11/19 Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning

Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning

Lankshear and Knobel (2008) provided us different kinds of conceptions of digital literacy in the article, and I prefer the concept that digital literacy involves “mastering ideas, not keystrokes”, which was claimed by Paul Gilster (1997). Indeed, digital literacy should not be the simple application of digital technology in the classroom by teachers. However, I think many teachers may misunderstand the significance of it and underestimate its value for disciplinary learning. Then may think that the digital device and technology-based texts used during teaching is the whole of digital literacy. Actually, as what was mentioned by Manderino (2016) that “digital literacies represent the use of digital tools to consume and produce knowledge”, which “include the mind-set and competencies needed to make choices, interact, and engage in an open, networked society” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Phillips & Manderino, 2015). From my understanding, the application of digital tools by teachers in the classroom does not enhance the students’ digital literacy. The key point is how teachers apply them. What kind of literacy strategies do they use to to improve students' digital literacy when applying digital media? That should be considered by teachers in the digital literacy classroom.

Kist (2000) argued that students need to be able to “practice representation” in many forms in diverse disciplines. He also proposed that students should be allowed for “choice of medium” to solve problems, modeling after the teacher. The teacher’s role is emphasized here that he or she is required to model his or her individual thinking process in working through a problem using diverse digital medium. This opinion just meets the idea in Manderino’s (2016) article that digital and disciplinary should be linked. I agree that teachers should not only be proficient in how to use digital media, but also combine it with disciplines. They should also consciously convey to students the ability to use digital media to interpret texts and solve practical problems in disciplines, so that students can have digital literacy and have capacities of lifelong learning and problem solving in the digital age. Thus, the increased demand for teachers in the digital age requires them to master digital teaching skills. At the same time, as mentioned in Manderino’s (2016) article, it provides an opportunity for bidirectional knowledge exchange between teachers and students. From this point of view, the digital age is an era of lifelong learning and learning together.

                                          

In primary and secondary school classrooms in China, teachers' assignments tend to be individual, and most of them are writing assignments. The group work is more likely to begin in universities. Teachers lack the awareness of digital literacy for students, so primary and secondary school students are not given many opportunities to cooperate and communicate with peers about digital choices and presentations. In fact, students’ ability of using digital technology is highly driven by social science and technology, but this ability has not been applied well in their disciplinary learning through professional guidance. I think this issue of disconnection between youths’ digital proficiency and learning should be considered and reflected by educators.

                                          

Digital literacy education seems to be an updated literacy education and also a necessary tendency in the 21 century. I think the prerequisite for it might be improving teachers’ awareness of digital literacy education. They need a conceptual change that the teaching of the digital age is not simply using digital media such as PPT and video playback in teaching, but also consciously guiding students to be capable of using different forms of media to work out problems and projects in different disciplines by themselves.

                                        

11/19 - Digital Texts/Technologies and Disciplinary Literacy.

    The literacies of this week are about the digital literacies. With the development of social media and technology, there are more and more digital literacies for us to read, and I think they are really convenient than before. Digital literacies for disciplinary learning are really very important in the modern society.Digital devices increase the ability to collaborate, create, and disseminate ideas that can generate solutions to local and global problems. Learners’ ability to use the Internet’s networking and knowledge-building resources is only as good as their skills in disciplinary inquiry: asking questions, constructing meaning from data, generating creative solutions, and reflecting on how to improve these solutions for different contexts Disciplinary inquiry with digital texts and tools fosters engagement with content (Coiro, Castek, & Quinn, 2016) Digital literacies represent the use of digital tools to consume and produce knowledge. They also include the mindset and competencies needed to make choices, interact, and engage in an open, networked society (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Phillips & Manderino, 2015). 

