Amberlie – English 332

Recollecting literacies

By Amberlie | May 10, 2015

What is literacy? How do people learn literacies? Can literacy change? These questions have been rattling around my brain for the entire semester. Yes, we have explored the definition of literacy, how people learn, and how literacy changes, but I feel that my personal definition has not changed much.

At the beginning of the semester, everyone was asked what their definition of literacy is. I recall that my answer to literacy was a rehash of a streamlined textbook definition, involving the ability to read and write. Today, my opinion has changed slightly, to be that literacy is a process to learn something that can be carried into many other fields and use daily in all aspects of life.

Shortly after the start of the semester, we were presented with the idea that video games were a means of programming their minds to learn processes. The way that a person applies experience to other situations is what literacy is. A person learns that work and effort is paid in equal benefit, and they carry that process to school. That person then takes time and effort, and is generally rewarded with higher grades, recognition, or at least the ability to retain much more information.

On the other hand, people learn many literacies via their social surroundings. People who live in very religious families tend to learn a very different set of reward/punishment scales than someone who isn’t. If a child who is given a free ride from responsibility will generally be unable to take responsibility for themselves once they get to college, because they did not get the programming to do so.

Then, an important idea became apparent to me. The processes that people become programmed with, the way they are programmed, changes over time. Once upon a time, people learned from verbal studies. Lessons and ideas were transmitted and learned through songs. Children were not exclusively the only singers of song, even fairy tales were transmitted from adult to adult, and functioned as a way to time (as in setting a rhythm to work to) and occupy the minds of workers. Twenty years ago, songs were exclusive to younger children, and older kids or adults were taught by repetition. Today, everyone can get some sort of game to teach math, language, spacial awareness, or even learning music and art. How is it that one idea can have a solid “standard” definition when what that word means changes constantly, and is different from person to person?

That brings me to my final idea. What is the definition of literacy? Here, I have not strayed from my first post on the subject: I don’t know, and I don’t know that I will ever know what it is. The concept of literacy is a thousand shades of gray in a black and white scale. It is an idea that is completely invincible to standardization. I hope that I will always have this ambiguous idea of literacy, and I hope that more of the world will come to see this idea from my point of view.

Just an awesome school related thing…

By Amberlie | May 5, 2015

By Amberlie | April 28, 2015

All of the presentations had great lessons and content to help us understand complex themes of literacy. I really enjoyed the makers demonstration, and feel that one in particular would have appealed to me growing up, since I was not as quick to learn and behind in y reading capabilities. All of the ddemonstrations had excellent activities, that fill in the blanks that purely text based learning would leave out.

In my own project, the fairy tales group, I learned a lot about what different literature does to developing minds. Although fairy tales were the primary focus, the main point was that adults need to engage children about what they read, regardless of what that content is. Children (and adults, in my experience) learn best when they can discuss and clarify ideas gleaned from text. A child qho read Cinderella, will inherently absorb certain information without knowing it, and it is the responsibility of adults to ask “why is it import to be pretty?” Or “do you think she is smart?”

On another note, here is an upworthy link I liked.

http://www.upworthy.com/how-one-teacher-told-her-students-that-theyre-worth-more-than-their-test-scores?c=ufb1

Video Games and Learning

By Amberlie | March 20, 2015

Sorry, I am really, really behind on this post, but better late than never, right?

I was part of the group covering James Gee and the Literacy and Gaming book. Basically, there was a whole lot of technical stuff about language, society, and gaming itself, all focused on how people learn, with examples from a video game fitting these themes. Although it is a great read, it is somewhat hard to get to the point until the entire thing is finished. Gee goes on in the book to explain that there are several aspects that are found predominantly in gaming that help us to understand how people think and learn, as well as interpret the world around them; these things are featured as concepts of race, gender, and ideas of good vs. bad among other things.

The purpose of the book is to understand that video games are a form of literacy and means of learning a literacy that can be transposed to other aspects of life (just like our movie trailer showed). By that, I mean that a person learns (often subconsciously) some way of doing something (for instance working for a given time will lead to rewards to get you one step further toward your ultimate goal). The example given in our trailer is of a student who learns that the process involved with interaction and division of tasks between a number of people in the same ‘quest’, will result in a better understanding and success in the given task. The ‘student’ (me) in this example is shown attempting to complete her task alone with little help and little motivation, and ultimately fails. However, after splitting the tasks between friends (much in the same way a group of people in a game would fill certain roles like healer, “tank” or the front man, damage, etc.) she is able to accomplish her goal of a successful paper.

In the end, the group who read this book came to the same conclusion that games are a tool to learn complex patterns of thought and recognition of those patterns, which are important and difficult to learn in other (more traditional) settings.

I know, this sounds ridiculously redundant, but it is so fascinating that I think it is important to fully understand!

Literacy As I Know It

By Amberlie | March 1, 2015

The plain and simple fact is this: I don’t know how what literacy is. What I had previously known as “literate” is not a viable definition, and I am not sure there is a way to define it that entirely encompasses the very broad and ever-changing realm of literacy.

According to James Gee, literacy is a combination of learning processes that we can translate into multiple areas of our lives. The current curriculum in the classroom is what is defined as “literacy” for my generation, and several before (and probably several after me too), however it is proving more and more inadequate for the depth of literacies we are required to know and be proficient with in this day and age. Gee argues that video games would help correct this inadequacy by giving students the means of practice without learning being a chore. He says that structuring things in the way that video games are (and in fact, most table top games too, from my experience), that students will be able to enjoy and feel accomplished after putting in time and effort into any task. The factors that he says would make students do better are as follows:

1.That there is equal reward for equal effort/work put into any task. You put in time studying, you get rewarded, even if the student does not necessarily reach the goal the other students do.

2. Mundane and overly structured repetition of the same content gets old and tedious. Nobody likes to redo the same quest a million times in order to get one item to finish a second quest, and no child likes writing their spelling list twelve times to ‘memorize’ a word.

3. People learn very well in social environments. People learn faster and with less chance of failure if they are allowed to consult or collaborate with other people doing the same task.

I think that if every classroom was structured in ways to fit the above mentioned criteria, then even the lesser fortunate schools would be able to perform better. It is still going to be an issue of availability of content that will stunt many students’ growth in the future.

As mentioned in one of the readings ( I am sorry, I can’t remember which one!) it is pointed out that someone who is raised with money and means will always have better and more updated literacies than someone who doesn’t. I think that if classrooms were structured differently, technology would only really be used when it is necessary, and in that way, need less per school, and therefore be able to spread out to schools in neighborhoods that need it. As I said, this is purely an opinion that is based in my personal knowledge of the subject.

So there we have it. I know exactly what literacy isn’t, but not 100% (or even really 1%) what it actually is.

What Counts as Literacy?

Reading together

Calendar

Author: Amberlie