Jami's Week 11 Post

“Critical literacy is an active, reflective manner of reading texts in order to better understand power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. For the purposes of critical literacy, text is defined as a “vehicle through which individuals communicate with one another using the codes and conventions of society”. Accordingly, songs, novels, conversations, pictures, movies, etc. are all considered texts.” 1 I think this would be a great way to teach students different tasks. It seems that children learn better through song or through pictures or movies. For example the ABC’s-is a song, the Magic School Bus series, which is shown in almost every elementary school. When students have conversations with each other about what they have learned they seem to grasp the concept much better, having talked about it with someone else. Students respond well to these types of “texts” and I have seen proof of this in my placement.

According to the Literacy for the 21st Century book, Basal Reading Programs are comprehensive core reading programs. They are scientifically-based reading programs. The Reading First legislation demands that reading programs in Kindergarten through 3rd grade are based on scientifically-based reading research. In my field placement the program that my students use I believe is Reading First. I have read through some of the books that they use and they seem to cover a wide variety of content and really touch on different aspects of fluency such as: phonemic awareness instruction, systematic explicit phonics instruction, fluency instruction, vocabulary instruction, and text comprehension instruction. When I taught my lesson I used the teachers guide to find a story for the students. In that guide there was a great deal of instruction and ideas that teachers could use based on fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, etc.. I thought this was great because it allows for the teacher to gain ideas from the book as well as use her own. It really guides you as a teacher which would be wonderful for first year teachers just getting the feel for this stuff. The basal reading programs have many different components and are very expensive. They are sold directly to school districts and the schools use them as they please. I think it is important that all districts use the same reading program so all of the students are on the same level. Once they get to middle school they will all be together and will all be expected to know the same information.

(1) Robinson, E., & Robinson, S. (2003). What does it mean? Discourse, Text, Culture: An Introduction. Sydney: McGraw-Hill Book Company, p. 3.