need for one's ability to read written text. Students can use these manuals as a model to produce virtual building manuals for their own Lego products, and by doing this they improve their skills of visual communication.

Lego is inherently a creative medium. If we value the use of imaginative classroom engagements to instigate divergent thinking, play, and problem solving, Lego blocks deserve a distinguished place in our instructional toolbox.

Csaba Osvath is a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida, pursuing literacy studies with a special focus on qualitative methods and arts-based research. His research explores the epistemological and pedagogical roles/functions of artmaking in the context of literacy education.

Csaba Osvath will present a workshop titled "Reimagining Literacy Through Lego" at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.