Social Collaboration: New Literacies

These days there's a lot of talk about what students need to be able to do with regard to something named, literacy.  The Common Core State Standards sets out to represent this and promises in the mix that adoption and application of these standards will result in "high quality education".  The framers write:

The standards establish a “staircase” of increasing complexity in what students must be able to read so that all students are ready for the demands of college- and career-level reading no later than the end of high school. The standards also require the progressive development of reading comprehension so that students advancing through the grades are able to gain more from whatever they read.

Given these standards, one might think that a single, uniform understanding of literacy existed— an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1995). Brian Street defined this type of understanding of 'literacy" as an autonomous model as it situates literacy as a neutral entity, stripped from social, cultural, gendered, and historical contexts.

In contrast, Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) situates “literacy events” as people’s ways with spoken and written words.  I would urge that a sociocultural perspective be used to inform what we mean by new literacies, or we will continue to understand “literacy” as reading and writing whether it is on paper or the net. A sociocultural perspective understands that a person’s primary and secondary Discourse groups will influence his or her ways with words. As educators, understanding that our students may have different ways with words than is privileged in school allows us the opportunity to build associational bridges between the child’s primary Discourse and school-based practices.

The Internet does not alter this dynamic.  Rather, digital literacies represent new Discourses (Gee, 1996).  Whereas the Common Core Standards reify this older and flawed version of literacy as a singular matter,  NCTE's Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment captures the complexity of multiple literacies that is always embedded in cultural and communicative practices.  From NCTE:

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally 
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

The Common Core State Standards situates Internet-based literacies as being merely electronic texts that are to be consumed and produced by students just as paper-based texts might be.  This is a colossal mistake. Absent from this viewpoint is understanding Internet-based literacies as communicative, collaborative, and cross-cultural.  As such, it is critical to help students develop and manage global learning-relationships.

Global learning is here. I know this to be true as an artist and as an educator. Below is an image I composed with Bradley Nichol, an artist from Canada.  We discovered that we each had an affinity for U2 music and decided to illustrate a few U2 songs from The Joshua Tree album.  Red Hill Mining Town was created without meeting Bradley in person or working on the image in the same place and time.  Bradley and I got to know one another via our participation in two social networks for artists and decided to collaborate.  We began when Brad sent me an image and I then remixed his image with some of mine and a public domain image to create the final work.  Since posting the work, 2200+ people from various places in the world have viewed the image and many have left comments.

Red Hill Mining Town. Image by Bradley Nichol and Mary Ann Reilly. 2009.

Empowering students in this century requires us to understand that the definition of classroom as a geographic space within a school building has been modified.  The classroom need no longer be limited to a pre-Internet world, just as our definition of being literate need not reside in that old world too.  We need to shake off these misunderstandings, not embed them within our curricula. The  standards offered by the Common Core initiative anchor us to a world no longer existing.

Works Cited

Gee, James. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in Discourses. NY: Routledge/Falmer Press.
Heath, Shirley Brice. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Street, Brian. (1995). Social literacies: critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography, and education. New York: Longman.