Adolescents and Their Literacies

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Adolescents and Their Literacies

Bryan Duff

Conventional wisdom in education holds that language-arts instruction shifts from “learning to read and write” in the primary grades to “reading and writing to learn” in secondary and higher education. This formulation assumes that reading and writing are all-purpose skills that students can apply to any situation in which text is involved. While there certainly are generalizable components of literacy skill, the changing nature of texts as students progress through school necessitates new reading and writing strategies. Widespread failure to appreciate that “learning to read and write” continues through secondary school has contributed to the well-documented literacy difficulties of high school and even college students. The first goal of this course, then, is to help prospective teachers and others interested in education to understand both the hidden challenges of post-elementary literacy and some of the strategies that teachers in all subject areas are using to meet these challenges. The second goal for students in the class is that they learn how other literacies (e.g., visual and informational) might be used to support more conventional literacy. Prerequisites: None. Credits: 4 Time: TF 2 - 3:50pm