Now What? (Education and Technology in a Post COVID World)

My week was jam-packed…and that’s saying a lot for someone who is used to being on-the-go, with more irons in the fire than any one person should have in one lifetime.

Aside from our class readings on New Literacies, I assisted in launching a stakeholders event for CMU’s Literacy Center. I am a graduate assistant with the new director of the center, and one of his goals was to gather superintendents, principals, literacy coaches, federal/state program directors, and more to discuss what needs they all have…and how the Center can help as we move forward in new directions. It was an exciting day of last-minute event-planning challenges, tech troubles, and meet-and-greets with key people from around the state: people who are passionate about literacy and helping birth-through-12 students with best practices in literacy education.

All day long my mind kept drifting back to this week’s reading. In fact, I mentioned some of the content to people I met at the event and started to formulate more of my own thoughts on how my ties to the Literacy Center and my areas of research interest have begun to converge.

Knobel and Lankshear’s (2014) work caught my attention in particular this week. In spite of it being one of the week’s shorter articles, it packed a proverbial punch when it came to relevant content. They give a brief history of the concept of ‘new literacies’ and explain that “new literacies researchers and scholars seek to explore and understand continuities and differences between the ways people in societies like our own produced, distributed, shared, and negotiated meaning” (p.97). I love this definition. Literacy, in all of his various facets, is about so much more than merely reading and decoding text. It is, after all, about connecting with others, sharing ideas, and generating new meaning and ways of experiencing the world.

The authors (Knobel & Lankshear, 2014) repeatedly use an intriguing phrase: “a different ethos” (p. 97). It refers to the shift from instructors being the expert at the front of the room to a mediator of the creation of new knowledge…(cough…constructivism…cough). They reference a new classroom culture of participation and multimodal interaction with information. In fact, they go so far as to note that learning created in this setting is “less ‘published,’ less ‘author-centric,’ and less ‘individual’ than conventional literacies” (p. 98). While this makes my lone wolf, introverted student heart quiver just a bit, I love the idea in practice as an instructor. People working together, bringing different strengths and varying knowledge to the table to create new meaning, new ideas, and new cultural artifacts? Dewey would be proud.

The authors (Knobel & Lankshear, 2014) go on to explain how most schools embody the very antithesis of these ideas by nature of their very structure. They cite multiple examples of the ways “the new ethos” might work and immediately share contrasting examples of typical schools doing exactly the opposite.

Knobel and Lankshear (2014) conclude with suggestions for teachers to become “more engaged in new literacies practices,” a topic that also emerged during yesterday’s meeting in Mt. Pleasant.

Stay tuned for more on that. These are exciting times to be studying literacy!

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2014). Studying new literacies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(9), 1-5.