Defining New Literacies and Why They Matter

    In the modern age we currently exist in, technology is a part of personal and professional life on a daily basis. By technology, I mean the way we "generate, communicate, and negotiate meaningful content" (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 24), which also so happens to be the definition of literacy, according to Knobel and Lankshear (2007). The authors say new literacies are, "socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses." (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 24). New literacy has been designed, debated, redesigned, and interpreted to stray away from this stereotypical and outdated way of viewing literacy as simply the practice of reading and writing in formal English. Historically, American schools used traditional English as the foundation for education. However, we have learned over time that this simply does not work. In doing that, we have silenced voices and perpetuated ideas of euro- and white-centric within the school system. To prepare students to be active, equitable, and justice-seeking members of society, literacy has to be expanded to a broader variety than what is currently taught to the majority of grade school students.

    As a future educator, my daily life at this point in time is spent completing school work and substitute teaching. The literature required to analyze as part of my courses are, in theory, written to support teaching. However, each piece I read I realize the more I need to challenge the current teaching strategies, content, and curriculum. In a place that claims to give equal treatment, it is glaringly obvious the difference between equal and equitable. The literacy students read is not equitable, it is one-sided and creates discontent between many students and their learning. For me, the frustrating part is that there is research and solutions out there. Schools and states have the easy part at the point of putting others' theories and strategies into practice. There are a million programs out there that will allow students to easily and efficiently translate between one another or between themselves and their work. New literacies are using new technology and a new appeal to ethos, meaning participatory, collaborative and distributed (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 9); Vanek describes ways in which to encompass digital literacy skills that do just that. There are a multitude of programs out there that will allow students to easily and efficiently translate between one another or between themselves and their work that allow each student, no matter their language, to critically think, problem solve, communicate, and collaborate with their peers (Vanek, 2019). 

   

    Shifting an entire nation's perspective and teaching strategies is by no means an easy feat, but part hard work is being done. The individuals doing this hard work are begging educational leaders, state education policy-makers, and teachers to read their work in an effort to implement these new practices. At this point, it is up to each teacher to be responsible for reaching kids in their own classroom and providing an equitable education in a world that is based upon one "standard" way of speaking and writing.

References

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2006). Sampling “the new” in new literacies. In a new literacies sampler (pp. 1–24). Peter Lang. 

Vanek (2019). Digital literacy. The American Institutes for Research.

https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/TSTMDigitalLiteracyBrief-508.pdf