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.

We go out for dinner, and the waiter doesn’t greet us. We go to the grocery store, and the bagger doesn’t ask us if we want paper or plastic. We go to the drive-through, and the attendant doesn’t make eye contact when handing us our change.

What were once referred to as “manners” are now called “soft skills” and, if you didn’t know this already, many young people don’t have them.

We’re quick to blame society for these missing skills. Obviously, these individuals were never taught these basic, yet vital, behaviors. It’s someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem.

But it’s not someone else’s fault, and it’s not someone else’s problem.

As teachers, we have been entrusted with the education of our students, but the term “education” has taken on a new meaning. Today, education means the whole child, not just the academics.

Bill Daggett, author of “Five Trends That Are Transforming Education,” writes, “We know that there is more to life than the core subjects of math, science, English language arts, and social studies. Personal and interpersonal skills—such as responsibility, self-management, integrity, honesty, collaboration, and leadership—are critical for success in college, career, and life. Strong schools build these skills into their curricula and create educational cultures and relationships that value more than just academics.”

As Mr. Daggett suggests, it is imperative for all teachers to embed the soft skills into their daily lesson planning. Creating lesson plans where the skills are rooted in prereading, during reading and after reading strategies is no longer just a good idea. Rather, helping students navigate confidently in the world has become essential.

Implementing “leadership” in a typical literacy lesson may seem like a daunting task, but by scaffolding the concept and using cross-curricular literacy strategies, students, who usually tend to compartmentalize their learning, will be able to transfer the concept of leadership and the reading strategies to other disciplines.

Begin with the end in mind: What is it that you want students to learn about leadership? What is it about leadership that is so vital, so critical, that you are going to create, develop, and implement an entire lesson plan around this single notion? We want our young people to lead by example and inspire others to have the courage to defend their convictions. So let’s end the lesson asking students to write a reflection based on one of these ideas: Explain what it means to lead by example and ask students to offer an illustration in their own life, or ask students to explain what it means to inspire others and to highlight a situation where they have offered hope, or ask students to show how one can illustrate the courage to defend their convictions in their school or in their neighborhood. Make leadership the goal, but use reading strategies to make it happen.

Scaffolding this conceptual lesson into prereading, during reading, and after reading strategies helps students stay focused and engaged. Leadership brings all sorts of discussion and personal reflections to the table; let’s get students motivated about the idea!

Prereading strategies

Begin with Janet Allen’s Wordstorming to Anticipate Content reading strategy. Allen’s alphabet grid validates what students already know about leadership. Using an interactive whiteboard, ask students to give you one word that defines a leader. As they offer their examples, write the words under the correct letter. By activating their prior knowledge of leadership, you will soon realize what your students think about leadership and what they understand leadership to be. In this way, you can determine where you need to start—either with a basic definition of leadership using rather pedestrian examples or more abstract analysis and synthesis.

During reading strategies

Now that you have an idea as to your students’ understanding regarding leadership, you can develop your next step. How about giving your students a reading choice? As examples, they could read a brief article about Will Allen of Growing Power and his desire to bring healthy food to those less fortunate, or they might read about Fr. Greg Boyle’s work with gangs on Homeboy Industries, or students might read about Diane Latiker and her work with homeless youth on Kids Off the Block. When you give students the opportunity to choose their reading (digital or print), engagement and motivation will follow. As students read, ask them to annotate, thereby initiating questions and comments from their reading.

After reading strategies

Once the reading is complete, encourage students to share what they have read. Embolden students to use their questions from their annotation as starting points for discussion. Now go back to the beginning. Give students class time to demonstrate their thoughts in a reflective paper—showcasing what they’ve learned about leadership and asking them for evidence based on the articles they’ve read. In that way, students have had the opportunity to relate this conceptual topic to their own lives and, more important, they have used research-based best practice strategies to learn about a theoretical subject.

So what is it about leadership that is so vital, so critical, that you are have created, developed, and implemented an entire lesson plan around this one concept? Students began with their own thoughts on leadership, thereby validating what they already knew and giving them a chance to listen and learn from their classmates. Next, they chose to read about other leaders by interacting with the text, asking questions and making personal connections. Finally, with time and support, students were able to take all of the information gathered and craft their own ideas and philosophies about leadership.

Next time, let’s not blame society for these transgressions; rather, let’s focus on our own classroom and offer opportunities to assist our students in developing manners to be lauded and respected.

Peg Grafwallner is an instructional coach with Milwaukee Public Schools.

He stood near my desk, clearly anxious, and waited for the classroom to empty. This is never a good sign. Seventh-grade boys do not stay after class. Worse, he was staring at my belly. Three weeks left until my maternity leave was scheduled to start, and I sensed this was going to be a disturbing and harrowing conversation.

“Mrs. Scullen, I need to tell you something. Privately.”

I braced myself. In middle school, I had to be prepared for anything. He looked deeply into my eyes and gave me a sympathetic head tilt.

“I need you to know, Mrs. Scullen, it’s going to hurt bad when that baby comes out. Really bad.”

I was able to keep a straight face, thank him, and let him know I would look into that. Relieved, he bounded out the door to lunch, his duty done.

