Cultural Literacy and Photos/Presentation

I am doing cultural literacy as well. I am really glad to see that I am not the only one because I understand that this can easily be left out of curriculum. Even last semester in the Social Studies section of 401, I had signed up for the group on race and was astounded when there were so few people who signed up for the group that it failed to be an option for class lessons.

After reviewing the definitions of literacy that my colleagues and I posted, I realized that pretty much all of them included reading, writing, speaking, and/or listening. They weren’t really specific about what, though. There are so many different things to read, write, talk about, and listen to, and so many different ways to do them all. That was definitely missing, and I think it’s really easy to miss all those different ways. Even though this project has been proven to be frustrating by other class’s comments, this is one of the things that I really like about the project. It dives into different ways to be literate; different things to be able to the read, write, speak, and listen about.

I am learning about cultural literacy. My pedagogy is focused around multiculturalism, so I find myself truing to include different cultures and the SIOP model into all of my lessons. i wan tot incorporate students’ different cultures into my classroom so that they are appreciated, not stereotyped, and learned more about.

This literacy area is very fascinating to me because I had never really thought about it as a separate type of literacy. I have pages and pages of notes so far, but here is a brief outline/list of what I have learned so far:

-All human societies have cultures and those cultures are 100% learned. While humans are genetically programmed to learn a culture, newborn babies can learn any culture that they are exposed to.

-Culture consists of learned patterns of behavior that allow us to be one of the most successful animals in the struggle for survival. However, culture is a fragile, changing thing in that it consists of ideas, information, and skills in our minds.

-A subculture is a regional, social, or ethnic group that is distinguishable from other groups in a society by the fact that its members share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come from their common ancestral background and experience. Members of a subculture share a common identity that partially sets them apart from other groups that share the same national culture. Subcultures are most likely to exist in complex, diverse societies such as the United States and Canada.

-The things that are listed in the other answers (the language that you speak, the kinds of clothes that you wear, and the specific knowledge that you acquired in school) are culture specific rather than universals. For instance, language is a human cultural universal, but a specific language is not.

-In the case of humans, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. Culture is created and transmitted to others in a society--cultures are not the product of lone individuals.

-The word culture has many different meanings.

For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food.

For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish.

For anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns.

Definition of cultural litacy: knowledge of history, contributions, and perspectives of different cultural groups, including one's own group, necessary for understanding of reading, writing, and other media

-one becomes more literate: by reading more, by reading about different subjects... when reading becomes a pleasure rather than a chore, one becomes more culturally literate... naturally. It's a simple fact that the more one reads, the more one can understand what is read, the more enjoyable reading becomes and... the more culturally literate one becomes.

I also read about neat ways to include this type of literacy into my classroom with assignments and projects that focus around both technology and cultural literacy. I have learned more about the definition of cultural in general and ideas that people may have about culture that may be misconstrued.

Originally I had put down photos as my technology to learn more about to teach about cultural literacy. While I want to include that into my learning device, I am going to include presentations as my method as well. Specifically I have decided to explore Prezi as my presentation option because it was an option for a CEP class and I hadn’t gotten a chance to understand how it works.

Thinking about my students in my placement, I can think of many ways that they would need support in order to become literate in this area. Not only do they not have the chance to explore technology in the classroom, they also are not very diverse. The entire class consists of black and white students and two Mexican students. That’s all. I think it would benefit all my students to become more literate in different cultures. This would help their mentality and understanding.

When I think of my other TE placement for 494, I think that this type of literacy is very much present. My CT in that class makes sure that students all understand or at least know about all the other students’ cultures with writings, projects, or presentations.