There is much discussion about redefining literacy and how it is taught differently now, especially with the prevalence of so much technology in our everyday teacher.

I definitely think that literacy is being redefined and it absolutely needs to be. We cannot think of literacy as the same as what we learnt or what has been taught in the past because how life was when we learnt and how we were taught are now very different to what our students are experience. Even for our students life is changing dramatically each year in regards to social and even health events like we are seeing now.

When I think about my definition of literacy perhaps from when I was at school I would have said literacy is reading and writing. I possibly wouldn’t have even considered talking and especially now view as they are such innate qualities we posses as humans. Now though, when I think about literacy as a teacher and future TL really start to consider all the different aspects that now fall under literacy and what skills students and young people need to understand and be literate in their world. One thing that really stuck out to me in video ‘What Does it Mean to be Literate in the 21st Century?’ was the discussion around social literacy and the real need to teach students to be able to read and understand people and interact successfully in many different forms. This makes me think, we all learned our social skills very likely before we entered school and continued to develop how we understood body langue as we grew but now students as young as 5 and 6 are interacting with their peer and even learning online. This brings a whole new set of social literacy skills such as interpreting text through message and even emojis and facial expressions over video. These are most definitely literacy skills and a requirement of being literate in the 21st Century. 

So what does this all mean when defining literacy and how we teach literacy to our students.

I believe it means we cannot get bogged down in one set definition on literacy and how to teach it but we need to be flexible and open when analyzsing the needs of our students and providing them with the skills they need to be literate not only know but into their future.