critical reflection – Musings of a Modern TL

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ETL402 Assessment 2 Part B

My Approach to Literary Learning: A Critical Reflection

Having studied the subject outline at the beginning of this course, I was both perplexed and mortified by this assessment; not only by the multiple parts it contained, but also by the complete lack of knowledge and awareness I had of the concept of ‘literary learning’.

After some initial readings it became clear that ‘literary learning’, although a concept strongly linked to the learning of literacy, was not the same as ‘literacy learning’ (Lehman, 2007). Although there is a strong connection between the two, literary learning relies on an entirely different set of skills to employ higher order thinking and can be suited to any subject or curriculum area – provided that there is quality literature concerning the area of study! A growing awareness of multiliteracies further highlighted the significance of this connection, as ‘literacy’ does not just encompass an ability to read or write but a wide range of abilities and skills across all areas of life, such as digital literacy, critical literacy (Antsey & Bull, 2006) or even ‘virtue’ or character literacy (Hart et al., 2020).

Once I had achieved an understanding of the concept of literary learning, I attempted to visualise it in the classroom and library space. In doing so, a distant memory of my primary school casual teaching days came back to me in which I remember teaching several library lessons to a Year 4 class. I cannot remember the exact book, but I strongly remember teaching the concept of places and belonging through a picture book reading and teacher-led discussion, what I now know to be a simple literary learning strategy. Since then, I have used more sophisticated strategies to teach literary learning in secondary classrooms. The most significant example of this was a combined Geography and English novel study looking at how the themes in dystopian texts are reflected in our own world and global attitudes towards sustainability and the environment. I found this to be a highly effective unit with students for two reasons; students had choice of the literature they were reading, a method I had used before on this group of students (Johnson, 2020), and discussions were conducted in a modified version of Socratic Circles (Styslinger et al., 2010) that allowed students to vocalise their thoughts and opinions about the texts they were reading to make connections with other students and their choices of literature. However, a lack of teacher cohesion on the content to be assessed did lead to some difficulties with the culminating project created by the students. As a result of this and my increased understanding, in future I aim to make literary learning units more cohesive and clearer by collaborating closely with classroom teachers to establish a common purpose and goals for student development of multiliteracies across the unit (Merga, 2019). By deciding on a common purpose at the beginning of the unit, students will have a better idea of where the unit is going, and how the content being studied in their chosen literature relates to the overarching concepts and content from the relevant subject.

References

Antsey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Defining multiliteracies. In M. Antsey & G. Bull (Eds.), Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies (pp.19-55). International Reading Association.

Hart, P., Oliveira, G., & Pike, M. (2020). Teaching virtues through literature: Learning from the ‘Narnian Values’ character education research. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 41(4), 474-488. https://doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2019.1689544

Lehman, B. (2007). Skills instruction and children’s literature. In B. Lehman (Ed.) Children’s literature and learning: Literary study across the curriculum (pp. 43-56). Teachers College Press.

Merga, M. (2019). Collaborating with teacher librarians to support adolescents’ literacy and literature learning. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(1). https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1002/jaal.958

Johnson, T. (2020). The ‘too cool to read’ group: A success story. CSU Thinkspace. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/tomthetl/2021/01/12/the-too-cool-to-read-group-a-success-story/

Styslinger, M., Pollock, T., Lowery, R., & Fink, L. (2010). The chicken and the egg: inviting response and talk through Socratic Circles. Voices from the Middle, 18(2), 36-45.

ETL501 Assessment 2 Part B: Critical Reflection

In terms of technology and the role of the TL in creating resources and learning objects, I have learned so much over the course of this unit that I need to consider, assess and implement in my own practice in the future.

Teacher librarians typically have three main roles within school contexts: they are information specialists, curriculum leaders and information service managers (Laretive, 2019), all three of which relate to the use of technology in supporting effective 21st century teaching and learning. This is particularly significant when thinking about 21st century learning from a school library perspective, as teacher librarians not only provide information literacy skill development for students but also have the opportunity to provide meaningful learning experiences and to guide lifelong learning when properly resourced (Quezzaire, 2018). Furthermore, teacher librarians are experts in the fields of knowledge and information; there is no one tool or technology that will provide students with all their information needs such that we are required to go above and beyond to provide our stakeholders with the most effective tools for learning (Gilbert, 2013). Through engagement with the unit content I have come to realise that this ultimately requires librarians to create their own resources and learning objects to fulfil these specific information needs, whether it be for library lessons, in the classroom or in collaboration with other teachers in the school (Johnson, 2020a). Especially in the current COVID-19 climate where there is a trend towards digital resourcing, school libraries are focussing now on providing online access and support for stakeholders (Dearnaley, 2020). This will inevitably result in the creation of a multitude of learning objects to support student, staff and parents in navigating this online environment, as well as engaging and participating in online learning, and supporting the learning itself.

As I have reflected previously, digital materials and learning objects should be created for specific purposes and their usefulness evaluated to investigate their effectiveness (Johnson, 2020b). This has been nowhere more relevant than in making the research guide for this assessment. Throughout my teaching career I have created a number of specific learning objects to achieve all manner of different ends, although my evaluation of these, as well as my collaboration with other staff to use these objects, has certainly been lacking in the past. As such, I began this assessment by approaching staff I would be co-teaching with next term to see which topic areas needed the most support, as well as to identify specific learning needs of individual students across Year 7. Following this, the process of finding digital resources for this research guide was thorough. This was due to my own strict criteria as all web tools and learning objects should be assessed against specific learning needs (Laretive, 2019), such that I initially rejected a number of informative websites in favour of more interactive resources that would support individual research processes. As a result, I believe the resources used are highly effective, although the time that went into searching and selecting these as opposed to creating and designing the website have let me down in terms of presentation and useability. In future, I will aim to address both of these crucial elements in a more balanced manner, especially now that I have developed a framework for future resources.

References

Dearnaley, M. (2020). A snapshot of a school library during COVID-19. Access, 34(2), 22–25.

Gilbert, K. (2013). What we hold in our hands: Teacher-librarian, knowledge manager [online]. Synergy, 11(2).

Johnson, T. (2020a, September 15). Learning Objects: A Quick Reflection. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/tomthetl/2020/09/15/learning-objects-a-quick-reflection/

Johnson, T. (2020b, August 3). Reference Materials – Print or Digital? Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/tomthetl/2020/08/03/reference-materials-print-or-digital/

Laretive, J. (2019). Information literacy, young learners and the role of the teacher librarian. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 68(3), 225-235.

Quezzaire, P. (2018, February 23). Libraries in the 21st century: the struggle between perception and reality | IB Community Blog. The IB Community Blog. https://blogs.ibo.org/blog/2018/02/23/libraries-in-the-21st-century-the-struggle-between-perception-and-reality/