New Literacies in New Times: Re-Conceptualizing Our Work as Teachers
Abstract
Young adult literacy is about complicated relationships between emotional- and social-driven young people and their visual and verbal-rich environments. Their engagement with language suggests our need to rethink our work as teachers in some fundamental ways. From this perspective, we must negotiate the territory where students live and work, developing an understanding of the “social languages” characterizing their discourse.
This session describes two projects that focus on engaging students in important “new literacies” skills as they adapt monomodal print texts into multimodal compositions comprising additional modes such as still and moving images and sound. In one project, students participate vicariously in a historical event through a variety of sources- Internet, documentary films, software, and their own writing and media production. The second project involves students in studying the video trailer genre. Through book clubs, they storyboard book trailers for their selections and create trailers using digital media (cameras, iPads, audio recorders and editing software).
For over a decade, researchers have made the case for expanding definitions of literacy to incorporate multimodalities, multimedia, and multiliteracies, with 21st century digital technologies, into literacy teaching. There is an urgent need to prepare students for “new literacies” in “new times.”
Location
Rooms 113 & 115
Recommended Citation
Wachholz, Patricia, "New Literacies in New Times: Re-Conceptualizing Our Work as Teachers" (2015). SoTL Commons Conference. 100.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons/SoTL/2015/100
New Literacies in New Times: Re-Conceptualizing Our Work as Teachers
Rooms 113 & 115
Young adult literacy is about complicated relationships between emotional- and social-driven young people and their visual and verbal-rich environments. Their engagement with language suggests our need to rethink our work as teachers in some fundamental ways. From this perspective, we must negotiate the territory where students live and work, developing an understanding of the “social languages” characterizing their discourse.
This session describes two projects that focus on engaging students in important “new literacies” skills as they adapt monomodal print texts into multimodal compositions comprising additional modes such as still and moving images and sound. In one project, students participate vicariously in a historical event through a variety of sources- Internet, documentary films, software, and their own writing and media production. The second project involves students in studying the video trailer genre. Through book clubs, they storyboard book trailers for their selections and create trailers using digital media (cameras, iPads, audio recorders and editing software).
For over a decade, researchers have made the case for expanding definitions of literacy to incorporate multimodalities, multimedia, and multiliteracies, with 21st century digital technologies, into literacy teaching. There is an urgent need to prepare students for “new literacies” in “new times.”
