Hawisher and Selfe (2004) tell the stories of the computer literacies of two women born one generation apart (in 1964 and 1986). The experiences of these two women support the fact that literacies are situational, depending on historical, social, familial, educational, and material contexts and that they are often developed in places other than the classroom.
I like Hawisher and Selfe’s way of thinking about literacies as having life spans – it is so true. Consider other literacies such as letter writing, cursive, actual physical dictionaries, encyclopedias and maps (as opposed to online ones), phone books… not to mention records, cassette tapes and VCRs – everything is dated! Ever evolving literacies do, however, make it difficult for education to keep up. It’s unfortunate that students are going into classrooms and realizing that they’re more capable than their teachers at what their teachers are trying to teach! Or… does it have to be? It could be a brilliant opportunity for an authentic project – students teaching their peers and teacher pieces of computer literacy (or whatever other new literacy). As the article mentions, literacy expertise flows from youth to adults as well as from adults to youth - as I’ve personally experienced in teaching my mom the wonders of google, uploading photos, etc.!
1 comments:
That is a great idea, and gets us away from a teacher-centered, print-text-centered classroom. I know it was hard for my parents to ask me for help with computery stuff--it was even harder for me to explain how to do things sometimes. It's really like learning another language, in that you can do it easily when you're young, but past a certain age it's really challenging.
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