So we’ve arrived at the end…

This class was completely surprising.  It didn’t talk about literacy in the way I expected.  It didn’t focus on literacy as specifically learning to read and write and when it did, it expanded our preexisting ideas of what these texts about which the public so desperately needs to learn to read and write were exactly.  What I learned is this:

Literacy is about competency.  Literacy is influenced by a variety of factors and manifests itself in a multitude of forms.  Literacy must be understood in all of its complexities to be taught and taught in all of its forms to be understood.

When schools seek to increase literacy rates they should be looking at literacy as a multifaceted concept and teach it as such.  Szwed lists examples such as graffiti, sheet music, cereal boxes, and closed captions as valid forms of literacy.  He, along with others, makes the argument that literature can be diverse without creating a hierarchy.  A lack of formality doesn’t indicate a lack of knowledge.  In fact, this diversity should be encouraged.  Students should know when to use what diction and level of formality and shouldn’t be taught that a specific dialect or convention is inherently wrong, but rather better used in certain environments.  Literature is encountered constantly in every aspect of life and when schools pretend most forms don’t exist or are in some way invalid it can be harmful to students, many of whom will go on to be people who create this supposedly invalid writing.  Szwed states that “one must know what [language] means to its users and how it is used by them” in order to improve literacy’s relationship to schools and education.  He goes on to say “the focus should be on the school and its relation to the community’s needs and wishes” (429).  If schools don’t look at how people are currently using language and anticipate how it will be used in the future, their students are going to be both uninterested in education and unprepared for the future.

Having more literate students requires students coming in contact with a wider variety of literacy.  Sponsorship and access, ideas discussed by Brant, are an incredibly important part of the process of becoming literate in any area.  Szwed talks about how socioeconomic classes and social context change what is being read and how that reading occurs but Brant expands on this idea.  In Sponsors of Literacy, she focuses on how people and environments affect literacy.  She defines sponsors as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy –and gain advantage by it in some way” (166).  Without sponsors who provide access for students, or anyone learning a new literacy, there will be significantly less success.  Teachers should be working to be sponsors for all students and to introduce equality in the learning environment because, as Brant points out, this doesn’t exist outside of school due to the marginalization of minorities, people experiencing varying degrees of poverty, and other causes.

Sponsorship, specifically with newer literacies, is becoming less and less something that occurs with someone in a position of authority.  New media tends to be learned in peer-to-peer environments.  This way of learning creates communities that can work together and use a shared knowledge to solve problems.  This idea is talked about in James Paul Gee’s book and was discussed in class in the video game and make/hack/play groups, but most importantly it was implemented in the class itself.  Video games teach us, through forums or mods or walkthroughs, the value that other players and participants in the community add to the experience of playing and the knowledge of individual players as well as the collective.  In this environment all players’ work is inherently canonical.  This class demonstrated this principle in a refreshing and inspiring way.  All students became active participants in an academic discussion through writing blogs and interacting with each other’s blogs, by teaching each other through activities and presentations, by having discussions and making things together in class.  This class embodied the ideas about literacy it was teaching and showed the value that peer-to-peer learning can bring to a classroom.

Learning about maker culture made these ideas even more evident.  Maker cultures argues that we should be creating instead of repeating.  In this way too the work of the makers has inherent value.  They are not trying to come up with the solution but instead a solution, and this is predominately done through collaboration.  Peer-to-peer learning and low risk learning are essential to successfully learning a new literacy.  Peer-to-peer learning requires participation, which our class was full of.  We taught each other things we never would have had time to study intensively on our own and used this communal knowledge to create activities, resources, and ignite talks.  We weren’t expected to regurgitate information but generate it.  And yet, all of these things were done in a risk free environment.  Repeating someone else’s work can be expected to be done without failure, but creating cannot.  Students in low risk learning environments are expected to fail, to retry, to tinker, to modify, etc.  Maker culture is inherently connected to low risk learning.  It asks students to solve a problem rather than telling them what they should do.  There is no right answer to look for but instead an effective solution to be created and we spent most of our class trying to build off ideas about literacy instead of memorize them.

There is so much more to be said about literacy studies, how it is changing, how literacies should be taught, etc.  But for now this has been a summary or manifesto of sorts of what I have learned in this class and what I have come to believe literacy is.  This class has been an eye opening experience and has led to so many interesting conversations outside of class, and hopefully will lead to more even once the semester has ended.

I learned so much from other article groups’ presentations and workshops.  It would have been impossible for each of us to spend a number of weeks on each topic, but having the class divide into groups with specific topics and then teach what we learned to each other was an awesome example of the success of peer-to-peer learning!