    Digital media can help shape learners’ understanding of the social and intellectual practices used within different disciplines. Digital literacies afford unbounded opportunities for collaboration and communication of learners’ intellectual and problem-solving work (see Castek & Coiro, 2015). Consideration of the role of digital platforms and media for local and global inquiry as a part of disciplinary learning is critical to student engagement and purpose for disciplinary literacy. Here is an example in the passage about digital literacies for disciplinary learning which puts students at the forefront of learning by offering opportunities to dialogue and problem solve collaboratively. Learners engage collaboratively in digital spaces to address global science and human rights issues, such as food scarcity and water shortages. They use online resources and collaborate using digital tools to address global issues in ways that improve scientific argumentation (Lawless & Brown, 2015). 

    Digital media not only in our lives but have a very broad use in education. In the past, most of schools using chalks and students should take many kinds of books to go to school and they also need to take some note books for different kind of subjects. And every district are closed because of the distance. If there are new books or some new ideas educators will not now immediately. However, with the development of digital media, the tool becomes a bridge of each area , each school and each of us. We can change our ideas as much as possible, we can see the books as we want. We can connect with teachers if we have some problems. And teachers and communicate with students as a secret through media.Teachers use less chalks and students can have class online and do not have to take so many books to school as well.

    As every icon has its two sides, the digital literacies have some advantages and disadvantages as well.In the view of social culture, this conception of digital literacy as what literacy as in the digital era opens up a second-line of argument for understanding digital literacy as a shorthand(Street 1984,p.1). Digital devices have preside over escalating levels of dis engagement from education that in many schools have reached crisis levels. Many have died or been severely damaged in the process. Just as Gee said, if people are to mature their souls, they need to feel a sense of control, meaningfulness, even expertise in the face of risks and complexity. They want and need to feel like hers in their own life stories man sense.They need to feel that they matter and that have mattered in other people's stories. If the body feels on food, the soul feeds on agency and meaningfulness.So, it is important to have some policies about digital literacy. And what do you think about this advantages and disadvantages?

11/19 Digital Literacy

With the development of technology and society, students can now access information in various forms, such as video, animation, audio, text, and data. For example, they can easily be globally connected by a few clicks on electronic equipment. The reading of this week mainly talked about digital literacy, including the main characteristic of digital literacy, digital literacy pluralism, the new literacy classroom and so forth.

I was informed that digital literacy aims at providing resources for learners, teachers, and other stakeholders to become better equipped in today’s digital world. Manderino Castek (2016) suggested that, “Skilled Internet use and global networking unleash vast potential and a multitude of real-world contexts for learners to engage in the world as critical and agentive citizens”. Indeed, digital literacies are the capabilities that fit someone for their living, learning and working in a digital society. Learning in the 21st century marks an easier access to multiple forms of text, a rich variety of representations and knowledge structures, and various forms of online communication to organize, collaborate and express ideas.

In addition, I was deeply impressed by the example of Tanaka Nanako in Lankshear’s article. It shows how engaging in fanfiction writing among peers can contribute to young people becoming accomplished narrative writers and I also think this is a good example of digital literacy practice. There is no doubt that, participating in digital literacy practices provides opportunities for students gaining situated rather than merely verbal meanings for concepts, processes, and functions. Therefore, I think educators need to encourage students to do more digital literacy practices in order to build their capacity to access online resources, extract the information and in turn, synthesize what they gather, and communicate solutions.

In China, schools are continuously updating curricula to keep up with accelerating technological developments. This often includes the use of educational software of curricula teaching, the available online course materials and the smart-boards using in replacement of traditional chalkboards. Digital technology has impacted the way material is taught in the classroom and digital literacy also has a tremendous impact on the way of teaching. Digital is both a source of information and communication that has increased exponentially internationally. Subsequently, integrating digital into the classroom is a highly constructive way that could expose students to a range of literacy practices in order to broaden their outlook and widens vistas of information and knowledge. With the development of digital literacy, educators enhance traditional forms of learning with digital literacy through different platforms, and this helps shape students’ understanding of the social and intellectual practices used within different disciplines.

