goals of literacy education...

Came upon this great quote by The New London Group. It sums up a lot of what I have been thinking about literacy education, especially with regard to digital literacies, this quarter:

"An authentically democratic view of schools must include a vision of meaningful success for all, a vision of success that is not defined exclusively in economic terms and that has embedded within it a critique of hierarchy and economic injustice"
(New London Group, 1996, p.67).

This is an issue I often run up against in education classes, particularly in recent discussions about technology in education. Why do we want to teach our students these literacies? We may agree that the fundamental purpose of education is “to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life” (New London Group, 1996, p.60), but there is a wide area of grey space around how we choose to define “participation.” I love delving into this murky territory and wish we would do it more in our classroom discussions—this is one reason why this blog has and will hopefully continue to be a good outlet for me to process and refine my thoughts on this topic.

In my opinion, giving students the tools to participate in an "Attention Economy" without engaging in a critical discussion of who benefits and who doesn't from these structures is worse than not teaching them at all...

...how to be a man.

I stumbled upon this interesting article about how we construct gender through our interaction with media.

Could be a good jumping-off place for a discussion about teaching students how to deconstruct and understand what the media is telling them about how to be a man or woman in our society today (and why). It is so confusing for kids (and some adults), and I believe these images are some of the most powerful forces acting in how we construct identity.

No wonder growing up is so hard.

the generation gap

The Seattle P-I ran what I thought was a pretty cute article today about a young person whose parents signed up for Facebook. This is a new column called "Net Native", written by a young woman--I am excited to see where it goes. The website for the P-I is really great--almost every article has a forum to post comments--but this one got some harsh reviews. Apparently young people's digital literacies are not considered "news"...I am actually considering posting a comment (in the spirit of trying out these "new literacies" myself), but it would probably take me a day to compose it and I still have a paper to write...sigh.

On that note, sorry I haven't replied to comments yet. It is on my to-do list, the second this quarter is truly over.

ecd