Fears and Literacies
We have been discussing our classrooms and our students, particularly their anxiety with writing, their inability to transfer their ideas from their heads to their papers, their lack of or different mode of critical thinking--the list could continue.
In my reading response this week, I wrote about the new kind of student that Lanham describes in Economics of Attention and The Electronic Word. He describes this student as having shorter attention spans; lacking critical thinking, writing, social, or verbal skills; being more accustomed to learning via images and sounds rather than text. He concludes saying that the student embodies the multimedia.
We all have students in our classes who make it clear that they don't privilege the alphabetic form that Selfe identifies (71). Their abbreviated forms--numbers for words, IM language in their essays, shortage of punctuation--seem to embody, or (re)present a new kind of literacy. If we can see a strength in these new textual forms, perhaps they bring to the table a kind of literacy more suited to (critically?) consuming and producing new media forms.
Comments
Hmmm...
I like your idea that we can work with students based on what they do now; when we pay attention to students' current literacy habits, we can draw on their existing strengths and build their trust. I also think there is great potential here to demonstrate to students that there isn't one literacy, but many. So many of my students say they never write, even though they have blogs, Facebook pages, email, etc.; they think they don't write because they think of writing only in terms of the formal essays they write for class. By drawing on students' existing literacy habits, we can push them to consider literacy in their everyday lives and demonstrate the complicated nature of literacy. The same goes for students' use of new media.
Pushing the Limits
I like your idea of thinking about the ways that their literacies have changed. They have so many literacies that we (and I mean I) don't, but they are hesitant to acknowledge them. Is it because these literacies have not been as accepted as other forms of literacy.
If we do start accepting these different literacies as valid, what form would they take if we incorporated them into the composition classroom? What would the writing classroom, then, look like? What kinds of writing (literacies) will we/should we teach? What kinds of assignments would we include? Will definitions of writing and composing open up to include a broader array of texts and compositions? Should they?
I really like your idea about drawing on students existing strengths as a way to build trust. But I wonder how we can overcome these gaps in our literacy knowledge when we (the academy) privilege (teach) only certain kinds of literacies, to the point that they don't even consider their blogs or Facebook pages as writing.