Nowadays, students have more ways of learning about the world and more ways of expressing themselves through technology. I would highly agree that digital literacy would occur in all subject areas. As educators, it is increasingly important for us to be able to create a new literacy classroom that is suited to our own disciplinary. Establishing the benefits of adopting an expansive view of digital literacies may have a significant impact on educational learning. Thus, I think the teacher for a new literacy would be one that honors all forms of representation rather than merely uses an unchanging method of teaching. We need to encourage students reading and writing in multiple media on a daily basis so that they will form the cognitive pluralism.

All in all, as a pedagogical approach in curriculum design, the implementation of digital literacy affords far-reaching advantages. Digital literacy believes in supporting instructional technologists in school to facilitate digital and media literacy instruction for students and all teachers. I think the reading of this week is quite enlightening for me as a teacher in the future.

The new digital multi-literacies classrooms: Is it a choice and are we equipped?

Manderina and Castek (2008) write that there hasn’t been any other time in history when “human’s have had such… [immediate]… access to information in multiple forms”. To this statement, I add that at no other time in history have human’s had such access to information that can be plausibly falsified. Although it has been the prerogative of state entities to falsify information in the supposed “interests” of the state, this information upon closer perusal, could be (we believed) identified as doctored or unoriginal.  Furthermore, most falsified information was in the form of written, verbal texts which could be believed or not, depending upon the reader’s inclination and beliefs. The onset of digital image manipulation has completely changed the way we can and should view perception. 

Although image manipulation has been used historically, from Stalin’s Russia, when “mass alteration of photographs was undertaken to purge Stalin’s enemies from history books” to more recent occurrences such as “the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an antiwar demonstration” printed by the Times, the technology in current use is far more advanced and is accessible to commercial digital manipulation platforms (Rothman, 2018, p. 35). What do these changes in technology and advances in artificial intelligence mean for understanding images at large and in classrooms. Can any image be relied upon as evidence of truth? What are the markers of original images? And to what extent has this technology been reproduced in other digital platforms? This is a serious questions that we need to ask as both citizens and educators since human’s tend to rely on the ‘evidence of their eye’s’ as something irrevocably factual. 

Furthermore, in exploring the notion of digital multi-literacies and disciplinary literacy (Manderina and Castek, 2016), we must also ask ourselves if we are equipped to deal with this onslaught of information that we as educators do not have the expertise to examine as forensic experts. When we present information to our students from different media, how can we determine if the images and media we use are authentic? These are very serious questions and must be reflected upon as our Defense agencies are advancing research into these questions. 

DARPA or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a program in media forensics in 2016, whose goal was to investigate potential risks to national security. These risks included “synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives …constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras”, providing additional plausibility to falsified videos, “created by national, large, low-resource, groups or individuals”. (Rothman, 2018, p. 40) Now more than ever do we need to change the focus of curricula from standardized testing based factual information to critical literacies. Lankshear and Knobel (2008) advocate the conceptualization of digital literacies as an extension of the ways in which we think about standard literacy; the ability to read and write in different media, while being able to critically assess the viability of the information being given. 

All information is laden with values and we must accept that human’s are value laden beings that build their own knowledge on the basis of previous knowledge frameworks. New information is assessed by our cognitive structures on the basis of knowledge acquired. If the knowledge acquired previously, is based on falsified information, then all knowledge built upon a system of false premises must be false. It has become increasingly urgent to make our students aware of the pitfalls of the threats of media manipulation, that are now used frequently by malicious individuals and groups in anonymity. 

