AVReading

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire entreats us to address the broader nature of literacy. He states that educators must do more than just teach students how to decode words in decontextualized text, but that we must teach them to read both the word and the world. While his original intent was to challenge educators to take a more active stance in addressing the inequities of our world, the phrase “reading the word and the world” has been watered down considerably. Today, the phrase represents the idea that reading involves much more than the comprehension of printed text. We read the world when we study graphs and charts. We read the world when we analyze the validity of data and statistics. We read the world when we study news broadcasts and documentaries for bias. We read the world when we evaluate the credibility of websites. We read the world when we study relationships and how they are defined by power. We read the world when we study paintings and the stor...

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

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 continuo...

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Sharon Taberski, an independent consultant and teacher of 28 years, recently offered some thoughtful ideas about the design of our classrooms to make them more interactive. She discussed a need to not only construct our spaces to be more interactive, but to also construct our language to encourage interaction. A recent concern is that we have adopted the language of tests within our classes.  In other words, in teaching to the test, we begin to adopt approaches that require the same type of interaction with our students; meaning that we simply rattle off simple recall or short response questions at the expense of rich conversations and discussions. In response to this, Taberski believes that there are structural room design things that we can change, curriculum modificaitons, as well as language things we can take on. The first of these is changing the structure and design of our rooms.  She offered images of classrooms that were designed with...

At Friday’s faculty meeting, teachers took a brief survey to indicate their initial impressions of the Literacy Moment here at AVHS.  In this month’s newsletter, I’d like to share a few of those results and observations with you. Of the sixty four teachers with a non-ninth grade class, forty of them returned a literacy survey, which means these findings represent about 63% of the potential teachers who participated in the program.  In general, teachers were considerably enthusiastic about the program.  All 40 of the respondents indicated that they participated in the literacy moment.  That is a strong response, though, one should be skeptical of a bias since about 20-25 teachers did not complete the survey.  Thus generalizing from this data is more of a broad indicator versus a detailed picture.  Bringing Books According to teacher observations, classes varied in their participation.  About 57% of the teachers stated that 75...

With this year’s unique scheduling, we have a great opportunity to promote reading and literacy in our building in a powerful way.  Six times throughout the course of our fall trimester, we will provide our 10-12 th graders with twenty minute windows to enjoy the chance to read.  While the popular narrative suggests that no one really reads anymore, the truth is that we probably read more (in text print) than we have ever done before.  In 2005, Gallup found that there had been a 22% increase in U.S. readers who claimed to be actively reading from the data taken in 1957.  And despite the fear that movies and online entertainments have pulled time away from reading, we discover that in many cases they promote it.  Blockbuster hits like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games,  Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Twilight all suggest that the book themselves have a symbiotic relationship with books.  Social networking sites have also drawn more people to ...