Making Connections

When we began work on this project and our presentations I was struggling to find the connection between each of the groups. The group titles were all so different and covered such different information that I was a bit confused on what the project really was.

After watching and participating in all of the presentations, I don’t think my confusing was too far off.
Literacy contains so much more than reading and learning. Of course it contains the storybooks and Fairytales, but it also contains hip-hop and rapping, and even building strange origami robots.

Literacy is much more broad than what I had thought before this class, and I think that this project was the epitome of that realization.

Each group had something to say about how their literacy affected the participants. The storybooks affect the children that are reading or being read to, but can also have an affect on our society and the standards and ideas that fairytales reinforce over and over. Their group also shared how creating new stories can be creative and help to change our stereotypes.

The hip-hop group talked about rapping and how that engages the participant and uses parts of the brain differently that other “literacies” don’t necessarily access.

The adolescent group touched on a lot of ways that all different literacies affect us and shape our world in adolescence. What they are exposed to and given the opportunities for will affect their literacy throughout life.

In our group, make hack play, we looked into how we could bend the rules and the common literacies and make something new. I’m glad I was in this group because it made the least sense and the most at the same time to me. It was hard to see, at first, how making things (ie. Robo-fingers) in a classroom really fit into literacy in terms of our class. But in the end, I saw that that was exactly the point. Literacy is so broad and contains so much more than anything I could have thought before this class.

So I’m going to keep making origami robots and kaleidoscopes and finding connections to other subjects and literacy.