This interaction was less horrifying than the one I had with an eighth-grade boy on the day I told my classes I was expecting. This young man snickered in the back of the room, gave me a thumbs up and a wink. Mortifying, and more than a little offensive.

As this was my third pregnancy as a middle school teacher, I was prepared for the interesting insights provided by my students. They were completely comfortable talking about any topic and rarely thought about boundaries.

Unfortunately, neither do their parents. For some reason, being a teacher suddenly opens a person up to all kinds of interactions addressing all sorts of personal topics. There are no boundaries.

I spent much of the last few days of what felt like my eleventh month of pregnancy lifting my belly out of the way so that I didn’t bump into desks or students in my crowded classroom. I had students’ complete attention—they stared at me with big eyes, I assumed they were worried I might burst.

I was prepared for the impending conference night—that most parents would be interested in the person hired to take over the class, how long I would be on leave, and how their child would do with the new teacher. These questions I was prepared to answer. Yet someone always manages to catch the teacher off guard. A lack of boundaries creates interesting conversation.

One mom asked if this was my first child.

“Oh, golly, no. My third, and the way I feel now, our last.”

Her next question still haunts me—“Really? Which one of you will get fixed?”

I must have mumbled some kind of response as she left the room, but I remember thinking, “Which one of us is broken?”

Another parent with boundary issues appeared in my room, took one look at me and announced, “Well! I can see why my son hates your class!” While I was trying to find my voice, she flounced to a student chair and said, “We’ve always taught our son that pregnant women are [tramps].” She used a more embarrassing word, but I do have boundaries, so I will let readers choose their own word. Apparently, this terminology was designed to keep her son away from romantic pursuits. I sometimes wonder exactly how that worked out.

As teachers, we expect our students to ask uncomfortable questions. It’s always a little awkward when the adults ask the distressing questions. But they do. Teachers are practically family, after all.

Middle schoolers are honest, open, and on the verge. They are on the verge of moving from preteen to teenager, busily connecting old thoughts to challenging new ones. Teachers don’t live at school! Teachers have babies! Teachers go to the gym and to the grocery store! Teachers are people!

In middle-school classrooms, boys who need to shave sit next to peers who regularly play with Barbies and Legos. Sometimes, those are even the same kid. I have to admit, though, for all of the embarrassment, these students without boundaries are my favorite students. Their questions make me smile and make me think.

Julie Scullen is a former president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council and is a current member of the International Literacy Association Board of Directors. She taught most of her career in Secondary Reading Intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, as well as reading assessment and evaluation.

When you’re a teacher, every minute of your day feels important. Because it is. Every. Single. Minute.

Often, many of these minutes are mandated. As in, how many minutes you must spend on reading instruction. How many minutes you must spend on writing instruction. How many minutes you must dedicate to character development or math or word study or science or social studies…or basically “insert anything here” and it is all urgent.

My personal tipping point was when I was told to find an additional 30 minutes twice a week to accommodate recorder lessons. Now, I am all for instrumental music but, one, the recorder sounds like a goose in the throes of death, and, two, those 60 extra minutes pushed my mandated minutes so far beyond the actual number of minutes I had with children that I could no longer stand the lack of common sense. I marched to my administrator and said, “I have 330 instructional minutes with students each week. You have now mandated 450 minutes of instruction.”

She replied, “Huh. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Well, make it work.”

So, in the wise words of Tim Gunn and my former administrator, I made it work. I made it work by choosing priorities for my students’ ultimate success. (Sorry, recorder.) At the top of my list? Independent reading and writing time. Kids get to be better readers and writers by actually reading and writing, not by listening to a teacher talk about them. These independent work periods also allow teachers the time to meet with students one on one or in small groups to address more personalized learning needs and goals. And I’m not talking about reading a pre-determined passage or writing in response to a prompt. Those have their place, but, for me, reading authentic student-selected texts and writing open-ended pieces were the minutes that mattered most.

I began making these minutes a priority by keeping track of them over the course of the week. Every day for one week, I kept careful track of the number of minutes my students spent reading and writing authentically and independently. Then, I analyzed my data. (The Powers That Be just love that last sentence.) Was I happy with the number of minutes students were actually engaged as readers and writers? If not, where could I steal extra minutes? Could I tighten up my own instruction, get creative with time, or trim any fat?

Let’s not get it twisted—this sounds much easier than it actually was in practice. I had to be very honest with myself about time-wasters and make tough decisions. Yet in the end, I was able to specifically diagnose my own redundancy and see how I could contribute to a solution, rather than continuing to complain about the problem of time.

A recent article published in Education Week solidified my fear that I am not alone. Many classrooms struggle to “cram it all in” and, as a result, students are often left with very few minutes to fall into an authentic reading and writing life.

So, yes, every minute is important. And no, there aren’t enough of them in the day. And of course, this reality is super easy to complain about—and complain you should.

But maybe, in this new year of possibility, we can find some time to prioritize and be part of the solution, too.

Mrs. Mimi, aka Jennifer Scoggin, is a teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of Be Fabulous: The Reading Teacher's Guide to Reclaiming Your Happiness in the Classroom and It's Not All Flowers and Sausages: My Adventures in Second Grade, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.