Literacies, Literacies and More Literacies

As an elementary student my mother gave me the gift that keeps on giving.  After my teachers told her that I had an unusually high aptitude for reading and writing she insisted that I read at least one book a week, and we made frequent trips to the public library.  Naturally I rebelled against this in High School as I did not want my peers to view me as a nerd because I loved reading.  I still read secretly away from the prying eyes of my friends and I can remember the best cure for having the flu in high school was curling up with a good book.  I was especially fond of John Grisham’s work at that time, and I remember reading A Time To Kill, and The Firm, and wondering why we didn’t read contemporary, fast paced books like these in high school.  These were books that could get kids excited about reading, and any reading regardless of its status or lack thereof in the literary canon increases literacy and intellectual curiosity.  To this day I am perplexed as to why kids hate reading, and in high school it becomes “cool to be dumb,” an idea that I succumbed to for a while, and it cost me a lot most importantly the opportunity to go to a good college right away instead of starting my college education at the community college level at the age of 21.  In many ways I am still catching up to that late start in higher education.  As a teacher I strive to make sure my students do not make the same mistakes I made, and my foremost goal is to make them better readers and writers yet they are resistant to traditional methods and I have become open to new forms of literacies.   One thing students, both male and female love is technology and we can use that in the classroom to increase literacy.  Technology is gender neutral in a way that most high school texts are not as they usually feature a male protagonist.  I think the future of literacy may look something like Twitter.  I have become a Twitter addict.  For instance when I publish a post on WordPress it also appears on my Twitter account.  I love to tweet random stuff as it gets me  in the mood for writing more serious material.  Twitter has become my electronic newspaper and entertainment forum as I receive updates ranging from the NY Times to Damon Lindelof, Producer of my favorite TV show, LOST.  As an aside I use LOST excerpts in my Government classes as their final project resembles the plot of the show in that they must  build a government after they have been stranded on a deserted island due to an airplane crash.  My kids love this project because I use current media to build on the concepts we have learned in class.  This is an example of embracing technology and creating teachable moments.  I have also used LOST to illustrate narrative structures with its various forms of flashforwards, flashbacks etc.  Again the students love deconstructing this stuff, and their literacy levels increases as a result, and  I will argue that point with any colleague for as long as I am teaching.  Getting back to Twitter, it  is perfect for students because it is akin to online texting.  I can see a time in the future where I have students meet online in small groups during which I give them a prompt based on something we have learned in class, and they have 140 characters or less to prove that they have grasped the material and can expand on it.  I hope that Twitter one day becomes universal in that everyone has an account, and we can use it to have our students interact with contemporary writers, and other aspects of mainstream culture. 

James Paul Gee argues that we can incorporate video games into the 21st Century classroom as well.  His theories on video games as a learning tool are fascinating but I am not quite sure on how I can directly translate them into use in my high school Social Studies classes.  Gee is correct in that video games are a tool of learning, and if we can find ways to utilize the way kids learn when they play video games, and tap into that same form of knowledge acquisition in the classroom then we will have truly created new forms of literacies.  However I think this is still at least 5-10 years away because as much as I love playing my Wii and my XBox 360 these are not tools that help students become better readers and writers which I am primarily concerned with.  Yes they do increase critical thinking skills, but we still have much to learn about incorporating this technology.  Gee has opened an interesting dialogue and I will be watching and reading its progression. 

In regards to the issue of Gender in the classroom as discussed earlier I think technology is gender neutral but we do have to add more texts that our female students can relate to and that feature heroine’s  rather than solely hero’s.  Stanley’s article makes some interesting points regarding female readers and romance novels and there are lessons that can be learned from it.  Many schools have already incorporated the Harry Potter Series into instruction, which feature a strong male protagonist of course but the smartest girl and most capable in the series is Hermione and young girls truly admire her.  As I alluded to earlier I am a proponent of using popular culture to increase literacy, and we can use the newest phenomenon to include more female protagonists in our texts.  For example, there should be no reason that we can’t use the Twilight Saga in schools.  Many people sexualize these tales but they are actually chaste and are written by a Mormon.  Beside the supernatural element the books are primarily concerned with a young girl coming of age and finding her place in the world, something all girls can relate to. A lesson that I have learned in my own teaching is that by using new forms of literacy we can sometimes trick children into learning even when they don’t want too.