Lankshear and Knobel (2008) also discuss literature that divides the purposes of introducing multiliteracies as part of our classroom learning experiences. These are the acquisition of technical skills and socio-emotional learning. Gee (2004, 2013) has also written extensively about the value of using games within k-12 classrooms, citing its increasing and very effective use in the military as well as college science courses. I believe that both technical skills and socio-emotional learning are an intrinsic part of the learning that occurs through immersion. The notion of ‘flow’ referred to by Kist (2000) reflects this aspect of learning, which can only occur through deep engagement in the tasks being performed. Kist (2000) re-imagines the K-12 classroom as studios that allow students to learn through an apprenticeship model; excellent ideas that cannot be implemented within the existential crisis that exists within school districts and institutional systems. A crisis that has been created by a concerted effort to de-value the purposes of taxation and social spending. What do current teachers do at a time like this? How do they incorporate the ideas propagated by researchers arguing for the inclusion of multi-literacies in classrooms, for the purposes of engagement, learning and future implementation? 

Furthermore, have we as educators, articulated for ourselves, the purposes and goals of the educational opportunities that we think we are going to provide to students, in a rapidly changing globalized economic system? And most importantly, what do educators need to do to equip themselves with the skills and knowledge, that will enable them to be the masters that can provide their students with the modeling necessary for learning in apprenticeship based classrooms? Is it even plausible to entertain these expectations from teacher educator or do we need to start re-thinking the teacher education program?  When Kist (2000) describes classrooms as studios, placing teachers as experts of content and media, I believe, this has serious implications for the future of teacher education. A need for deeper content learning as well as, learning ways of implementing this deeper learning into practical artifacts, that are meaningful, both in the classroom as well as the real world.  After all, isn’t that the ultimate purpose of a digital multi-literacy based education; to equip students with the tools and skills necessary to be both critical consumers and producers of content. Or do you as future teachers, feel that you are equipped to negotiate these changes successfully?

References:

Rothmans, J. (Nov. 12th, 2018). Afterimage. in The New Yorker. 34-44

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing

Lankshear, C. and Knobel. M. (2008).  Introduction. In Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. Eds. Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices (pp. 1-12). Peter Lang Publishing

Kist, W. (2000). Beginning to create the new literacy classroom: What does the new literacy look like?. Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy. 43(8). 710-718

Madelino, M. and Castek, J. (2016). Digital literacies for disciplinary learning: A call to action. 

Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy.  60(1). 

11/12 - Supporting Writing in the Disciplines

Supporting Writing in the Disciplines

It is impressive to see the increasing literacy demands our workforce is facing. However, I can see the importance of these writing criteria for policemen in California:

Avoiding fragments and run on sentences
Avoiding vague or indefinite references
Be coherent and logically organized
Be generally free from spelling errors
Have a fluent style marked by sentence variety and language control

Though I did not know the extent that these literary requirements were imposed. Many employees require a standard literary capability even for fast-food workers and janitors according to the reading. So, for those of us who are going into education, we need to ask ourselves, “Are doing all we can to prepare our students for this fundamental requirement in today’s society?”

Anecdotes from the author are startling- that 90% of surveyed teachers do not feel their students are doing enough writing to become skilled writers, and that some teachers are spending 55 days out of there school year testing. With so much time devoted to multiple choice standardized tests, it can be argued that policies are making the situation worse, in spite of so many corporations, research studies, and even politicians agreeing we need to improve the writing capabilities of our students. For now what we can do as educators is understand its importance and make sure our writing instruction is the best we can make it.



Semiotics is the formal study of how we make meaning out of the world. From Icons, to Indices, to Symbols (going from less to more abstract), it is helpful to understand literacy from this more metacognitive approach. Each discipline have their own specific qualities to them. The predominance of symbols in math is almost unique. Even going so far as preferring specialized symbols to express ideas and answers, over that of descriptive text. Science utilizes many forms of semiotics to express their ideas. From graphs, to pictures, to animations and even gestures. All of those are utilized to describe and explain natural phenomena. It is recommended that we find a way to adapt our teachings of writing to be discipline aware, instead of using generalized strategies “such as summarizing”.

I think that it would almost be difficult for teachers not to be adjusting their own teaching to coincide with their discipline. At least for any teacher who has had significant study in the subject they are teaching, because they should be very ingrained in the standard literacy of that discipline. Which, if true, then the heart of the matter lies with how do we overall increase the literacy of students. Where should our focus be? Should it be to change policy? To change are presentations and homework assignments? What would you like to do to increase your students writing capability?

