Ann-Marie Henry-Stephens
IST 668
I-Teach Paper
Learning Literacy
Approximately 20 years ago, I got my first teaching position as an elementary school teacher in a small school on the north-east coast of Trinidad and Tobago, my native country. Very early on, I was schooled in the notion that my job was to educate students so that they would become literate. That is, by the time they left my keep, the students should be able to read and write at the “appropriate” level. Literacy at that time had that one very basic definition to me—the ability to read and write—and I felt comfortable with that and did my best to achieve good results. After toiling there for 8 years, I felt quite comfortable and competent with my ability to help students become literate. Eventually, I decided to migrate to the United States where I hoped to continue my teaching career, but little did I know that I was also embarking on a journey to continue my schooling in literacy.
When I immigrated to this country, I went back to school and then continued to teach. Because of my strong love for literature and my dislike for teaching at the elementary level, among other things, I became a part-time English instructor at a community college. In the English department there I heard a familiar song. The music was different, but the message was the same—students needed to be literate. To be literate, students had to be fluent and competent in Standard English atlevels determined by the department before they were allowed to move on to the next level of English. There, for the first time in my career, I worked with English as a Second Language (ESL) students, and I quickly realized that literacy, as I “knew” it, did not happen in a vacuum. In meetings, workshops, and professional development sessions, factors affecting development of fluency and competency were explored—age (older students have a harder time learning a new language), level of literacy in native language, and level of schooling in native country, among other things. Again, I worked as hard as I could to get my students literate and after years of teaching at that level, I thought I was well-versed in the genre of literacy, but then I became a high school English teacher.
Upon entering this arena, I heard terms like “balanced literacy” and was trained in programs like “Ramp-Up to Literacy.” I was told about state standards for literacy, the reading, writing, listening, and speaking components of those standards, and that students needed to read a certain number of books per school year to aid in developing those standards. From other teachers, I heard terms like computer literacy, math literacy, and science literacy. I had never really given much thought to the other subject areas literacy issues, but thenI began to question myself: how did my English teacher literacy lessons affected those other subject literacies? Should I even care about those literacies? After all, once I thought them to read and write in Standard English, my job was done, right? My students are so far behind; how do I get them to read and write? Literacy was primarily a reading and writing issue, wasn’t it? My head was spinning after that first year because I now realized that literacy had developed tentacles and I wasbeing strangled by my inability to fully grasp and control it. But quitesuddenly, things changed.
During the first semester of my second year in the high school, I was asked to work in the library, first as an assistant to the library media specialistand later on as the acting library media specialist; and it is here that I am beginning to make sense of the many arms of literacy. Information is the new “front man” for literacy in the library. I now have to help the students and the staff of the school develop “information literacy” skills because the library is all about information, not information specific to just English, Math or Science, but “information for retrieval, utilization, and dissemination” that “will help equip our students and fulfill their educational goals,” as the Paul Robeson Library Media Center Mission Statement says.
So exactly how does one teach information literacy in the library? I am learning as I go through this program in Library and Information Science at SyracuseUniversity. With each class, I gain new insights that will factor into my development as a knowledgeable, resourceful library media specialist. With each assignment, my philosophy takes shape and my confidence in my abilities grows. Let me explain.
Two weeks ago, I had to write a lesson plan for teaching one of six literacy skills (Monitoring Comprehension, Activating and Connecting to Background Knowledge, Questioning, Visualizing and Inferring, Determining Importance in the Text, Summarizing and Synthesizing Information) as identified by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis in the book Strategies that Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement. Immediately, I thought that my lesson must be relevant to the community of students with whom I work, and it must address an area of weakness in their literacy development. I have been in the library for approximately two years now and I feel that I have a good grasp of what the students need. For this lesson, I re-read the whole section of the book dealing with summarizing and synthesizing information, trying to find a strategy that would work with my students. I found myself considering the following: How do I get my students, who are mostly boys to be interested in reading? How do I make it relevant to their interests and culture? Should I include technology in the lesson as a motivator? Given their reading and writing levels, how can I make the tasks doable? Is every child going to get it? Do I have enough variety in the lesson to keep them interested? I struggled with these questions and eventually picked a strategy and resources that I felt would best address all these questions.
In addition, as I wrote the lesson on the template I was asked to use, I had to thoughtfully address and area of my teaching that I had given very little thought to before. The template had an area designated for the teacher to explain how he/she would model the strategy to be used for the students, and I had to really think about this. I had to ask myself, “Have you ever truly done this before? “Have you really modeled or just explained what you wanted the students to do?” I was stomped. I couldn’t really answer the question and that bothered me. What had I been doing all these years? And yetit enlightened me, because now I will have an answer the next time I teach a lesson. I will think about this as I plan lessons for students in my role as library media specialist. I have to show students what I want them to do—I cannot simply tell them what to do. This aspect of the template, more than any other, has forced me to think of my teaching technique. I want to do better.
I eventuallychose a lesson on writing summaries that allowed the students to work through a long article bit by bit, and I picked an article on cellular telephones which I know would appeal to the boys just as much as it would to the girls. I taught the lesson to my classmates and their comments reassured me that I had made some good choices. And then it hit me! In many ways, I had come full circle. Literacy is about reading and writing, —reading and writing in every subject area, Math, English, Computer, Science, every one of them. But, I also realized that my circle had grown to include the “other things” that influenced my students’ ability to become literate. I had to think about their interests, their skills, their culture, my teaching skills, and my delivery to them. Teaching a literacy lesson was no longer “I lead you follow.” Instead it now was, “Let’s do this together.”
In another assignment, I had to select and research one specific literacy issue. I chose “gender” because I work in a school with a 60-65% male population, and I am very interested in finding ways to motivate them to read, learn, and grow. When I started researching the topic, I thought that I knew what was coming—boys read less than girls, they like sports and action adventures, and they like technology. What I found out that made the most difference in my thinking was the fact that most library collections are stacked in favor of girls, and that reading for boys is not necessarily reading a book or other academic material. I had never really considered these two things and feel that they will most influence the adjustments I make as I continue to make my male student population literate. I must now take a closer look at my library collection and see how it could be viewed as a positive or a negative one by the male student body. Instead of simply telling the boys to read more, I will offer more variety and allow them to find something of interest to them. For the young men who leave their English classes full of “girly books” I want to offer “boy books” in a safe supportive environment. I will also keep in mind the research that says that boys have a higher likelihood of having a learning disability and that they need role models to demonstrate and reinforce the notion that literacy is an important life skill. I must now use more non-fiction texts in my lessons. Like many teachers, I was guilty of using mainly fiction novels for teaching reading lessons, and but now realize that I have to use a wider variety of texts in my lessons. A graphic novel or a book on basketball will now be viable texts for me to use when teaching students. I was wrong to take them off the table before.
In addition, I have discovered and explored with my classmates how other literacy issues–visual literacy, digital literacy, struggling readers, aliteracy, cultural literacy, and gifted readers--affect the way students learn. This knowledge forces me to be more creative, more inclusive, and more thoughtful in planning lessons. More and more, contrary to my original training, I am recognizing that children are differently and learn differently.
Teaching literacy lessons is not easy and I am not going to pretend that it is because there are many obstacles in the public school environment. But, now that my sense of literacy has grown wider and deeper, my teaching will too. It must, or I will have come this far for nothing. As a classroom teacher, I had a somewhat narrow view of literacy that was confined to a specific subject area, but in the library I am beginning to understand literacy as having many arms that are connected to the same animal. Literacy is as multidimensional as the students I encounter every day, and my role is to make sure that I work with all dimensions or as many as I can in my capacity as library media specialist.