Literacies mid-course reflection

Literacies mid-course reflection A. Many students have requested direction from us—our critical engagement with texts, our opinions, and our classroom experiences. These feel like reasonable requests to me. It won’t serve our students to provide answers for them (and thereby position ourselves as authoritative), but I do think we have an obligation to provide mentorship and support their inbound trajectories into our community of literacies practice. 

How might we do this? A few thoughts have crossed my mind: 

  1. We could have an “I taught literacies in secondary school. Ask me anything” session, either digitally or in a panel where the STEP candidates choose a couple of moderators who solicit questions from their colleagues.
  2. We could start an ongoing #schmiteracies chat where students can ask direct questions and we answer them as we feel we can.
  3. We could start an ongoing #schmiteracies chat where we synthesize big questions, and point students toward resources to continue the conversation. For example, I’d like to offer more resources around what student activism can look like, how white people can be effective allies, why I disagree with “just give us the knowledge about literacies”, thinking about race, gender, sexuality, language on campus, … A little #schmiteracies series of “I’m hearing people asking this; here’s an accessible author to check out sometime…” might address this. 

B. Many students have been asking for strategies for putting the theory into practice. (Surprise!) Again, this feels reasonable and I would like to see what we can do. I am somewhat concerned that a lot of students seem to have developed an understanding that the practical strategies will emerge from meeting within content areas; I think this dynamic erases the visibility of academic disciplines as some of the most significant literacies that we contend with as teachers. To make this concrete, I’m seeing a lot of comments like “More readings/discussions for using literacy in science would be nice. I’m still a little fuzzy on how a lot of this applies to science.” I read this as taking science to be unproblematically the teacher’s main purpose, and wanting to know how to do literacies within science. 

Beyond, just disciplines, I see some comments like “I am still having trouble seeing the absolute value in all of the content areas being together. I feel like it stunts potential depth and application” which feel like they have the “banking-concept of education” underlying them, and take the work of schools to be such that literacies would contain teaching about literacies rather than being problematized by a literacies perspective. 

A few ideas:

  1. We could pose scenarios and consider many possibilities. Specifically, I’d be interested in posing scenarios in which school communities work across disciplines. Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia has an essential question guiding each grade level; we could imagine how in such a context, disciplinary approaches could cooperate and be productively juxtaposed against each other. Day 8, which takes up Connected Learning, could be a good opportunity to take this up. 
  2. Again, we could make this an ongoing #schmiteracies undercurrent. 
  3. We’re currently planning to read diSessa on Day 7. Alert! diSessa provides an explicit, clear-cut definition of literacies. Let’s be ready to handle this. I propose introducing it as, Look, this is how a physicist approaches literacies. It’s very mechanistic, which makes it more actionable. What’s gained and lost by reading literacy through physics rather than through the humanities? (This will allow us to open into digital literacies too, and HCI, where there’s a lot of empirical experimentation with creating new literacies, with often shallower consideration (or at least less open discussion) of how new media reshape power, ideologies, and subjectivity. 
  4. We could curate and share some of the threads of these discussions with the class.

C. There’s some tension in our norms that would be valuable to address if we feel we can. On the one hand, I think it’s productive that “it’s not my job to educate you about my life experience” and critiques of white fragility can be voiced. On the other hand, there are a lot of students  who are just getting started on unpacking privilege, and I think it will do a lot of good down the line to let STEP be a space for them to do this. This feels like a STEP-wide conversation though, because what’s at stake is who can feel comfortable in the program, and I think there’s unresolvable tension here.