The reading from “Writing Next” goes directly into these types of questions. Providing strategies for helping to teach writing. Though their aim is for more general strategies.

Poetry comes with it a great flexibility of expression and interpretation, which makes it a valuable way to strengthen literacy at the same time as being culturally sustaining pedagogy. Each individual gets to bring their prior knowledge and culture to the foreground with poetry. It makes it easy to extend and support agency in the student’s language choices. Deemphasizing grammar for a moment to check and see what students intentions are is particularly important with Poetry. It is important to position students as experts or insiders when expressing themselves and their culture. Poetry is arguably a more powerful way to sustain a student’s culture then displaying a few different cultures holidays in class.

                                     

                                              (3-minute powerful and emotional poem)

“Lived Life Through a Colored Lens” (Machado, Woodard, Coppola, & Vaughan 2017) does not offer a wide range of different practices for sustaining student’s culture, though it does give a strong example of what that kind of pedagogy looks like. We need to take that example and find more ways sustain our student’s culture. How might you do that?

11/12 - Supporting Writing in the Disciplines

This week, we read about the importance of supporting writing across all disciplines. In Gallagher’s Moving Writing to the Front Burner, he mentioned how crucial writing is for the future lives of students yet it’s not being taught effectively in schools. In Wilson’s A Social Semiotics Framework for Conceptualizing Content Area Literacies, she spoke about the differing ways in which students read, write, and interpret different disciplines. Also, Woodard and Coppola’s More Than Words: Student Writers Realizing Possibilities through Spoken Word Poetry, sheds light on the impact of culturally sustaining writing on student empowerment and individuality.

To have our students take an interest in writing and be able to effectively do it on their own, we need to make it relatable and provide them with the skills necessary to do so. When I think back to when I first began writing papers in high school, I remember struggling… a lot. Writing hasn’t always been my best friend and maybe if some of my teachers had incorporated some of the ideas Gallagher mentioned or the poetry unit Coppola did, maybe it would’ve eased the stress of writing for me. Gallagher mentions exposing students to the importance and impact writing has on the real world around them. This goes back to the idea of basing the curriculum around the students and making it relatable to them. Displaying the areas in which writing is important exposes them to so many more doors to the reason as to why we write. It shows them how far beyond writing goes from school and the classroom. This is also seen when the student Sujaya writes her poem and mentions how she feels about being called “fake asian.” She found it easier to write down and read how she felt. By sharing her poem with the class, she was able to see the impact her words had on the world around her - even if it’s the smaller one of a classroom.

Another important facet is modeling for the students the writing process one goes through when writing as an example. Of course everyone is different so their process for writing might differ from another person’s; however, when exposing students to a new concept, it can be beneficial for them to see how someone who is familiar with the process does it. Personally, I think this is a great idea and is something I see done very often in my discipline of math and in so many others that is makes sense for it to be done with writing as well. Thinking back to when I was a high school student with little experience in writing, I think this would have helped me tremendously, especially as a beginner. Lastly, Gallagher mentions how helpful giving students examples of writing that correctly show what it is you want them to do is for students. It’s one thing modeling for them what you do and another what someone else does who is known for their writing and uses it in their profession. This also allows for student growth and shows them the different ways to ultimately do the same thing. This might also help them find their own voice in writing.  

For the longest time, writing was strictly thought of as something that was solely done in an english classroom, but now we know it’s something practiced in every discipline and that means we have to help students build the skills to apply their writing skills to the discipline they’re writing in. When it comes to math, I always thought it was computational and all about precision, knowing the right formulas and methods to use, and being able to take the little information given to you and using it to see the bigger picture - essentially, I never thought it had anything to do with writing whatsoever, that was until I was introduced to proofs. Mathematical proofs are all about writing and being able to effectively convey the mathematical process that is taking place; however, the similar concept can be applied to any level of math. There’s writing in geometry proofs, word problems, and explanations of answers of the solving process. Wilson mentions how writing in math is mostly embedded in symbols and numbers but that shouldn’t take away from the importance of words and writing for they are the foundation. By teaching students how to properly read and analyze the symbols, words, diagrams, numbers, etc. that make up math, we’re also teaching them how to use it on their own.  

