Implications For Practice And Biographies-in-literacy

By Author: Tracy McGrady
Total Articles: 55
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Our experience interpreting Orlonia's literacy-in-persons enabled us to consider how teachers of adolescent and adult learners might use literacy-in-persons to inform their pedagogies. Although the context of this study is unique and although Orlonia has never been a student of ours, Orlonia's literacy-in-persons provides a specific example of how literacy educators might use personal experiences and histories as forays into literacy.

Adolescent and adult learners bring personal and familial legacies of literate engagement with them into the classroom. Often, however, when we as teachers encounter students who struggle with reading or writing printed text, we focus too intensively on what such students "can't do." Such a focus can prevent us from seeing the multiple forms of literacy that comprise our students' biographies. In the Replica Tag Heuer case of Orlonia, for instance, she openly discussed her struggle with spelling and composing printed texts. If we had solely focused on Orlonia's struggle with encoding printed text, however, we would ...
... have overlooked the numerous and complex ways that Orlonia makes sense of and composes her world—that is, through baking, interpreting space, and reading newspaper articles.

Teachers can heighten their sensitivity to their students' personal literacy legacies using them as resources for expanding students' repertoires of literacy so that they include more diverse set of practices and engagements with texts, including school-based literacies. Household research, as outlined by Gonzalez et al. can be one such method for finding out more about the "funds of knowledge" or literacy legacies that our students carry to school each day. Teachers can work together in study groups to research their students' homes and communities. P Is for Pinesville is an example of how teachers, students, and a university teacher educator (Amy) collaborated to uncover the legacy of knowledge present within Pinesville. Teachers can also work independently by sending home interest surveys or by offering a context for students to use their biographies or biographies of family and community members as the basis for completing school assignments. Likewise, an increasing number of children's literature texts are being published that illustrate the concept of biographies-in-literacy (see Table 3). Recently in a graduate-level course on reading instruction, Lauren discovered that the children's text Jeremiah Learns to Read (Bogart, 1999), about one man's struggle with literacy, helped her make better sense of biographies-in-literacy. We recommend that teachers use children's literature to explore biographies-in-literacy with adolescent and adult learners.

Teachers can even consider the legacies of literacy that exist within their own biographies. In so doing, teachers can identify how they, similarly to their students, carry with them biographies of literacy that inform their instructional decisions and make it possible for them to value some forms of literacy over others. Widening the lens for what counts as literacy, however, is key to understanding students' and teachers' literacy biographies. Teachers must look beyond how their Tag Heuer Replica Watches students decode and encode printed text to see how they make sense by using a variety of resources across multiple contexts. Teachers must also open themselves up to the possibility that they can learn about literacy through their interactions with students. Just as Amy came to read articles from Pinesville's newspaper differently through her interactions with Orlonia, so can teachers come to new understandings of texts through interactions with their students. Only when the practice of literacy is recognized as involving people, places, and things across time and in relationships can the sense-making practices of all students truly be appreciated.