Teacher-to-Teacher Debut

Welcome, teachers across the United States and the world.

As a teacher-researcher, I narrate and interpret students’ reactions to my critical literacy classroom. Literacy is the ability to read, write, communicate, and comprehend. Students have access to a wide array of literacy-based activities ranging from traditional school-based literacies to the literacies they use to make sense of their daily lives.

Yet literacy skills recognized in American public schools do not resemble literacy in the real world. American public schools do not offer students instruction or provide tools necessary to help them read, analyze, and critique embedded messages in the extensive variety of texts they “read” everyday.

I'd like to create a dialogue with you and other teachers around the world about literacy for today's students: what it is, the obligations of public schools to create literate learners, current research about multiple literacies and multimodality, and your own classroom experiences in which you have tried to extend a cultural transmission approach so asa to enhance literacy structures in students.

I'll post weekly about ideas that arise from my own classroom observations and data collection. In the meantime, allow me to share with you some comments from Amy Tan, the opening ceremonies' keynote speaker last weekend at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention in New York City.

She suggested that reading creates a certain magical reaction:

“When it happens, you feel you have gone to a different place… It is the highest moment. I can’t predict it: it just happens. Whenever you’re a write or a reader, you’ve had it. You’ve had these high moments. You found a connection between your life and this writing.”

What moment can you recall in which a text brought you to a "different place?" Was it a film, an audio story aired on radio, a poem that you memorized, a primary source digital document, an original song you wrote? Post your moment of connectedness between your life and a text.

Welcome.