Literacy Today

New Standards Across the Curriculum

Dennis Adams, Mary Hamm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135689292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book defines literacy broadly as it explores concepts within core subjects and shows how to make standards-based literacy the goal and outcome of school reform. It imagines a future digital medium where educational technology is worthy of the spirit our children bring to it.
Classrooms and schools centered on learners and learning can be intellectually exciting places. This book attends to that concern while giving a great deal of attention to connecting overlapping themes to good teaching.
Literacy Today sets out to challenge teachers to make literacy and learning more relevant and lasting for their students. By providing a standards-based context for connecting basic subjects, it encourages teachers to reflect upon their practices while building a conceptual framework for new directions and new approaches to the curriculum. As the concept of literacy expands to meet the needs of today's complex world, teachers need all the assistance that they can get. The standards movement does not authoritatively tell teachers what to do. rather, it helps them make decisions about what to teach, what to spend time on, and what to eliminate from the curriculum. This books gives teachers a road map and a literacy-intensive destination. It highlights some of the better routes and helps teachers with good activities and professional development along the way.

CHAPTER 1

Standards-Based Literacy

Developing a Vocabulary to Address the Future

A good teacher can provide astonishing revelations. Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by and, over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives.

—TRACY KIDDER

Literacy Today explores core subject matter standards and the meaning of literacy in today's schools. There have been several efforts undertaken in the past few years to develop goals for the basic subjects in the school curriculum. Educators, researchers, parents, policymakers, writers, scientists, and the arts community have all been involved. Professional organizations, private foundations, and the U.S. Department of Education have also lent their support. Mathematics was first on the scene in the early 1990s. After several years of viewing the positive influence of the math standards, the other core subjects started their own projects. By 1997 we had newly minted standards in the English language arts, the arts, and science. Literacy has taken on new meaning in all of these documents. For example, the very first sentence of the science standards reads: In a world filled with the products of scientific inquiry, scientific literacy has become a necessity for everyone.

There is general agreement that literacy lies at the heart of education. However, the definition of literacy has varied from the narrow confines of print to general competency in just about anything. But including everything from sexual to emotional literacy lacks the educational focus that we would like here. It is also our belief that the traditional definition of literacy (reading and writing) is just too narrow to meet the demands of an increasingly complex world and a rapidly changing instructional environment. Therefore this book includes interdisciplinary elements of the core curriculum under the literacy umbrella in a manner that reflects today's standards-based reform efforts.

An expanded definition of literacy will be part of the educational vocabulary that educators will need for the new century. New interconnected literacies and new subject matter standards provide teachers with some powerful opportunities for teaching and for their own learning. By focusing the spotlight on a standards-based definition of literacy we hope to challenge your thinking and further stimulate your interest in a more connected, expansive, and inclusive curriculum.

Focusing professional development on the vision of education presented in the standards requires giving attention to more than technical skills. High-quality ongoing programs deepen and enrich understanding by providing a range of opportunities for teachers to refine their knowledge and ability. If the schools are to honor individuality and help students gain the ability to think independently, then they must do the same for teachers. Implementing new ideas about overlapping literacies means supporting and integrating these ideas into the life of the school. Intellectually exciting places reward professional development and support standards-based change. They do not favor time-worn procedures over competence. Good schools serve learners by allowing good teachers to flourish.

LOWERING BOUNDARIES AND EXPANDING DEFINITIONS

Becoming truly literate in today's world requires building bridges between subjects. By organizing work around a specific issue or theme, teachers can prevent the boundaries between disciplines from becoming closed borders. Such an interweaving of subject matter skills and processes is an open invitation for connecting learning in ways that tie in with prior experience. Interdisciplinary learning has proven that it can help students understand the connectiveness of knowledge.

Significant efforts and a change in thinking are needed if we are going to create a citizenry that is truly literate. Teaching subjects in isolation leads to isolated thinking and less frequent use in real world situations. Exploring the big ideas that link important areas of knowledge requires a sound grounding in science, mathematics, language, the arts, and technology. The intellectual tools of these basic subjects are reciprocal in nature and amplify each other.

Teaching children and preparing them for the future requires learning about reality from many angles. As children use a broad base of literacy skills to work with ideas and symbols from across the curriculum, they learn to identify their assumptions, use critical and logical thinking, and consider alternative explanations. As one question leads to another, inquiry ripples outward to form ever-larger concepts to reveal ever more universal ideas about communication, our lives, and our world. Whether it is creatively solving problems, thinking critically, communicating effectively, working cooperatively, or making good use of technology, students need to be active and engaged with the curriculum and one another.

A paradigm shift often begins with new discoveries and experimental discrepancies that cannot be squeezed into the usual framework. As new discoveries about learning and new approaches to knowledge building come into their own, we must view literacy as extending across the core subjects. Implementing a curriculum that connects domains of knowledge requires time, motivation, shared beliefs, a developmental process, and participants who share ownership of the new literacy possibilities being opened up.

The new standards suggest a more inclusive literacy if we are to enter a more mature and more productive period in human history. Changing habits and breaking from some past practices is never easy, but it is important for all students to become literate in a manner that allows them to flourish in the twenty-first century. Change is not always a smooth or linear process; it is interactive, dynamic, complex, and strongly influenced by environmental factors. Putting something as dynamic as new subject matter standards into practice requires well-prepared teachers and school policies that support the vision contained in the standards.

