Reading Reflection #2

Labeling and Defining Literacy in 2019

In a field that is rapidly evolving to keep up with a technological landscape that defines itself by constant revision and disposal, it is not surprising that the language surrounding digital literacy has, itself, not settled down. Alvermann uses literacy as an adjective, speaking of “literacy practices,” or “literacy skills” or “literacy instruction” (Alvermann, p. 12), but when using literacy as a noun, it becomes plural when referring to multiple types of media or a range of settings: “out-of-school literacies,” for example. In the article by Lankshear and Knobel, the plural “new literacies” seems to refer to the numerous interpretations and definitions of literacy as much as it does to the multimodal nature of our redefined conception of literacy. Using a plural designation is also a way to underline the fact that we once thought of literacy as a very specific, singular thing - the ability by an individual person to accurately decode printed text. The plural “new literacies” makes it clear that literacy is not about just one thing, one viewpoint, one medium, but many. Hammerberg leans more toward using the singular form of the term literacy, but wants to expand its meaning to be one driven less by a skill or activity and more by the purpose of comprehension. To that end, “reading” itself becomes a much broader term as well. Coiro’s use of “new literacies” seems to indicate that she sees them as multiple approaches that all fall under the broad umbrella of literacy.

Some aspects of the new literacies are truly new, others are new-ish, and others are not new, but are only recently thought of as literacy. Hyperlinks are most often contained within text, and online search results are often composed largely of text, but they are new expressions of information for most people in the past 25 years or so. Recorded audio and video formats have been around for longer and have been the subject of study for some time, but it’s relatively recently that we’ve been able to access them easily in a format that marries them with text. In the case of video, its study has typically been tied up more with the delivery mechanism of television or cinema. Now the delivery mechanism (a computer device) has many different genres and formats together in one place, making it easier to evaluate the piece for what it communicates rather than for its format or how it’s distributed. Some “new literacies” are older than printed text, but are newly thought of as an academic literacy, such as “reading a situation,” as Hammerberg points out (p. 649), or engaging in code-switching, by being aware of socio-cultural contexts. Other new literacies are due to the ease of production. In the past it was too complicated or expensive for the average person to create multimedia, so it was a specialized ability. The logistics of collaboration was more difficult in the past, but now it’s simpler to accomplish, so many people need to know how to use collaborative features in digital tools. Literacy, as a term, tends to connote an agreed-upon basic level of competence; it has an air of daily necessity about it. Some skills were once too difficult or expensive for most people to engage in, so they couldn’t be considered something that one could expect most people to be able to do, but that has shifted rapidly.

When one speaks of “online reading comprehension” and “digital inquiry” as somewhat equivalent terms, many would be confused. Reading, to most, still means decoding of text, and “digital inquiry” seems to be directed more at the process than at the hoped-for end result of comprehension. “Online reading comprehension” is about fully understanding what you encounter online, whether it’s text or videos, audio, or hyperlinks. Using “online reading comprehension” to indicate a range of literacy activities seems not that hard to grasp, while “digital inquiry” refers more to an activity (inquiry) that one engages in as part of the process of trying to comprehend online information. And when you throw in the use of upper- and lower-case terms to mean different things, it muddies the water even further for the majority of people. Personally, I prefer “digital literacy” in most usages. Digital is fairly easy for the layperson to understand -- it’s anything that is encountered with a computer or similar device. And it’s not a huge jump for literacy to be expanded to include more. I also like the idea of trying to achieve “digital fluency,” since literacy has typically suggested a fairly low bar to clear.


Implications for Teaching and Learning
Are digital literacy skills, strategies, practices and mindsets more or less important than traditional ones? I don’t think you can divorce then from one another, so you need to give them equal importance, although the balance of time spent may shift over a student’s career. The basic building blocks of vocabulary, grammar, background knowledge, and fluency are needed regardless of whether you are reading online or off. Newspapers didn’t go away when radio came in, radio didn’t go away when TV came in, and printed books continue to survive (although I suspect periodicals’ days are numbered), and even thrive in some categories. Printed books continue to be a preferred manner of introducing literacy to small children, for a variety of important emotional, eduational, and logistical reasons. For early readers, the straightforward and usually linear nature of picture books is a powerful entry point to literacy -- for most. That being said, understanding literacy in a broader sense could help us to reach a wider audience and leave fewer children behind. The “new literacies” offer affordances, capabilities and enticements that could draw a larger percentage of our children into self-directed inquiry and literacy activities at a younger age -- before they, their parents or their teachers decide that they aren’t “readers.”

