The Redefinition of Literacy Skills and its Effects on Teaching
The information landscape has evolved at a rapid pace over the last few decades. I am a part of a generation; Gen Y, otherwise known as the Millennials; that has grown up within this rapidly changing environment. In the little country primary school that I attended, we had 1 computer in the library that was connected to dial-up internet that was so painfully slow. In high school, the internet was becoming common-place for socialising, with all my friends and I chatting after school on our PCs using MSN Messenger. In year 10 I got my first mobile phone, thanks to my best friend winning us both a Nokia 3315 in a radio competition. The way I consumed music was also defined by my schooling years: in primary school I had a cassette Walkman, in highschool: a Discman, and in College: an mp3 player. This evolution of the information landscape has continued at a fast pace well into my adulthood. Here I am in the present day completing a Master’s degree online, having access to everything I need to succeed at my fingertips thanks to technological advancements.
A school cannot stand-still in time while all this rapid change is happening around it. It needs to evolve with the ever-changing information landscape that the students it services live in, play in and learn in. As I have come to learn through ETL401, the term “literacy” itself is broad in its definition and changes depending on the context. With each new piece of technology that is introduced comes new literacies. The reasons why our methods for teaching literacy need to evolve with it are two-fold. The first is that our students will not hesitate to adopt these new technologies within their lives outside of the school (O’Connell, 2012, p. 4), so schools need to also adopt these same technologies in order to be authentic places of learning. The second is that the critical thinking skills needed to critically engage with these technologies requires explicit teaching.
The introduction of eBooks are a prime example of why we need to adjust our methods of teaching literacy. When we use electronic devices, information is being provided to us at a rapid rate. To cope with this influx we train our brain to use skills such as skimming and looking for key words. Our attention is also pulled multiple directions at once as we have multiple tabs open or notifications from different applications popping up, interrupting our train of thought. When use these same devices to read an eBook, our brain instinctively applies these same skills which subsequently results in a shallower understanding of the text being read (Barron, 2017, p. 18). Maryanne Wolf (2018, para. 12) proposes that we need overcome this difference in multimodal reading methods by helping our students to develop a “bi-literate reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums”. This ultimately means teachers will need to change the way in which they currently teach reading skills; accommodating for this new modality of text that students will be accessing more and more frequently in the future.
eBooks are just one of many examples of technology changing our methods of teaching literacy. It is the job of the teacher librarian to keep abreast of any changes within the information environment and instigate changes to the teaching of literacy within the school when the need arises.
References:
Baron, N. S. (2017). Reading in a digital age. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(2), 15-20.
O’Connell, J. (2012). Learning without frontiers: School libraries and meta-literacy in action. Access, 26(1), 4-7.
Wolf, M. (2018, August 25). Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf
