We have read quite a bit about literacy learning and teaching. We looked through many articles, conducted interviews, and read books. After all this consideration, my beliefs about literacy and learning have changed. I believe all people are literate to some extent in various subjects. This conclusion is drawn in part from the Szwed piece which showed how we are not seeing a decline of literacy. Szwed did a good job at questioning the decline of literacy. However, I think he could possibly take a more challenging stance and say literacy cannot decline in a first world nation. However, before you can agree with that claim, you’ve got to understand how this class got me thinking about what literacy is.

Literacy cannot decline in our society because literacy is the glue that holds our society together. Maybe that seems like a stretch, but remember, Hamilton called a literacy events “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants interactions and their interpretive processes.”  In other words, this quote means: if reading words is an important step, then that step is a literacy event. We can all see how reading is so inextricably tied into every aspect of life. People are always reading manuals, instructions, social media, and directions. It just seems that there are too many literacy events occurring in daily life for literacy to ever decline. Maybe the way literacy manifests itself can change through remixes. These remixes are transformations, not destruction.

Now, we have discussed how  manifestations and expressions of literacy are transforming as changes in culture and technological advancements extend the affordances of both authorship and reading to more people for use in a growing number of contexts. That’s a pretty big takeaway from this class. But, in this blog, I want to put more stress on what I have come to believe about literacies place in society. I think literacy has a permanent place in society as each person’s tool for the multitude of interfaces that call for reading and writing at this point in history. I’ve learned that literacy is probably only going to spread because it’s useful for any subject that involves using language.

Obviously literacy is everywhere and commonplace in our country. Who would disagree? This is why, as a future teacher, I’m not only aiming to increase the students literacy. I’d like to do more. I’d like to look into authorship and creativity and see how to teach those skills to students. I’ll also like to see how to teach and learn the tendencies and common practices of masterful authors in specific genres. I would focus on genres rather than an entire language( the way students can take four years of English now in high school.) To be honest, my Ideal teaching environment would be about communities of practice rather than a few months of speeches, discussions, and assignments. We have looked at literacy in so many contexts this semester. We’ve looked at games, music, and academics. I think instructors can impact a student’s literacy in a most positive way by having a narrow and clear focus.

 

It was interesting seeing the other groups present. Before the groups led activities, I was particularly interested in how the other groups concepts can give me a  more nuanced understanding of literacy; each group pointed out different facets of literacy.  Presentations triggered my curiosity about literacy as a many faceted subject.

For example, there was a crucial take away from the class on Gaming and literacy. During their slideshow, they talked about why games can be enthralling. A main reason for this is that failure is considered a part of the process of becoming an expert. Moreover, gamers have many opportunities to try again after failure. Now, when we consider gaming as a literacy practice, we can see how continuing to engage the game in spite of failure leads to more literacy events. 

The gaming and literacy group showed how games can lead to individuals embracing a multitude of literacy events. On the other hand, the presentation and discussion on adolescent identity and literacy showed how social connections influence how we practice literacy. From this group’s presentation, I saw that adolescents typically read the books that their friends do.

Finally the make/hack/play group showed how cooperation, experimentation, and extrapolation are skills that can be cultivated through practice with others. The activity they had us do really got interesting when we shared out from our groups. I think with second attempts, we could have made more creative things. I can also see how activities like this might be useful for any practice that calls for collaboration. 

This week, our group worked on Anne Dyson’s Writing Superheroes. In this book the author describes observations of an elementary school class’s small plays, which are written and acted out by students. Dyson also tells us the social context of children and how they construct their works for the student author’s theater. She is able to see the same themes, roles, and plot structures arise in many plays. From this book we can see how contemporary childhood and classroom literacy are both linked to popular culture.

Popular culture and childhood are obviously linked, Dyson gave great examples of this.  The focus of Writing Superheroes is the author’s theater. In this child-run theater, superhero stories are always joyously anticipated. These classroom superhero plays echo the same subjects, themes, and characters as those in famous comic books and popular movies. Authoring these stories is a chance for some children to broaden their social circle. For students like Sammy, a boy who used the plays to have social inclusion, these plays allowed his literacy to work for him. While these plays typically serve young boys well, the girls are often excluded.

