Ed’s great question, Moje

What’s new in literacy education these days? After reading Moje it seems that, “education should be as much about learning to be metadiscursive as it is about teaching conventional codes and scripts (Moje, 4).” The point of Juvenile Literacy education is to equip students with more than stories and skills. Their stories and skills are meant to garner “the ability to engage in many different discourse communities, to know how and why one is engaging, and to recognize what those engagements mean for oneself and others in terms of social positioning and larger power relations (Moje, 4).” This is a good thing if it is possible but how is this accomplished?

Opening a book and reading just isn’t going to accomplish metadiscursivity. It’s not that easy. You don’t develop “access to many different literacies because readers and writers can understand the different discourses that authors bring to bear on a text or can produce such discourses themselves (Moje, 4).” In a juvenile education setting how do you get juveniles to break the norms of the social barriers? How do you foster this dynamic learning environment that addresses both metadiscursivity and conventional codes and scripts?

An attempt at this dynamic comes close as scholars advocate that “the digital media themselves shape what gets written and how such texts should be read, and that young people need to develop both skills in using these technologies and strategies for navigating the technologies when their skills break down (Moje, 4).” ??? A little confusing right? I mean, doesn’t this technology create a storm of possibilities (both good and bad)? And how does that all get worked into a curriculum that addresses the myriad of difficulties facing education?

I’ll try and attempt to discover the solution to that riddle in my final post entitled Moje in Motion.