I believe words are very powerful, whether they be spoken or written. By properly preparing our students to write and letting them see that for themselves, I think we’re empowering them and showing them that their voice matters.

11/12 - Supporting Writing in Your Discipline

The readings this week stress an idea that comes as no shock: that writing is increasingly important in today’s careers and daily life and that it needs more attention in the classroom.

This reminds me of something I heard in Ken Burns’s documentary about the Vietnam War (sorry, I don’t have the time to rewatch the whole series to find the name/exact words of the speaker). Describing the use of body counts as a proxy for progress in the war, one man said that  “sometimes when what is most important is hard to measure, what you can measure becomes more and more important.” Dehumanization through numbers aside, the fact that the number of Vietnamese people being killed was equated with success led to more deaths instead of better strategy. While of course it is not impossible to measure student writing, it is more difficult to do than with skills that appear most often in standardized tests. Not enough time is allocated to learning critical writing because improvement is determined by changes in those test scores.

People saw images and body count reports from the war on the nightly news (Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine)

In “Write Like This,” Gallagher argues that one way to focus more on writing in a meaningful way is to find real-world discourses in your discipline. Looking at not just the disciplinary content contained in such texts but at how they are formatted can be a model to students. Students will be writing for different purposes in their future. Thus, it makes sense for us to find texts, traditional and non-traditional, that communicate disciplinary thinking.

(Left: A mathematician’s proof of existence/uniqueness of GCF from a Number Theory textbook. Right: YouTuber’s visual explanation of how to use proportional reasoning to find the heights of Mario’s friends knowing he is 5’1”.)

Similarly, the teacher can be a model for writing. Just as we might use Think Alouds while reading disciplinary texts, we can share how we are deciding what to include as we write in front of students. In math, that means describing why I’m using certain numbers and symbols to convey meaning and how the order and spacing I choose will have meaning.

The “Writing Next” report has some good guidance for how to teach students the distinctive qualities of writing in your discipline. Reading the list of eleven elements for teaching writing made my reflect on notable efforts of my past teachers to improve my writing.

Summarizing is commonly taught, but I had one high school teacher who did it in a memorable way. After every reading assignment, we had to write the most detailed and representative summary possible using only 25 words. Revising those summary sentences was often part of the class. We would talk to the members of our table and come up with one 25-word statement together. Or we considered one group’s sentence and suggested what could be removed or added. The statements that we wrote at the bottom of the articles were useful to us as we planned and drafted papers.

Collaborative Writing stuck out to me because I don’t think I have ever been given good instruction in how to do anything more than brainstorm or edit as a team. Yet, team writing is something common to many careers (and in college academics). In trying to be efficient with time, groups I have been in usually try to divide tasks and sections of a paper. When I gave such a draft to one professor, he called it “Frankenstein’s Monster.” We had to rewrite substantial portions of the paper, and it ended up taking much more time than if we had worked separately. Like us, students will struggle with team dynamics and efficiency in their writing.

Reading about the spoken word poetry unit as an example of culturally sustaining pedagogy led me to consider what that might look like within my discipline. I am still grappling with what non-dominant forms of mathematical reasoning are and how I can encourage those perspectives in my class. Since I like to think of math as an articulation of what our intuition tells us, perhaps I could have students explore how they use some form of math to make decisions that are unique to them: from deciding which line to get into at the store to choosing a place to live.

What specific things will you do to teach students how to write well in your discipline? Have your former teachers provided any good models for you? And how will you do this in a culturally sustaining way?