More Doors to New Literacy

More than ever, educators will need to identify and create opportunities and environments that encourage general tendencies and skills in old literacies to blossom in all the directions required of the 21st Century. Girls, still quite often influenced by traditional gender roles, need to be encouraged to engage with the various literacies of the internet. Luckily, as women tend, in general, to be more interested in cooperation and relationships over competition, these new “literacies of the internet” provide some new and enticing doors to fluency.

Wiki’s and Blogs provide wonderful opportunities for collaboration. Whether in class or, in many cases, from their homes, students can communicate and work together using new literacies that are quickly changing traditional means of public expression. In working on a class project in poetry, I wanted students to post the drafts of their poems onto our class Wiki and then have peers comment. Each student was given a color that would identify him or her, so I could really deliver the message of what constructive feedback was and encourage each student to do so. By revising their comments where necessary, I was able to teach them how effective real collaboration can be. In the end, many students expressed their appreciation for the guidance of their peers.

A colleague of mine had students post ‘high interest’ reading selections from the internet and then required they read and comment on at least three. In addition to encouraging the many ‘non-readers’ to develop reading as a good habit, this project, as it came from the students, would do wonders in bringing the class on board. The class could examine which selections were the most popular and why. What would the answers to these questions suggest about the class and how did they feel about this? Projects such as these also provide a bridge from the tendency to appreciate cooperation over competition and from the skills developed in the traditional literacies of reading and writing to expression in new literacies that increasingly demand fluency. They allow a greater access to a much broader swath of learning styles, opening the traditionally narrow sense of traditional education that frankly left many feeling unintelligent.

In addition to collaboration, students interested in and engaged via seeking to understand relationships are finding avenue to fluency in new literacies via such platforms as role-playing games and My Space or Facebook. Many girls who had once been seen as uninterested in computers, are now "now in the majority" in playing popular role-playing games like "The Sims" (Williams p303). While many girls did not seem to be attracted to video game violence, The SIMS focused attractively on relationships by SIM-ulating human interaction in a number of different scenarios. And while, to be honest, I have not thought to use either Facebook or MySpace in the classroom, I recently spoke with an English teacher who wanted to use My Space for a project on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (she was complaining about the large number of internet sites blocked by her district!). She wanted to her students to form groups, choose characters from the play and then create MySpace pages for each. Each character’s page should reflect their personalities, interests, and ‘recent events,’ all of which would be discovered as the students read through the play. Students interested in relationships would have an engaging time visiting and commenting on the sites of other characters in the group, inspiring students to really get ‘into the heads’ of their characters and reflect on how the characters should interact.

And while this entry dealt primarily with how educators might invite more girls into developing fluency in ‘new literacies’ of the internet, it must be said that the main thrust of my argument is that educators attempt to discover the incentives for all of their students to explore and develop such fluency by exploring as many possibilities as they can.