Literacy Tools

"Literacy is not regarded as simply a cognitive skill to be learned, but as a complex sociophsycholinguistic activity" (Teale & Seulzby. 1989, p. 2). It was not long after reading this that I was reading material for the mathematics methods course ("Mathematics" or "Mathematizing", p.11), and it was explaining how math "symbols were initially developed to represent mathematical ideas, they become tools, mental images, to think with." And, this mathematical concept to understand how students learn math was explained with, "Initially, language represents ideas and actions; it is a representation of thought...Eventually it serves as a tool for thought," (p. 11). Now my understanding of math symbols and language is that they begin and continue to be idea representations that as development progresses, additionally become tools to aid in thinking. For me, this is helpful in understanding how people learn, especially how people who haven't mastered literacy tools yet, learn. I really appreciated the paper's holistic perspective on learning, that learning literacy encompasses so many different avenues, and all of those avenues can be utilized in the classroom to help students learn and even function in their everyday lives.

The paper, "Teaching for Equity and Justice" by Rethinking Schools, reminded me of something I read William Ayers discuss. He had his students analyze books themselves for racism and sexism, and I thought that was such a fantastic idea. It would be a strong way to bring in critically-conscious multiculturalism. Even for young students, if a book can be compared and contrasted to their reality as well as their sense of justice, for example, I believe it could be a powerful learning experience. It is a little concerning to me to think back at all of the books I have read myself and not be able to clearly identify what may have confirmed injustices. Being able to effectively analyze books for racism and sexism is something I would like to be skilled in because I think that if I could identify those injustices better I could better address them.

Finally, I did get excited when I read Albright's "Bringing the Ice maiden to life: Engaging adolescents in learning through picture book read-alouds in content areas" (2002). The paper brought out multiple points why this can be such an effective learning tool, and one that I thought could be added to the idea of it being a discussion generating tool is that I think it would make students feel they had much more space sharing in a discussion with each other and their teacher. For example, if teacher just tells the students some information I know that I personally feel that the teacher has a big agenda that I would be worried any comment I would want to contribute might not fall in-line, or be "wrong". Through a read-aloud the teacher can show that discussing the information of the book isn't about the validity of the teacher's thoughts, or that the teacher wants the discussion to go a certain exact way.

Also, a read-aloud takes the pressure off of reading skill and onto the big ideas of the learning. Reading skills are still being encouraged, but more through example and experience instead of public test, such as being asked to do a dense reading during a specified amount of time in class. All students, no matter what their reading speed or reading comprehension level, can participate in their own way of speaking. And, the added bonus of picture books is that even students who are having trouble comprehending spoken words will have the pictures to aid them and be able to participate in the whole learning-community's literacy experience.