Always Learning...

     As an English major, I knew literacy skills would be a fundamental part of what I will teach my future students. I knew that, without proper guidance and modeling, my students may not fully grasp certain concepts and ideas on their own. However, what I didn't realize was that literacy skills include far more than simple reading and writing; literacy pertains to understanding, comprehending, interpreting, evaluating, and producing texts. Furthermore, those texts can include novels, short stories, blogs, websites, musical presentations, videos, business and technical documents, paintings, photographs, and anything else that conveys a message. That's a lot to cover. Thankfully, it's not up to English teachers alone to teach literacy skills; literacy can be taught in all subject areas and by a variety of methods.
     That being said, I'm not trying to downplay the importance of reading and writing; on the contrary, I think knowing how to read and write proficiently can strengthen students in other areas of literacy. For example, an art student who is required to evaluate a Rembrandt painting, pointing out its good and bad qualities and explaining his or her evaluation in clear, concise language, will make a much more effective argument if he or she has been taught how to write analysis papers using persuasive, logical reasoning. A history student will be better able to tell the story of the Battle of Gettysburg and keep his or her listeners interested if he or she has been taught how to write a narrative. Any student moving into a new apartment will be able to understand an apartment contract if he or she has been taught how to identify key words and phrases and to ask about things he or she doesn't understand. So, English teachers can work together with teachers of other disciplines to improve literacy instruction.
     Over the last few months (since I've been in SCED 4200), I've noticed how "information-focused" our world is becoming. Maybe it's just because I'm getting to the point in my life when I have to make my own way and provide for myself and my family, and I can't rely on my parents any more, so I have to be able to understand and interpret everything for myself. With more and more information available, though, we have to become more critically literate. Not everything we see or hear is true, and much of it is biased one way or another. One of the most important things we'll need to teach our students is how to know the difference between fact and fiction, truth and opinion, and research-based information and speculation. Along with that, we need to prepare our students for the time when they'll be out on their own, the time when they won't have teachers to depend on for help. We can do that in a way similar to teaching them how to learn new vocabulary words: when they encounter something new, they should look for context clues and things about the new "thing" that are familiar to them, then go from there. If they can relate the new "thing" to something they already know, it'll be easier to understand.
     The most important thing for teachers to understand is that their students are all going to be different. Different modes of learning will work for different students, and certain accommodations will need to be made for others. In my classroom, I'll need to have different texts available for students with lower reading levels, and I may need to spend more instruction time with those students, too. Literacy applies to us as teachers, too; we'll have to "read" our students so that we understand how much they know, what they're gaining from our instruction, and what we need to improve or explain further to benefit them. We'll also need to learn about the new technologies and resources that are becoming available every day; the more ways we can reach our students, the more they'll benefit.