Category Archives: Reading Reflections

reflection on article and book readings

Dec11

Relevancy in Writing for Test Preparation

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Many students loathe the idea of writing in general. They typically see it as a time-consuming and unnecessary chore. This is not terribly surprising because as Yancey explains, “Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing.” (2). Of course, it is really just the writing that occurs in the classroom that is so dreaded because we see young people writing all the time in our modern age. And they are not just simply writing alphabetic pieces, they are often composing in multimodal contexts and for different rhetorical purposes. This is why teachers should draw from students’ experiences outside of the classroom in preparing relevant assignments for them. It excites me that so many young people do want to write, even if it is not traditional compositions that they are creating. The fact that they are writing blogs, tweets, making memes, posting YouTube videos, storyboarding their desires on Pinterest, and critiquing others’ posts demonstrates that they are expressing themselves and practicing rhetorical strategies for different purposes and audiences. This means they already have real-world experience in composition and they love composing as long as it is relevant to them, which is very valuable information for a teacher to have. Teachers can use this information as a tool for developing class activities and assignments that involve writing and that are not linked to testing, but will prepare them for testing regardless. These assignments do not have to be multimodal, but they frequently can and should be to engage more students. Essentially, teachers should appeal to students’ needs for relevancy in their studies by making them aware of how to find something interesting or relevant to them in each writing assignment. The idea is to get them writing, and once that has been accomplished, they will be on the road to testing better in writing without them even knowing it!

Source: Yancey, Kathleen B. “Writing in the 21st Century: A Report from the National Council of Teachers of English.” (2009): 1-9. NCTE. Web. 4 December 2012.

Dec11

Teaching Multiliteracies

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Stuart Selber says that “to allow others to determine the design of human-computer interfaces is to risk naturalizing a set of literacy perspectives that fails to support the pedagogical practices teachers of writing and communication find most effective and informative” (11). I agree with this statement. I generally think that it is unwise to create any program without consulting a variety of people within the field(s) the program is being created for. What a program will be used for should impact how any interface is set up for it to be most useful to its users. For instance, even though Adobe Creative Suite was designed for graphic designers, many non-designers use it to do graphic design inside and outside of the classroom. If Adobe asked people who did not have specific training in Creative Suite, but had some experience in art and technology, they may have set the program up with more recognizable terminology to indicate the various functions, as Adobe Acrobat does.

More interesting than these thoughts, however, is Selber’s conception of teaching multiliteracies in the classroom. He identifies three types of literacy: functional, critical, and rhetorical (25). Selber’s model provides a well-rounded approach to the different uses of computers, all of which have relevance for all of us. The three ways of thinking about computer literacy are definitely complementary. For instance, we cannot produce technology (rhetorical literacy) if we cannot use it (functional literacy). We also cannot utilize it fully (functional literacy) if we have not discovered its limitations and capabilities through criticism (critical literacy). Furthermore, if we do not know how to produce technology, we certainly do not know how to criticize it, and likely do not know how to use it. Essentially, the only way to have a complete understanding of the purposes and benefits of technology is to operate under the three-part multiliteracy model that Selber provides us. Students need to understand that computers are not just word processing machines––they are also machines that allow us to produce multi-layered meaning in many different ways, as well as machines that need to be assessed for their limitations and advantages of use.

Source: Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. 2004. Print.