Part 1 continued

What Should We Teach? Rethinking Literacy

The authors agree that textual literacy will remain a central skill in the 21st century. They go on to say that youth must add to their competencies, not exchange old skills for new skills. I agree because reading and writing is such a necessity for doing anything in the world (one of the reasons I love teaching reading).

Researchers Blqack and Jenkins say that the new digital cultures provide support systems to help youth grow as readers and writiers. They cite blogs and live journals as ways for young people to receive feedback on their writing.

The authors state that beyond core literacy skiils, youth also need research skills
such as accessing books and articles through the library, taking notes on and integrating sources; assessing the reliabilty of data; reading maps and charts; making sense of visuals of all types; understanding the type of information that is being put forth by its representation; telling the difference between fact and opinion, fact and fiction; and constructing arguements or using evidence.

Technology skills (such as moving a mouse, searching, logging on/off, etc.)
also need to be developed in students.

Beyond these simple skills, students also need to see the influence of media on our selves and our culture, including "the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and circulated". However, even these more global skills are not enough. The authors advocate social skills for working in groups, pooling knowledge with a collective intelligence, for negotiating across cultural differences, and for "reconciling conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around them">

The authors say that teachers/schools are still producing independent problem-solvers. They believe, instead, that we should be creating individuals who can work in teams to collaborate to solve problems.

(O.K., I might add here that the authors, in my oipinion, have just slipped into the ideal outcome of educating an individual. Some kids can work in groups well, others cannot due to their own issues, their upbringing, or otherfactors. Additionally, I think schools are more and more utilizing group work to teach kids to be collaborative individuals. Sometimes it works, at othr times it doesn't due to the maturity and social skills of the students.)


The authors give eleven Core Skills needed to participate within the new media culture. They say these skills are needed "to participate fully in public, community, and economic life". Furthermore, the skills are not exhaustive. Rather
they are illustrations of the kind of work already being done in each skill area.

(I'll describe these in Part 2 of this article- since this section is getting a bit long and I need a short break!)