The Adolescent Identity and Literacy group did a fantastic job of explaining the ways our identities, how we see ourselves and how others see us, shape how we learn.  Though our identities may change throughout our lives, adolescence is when these questions of identity are beginning to form.  This group pointed out the vital role new media plays in this process for youth today.  They have a multitude of platforms on which to express a variety of identities each with a different audience in mind.  These adolescents are learning how to shape the way others view them through what they post and where they post it, and all while they are trying to figure out how they view themselves.  This group also discussed the role self-expression plays in schools, asking questions like: how much expression should be allowed and what advantages and disadvantages occur by allowing students to express their identity?  This discussion largely revolved around the idea of uniforms and how they can both positively and negative affect learning by allowing students to express, and therefore better understand, who they are while simultaneously creating some level of inequality between students.

The Hip-Hop and Literacy group gave a fantastic presentation with a variety of useful and interesting outside resources.  The most interesting aspect of this presentation was their emphasis on the fact that hip-hop is just as valid as poetry, just as much an example of literacy as poetry.  This is a completely different argument than the idea that rap is poetry.  When this topic gets discussed, most of the time people think that to give rap validity they need to call it poetry.  This group wasn’t afraid to recognize rap as its own separate form of literacy.  They of course talked about its similarities to poetry the way someone would talk about similarities between poetry and prose, but they acknowledged the distinction between the two which I found very refreshing.  Their video “Vital Tips on How to Rap Fast” and their discussion about raps and scansion was super interesting.  They also had new ideas regarding how to implement rap into a class room both as written pieces of literature and through freestyling.  A lot of these ideas were shown in the video of Kendrick Lamar visiting a classroom.

The Video Games and Literacy group also did a great job.  I’ve already written quite a bit about video games and literacy because I was part of the What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Literacy and Learning book club.  They discussed many similar ideas, such as the importance of low risk learning in video games and education and the role that community and teamwork play.  Their activity in which we were sent on an IRL quest was a really interesting examination of how video game principles can be applied in real life situations and classrooms.  After returning from our quest they asked us interesting questions about communication and strategizing.

The Make/Hack/Play articles have had a lot to say about maker culture and the role it could (and in some places has begun to) play in education.  Maker culture, though a relatively new movement, is in many ways similar to the older DIY culture.  Maker culture is significantly more community based and tends to put a greater emphasis on the use of technology than DIY, but maintains the overall importance of creating.  Learning through hands on experience and experimentation are two of the most vital principles of this movement.

Creating, maker culture seems to argue, is learning.  In order to make, the creator has to first understand, not understand enough to regurgitate answers on a test but understand on a much deeper and more valuable level.  Creating also teaches the creator about more than just one project; it allows them to think about potential, about how to enhance their project or how individual pieces can be used in different ways.  Making will often involve collaboration, peer-to-peer learning, and trial and error.  Collaboration and peer-to-peer learning require creative problem solving in a way that learning from an authority figure doesn’t.  The idea of trial and error is especially important, and a way in which maker culture can revolutionize education.  Repeating someone else’s work can be expected to be done without failure, but creating cannot.  Potential students would be expected to fail, to retry, to tinker, to modify, etc.  Maker culture is inherently connected to low risk learning.  It asks students to solve a problem rather than telling them what they should do.  There is no right answer to look for but instead an effective solution to be created.  Making also requires students to design something that, once completed, will be their own.  This is not only good for learning purposes, but is also infinitely more engaging and personal.

Though making learning “fun” or “engaging” might seem more like a bonus than a necessity, reading through these articles have convinced me otherwise.  Being engaged means developing an interest and although interest is not always needed in school to pass, it will be what guides students after graduation.  Maker culture is not made up of college kids but of a variety of people who are interested and want to see something come out of that interest.

 

Some resources if you dare:

– Permission to Make (video interview of Adam Savage):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrRNwLJHxhQ

– Try some making for yourself

http://scratch.mit.edu

– College Campuses and Maker Culture

http://hackeducation.com/2013/02/06/the-case-for-a-campus-makerspace/http://hackeducation.com/2013/02/06/the-case-for-a-campus-makerspace/

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning is a book that focuses on 36 principles created by the author, James Paul Gee, which he establishes over the course of 6 chapters.  I’m just going to pull out a few of my favorite ideas, though.

In his first chapter, he discusses the idea that games encourage, “exploration, hypothesis testing, risk taking, persistence past failure, and seeing ‘mistakes’ as new opportunities for progress and learning.”  This sentence encompasses many principles he addresses later in the book, the importance of which are (in my opinion) irrefutable.  The author mostly talks about how these ideas can be applied to education but they should, of course, be a part of any new literacy.  Learning requires exploration.  It requires testing hypotheses as a part of this exploration, as a part of figuring out how to use the literacy and later how to best use the literacy.  The book also points out that learning a new literacy will inherently require mistakes and the consequences of these mistakes cannot be so dire that the learner doesn’t want to continue.  Instead, these mistakes should encourage the learner to explore more and create a new hypothesis.  He talks about this more when he brings up the psychosocial moratorium where a learner can take risks without real world consequences, somethings formal education often lacks but a good videogame creates.