The greatest challenge, to most teachers, is finding the time in an already over-burned day to address both traditional and digital literacy. Teachers need professional development not just to acquire the digital skills, but also to learn how their goals and standards are embedded digital literacy activities like inquiry, collaboration, and communication. Moreover, these are all skills that are needed for lifelong learning and in the 21st century workplace. And to get that professional development there must be buy-in on an administrative level. Districts must give teachers time to learn the skills and to adjust lessons, and they need to give teachers time to collaborate and teach one another and to share. Digital literacy approaches should be used to provide improved professional development. We need to use the same approaches in teaching one another that we know we need to use in the classroom, moving away from the sage-on-the-stage to the guide-on-the-side model. Just as digital literacy integrates well with many curricular goals, it also dovetails with other educational priorities like SEL (social-emotional learning), inclusion, engagement, authenticity, and giving students more voice and choice, project-based learning. Digital literacy is not an add-on, it supports and extends a lot of what we are already doing or need to do. In addition, most teachers about elementary levels do not consider literacy something that they think they need to integrate into their instruction. But if being truly, fully literate in the 21st century means mastering many of the traditional skills as well as the new literacies, we need teaches to understand what that continuum looks like. Perhaps in the younger grades the greater amount of time should still be spent on offline-type reading skills, with some age-appropriate digital skills integrated, but as the child progresses through the system, the balance should shift to more time spent on the digital literacies, continuing into high school and even college.

There are big remaining questions about assessment. How can we assess deeper learning in the classroom in a useful and objective, or at least non-biased, manner? So much of what we do in the classroom is driven by the needs of standardized assessment, from state tests like the Massachusetts MCAS, national exams like the SAT, and international ones like PISA. If these tests integrate measurement of digital literacy in an effective manner, then classroom teachers will be forced to address these skills. But this is a challenge because the very nature of digital literacy means that students work in a collaborative manner to deeply investigate authentic issues. By its nature standardized tests are not collaborative, don’t allow for in-depth work, and are the very opposite of authentic.

New Literacies Scholar danah boyd

danah boyd by Kendall Whitehouse

In the decade since completing her PhD at UC Berkeley’s iSchool, danah boyd has devoted her career to examining “the intersection between technology and society.” (boyd).

While boyd (who does not capitalize her name) has broadened her scope in recent years, her early career was dominated by her study of teens and social media and how they live online. She spent a great deal of time between 2005 and 2012 hanging out with teens in a diverse range of communities and schools across the US. The result of that ethnographic research was a 2014 book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. That book and an author appearance at the Harvard Bookstore captivated me when it came out. She makes a case for the rise of social media teen culture being tied to teens having fewer opportunities for face-to-face peer interactions due to more structured schedules and parental fears of children moving around independently. It’s Complicated examines the rise of specific online cultures that teens have created online with their own sets of rules and issues of identity and privacy. Rather than being alarmist, as most books about teens on the Internet were and are, the book reported on specific ways that boyd observed teens building their online worlds and how they have created complex social environments and contexts. She is particularly sensitive to how kids navigate issues of race and class and inclusivity.

Sociocultural theories “see literacy, first and foremost, as a social practice always embedded within structures of power.” (Hammerberg, 2004, p. 649) Teens as individuals are quite powerless, but as a group they can start cultural movements or appeal to marketing by large companies. Teens “in the wild” online exhibit multiple identities in different spaces, create their own social cues and rules, and develop their own socio-cultural contexts. In her Harvard Bookstore appearance, boyd discusses how race and class influence teens’ choices about social media services and how the norms differ in how they interact.

More recently, boyd has “turned to focus on understanding how contemporary social inequities relate to technology and society more generally,” through the research institute Data & Society, which she founded in 2013. She is unafraid to poke at some of the most accepted current thinking in relation to media literacy. In a 2018 SXSW EDU keynote address, which was largely based on the text of her blog post, You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?, boyd says, “I want to examine the instability of our current media ecosystem to then return to the question of: what kind of media literacy should we be working towards?” She suggests that use of language in the United States is an accepted cultural marker and differentiator: “People became elite by mastering the language marked as elite. Academics, journalists, corporate executives, traditional politicians: they all master the art of communication.” (boyd, 2018a) To boyd, social class and other determinants do not bestow power as much as power resides in the use of language. This is not dissimilar to the theories proposed by the Australian genre theorists, who associate “social power with mastery of genres” and believe that those “powerful genres and their social purposes can … be identified and taught explicitly.” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 19)

