#educ1707

How does your use of particular literacy practices reflect your own family and schooling history?

When looking at how my particular use of literacy practices is reflected in my family and schooling history, I first think of what literacy practices I engage in regularly. After this, I think about how I came about to learn these literacy practices and why I had the chance. When using the example of technology,  we must first consider the fact that I come from an educated middle class family, who have always lived in a Western culture. This social economic status means that I have always had more than easy access to computers, and have been able to learn the literacy skill involved from a young age.

  The literacy practices I engage in reflect my place society, and my ability to teach others around me. It also reflects the level of education I have as well as the opportunities I have come across in my life. My family has travelled the world, and I have lived in three different countries. Not only has this experience given me the travel bug, it has given me a whole new literacy of understanding other cultures and languages.

  I hope that having this experience of how other people live and an appreciation of the opportunities I have had will help me take the perspective of learners whose life has been different from my own. Instead of blaming children who are not able to learn as quickly as others, I hope that I will be able to create a connection with children and help them engage more with a curriculum (Comber & Kamler, 2004). When children struggle in my classroom I hope that I can also move beyond blaming this on parents who may not fully understand the education system or even the school, to avoid the “habitual deficit way of speaking about culturally diverse, poor, working class families” (Comber & Kamler, 2004, p. 296) and instead think creatively about how I can use  my own literacy practices to engage struggling learners

1965 video of my home town in England (Broadstairs, Kent) - embedded above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_inhKjC77gM

REFERENCES:

Allen, J. (2010). Literacy in the welcoming classroom: creating family-school partnerships that support student learning. New York: Teachers College Press. – Chapter 3

Autism Science Foundation (2014). iPads help late-speaking children with autism. Science and Children, 51(5), 18. Retrieved http://www.autismsciencefoundation.org/news/ipads-help-late-speaking-children-autism-develop-language

Alvermann, D., Marshall, J., Mclean, C., Huddleston, A., Joaquin, J., & Bishop, J (2010). Adolescents’ web-based literacies, identity construction and skill development. Literacy Research and Instruction. 51, 179-195. 

Ashton, J., Arthur, L., & Beecher, B. (2014). Multiliteracies: Embracing the multiplicity of experiences called ‘literacy’. In L. Arthur, J. Ashton, & B. Beecher (Eds.) Diverse literacies in early childhood: A social justice approach (pp. 1-21). Camberwell, VIC: ACER Press

Autism Science Foundation (2014). iPads help late-speaking children with autism. Science and Children, 51(5), 18. Retrieved http://www.autismsciencefoundation.org/news/ipads-help-late-speaking-children-autism-develop-language

Comber, B., & Kamler, B. (2004). Getting out of deficit: pedagogies of reconnection. Teaching Education, 15(3), 293-310. 

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1: Literacies on a human scale pp.21-40. 

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 7: Literacies as multimodal designs for meaning pp.173-205

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 14: Literacies and learner differences pp. 374-400.

Kasari, A., Kaiser, A., Goods, K., Neitfeld, J., Mathy, P., Landa, R., Murphy, S., Almirall, D. (2014). Communication interventions for minimally verbal children with autism: A sequential multiple assignment randomised trial. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 53, 635-646.

Mahar, D. (2003). "Tech-savviness" meets multiliteracies: Exploring adolescent girls' technology-mediated literacy practices. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(3), 356-385.

Mike Wilson Tunes (2010, June 24) Baby works iPad perfectly. [You Tube video]. Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMsT4qNA-c

What literacy practices do you engage with regularly?

Multiliteracy takes the traditional approach to reading and writing, but importantly extends to consider how people make meanings in a complex world of multiple sources of technology to communicate. Meaning making is influenced by both social diversity and multimodality (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) 

There are many different sorts of people in my life that I mix with on a daily basis: parents, friends, employers, students and lecturers. This social diversity means that there needs to be an adaption to the style of literacy practise and links to the notion of meaning making - the way in which we communicate differently with different people. 

I found myself thinking about the many different ways I communicate ideas within different social contexts. There is not one single way of being in my world. There are times where it is entirely appropriate to be informal and I use a language and a style of communicating that is appropriate for my own peer group – but it is a style of literacy practice that would be quite inappropriate for many other more formal situations.

I created a video to show how my own representation of my internal narrative of procrastination plays out. I communicate this by an external narrative and am expressing a set of ideas that shows how using my computer incorporates ideas around multiliteracy. This is in part an exploration of my “online” identity (Alvermann et al., 2012). 

One literacy practice links to the concept of multimodality in which modes of meaning such as written, audio, visual and oral meanings are all interconnected. I use language every day – not just the language that I was raised in but French, a language that I have acquired during childhood. But I use multiple modes of meaning in taking meaning from languages that I am not familiar with. I watch a Portuguese video on make up relying on her ability to use gesture to communicate her ideas. I play a game from a Japanese site and rely on visual mode of meaning to play the game.  I need to understand the context behind a certain subject in order to work out the meaning that is being conveyed. Being able to understand the context behind a certain subject in order to work out the language is a skill in itself. As a teacher I hope I will be able to apply this literacy to my classroom, and be able to help student who come from a non-English speaking background.

To be literate, and to use literacies in 2014 is a vastly different concept to 50 years ago. Although literacy once referred to the ability to read and write, the term has now been broadened to describe many different processes and abilities we use within our everyday life. One of these key processes involves the use of technology – we are multiliterate and although we may use the same technology the way in which we use this will depend on the social context – for example the way I write an email to a lecturer would be different to a posting on facebook. So literacy is more than competency in technology, it is competency in understanding how different forms of expression relate to different social settings. I learnt that once you have made meaning of something, you have become literate in that subject (Cope & Kalantzis, 2012). Mahar (2003) further argues that being multiliterate means that you are also technologically literate, it is not an add-on, but rather a part of the definition of literacy (Mahar, 2003).

To further explore this idea of meaning-making via literacies of technology, I looked into the understanding children have of their world around them, and the different way they use literacies in 2014. It made me realise that the ability to use technology is something that children acquire from a very young age. For example, toddlers and babies being able to navigate an iPad. I found this interesting, as these children were able to apply their literacy of technology before they had the ability to read and write, completely discrediting my previous idea that literacy was about reading and writing. In fact, this use of literacies can help children develop their speech earlier, especially for those with autism (Kasari et al., 2014; Autism Science Foundation, 2014), helping them further their literacy knowledge, and developing new literacies.