Non-fiction Reading Skills and Media Literacy.

I am not sure why this didn't come to mind last week in class, but when I was cruising through Channel One and Youth Radio, it hit me that I struggle to help my students become media literature every Wednesday. When I began teaching, I had some wonderful mentors in the English department at my previous school. They knew YEARS before the PSAE (Prairie State Achievement Examination: a combo of the ACT and a second day of testing by which all Illinois schools are measured) that non-fiction reading skills were essential to the future success of their students. Furthermore, it is as Leah Price argues in "You Are What You Read," well "You Are What You Read." And what my colleugues knew is that if we did not provide students with information about current national and world events, that they would not be wise citizens during high school, and certainly not after. They needed to be media literature in that they needed to be knowledgeable about the world, and thus understanding of the events that are occurring in it. In an attempt (a successful one, I believe) they ordered and had delivered, weekly current events magazines that were written at the reading level of our students. At the time it was Teen Newsweek. I saw the success of this process, and even after leaving my first teaching job after four years, I brought this concept to my current job, and each week, I still have these magazines delivered. These are now published by Weekly Reader, and the magazine is titled Current Events.

Recent issue: Current Events

This is a recent issue of the magazine that my students tackled in December. My co-teacher and I have continued the belief that I was taught in my early years of teaching. The idea that if we teach them non-fiction skills, then they will have the ability to become media literate. Also, if we expose them to current events, they may (hopefully) continue to pay attention to these after they have left us. Since we do have the students for two years, we find that we can wrestle our way through those two years and they seem to (so far) keep up with current events. We have had students come back to us weekly and ask if we have extra copies from the week's magazine, which is a great feeling.

If you take a look at the magazine (follow link above), you can see that the magazine does a great job of drawing students in. We focus every week on the cover story, but the students are always eager to look at and read other areas of the magazine. They love the political cartoons each week, which always leads into a great discussion about current political issues. The debate section is always interesting and relevant to them, and there is always a funny/shocking "snippit" on something (This issue's was "K-9 Cutie") that they look for.

We have used this magazine to teach annotating, highlighting, note-taking, paraphrasing, summarizing, and vocabulary, as well as used it as a model for writing (thesis, detail, etc.). It has been hugely successful with our students. It is short enough that it keeps their attention, and interesting enough that they are willing to keep coming back for more.

There is also a website, and while this has shades of Channel One and Youth Radio, it is not the same, or as effective. First, the focus is not fully on students, but rather on the teachers as well. There are great resources available for teachers to access and use that coincide with the magazines. There is also information/resources on the many other magazines that Weekly Reader publishes. The section that is most like Channel One and Youth Radio, in that its focus is on young readers is "Kids and Teens." There students can find current news stories, as well as contents that they can enter, blogs and other digital content they may enjoy, a health section, and an area where they can voice their opinions on previous issues of the magazine. This is a great resource and site, but it in not dedicated to 'tweens and teens in the way that Channel One and Youth Radio are.

The bottom line is, that students must be media literate. They also must possess the non-fiction reading skills so that they can be media literate. Yes, there are places like Channel One and Youth Radio, where young people can go and get information on current events. But at some point, they are going to have to rely on their non-fiction literacy. I guess they could go to Channel One forever, but is that really realistic?

Price, Leah. "You Are What You Read." New York Times (December 23, 2007).

"Weekly Reader." Weekly Reader: Curriculum-Rich Resources for Teachers. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. .

A Visual Shakespeare

This week, I began teaching Othello to my Honors English class, and I was reminded of the much different approach that I took with my other classes, which includes all struggling readers. Today, I attacked print literacy with my Honors students. They are strong readers, so their issue with Shakespeare is the language. They have enough knowledge of contextual clues and elements of print literacy to attack one line at a time, and while they do not understand all of his language, they certainly can get a good deal of meaning out of the text on their own. For example, this quote came up today in a "Tossing Lines" activity that I was presenting to the students:

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

In this quote by Iago, my students recognize that "doth" may replace "does" in their minds and that "extern" could just be "external" without the last syllable. They understand the saying "wear your heart upon your sleeve" and many other words/phrases in this quote. They have incredible print literacy, as well as coping skills for when they are trying to grasp at straws and not fully understanding the text.

So I move on to my students who do not have strong print literacy skills. They are struggling readers in both comprehension and vocabulary, and this makes all reading in my class a struggle, especially Shakespeare. So in this class, I tried to tap into their visual literacy to help them comprehend and find success. Graphic novels have become mainstream in both the classroom and the library, and I was presented with three levels of Romeo and Juliet at a Newberry Library Conference by a fantastic University of Illinois literature professor. I have included a link here to the amazon.com "look inside this book" section of the original text version of this book.

Romeo and Juliet The Graphic Novel

We began with the "Quick Text" which was the easiest of the reading levels, and by the end, we worked a little bit with the "Original Text" version of the graphic novel. What I realized quickly was that this was a form of visual literacy that the students had not experienced, and I had to teach them how to read a graphic novel. The were visually illiterate in many aspects of the novel. Their first question was, "What order do we read the boxes in?" In a graphic novel, the layout of slides is rarely the same on each page, so I had to teach students how their eyes should move on the pages. Also, I have to review what each speaking bubble meant. If you look at the link, you will find that the characters have different types of speaking bubbles. Some display emotion, others simple conversation. Some of my students did not know that if a conversation bubble is attaching by smaller bubbles, that this is internal thought being spoken aloud to oneself. Since Shakespeare loves to have his characters talk to themselves, many times in long monologues or interspersed with other dialogue, this was important for them to understand.

What was great about using a graphic novel, is that all of the visual literacy that I had to teach the students was worth it. They are such visual learners already, that they really grasped the concept and ran with it. They could understand that a "SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!" across the page was the sound of a sword fight, better than they would have ever understood it in a typically laid out play.

In an article by Gretchen Schwartz she states that "The graphic novel, increasingly popular with students and educators, offers teachers the opportunity to explore the “rhetoric” of the visual-print world and the opportunity for students to become media literate." This was exactly my experience. The students had a close relationship with visual literacy during this unit, and it helped them to become more print literate. Since then, a few of them have tapped into their knowledge and began reading more graphic novels. In this case "The balance of power between word and images which, after the invention of the printing press, shifted in favor of the word, seems now to be shifting in favor of the image" (Varnum & Gibbons). The technological bombardment that has existed for the majority of these students' lives makes them so much more visually literate, than print literate, especially with the most struggling learners.

Schwartz, Gretchen. "Teaching Visual Literacy Through Graphic Novels." ALA | Home - American Library Association. Jan. 2008. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. .

Varnum, R., & Gibbons, C. T. (Eds.). (2001). The language of comics. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.