Despite holding progressive views herself, boyd cautions that our belief in media literacy and its processes risk leaving behind those with more conservative views. “There’s widespread sentiment that we can fact check and moderate our way out of this conundrum. This will fail. Don’t forget that for many people in this country, both education and the media are seen as the enemy — two institutions who are trying to have power over how people think. Two institutions that are trying to assert authority over epistemology.” (boyd, 2018a) While I am not quite persuaded by all of her arguments, I appreciate that she poses questions others may not about the efficacy of digital literacy and its instruction in our schools. She has at least a few practical suggestions, such as separating out the context from the content in order to create a “cognitive disconnect” for the purposes of analysis -- the opposite of what is often suggested when we look first at the context.

Boyd is currently a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Visiting Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the founder of Data & Society, a research institute. She recently received a 2019 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She has been published in journals like the SSRN and many other academic journals, but as a leader in new media and new literacies, she blogs regularly at apophenia and her Twitter feed @zephoria to disseminate information on her current research and writings. While boyd has a powerful academic CV, she has plenty of what might be termed “street cred” as well, with a deeper understanding of how our students inhabit the digital world than many researchers.

References

boyd, d. (2014, February 26). danah boyd: It’s complicated - The social lives of networked teens. Retrieved October 9, 2019, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/2yCHI8WCbDY

boyd, d. (2018a, March 7). What hath we wrought? Retrieved October 8, 2019, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/0I7FVyQCjNg
SXSW EDU Keynote address

boyd, d. (2018b, March 9). You think you want media literacy… do you? Retrieved October 8, 2019, from Medium website: https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2
The text on this page was the basis for danah boyd’s March 2018 SXSW Edu keynote address.

boyd, d. (n.d.). danah boyd. Retrieved October 8, 2019, from danah.org website: https://www.danah.org.

boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hammerberg, D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. The reading teacher, 57(7), 648–658. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20205412.Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2008). From ‘reading’ to ‘new’ literacies. In New literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning. Berkshire, England: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education.

Reflection 1 - Digital Literacy Class

STRATEGIC AND ENGAGED READERS

The why and how of reading comprehension are tackled, respectively, through engagement and strategy on the part of the reader. While there are certainly external forces that can affect a reader’s ability to comprehend a text, engagement and the ability to implement strategies (whether consciously or not) while reading are central to reading success.

Reading comprehension success depends on a lot that happens even before the reader begins the process of decoding the text. An engaged reader is interested, motivated and prepared, reads with a sense of purpose, and actively creates meaning from the text.

An engaged reader is interested because s/he can make connections, most often to their personal life or to prior knowledge. It might be content knowledge gained through other reading, through conversations or direct learning experience, or it might be personal experience (perhaps a book has a family or emotional situation with a character that the reader can identify with). More challenging are abstract connections, like picking up on the style of writing that’s similar to another piece, or reading about life in another country and understanding how certain practices are part of broader cultural expressions. Students who come to a piece of writing without background knowledge that allows them to make some sort of connections will struggle to make sense of the text.


Creating connections is what makes meaning out of the text for the reader, but those connections are also what can help make the reading process purposeful. A reader who sees no relevance to his or her life or goals (either short-term or long-term) will have difficulty engaging with the text. For some students, the purpose of getting a grade could be motivation, for others it’s their own curiosity, or it might be content that relates to an activity they want to do, like directions for something to build or an event they want to attend.

Even if a reader is engaged, if they are not actively employing at least one, and better several, strategies, they will find difficulty in getting the most from a text. Some of the most powerful strategies are best done in advance of reading -- things like activating prior knowledge, previewing the text structure, and predicting what sort of information or events are to be contained in the piece. Others are done during the process, where the reader is checking for understanding and re-reading, deciding what to skim and what to read more slowly and carefully, visualizing elements from the text, and continually making inferences and and posing questions to oneself. At the end, the strategic reader reviews the information and knits more of the meaning and connections together. All of this may be done fairly automatically by a skilled reader.

A strategic reader is an experienced reader. The range of skills that one might activate while reading is high, and it’s difficult to give proper attention to the content when one is focused on practicing a specific skill. As with playing an instrument, as the reader can become more automatic with decoding and comprehension skills, it is easier to focus the mind on creating meaning.