Today's citizens are increasingly called upon to make decisions regarding problems that are not limited by discipline boundaries. This means participating effectively in decisions ranging from funding electrical power plants to approving the distribution of genetically engineered life-forms. Our fast-paced technological and communications culture also requires workers who can go beyond machine calculations to critically think and collaboratively solve problems related to real-world situations. It is little wonder that interdisciplinary inquiry is part of the science, math, and language arts standards. In a world filled with the products of language, science, math, art, and technology, a broadly defined literacy has become a necessity for everyone. We all need to use the skills of language, science, math, the arts, and information technology to make choices that arise every day. It is no wonder that so many teachers now use a thematic approach to explore overarching concepts that cross discipline boundaries.

All students should be offered the opportunities, the encouragement and the vision to develop the skills they need to pursue life's goals, including personal enrichment and participation as informed members of our society. More than ever, everyone must understand the basic demands of cross-disciplinary literacy to grasp patterns, solve problems, and deal with the ambiguity of a constantly changing world. Such literacy begins before a child enters school and continues after they graduate. As each of the standards projects point out in their own way, students are now expected to be knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

Each of the core subjects are related systems of thought that naturally correlate to one another and the world. Communications technology can provide students with concrete examples of problem-solving techniques and processes in real-world situations. Content literacy enables students to achieve deeper understanding of subjects and provides them with tools for quantifying and explaining relationships. The standards projects share a number of common features. Among them is ensuring that all students reach a measure of subject matter literacy high enough to participate in our democracy as informed citizens, find challenging work, and pursue their own goals and interests as independent learners throughout their lives.

INQUIRY-BASED PROBLEM SOLVING

Learning any subject involves the continuous reshaping of the mental processes that mediate learning. Children learn best when they build meanings and relationships from their own experiences. As children do this, they combine what they already know with new information. This constructivist approach is based on the view that knowledge is built most effectively by active thinking and doing. In their own way each of the standards projects builds on this and suggests that challenging, inquiry-based learning activities are appropriate for all children.

Although children need to learn how to construct knowledge for themselves, it should be recognized that they frequently have false ideas about many subjects. Common sense, for example, doesn't clue you into the fact that the earth is round. Whether misconceptions are natural or learned, all have to be dealt with in a way that makes room for the beauty, quirkiness, and complexity of learning subject matter. This also means that the classroom teacher has to figure out how to make the subject under study comprehensible and relevant to the everyday world of children.

Good teachers have always changed their practices as they worked at engaging students with increasingly complex content and changing instructional situations. In the visual arts, for example, teachers used to focus on self-expression and making students feel good. Now they have to teach a wider body of content knowledge that connects to the rest of the school day and to the world outside of school. Whatever the basic subject, we now have content standards that suggest classroom experiences modeled on the realities of the discipline and the world outside of school. In science, for example, the standards call for approaching experiments and projects much as scientists would. The same thing is evident in the language arts standards, as they also suggest having students explore the ways adults actually use language. This real-world connection is seen as giving students the building blocks for understandings and their future actions as citizens.

“Goals lack meaning if students are not motivated to integrate their knowledge willingly, effectively, and joyfully into their academic work and into their lives outside the classroom” (English Language Arts Standards, 1996). As students examine reality from many angles and in different lights, they can engage in social, physical, and mental activities that allow them to visualize new connections and choices.

A well-designed curriculum can serve everybody (including those with special needs) and still be committed to a common core of learning. All of our students can solve problems creativity, think critically, and work cooperatively. Students today require teachers who can help them feel actively involved, motivated, and reasonably competent.

The following list of ideas can be incorporated into developing a curriculum for integrated learning.

• Children reason with literacy expectations and how they learn from direct experience with real things.

• An integrated approach to a broadly defined literacy can invigorate a whole range of subjects.

• Students reason and collaborate as they investigate with language, science, mathematics, the arts, and the tools of technology.

• The incredible roller coaster of technological change requires getting it in harmony with itself, its users, and the curriculum.

• The intellectual tools of the new literacy can help students make the leap from facts that can be observed to complex realities that cannot be experienced.

• Make standards-based participatory lessons meaningful and pleasurable for you and your students.

For teachers to move students beyond socially constructed fictions and subject matter phobias involves looking for the connections that provide insight into our subjects, ourselves, and the world around us. Traditional definitions can hinder progress, so we have to do more than round up the usual suspects. Remember, imagination often beckons from the borders of the known instructional world.

DISENGAGED STUDENTS AND A DISENGAGED CULTURE

Lack of information is not as big a problem as the lack of knowledge and wisdom. You can get plenty of the former without touching on the latter. Today's fast-paced technological and communications culture requires us all to go beyond the glut of computer-generated data to think and solve problems related to real-world situations. Increasingly, everyone must understand the basic outlines of language, science, math, the arts, and technology to understand patterns, solve problems, calculate probabilities, and deal with the uncertainty of a constantly changing world. Unfortunately, at the very time that they need to understand what is going on, many Americans are being distanced from informed participation.

Teachers are caught between disengaged students and a culture that is not really committed to higher academic standards. The first step in a long march is getting external structures like national goals and subject matter standards clearly in place. This will signal students that hard work and academic achievement will be rewarded. Striving hard to achieve goals can move us forward without actually getting us there. But we make little progress toward the goal of being “a nation of readers” or first in the world in science, mathematics, or anything else found in the Goals 2000 Act. However, some positive trends have become evident. In 1995, for example, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) published a report showing more positive trends in test results and the new standards in science and mathematics education. The report links many of the positive changes to two factors: the development of unambiguous professional standards and more teachers who really care about the subjects that they teach (CCSSO, 1994). The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) confirmed that elementary school students scored a little higher in many of the core subjects over the past five years. The increase in science, for example, is equivalent to achieving one grade level higher. (Our international competitors, however, are doing even better). Improved student performance in mathematics is partly attributed to new standards put into place in the early 1990s (NAEP, 1995). One of the most important and consistent findings in all of these studies was that academic gains wer...