I taught my first high school class today - I was invited in to teach poetry on the narrative of immigration. And it was amazing! But something that really struck me while I was debriefing with the English teacher was how textual literacy is really about more than making literal sense of the words on the page or the words you're hearing. It's also about developing a flexibility - to accept that there are multiple meanings that can lay beneath the surface of a text. It was something that many of the students really struggled with - they wanted there to be a single RIGHT answer. We didn't talk very directly about applications of various understandings of literacies in more traditional settings - how we encourage a flexible sort of literacy as we help students develop more technical literacies skills.
The English teacher had assigned a final project for the students that challenged them to find the right medium in which to express an immigrant's personal experience (they are doing a group interview). That's an incredible kind of media flexibility that I really hope the students take advantage of that and create pieces that explore the ambiguous ways we communicate with each other.
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