Responding to Literacy in Adolescent Lives

Throughout this semester, I have learned to view literacy in a different way than when I first began this course. If someone would have asked me back in August what I would do in my own classroom to address adolescent literacy, I probably would have said something relating to helping students learn how to read at their grade level, or teaching them how to write effectively. However, now that I have read articles that conceptualize “literacy” differently, examined Kirkland’s text that explored the intersection of literacy and race, and engaged in discussions with classmates (who have been able to share their own real-life experiences with adolescents since I wasn’t in a middle school classroom yet), I now know which three things I hope to focus on for the upcoming spring semester: 1) teach students that literacy is dynamic, 2) show students how literacy operates within my discipline (ELA), and 3) continue to focus on my own conceptualization of literacy to ensure that I am not limiting students’ capacity.

1. Young adolescents are already using literacy (especially digital literacy) in multiple ways to make meaning. For instance, middle school students know how to use technology to communicate (Snapchat), play games (Minecraft), and create content (YouTube). Part of my job as an educator is to show students that literacy is dynamic, and that interactions between their social and cognitive worlds create knowledge. The school that I am going into is not one-to-one, so it’s not likely that I’ll be able to use technology as much as I’d like to. However, I think it’s important to have classroom conversations about how, why, and when we socialize as well as how, why and when we learn so that so that students can begin to develop metacognitive functions and start to think about the ways they engage with the world both in the classroom and outside of it.
2. I’ll be in an ELA classroom, and part of my job is to teach students what it means to be literate in this discipline. Obviously ELA involves that traditional form of literacy in that we will have to teach students how to read, write and communicate (our SC standards reflect this ideology). However, beyond this, it seems imperative that I teach students how to use their voice (i.e. writing and communicating, which are both predicated on reading skills) to make the world more just. Specific ways in which I hope to focus on this aspect of literacy include the very concepts we’ve addressed in class, such as tying a skill to a relevant issue. One of my favorite aspects of ELA is its versatility; seemingly any subject can be framed in terms of reading, writing or communicating. I hope to get to know my students well enough so that I can determine which issues to use to frame my lessons. Whether we are examining the school, local community, state, gender, education, or any other issue, I want to encourage students to use their voices to be an important part of the conversation surrounding the issues that we discuss.
3. One of the most memorable things from this semester for me came from Kirkland’s book. He discusses a moment (that we’ve discussed in class) during which a teacher assumes that a student cannot read or write because he doesn’t want to or because he is lazy. The teacher finds a journal in which the student has written some rap lyrics and asks the student why he doesn’t perform this way for her in class. The reason this has continued to stand out to me is because this is the reaction most well-meaning (albeit ignorant) people have when they want to help someone, especially someone who belongs to a minority. As we’ve said in class, the teacher wasn’t necessarily wrong (because she literally did not know any better and truly believed she was helping), but, for the student, this one interaction solidified in his mind that the teacher was never going to understand him because she didn’t want to get out of her comfort zone. This interaction was essentially the end of that student’s learning in this particular classroom because the teacher didn’t know he felt this way, thus would likely never change her method. Based on this, it seems that there has to be a constant interaction between teacher and student, in and out of the classroom, so that we can ensure that we are never making assumptions or jumping to conclusions, thus limiting our students’ learning. I hope to be cognizant of the ever-changing lives of students so that I don’t unintentionally comes across as unwilling to see things from my students’ point of view.

This course has helped me to learn about the importance of using literacy to see my students in a more humanizing way. Our students are more than their test scores or IEPs or 504s; they are young people with real-life problems whose value shouldn’t go unrecognized. It’s our job to ensure that we give them the skills that they need to ensure that they are successful in the classroom as well as outside of it, but most importantly, that they can use what we teach them to make the future a place where we all want to live.