1. MY CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING:
My conceptual understanding of literacy has changed since beginning this class. I hadn’t really thought of literacy as so many layers and aspects. In TE 301, literacy had been the smaller components that we wrote about in our literacy projects. This class showed that literacy is broader than that and that these new literacies affect the way students and people in general learn.
My research on a new literacy and the development of my own digital literacy (using my new technology) informed my thinking. A lot of my college experience has been focused on multiculturalism so I understood what that meant and how to implement it in the classroom, however, I hadn’t ever really thought about how it affected students’ literacy if they were multicultural. The connection hadn’t been made until this project that what my students bring into the classroom based on their cultural background (and from the other projects, also their emotions, their social networks, relations with the environment around them, and through what lens they are looking to see the world) really effects their literacy.
New knowledge, skills, strategies and dispositions that I am now aware of are definitely prezi and how important making sure my students can relate to what they are learning as well as become engaged in rather than lectured to during their learning is. I think this contrasts to more traditional literacies which focuses on reading books that have been deemed important by society (the canon), while cultural literacy explains the importance of incorporating other societies and cultures into the classroom in different ways, like through pen pal letters or visual tours of other countries. This gets students involved and interested so they may be reading and not even realizing it.
My own growth in what I understand to be literacy (or literacies) has changed. I see that the basics are still important, but the methods and ways you get to those basic understandings aren’t as important. Students should feel comfortable yet challenged in their learning and using these new literacies they can become engaged and passionate about their learning so it’s less of a chore and more of an adventure of growth in the classroom. This growth has altered my conception of learning in English language arts. I have discovered so many great things that I can use in my classroom that will tie so many different subjects together. One thing that I really worried about was how hard teaching social studies would be for me as a teacher because it was the subject I most disliked in school. Now I have gained so much knowledge on how to incorporate the two together using the many classroom supplements that discovered based around and focusing on cultural literacy and technology.
2. EFFECTIVE LITERACY INSTRUCTION:
Providing “effective literacy instruction” to diverse learners means giving students something they can relate to or compare to their own lives in order to understand. If it seems like it’s coming from a different planet to the students, they won’t know what they are supposed to take out of it. My research on a new literacy and development of your own digital literacy (using my new technology) informs my thinking because it provided me many different angles to approach literacy from. If the goal is to be proficient and literate in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, the question is more how to effectively and peacefully get there with little struggle and defiance.
I am placed in a second/third grade classroom. I focused on the GLCEs make text-to-self and text-to-text connections and comparisons by activating prior knowledge, connecting personal knowledge, experience, and understanding of others to ideas in text through oral and written responses (R.CM.02.01), and connect personal knowledge, experiences, and understanding of the world to themes and perspectives in text through oral and written responses (R.CM.03.01). My lesson focused on culture and I expected my students to think about their own culture and what that means in terms of where their family is from and what foods they eat. Since I talked about pictures, I think it would be cool to do a slide show of photos as a mini lesson off of the lesson I taught to show foods and people from the places that my students said thief family was from to show them what it looks like there.
Now that I have engaged in this project and have reflected on my own learning, I could definitely see myself doing a similar project. I want to teach in a middle school classroom. I could see myself having students spend time in the computer lab, making a prezi about their own culture or lifestyle, or just what makes them a different learner in general than their other classmates. In order to be successful for this project, students would need to know how to use prezi, use a search site, type on a computer, and understand how to relate or what make them different. I know that my second and third graders don’t really know how to use a computer right now. They can play games on it and that’s about it. I’ve never seen them in a computer lab at all so I don’t even know if they can type. One lesson last semester I brought my lap top and a projection screen for my lesson and they seemed pretty excited about that, so I don’t know how much technology (outside of the overhead projector) is incorporated into their learning.
3. LESSON PLAN
Because it would take more than a single lesson to address cultural literacy, I would need to provide instruction and scaffolding over time. Below is a sample lesson that I could use in my classroom to expand my students’ knowledge and understanding of cultural literacy. I am going to make this lesson for 6th graders because my target grades are in middle school.
Target area and rational:
-Exploring the new technology of Prezi and the website http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
-Discussing and examining how students’ language variations can be used as a resource
-I think that stereotypes are very common about language learners or dialects of the same language. I think that I will have students from many different areas in my classroom so I will show how all their ways of speaking are important and show a bit of where they come from and who they are.
Objectives:
-Students will respond to multiple text types when listened to or viewed knowledgeably, by discussing, illustrating, and/or writing in order to compare/contrast similarities and differences in idea, form, and style to evaluate quality and to identify personal and universal themes (L.RP.06.05)
-Students will exhibit personal style and voice to enhance the written message in both narrative (e.g., personification, humor, element of surprise) and informational writing (e.g., emotional appeal, strong opinion, credible support) (W.PS.06.01)
Materials:
-Computers with internet
-www.prezi.com
-http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
Key events:
-introduce prezi by showing them a shorter version of the one that I made (see below)
-students will explore prezi by making a very short “About Me” prezi that will dive into who they are as a person, a learner, and a part of their family
-students will already understand what culture is, but we will discuss more how their language that they bring to the classroom is part of that culture
-students will each pick a story from the International Children’s Digital Library from a different language than they know or have experienced
-students will read the stories and make a new prezi about how the language effected how it was read and what it meant.
-students will rewrite the stories from their background based around the way they would have experienced during their lives
-students will then switch stories and add to their own prezis how now this story had been influenced by the writer’s life
Closing summary:
-To finish the lesson, I will have students silently reflect on how different languages are an advantage to the way a story is understood. They will reflect on the effect the language and experience has on the story and the effect their own experiences have on the way they themselves read the story.
Ongoing assessment:
-students will finish their prezi a different day by piecing everything they have learned together, including their thought processes during the whole lesson. Later on in the year we will revisit the projects and add on to them about other areas of culture, other than language, and how that created visions in our minds that affect the way we view things, as well as how our own experiences affect the way we view things.
THIS IS MY PREZI FOR CULTURAL LITERACY:
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