Parenting Lesson

Video #1-- Reading to Children (33:00)
Video #2-- Beatrice Doesn't Want To  (12:00)

AVReading Newsletter February: 21st Century Literacies

The book study for this year’s Literacy Planning Committee is Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice. This month’s reading, written by Jim Burke focuses on 21st century literacies-- the skills and processes we believe the coming years will ask of our students. The term “new literacies” --or 21st century literacies-- is by no means new. Coined by a group of academics in the early to mid 90s, it’s very definition has become difficult to pin down. Leu et al. (2004) suggest that a hard definition for new literacies will always be elusive since they are constantly changing with the new affordances of emerging technologies. However, they do offer a running list—of sorts—that outlines some of the processes of reading as defined by this field. “The new literacies of the Internet and other ICTs include the skills, strategies, and dispositions necessary to successfully use and adapt to the rapidly changing information and communication technologies and contexts that continuously emerge in our world and influence all areas of our personal and professional lives. These new literacies allow us to use the Internet and other ICTs to identify important questions, locate information, analyze the usefulness of that information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others.”(1570) Social commentators, like Thomas Friedman and Daniel Pink, often dabble with the idea of new literacies in their writings on workers of the coming years. In all honesty, both the ideas of 21st century literacies and new literacies have been greatly abused, in the sense that they become the wish list of everything we hope our students can do or become. And in some cases, by designing these laundry lists of our expectations, we forget that many of these qualities are just repackaged ideas of the past, all piled up into one big mess. In fact, it could be argued that our expectations of students today far surpass the expectations of our students from past eras. And while it seems to be the common convention to berate schools, teachers, and students for being less capable today (often indicated by the skewed presentation of test data), those notions of incompetence and negligence do not really withstand the scrutiny. With that said, our evolving standards of students should be in line with what we do within our classrooms. For this month’s newsletter, I would like to briefly offer three learning areas outlined by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills: Information and Communication Skills, Thinking and Problem Solving, Interpersonal and Self-Directional Skills. First, students and workers of the 21st century must be comfortable with their ability to both process and present information from a broad array of sources and mediums. This is as close as the Partnership gets to the traditional notions of reading and writing. Notice, however, that we no longer expect students to merely comprehend text and compose letters to elected officials-- which have traditionally been the benchmarks of work-- but rather we expect them to integrate, analyze, access, and manage data, no matter the form and medium. Second, students and workers of the 21st century must be able to employ thinking and problem solving skills. Whereas the traditional conceptualization of school has been a focus on drilling and memorization (ie. What were the dates of the Civil War? What are the six stages of mitosis? What is a noun?), learning today has become more about developing critical thinking skills, evaluating problems and situations, determining creative approaches to complex situations, and fostering one’s intellectual curiosity. Finally, students and workers of the 21st century need to develop interpersonal and self-directional skills. I don’t believe that this is anything new. Teaching students to work cooperatively has a long history in American schools. But the socially connected environments of the digital age have changed things slightly. People need to know how to manage professional relationships and networks both in real time and in virtual space, where the rules are slightly different. They will be asked to work in new environments, at keyboards and desktops, where their duties will demand more self-directional responsibilities. Inherently, what we know of students and how they learn has not fundamentally changed. Instead, 21st century literacies asks us to consider the changing world and workplaces around us, to promote and emphasize ways of knowing and working that will enable students to be successful in a rapidly evolving landscape. View the full newsletter here.