CONNECTIONS

All of our texts put a lot of emphasis on what happens before the reader begins a book or article. I have had many discussions with reading teachers in my school about how much they need to build up students’ background knowledge, and there are always conversations with teachers across the school about what our middle schoolers don’t know. But I don’t think I had really understood its central importance in literacy. One teacher told me yesterday that she asked a student to tell her how bees and wasps are similar. The student couldn’t answer something like, “They’re both insects that sting,” because she didn’t know what a wasp was (or a hornet as it turned out). This is the sort of information that a child from a family with parents who read to them and have robust everyday conversations, who have the good fortune of experiences out of the house and interactions with many people, would likely be able to easily answer the question.

The importance of posing questions while one is reading, of visualizing and making inferences - those are all habits of a strong reader that every article mentioned. Because all that cognitive work happens so invisibly and automatically in a proficient reader, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it’s effortless. It’s not that it happens without effort, it’s that the practiced reader can self-monitor and do these activities almost unconsciously. It’s important to unpack all of this for our students so that the less skilled readers can see that it is more about the work, and not all about some inborn level of talent. We have to make visible the act of reading comprehension, to show it as an act of creation and not a passive activity.

There is a lot of talk of creating scaffolds for students in schools, but the readings had many examples that showed how to begin with more modeling and structure and gradually release control to the students. I fear that the scaffolds we provide are supports that they become dependent upon, while the focus of the strategies discussed in our readings was to create a path where the student is able to become more independent over time. The need for scaffolds can feel like a sign of weakness, while the use of strategies is one of strength.


IMPLICATIONS/QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES

One common thread in the readings that I found but that I felt did not receive sufficient attention is that of time spent reading. Buehl talks about “what proficient readers do as a matter of habit,” and Duke & Pearson mention that good comprehension instruction “includes both explicit instruction in specific comprehension strategies and a great deal of time and opportunity for actual reading, writing, and discussion of text.” The Common Core standards ask that students “habitually perform the critical reading necessary.” No one expects to be proficient at a sport or playing an instrument without a lot of practice. Certain aspects of reading must become automatic and habitual, you must be able to offload decoding and basic strategic activities to background brain activities so the hard work of creating understanding can happen. I fear that many of our students, even (perhaps especially some of our brightest) spend nowhere near enough time reading. In the past there were far fewer choices of entertainment and children had many fewer demands on their time. We need to model reading, to make time in the school day and in family time, and to give reading importance in our daily lives, and also recognize the reading that we don’t think of as “real” reading. We need to help students see how all reading is not the same -- not that some is less valuable than others, but that different genres and contexts require different skills and approaches.

What is the solution to issues around background knowledge? Some programs push early literacy with parents, encouraging them to read or just talk to their children more. Some, like author Natalie Wexler, argue that the curriculum in our schools is too focused on skills and not enough on content -- that we need to better embed the skills across our curriculum and spend more time teaching content. Field trips and arts/enrichment programs and elective courses take on greater importance when we understand that a life with rich experiences allows one to make much deeper intellectual connections. I would like to know more about connections between lack of background knowledge as it impacts reading ability and socio-economic backgrounds. What are the implications for what our neediest students should get in school? Probably a lot fewer pull-outs for skills lessons and more content with the skills embedded and more interactions with their peers.

Engaging students with text that is authentic to their needs and their lives is critical. I want to know more about how they can see themselves as part of a community of readers, both inside what they are reading and in the real-world community where they live their lives and share ideas. If reading is to help them achieve their goals, we need to understand what those goals are and how reading connects to them -- and help them to see those connections.

Finally, I am curious to know more about reading comprehension research and strategies across the globe. How do they differ across cultures and languages?

Sesame Street Music

Great article in NY Times today: https://nyti.ms/2U37pAt

including this clip of Stevie Wonder, who apparently was a guest on the whole show.

So then I found this Paste magazine article with 20 embedded clips: The 20 Best Sesame Street Musical Guests - including R.E.M. doing "Shiny Happy People," Paul Simon with a really cute little girl who tries to steal the show, Stevie Wonder teaching Grover how to scat sing and Little Richard doing "Rubber Ducky" while sitting in a giant bathtub.

Trapped

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Excited for... Trapped Season 2. Love those M-F flawed team police procedurals in northern climes: The Tunnel, Broadchurch, The Fall, Shetland, Fortitute (that one was kind of weird), Happy Valley. Have to decide if I'm going to watch. Season 1 first.

Made me think of Bruce Springsteen's song "Trapped" - which was written by Jimmy Cliff - news to me? Or maybe I knew and forgot...

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Do

Going to see John & Jan at Annisquam.