Todays Adolescents and Literacy

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Todays Adolescents and Literacy

• Dr. Connie Bowman
• University of Dayton

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Who are our students?

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v_A-ZVCjfWf8
• www.bookwormpalace.typepad.com

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• Who are our students?
• (link-http//www.mcmel.org/)
• (http//www.apple.com/education/digitalkids
• Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
• Prensky (2001)Multiliterate youth are immersed in
  the new inforamtion communicaiton technologies
  (Armas, 2005)
• Gee (2003)
• Learning by playing video games
• Youth and connections to sign systems
• How they solve problems
• How they learn from nonverbal cues

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• Current Learning Model
• Designed around the transmission model (sage on
  the stage)
• Text, homework assignments
• sit and get
• Centralized
• Delivered unilaterally
• Based on pre-designed structures that work best
  for a mass audience

• 21st Century
• Designed around an interactive delivery model
• Learning should be
• Customized
• Student-centered
• Non-linear
• Teachers as motivators and facilitators of
  learning

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• Adolescents may be struggling with academic
  learning, but they are engaged in multiple
  literacies (emailing, text messaging, instant
  messaging, social networking, blogs, and personal
  web pages) and in new technologies (iPods, iTalk,
  iMovies,wikis) that require literacy skills that
  learning from traditional textbooks doesnt
  require.
• Students are authors of their own web page,
  chat room, blog, wikis,or virtual reality games
• Students are e-mailing, text messaging, visiting
  chat rooms, listening to downloaded music while
  playing a video game with individuals from across
  the world, and developing their fantasy leagues

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• New literacy skills
• Information and communication skills
• media literacy skills
• Thinking and problem-solving skills
• Critical thinking and systems thinking
• Problem identification, formulation, and solution
• Creativity and intellectual curiosity
• Interpersonal and self-directional skills
• Interpersonal collaboration skills
• Self-direction
• Accountability and adaptability
• Social responsibility

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Who are our students?

• We are preparing students for jobs that do not
  exist today.
• We are preparing students for literacies that do
  not exist today.

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Who are our students?

• My generation 25 years ago organizing meetings
  with friends
• Face-to-face
• Telephone (rotary)
• Passed notes in class
• Teens of today
• Text messaging, instant messaging
• Cell phone
• Email
• Instant messaging

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Who are our Students?

• Students of 1980
• One screen to view one film
• Television with 3 local networks
• Betamax videotape recorders (VCRs)
• Buy albums/8-track cassette
• Tape recorder and record player
• Overhead projector, chalkboard, calculator
• Typed homework on typewriter
• Wrote essays longhand
• (Bill Kist, 2005)

• Students of Today
• Multiple screens to view film
• Cable television
• DVDs
• Download music from computer to Ipods
• laptop computers
• Internet
• Cell phones
• Communicate via chat rooms, blogs, My Space,
  threaded discussions, message boards
• Computer games with alternate realities
• Making multimedia presentations in class
• smart boards

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• Online reading
• Reader clicks on one hyperlink to another
• Reader is taken to other sites and may never
  return to the beginning or ending of the text
• Reading is interactive and nonlinear
• Readers use hypertext links embedded within
  documents and web surfing
• E-journals
• E-newspapers
• E-news

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• The concept of achievement gaps in reading
  achievement and the consequences for a democratic
  society
• 1 in 5 high school graduates cannot read their
  diploma
• National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS, 2002)
• Study of 14,00 adults ages 16 and over, revealed
  that 44 million adults could not read well enough
  to read the label on a food can
• Lost productivity due to low levels of literacy
  approaches 225 billion a year
• Many adolescents do not possess the necessary
  literacy skills to enter post-secondary schools
  and the job market

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• What does it mean to be literate in the 21st
  century?
• In order to be read, a poem, an equation, a
  painting, a dance, a novel, or a contract each
  requires a distinctive form of literacy, when
  literacy means, as I intend it to mean, a way of
  conveying meaning through and recovering meaning
  from the form of representation in which it
  appears. (Eisner, 1997, p. 353)
• Literacy involves reading, writing, speaking, and
  listening
• New literacy skills
• Information and communication skills
• media literacy skills
• Thinking and Problem-solving skills
• Critical thinking and systems thinking
• Problem identification, formulation, and solution
• Creativity and intellectual curiosity
• Interpersonal and self-directional skills
• Interpersonal collaboration skills
• Self-direction
• Accountability and adaptability
• Social responsibility

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• A flat world is a competitive world due to
  digitization and the Internet, where work will go
  to people with the best skills and best price.
• Skills needed for a flat world
• Collaborators and orchestrators
• Synthesizers
• Explainers
• Leveragers
• Adapters
• Green people (naturalist intelligence)
• Personalizers
• Localizers (Friedman, 2006)

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• Adolescents may be struggling with academic
  learning, but they are engaged in multiple
  literacies (nonschool types of literacy skills)
  and in new technologies that require literacy
  skills that learning from traditional textbooks
  doesnt require.
• Students are authors of their own web page,
  chat room, blog, wikis,or virtual reality games
• Students are e-mailing, text messaging, visiting
  chat rooms, listening to downloaded music while
  playing a video game with individuals from across
  the world, and developing their fantasy leagues

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What Research Says

• The majority of inexperienced adolescent readers
  need opportunities and instructional support to
  read many and diverse types of texts in order to
  gain experience, build fluency, and develop a
  range as readers (Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko,
  Mueller, 2001).
• Through extensive reading of a range of texts,
  supported by strategy lessons and discussions,
  students become familiar with written language
  structures and text features, develop their
  vocabularies and read for meaning more
  efficiently and effectively.
• Conversations about reading that focus on
  strategies they use and their language knowledge
  help adolescents build confidence in their
  reading and become better readers

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What adolescents need

• They need sustained experiences with diverse
  texts in a variety of genres and offering
  multiple perspectives on real-life experiences.
• Wide independent reading develops fluency, builds
  vocabulary and knowledge of text structures, and
  offers readers the experiences they need to read
  and construct meaning with more challenging
  texts.
• Texts should include print, electronic and visual
  media.

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• To make progress many students need continued
  instruction beyond the elementary grades.
• The range and complexity of texts students must
  comprehend increase as they progress into middle
  and high school.
• The amount of instruction and support for reading
  and writing actually decreases.
• When students do get support for learning
  specific content, they might not get experiences
  that help them get better at reading and writing
  in general.

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• Instruction that is effective is embedded in the
  regular curriculum and makes use of the new
  literacies, including multiple forms of texts
  (print, visual, aural and digital) that can be
  read critically for multiple purposes in a
  variety of contexts (Lankshear Knobel, 2003)

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• This involves rethinking or reframing the way we
  think about intervening in adolescents reading
  lives It calls for moving beyond some method or
  magic bullet that fixes deficits in reading
  (Luke Elkin, 2000)

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What Teachers Can Do

• Use strategic teaching (content knowledge)
• No one knows the specific content better than the
  teacher of that discipline
• Content teachers are the ones who have the
  knowledge of the reading, writing, listening,
  discussion, and deep thinking skills that are
  required to understand content text
• Content teachers have the opportunity to develop
  students literacy skills because they see them
  on a regular basis and can teach content relevant
  to reading and writing within the context
  promoting engagement and learning. (Irvin,
  Meltzer, Dukes, 2007).

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Interactive Website

• www.canadianshakespeares.ca/folio/folio.html