With our students in 2019, we have access to more information instantly than ever before. These articles (Kist, 2000) (Castek & Maderino, 2016) begin to go into detail with how this is applicable in classrooms. Kist begins his article discussing how watching a movie as a high schooler opened his eyes to how we are educated through many means other than a teacher-classroom setting. I think this is where students really learn and synthesize information the most because they make all these connections and thoughts without a teacher having to help them. Students clearly benefit when the subject matter being discussed is in a form of media they can relate to or put into their own colloquial terms. However, as teachers, are we doing a disservice to their disciplinary education by making the content more relatable?
The Castek & Maderino article focuses in a bit more on that idea. I believe there exists a happy medium between the digital and disciplinary literacies. Our job as future educators is to focus in on that medium and find ways to help develop all of our students’ multi-literacies. In the Elmore & Coleman article, middle school students are being taught to analyze these political memes while maintaining a disciplinary historical lens. The students are still expected to think like historians while they analyze texts that they can see on any social media they are browsing that day. This helps to create this bond between the discipline and their interests by making the material culturally relevant and educationally relevant. This was the article I read, however I guarantee the other 5 articles Ellen and Melina posted have other great examples of using students digital literacy to go hand-in-hand with developing their disciplinary literacy.
Questions to think about:
- Is the need for disciplinary literacy going to withstand our societal shift of putting a higher value in digital literacy?
- As educators, how can we facilitate that gap between the disciplinary and digital literacies to have them work together to create knowledge?
I personally think you cannot have one without the other, presently. There is so much new information that only comes in “digital” medium, and I think it is important to understand that information's value and relation to our discipline. I think this is also really important for their own personal growth. Being around these everyday multimodal texts and/or memes can translate into their own creativity when trying to understand and synthesize new material. I think it will change the way we view disciplinary learning, what it pertains to, and how it is achieved as well. And that's that.
I do not believe we are doing our students a disservice by providing them with more relatable content. Instead, I think it is necessary for teachers to update their teaching of disciplinary literacies and include more digital resources. It is the 21st century and the advancements in technology are so advanced that kids in elementary school are even up-to-date with most of it. The internet and phones are part of our students’ everyday lives and we would be doing them a disservice if we did not implement new programs and activities that dealt with the use of the internet. As stated in the article, “Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning: A Call to Action,” “disciplinary literacies that rely on print resources are no longer sufficient to fully convey complex and multilayered meanings… digital use provide greater access and opportunity for creation and communication of ideas” (Manderino and Castek, p. 80). A way that teachers can make sure to facilitate the gap is by asking students to do research on certain trusted websites or to watch videos that can help enhance their learning about a certain disciplinary. There are an abundant number of ways to facilitate the gap between disciplinary and digital literacies that will create knowledge it is just a matter of using it in the classroom effectively with few distractions.
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I believe that as teachers we should be moving more towards digital literacies. We live in the day and age of a digital culture. We can access information in a matter of seconds, teachers would be naive to believe that their students are not already doing that. Why would a student want to read a 30 page history packet, when they have no interest in the subject. As a teacher that has to be recognized that it is not going to be sufficient for them. Rather than do that maybe say hey there is this great crash course video, or I found these really great short articles on the topic. I had one professor at UIC who went as far as assigning a chapter of a book but highlighting the pages he actually needed us to read and letting us know, hey the rest is filler. Now, I am not saying to get rid of the old disciplinary texts. However, in my own teaching if I could avoid saying the words "open your textbook" in a lesson, I absolutely will. I want my students to engage in groups and communicate with one another to figure out their answer, rather than just read and annotate a packet, and get ready for the DBQ on Friday.
ReplyDeleteCharles, I agree with you. I think short articles on trusted websites and written by credible historians and other professionals are far more effective. Not only will students be more likely to read shorter texts, but they are much more concise and easier to discuss if students are assigned multiple articles. This not only allows for more texts to be read and more critical analysis from students. This will benefit them much more for college and their overall knowledge on historical topics.
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