Literacy Philosophy

I believe that literacy in our society, and our schools in particular, is too narrowly defined.  As a schoolteacher, I feel that it's my duty to stay current with any changes in literacy.  In this day and age, digital literacy is where it's at.  I have made emergent literacy one of the major focuses of my study in both my academic training and my free time.  Text-speak and Webspeak, the language of blogs and social networking sites--these are all areas of interest to me.  In addition, I value the literacy of my students in other, non-traditional formats: colloquial language and slang, cultural (and sub-cultural) literacy, visual literacy, musical literacy, et al. 

I believe that literacy is about more than books--it's about communication, plain and, well... not very simple.  If you can communicate with it, it is worthy of study and potentially useful in my classroom.  In my lesson plans, I try to incorporate as many different modes of communication as is reasonable.  I approach planning from the standpoint of my unit goals first, and then I choose the texts (books, essays, film, music, &c.) and methods that will facilitate the desired learning objectives.

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