What does literacy look like in my community and why should I care?

Literacy comes in many forms and serves many purposes. It could be a novel to provide entertainment, a poster that holds information about an event, or a letter mailed to a loved one. These forms and purposes will vary across individuals and even across communities. I can see this when thinking about my own community and how it is different from others. The literacy in my community looks like books, journals, calendars, television shows, music, movies, advertising, social media, photographs, notes, signs, posters, and conversations. The purposes they serve include entertainment, providing information, organization, communication, reflection, reminding, and relaxation. It is important to think about what literacy looks like in your community because it allows us to consider how it differs from other communities and individuals. As teachers, we can use this information and understanding in order to provide our students with experiences that are meaningful and constructive based on what literacy looks like in their communities. We can also help our students to make connections between home and school by understanding the types of literacy they are surrounded by in their communities.

Language Learners

Language acquisition is an important and unique process for everyone. As teachers, we need to understand this in order to provide the best opportunities and support for our students throughout this process. Getting to know and understanding what our students know is an important job for teachers. We can then investigate further and discover the interests and preferences of our students. This information will provide us with what we need to individualize the opportunities and support for all of our students. Teachers also need to understand what it is like for children who are in the early stages of language development. It can be frustrating and discouraging to be in a classroom that does not account for your level of language ability. We need to be sure that we are not making students feel this way by providing appropriate activities and supports so that they can actively participate and engage. When we, as teachers, take all of these things into consideration, it equips us to be effective teachers who can contribute to our students' language development.

Literacy Journies: How We Learn to Read and Write

As teachers, our personal experiences with literacy will affect our attitudes toward literacy and the way we teach it to our students. Maybe we have meaningful and positive memories of learning to write, or negative and painful memories of struggling with reading. Whatever our past holds, it has influenced the way we think about literacy. It is important to reflect on our experiences and remember the process of learning to read and write so that we can better understand how to provide opportunities for our students to have meaningful and positive experiences with literacy. In Pat Johnson's and Katie Keier's book, Catching Readers Before They Fall: Supporting Readers Who Struggle, there is a huge emphasis on the importance of children's construction of a reading process system. This involves a network of literacy strategies that are integrated with and supportive of one another. Some examples of these strategies include predicting, visualizing, and synthesizing. When a collection of these strategies is obtained by a child, they can then integrate them to construct a reading process system that will serve them as proficient readers. Some may think that reading is simply the ability to accurately recognize sequences of letters as words, but it is much more complex than that. "Reading is making meaning" (Johnson & Keier, 2010, 15). Those who have successfully constructed a reading process system are able to read text fluently and make meaning out of the text. By understanding what a reading process system is and how we have personally constructed our own, we can provide opportunities for meaningful interaction with literacy that will best support our students' constructions of their own reading process systems.