The idea of transliteracy has made me challenge my philosophy on literacy, the direction of my capstone project and my future instruction as a language arts teacher. The question, “Will reading as we know it become obsolete?” keeps echoing in my mind.
After reading and listening to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on the development of literacy over the centuries and in different cultures I began to wonder if my notion of literacy was limited. Literacy has not always been reading a text from left to right to understand and transmit ideas. Before written language, people communicated ideas, culture, and their shared history through oral stories memorized and taught. The “academics” of these societies were poets such as the Greek, Homer. Communicating and forming a “village” was done orally and symbolically. When language developed to the written form, only a small population was educated in its use and only the wealthy could afford to use the materials for written communication. Reading and writing became a function of an elite portion of the society. It was arguably a social class divider. It was not until the advent of the printing press that written transmission of ideas became accessible to the general population. A shift in the “village” appeared. Now communicating could be done by an individual alone in a room sending an idea and received by another individual alone in a room at a different time and place. The notion of a community became simultaneously more global but also more individualized and isolated. Literacy morphed from a group collaboration to an individual activity. This history represents those cultures where language is phonetic, typically western civilization. Historically and currently for many languages , literacy is not even a left to right scanning of phonemes to make meaning. In some languages reading and communicating is a visual representation of symbols that carry their own meaning, for example, in languages such as Chinese or Japanese. The distinction is important when considering the brain’s process of making meaning. This is, afterall, the foundation of literacy. In linear text with a phonetic alphabet, the brain translates meaningless bits of sound/text into meaning. In text that is symbolic, the eye and the brain processing can hop from place to place and makes meaning from symbols that carry meaning in and of themselves. The digital age is marrying the ideas of literacy being oral, visual, and textual. Digital communication gives us the ability to be both individualistic and collaborative. It also expands our village to the global community. Has the pendulum swung from far left to far right and is it now coming back to the center? Is transliteracy an ideal place to land? I am pushing my thinking to question my bias toward traditional reading and accept the positive aspects of transliteracy. I value reading as we know it. I think it is also safe to say that as a whole, we are still a world that values literacy. “Reading” conjures the image of a person alone with a book or screen reading text. In 300 years, will “reading” be something entirely different? Will it be obsolete? If you hand a 12 year old a copy of The Hunger Games, will she know how to decode it? With my current love of curling up with a book and losing myself in another world, I know my answer is “I hope not”. And I think not. At least in my lifetime, I don’t believe traditional reading will disappear. Yet it is undeniable that transliteracy - communicating ideas through varying formats - is here to stay. The value of transliteracy to support literacy is the new direction of my driving question and my capstone project. At the outset of my new driving question and without the benefit of having done the literature review research or my own action research, I can already see how the idea of transliteracy is changing my teaching practices. I am embracing not only the textual aspect of reading, but also the oral, visual, video, digital, and collaborative aspects. Most teachers are already practiced at drawing out students’ prior knowledge at the beginning of a learning unit. We know that background knowledge is a key component of building student understanding. So take for example, my 8th grade ELA unit on “Suspense”. Before digging into rigorous texts, the new curriculum introduces the Big Idea by introducing the students to Alfred Hitchcock. What kid today has even heard of him, let alone seen one of his movies? Where there is a lack of prior experience, audio-visual presentations are a helpful and engaging way to shore up students’ foundation. The new curriculum, StudySync, provides videos of Hitchcock to expose the students to the background knowledge. Collaborating with other students to hear their stories and experiences is valuable. Previously, this would all have been accomplished by yet more reading, which was problematic because it required the labor of reading to get to the pre-reading idea. StudySync seems to be designed with transliteracy in mind - it provides video presentations done by students with mini-lessons on skills and content. Each text is also available orally - the program will read the text (in this case with a British accent). Students can slow it down, pause, repeat,and highlight the text to follow along. These transliterate strategies are more engaging for students. I also find that the content is more accessible for reluctant and struggling readers, students with special needs, and second language learners.
3 Comments
I really enjoyed reading this. Like you, a dive into transliteracy is pushing me toward thinking about ALL the ways my students, parents and other teachers can access the ideas I wish to express. Although the idea of a world without solid, beautiful books terrifies me, I don't know if that terror is grounded in a real danger or my fear of change. I love the words of Shakespeare, Homer, and even the starkness of Dickens. I cannot imagine a world without them, and yet, I understand that it was only through my guidance that most of my students were able to access them. Perhaps the world has shifted and we are just now beginning to see it. To those of us on one side of the shift, it appears to be a shift toward destruction, but for those on the other side, it is the beginning of something new, powerful and beautiful. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
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James Landis
9/11/2017 08:20:13 am
Nancy,
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9/13/2017 08:35:22 pm
I'm with you Nancy curling up with a good book is a big part of our lives be it a ebook or paper copy. I believe if the reading is interesting or needed to understand what you want to do, be it a videogame or build/make something. My students today was looking at egyptian amulets with hieroglyphics over 1500 years old and my student knew what many of the symbols were. They also believe that we are going to have more coding like reading in the future because of the way you have developed short terms for everything. Kentucky fried chicken = KFC, etc.
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