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Changing Literacies
As we develop more and more ways to express our ideas, our definition of literacy and our understanding of the strategies that teachers need to explore with students gradually changes. These resources look both at ways that literacy changes students and at the ways that our understanding of literacy has expanded.
To see dynamic examples of the ways that many students already engage in complex literacy activities, take a look at the Language Arts article "Literacy All the Livelong Day:
A Picture Portfolio of Kindergarten
Teaching and Learning" (E), which includes a series of photographs documenting the literacy work of a group of kindergartners.
Changing the ecology
of classroom teaching and learning can lead to important gains in literacy abilities.
The Voices from the Middle article "Literacy on the Edge: How Close
Are We to Closing the Literacy
Achievement Gap?"
(M) introduces us to a new approach that involves fixing the conditions in which students learn rather than attempting to fix the students per se.
While students interact with a range of print, visual, and sound texts, they may not recognize that these documents are texts. The ReadWriteThink lesson plan Defining Literacy in a Digital World (S) asks students to create an inventory of personal texts and explore how their definition of literacy changes as a result.
Computer networks increasingly
serve as sites within which people from around the world design and
redesign their lives through literacy practices. "Globalization and Agency: Designing
and Redesigning the Literacies of
Cyberspace" (C) from this month's College English tells
the stories of two women who have acquired English and digital literacies
over the course of their thirty-some years and who have used these literacies to
communicate within and between cultures as they advance their educations.
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