Girls could have been excluded for a number of reasons. Dyson noted that the roles women play in popular superhero movies (which lay the foundation for the children’s plays) are typically passive roles or insignificant. This dynamic between men and women is mimicked by children.  To get around weak female roles, young girls had to write their own plays that would empower females in the script. For instance, a young girl named Tina and a friend began to write a superhero play and intentionally exclude boys. The plays clearly give a look at how popular culture influences the literacy of children since childhood literacy is developed through popular culture. Many children have literary events that require a familiarity with pop culture (superhero plays, card games, manga reading groups etc.)

There are so many ideas to unpack from this book. The author explains the numerous roles text can play. For the boy Sammy, text was a “ticket to play”. For Tina , text (in their plays) indicated who was tough and their social influence. Students used their characters to play out this toughness and gain social influence. This book says a lot about childhood and literacy practices of children in relation to popular culture. This book showed me how classroom literacy builds on the literacy practices of childhood; these literacy practices are rooted in popular culture sometimes.

Sponsors of literacy can play a crucial role in successfully learning a literacy practice. My most recent attempt to learn a new literacy practice was with Mandarin Chinese. During this experience, I had sponsors of literacy such as my professor and the student aids for the class. There is no form of Chinese that’s similar to english. Unlike spanish letters, Chinese characters are not like English. I decided to drop the class after struggling for a week or two. Nevertheless, I was able to see what conditions might have enabled me to succeed in the class with greater ease. Learning Chinese as a digital literacy might have made a difference. Keri Franklin’s experience with learning Twitter is an example of how digital literacies have some advantages over printed literacies.  

Franklin and I both struggled as newcomers to a new literacy practice. Franklin said twitter “seemed like an enormous bulletin board.” she didn’t know how to get a following for her posts and said her first few posts and said “I might as well have written a note in my diary and stuck it in a nightstand.” However, this negative feedback is crucial for learning to attract a following. Since twitter is a digital form of literacy, users not only get feedback, but also gain access to other users who are masters. Another benefit is getting to see skills used in context as frequently as is required. All this is made possible by digital literacy; digital literacy practices make practicing in context convenient and gives newcomers access to competent oldtimers in this case.

But it’s different with me and Chinese. While Franklin could  see twitter used in context as long as she had a phone, I didn’t know anyone who spoke chinese. So my opportunities to practice conversation were limited to the class. I speculate that it might have been much easier to learn this if I was immersed in a practice with a more authentic context.  By putting skills in context digital literacies can increase access to COPs, thereby increasing access to sponsors of literacy as individuals.

 This last reading got me thinking about how literacy events are related to literacy practices. Hamilton defined literacy events as “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants interactions and their interpretive processes.” I think this says something about learning in more terms than just literacy. For instance, by extrapolation, we can assume that as literacy events might improve literacy, an athletic event might improve athleticism.    

   When I think about learning anything, I think of the things we do in a  learning process. These things we do are  practices.  These practices help to cultivate skills through a series of events which engage us in such a way that we develop a skill through perfecting actions. Thus, it follows that literacy events are an essential component of literacy practices. This seems obvious, but I never thought of literacy practices in terms of events. This is why Hamilton was particularly interesting for me.

    The most interesting passage from this reading was the section “Extending definitions and Boundaries of a Literacy Event” Hamilton said, determining what practices have legitimate literacy events is “problematic.” We would like to think of the reading of a book for school as reading for a purpose, and therefore a literary event. However, reading signs in public places can be viewed in that same light (according to the definition of literacy events). Clearly an inclusive concept of literacy events is an good one. Clearly there are literacy events in most of our daily lives. This is what I expected to find, since last weeks reading quells the ungrounded concerns for a crisis of literacy.

 The image I chose was a World of Warcraft player. This is a game that has players reading constantly. Language is a significant part of the game. A Literacy event might be when he reads the maps, and names. Other events might be when the player reads about the history of characters. Many World of Warcraft players are in a huge community of practice, and search Wikipedia and other sources extensively for information on how to advance in story-mode and other things.