What do you get when you put ten incredibly passionate educators and writers in the same space at the same time with one goal in mind: write a book which will address common challenges in education and practical solutions for it? Well, a fantastic book of course!
What was most special to me is that all the royalties from the book will go to The Will to Live Foundation, a non-profit organization founded to support teen suicide prevention.
We gathered together as strangers mostly; knowing each other from Twitter or not knowing each other at all. We began that first meeting brainstorming chapter Ideas which would morph and evolve into chapters that connected to each other and a book that would serve the needs of any educator in the building. Those three days were filled with writing, editing, feedback, delirium, writer’s block, laughter, writing, more editing and more feedback. By the end of the three days the strangers became life-long friends. I sat amazed as we read excerpts to our respective chapters in the order that Lauren Davis (our Routledge editor suggested). It was as if it had been orchestrated for months!
Here is a brief excerpt from my chapter:
When I talk about redefining literacy, people become very emotional. At its very core, literacy is about reading and writing, but if we consider the various definitions, it’s about making meaning and reading and writing the world. Does this mean we stop reading Shakespeare and stories which are culturally relevant? Does it mean we stop reading aloud to children? Of course not. What it does mean, however is that we help students to recognize their own literate behaviours and augment the literacy experiences we are already providing, use the vast reach of technology and social media to understand the world around them.
NCTE says that in order to be successful today, learners must:
- Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology
- Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought
- Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;
- Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;
- Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;
- Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.
As an example, it is common practice for us (adults and kids) to use Google. So let’s consider how students have learned to navigate that text and the explicit literacy skills required for students to effectively make meaning when they are searching on Google. You would first need to understand the conventions of the text and be able to decode information.
In the chapter I provide practical examples and ideas for broadening our definition of literacy to support our students in their understanding of the world around them.
I am grateful to the incredible leadership of Jeff Zhoul, Sanee Bell and Lauren Davis, and to my co-authors whom I admire immensely. We are each writing a blog post to share about our experience. Check out:
and be sure to keep an eye out for Josh Stumpenhorst’s coming soon!