Another important idea that the book brings up is that of “walkthroughs” and “cheating.”  Gee says, “…imagine what a science classroom would look like where learners wrote extensive walkthroughs according to strict norms and debated when and how to use them, debates that became part and parcel of the learners’ growing appreciative systems about what it means to ‘do science (well).’”  Later in the book, he goes on to talk about communities and forums and the role they play with respect to videogames, education, and literacy.  I think these two ideas go hand in hand.  I have no idea how something like a walkthrough would function in a science class but being engaged and collaborating are two incredibly important things when it comes to learning.  The book emphasizes this importance of learning in community, something that we’ve talked about as a class and could be linked to the idea of sponsorship.  Walkthroughs allow the learners to become sponsor for fellow learners, and sponsorship is a necessary part of learning any literacy.

Lastly, I really liked what the author had to say about what he called decontextualized “skill-and-drill.”  He states, “The issue here is not starting children (or game players, for that matter) with easy cases.  The issues is starting them with cases that are basic or fundamental in the sense that they lead the learner to discover and practice what are, in fact, fruitful patterns and generalizations.”  This also is applicable to any new literacy you might be trying to learn.  Though “transfer” can be important and useful when learning a new literacy, it is not always the best way to go about teaching it.  Decontextualizing information that the learner will need to use later on can often be harmful and jarring to the learning process.  A literacy should build off itself, of basic fundamental ideas.

This book helps us to understand ways in which we can approach learning a new literacy and ways in which the designers of the literacy can help us to do so by looking at how this is done in video games.

So far, all of the readings have been expanding my understanding, and maybe the general meaning, of what literacy is.  Traditionally, literacy is defined as an ability to read and write.  This definition makes teaching literacy seem almost easy.  However, all of the authors we’ve seen have challenged this idea.  They have argue that literacy is a multifaceted concept with a variety of influencing factors and multiple manifestations.  Each author has a different way of expressing this idea, but the concepts we’ve looked at tend to be broken down into two sections, things that influence literacy and ways that literacy appears in the world, including the less conventional forms.

We started the semester off with Szwed, who categorizes the influencing factors as context, function, participants, and motivation.  The examples of literacy itself he refers to as text.  Throughout this reading we see how socioeconomic classes and social context change what is being read and how the reading occurs.  He also argues that “literature” is not the only form of reading that should be connected to literacy, listing signs, graffiti, sheet music, cereal boxes, closed captions, etc.  Szwed wants us not only to recognize these ideas but to think about how they impact literacy’s relationship to schools and education.  He says, “Educators often assume that reading and writing form a single standard set of skills to be acquired and used as a whole by individuals who acquire them in a progression of steps which cannot be varied or avoided in learning.  But even preliminary thought on the problem indicates that these skills are distributed across a variety of people” (426).  Szwed concludes this reading by suggesting ways literacy should be studied and saying, “the focus should be on the school and its relation to the community’s needs and wishes” (429).

Brandt also makes this division between influences and text.  In Sponsors of Literacy, she focuses on how people and environments affect literacy.  She defines sponsors as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy –and gain advantage by it in some way” (166).  In her section on sponsorship and access Brandt, like Szwed, discusses socioeconomics as well as how majority-race status tends to be linked to higher levels of literacy.  In Accumulating Literacy, she expands on the text and literacy itself, providing two ways of looking at it.  Literacy piles up and spreads out.  The piling up refers to the new and old literacies.  Some examples we gave in class were penmanship to computers and encyclopedias to Wikipedia.  We also discussed how people are often expected to know the outdated as well as the new forms of literacy.   The spreading out refers to how literacy as invaded nearly all aspects of life, which in some way provides people with better access.  Brandt gives examples such as “economic, legal, political, and domestic activities” and in class we gave the example of paperwork at the DMV, and even online paperwork (652).

Ultimately, these two authors and Williams’ ideas about our perception of youth and change in relation to literacy have been the most interesting to me.  However, the main thing I find myself “mulling over” is why it matters.  I think there’s the easy, though not simple, answer of education.  It matters because without a better understanding of literacy we can’t educate students, at least not well.  It matters because those students won’t be able to function outside of school if we teach them the wrong types of literacy, or only one type of literacy.  It matters because it allows us to help those with less access, and so on.  But outside of education, why?  As someone who is incredibly interested in literacy, and has been long before this class, I’ve never known what to do with it.  How, when you don’t intend to go into education, is studying literacy beneficial?  I think it gives us a better understanding of our culture, it helps us to be innovative, to not be afraid of new types of literacy, even to create new types of literacy.  Maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the answer, but I’m not really satisfied with that, and as a student who can’t currently devote my life to the study of literacy I feel a bit disconnected to it.