Literacy Now

Just the very act of reading this article sets us apart from millions of people in the world who do not have the skills to read and write. According to UNESCO, 12% of the world’s population is not functionally literate. Reading this staggering statistic and thinking about the vast numbers of people affected can be overwhelming. But the solution is not for the individual to solve; it is for all of us to solve.

And when we want to be part of this work, it turns out that we are not alone. There are so many people and organizations around the world that are doing the important work of advancing literacy.

The following is just one example. This is how the Massachusetts Reading Association (MRA) has become involved in the work of two important projects to advance literacy in South Africa.

Forming partnerships

Since 2009, MRA has made financial donations to the Family Literacy Project (FLP), a program based in a rural area in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Rooted in the knowledge that literacy begins at home before a child even enters formal schooling, the FLP supports parents and caregivers to create everyday opportunities to build early literacy skills. FLP trains home visitors to visit isolated rural families and support their literacy interactions with children. Very often the parents and caregivers want to improve their own literacy skills, and the FLP provides this training as well.

In addition, the organization runs community libraries so adults and children alike can build and strengthen their reading skills. FLP runs four community libraries and other smaller libraries in boxes, much like Little Free Libraries, so that people throughout the 15 villages in the region can have access to reading materials. An outgrowth of these libraries has been reading clubs for children and teenagers.

MRA’s newest international partnership was established last summer when our members attended a session at the ILA conference in Boston. Judith Baker, a consultant for the South African organization African Storybook, presented its creative and pragmatic work. One of the barriers to literacy in Africa is the lack of reading material in a child’s mother tongue. African Storybook has found a way to address this lack of reading material, not only for vernacular languages but also for culturally relevant characters and settings. African Storybook’s goal is to provide open access to picture storybooks in the languages of Africa so that children can develop literacy in their home language and experience the enjoyment and spark of imagination that reading can bring.

On the basis of the difficulty of providing printed books and acknowledging that cell phone use is widespread throughout Africa, African Storybook creates stories in a digital format that can be downloaded and read on smartphones. Because the stories are all created as open source material, people can translate the stories into their language. They can also write their own stories to add to the collection.

What you can do

I traveled to South Africa, the country where I am originally from, last August. The purpose of my trip was not only to visit family but also to explore closer literacy connections between my former home and my new home in Massachusetts. During my visit, I was fortunate enough to make connections with the directors of both of these projects.

In Johannesburg I met with the project leader of African Storybook, Tessa Welch. The remoteness of FLP precluded a visit, but I had many conversations with its director, Pierre Horn. From these discussions, it was obvious that financial support is always welcome. It takes money to buy books for FLP’s community libraries. It takes money to develop the apps and software to make stories accessible through African Storybook. But our support for the crucial literacy work of these organizations will go beyond our continued financial support.

MRA’s International Projects Committee has plans to exchange expertise and strengthen the personal connections between the organizations. FLP is looking for skilled literacy teachers to provide training, especially in the area of struggling readers. This, of course, necessitates face-to-face training, either in Massachusetts or in South Africa. The logistics of raising funds and recruiting volunteers to travel and teach has become our new challenge to embrace.

African Storybook needs people to translate and edit their open source stories into a myriad of African languages. Anyone literate in an African language can help directly in this project. And even if MRA and ILA members may not be fluent themselves, through our associations with universities and others, we can recruit the needed editors and translators.

These are just two examples of what MRA is doing, but they show what any chapter or affiliate can do to get involved and make a global impact. Here are some starting points that can help your organization:

• Form an International Projects Committee to explore and promote international literacy projects.
• List the assets (not just financial) of your organization. Do you have members who are teacher educators, are EL teachers fluent in other languages, have experience teaching abroad, have emigrated from or who have connections to other countries?
• Attend conferences and look for presentations that focus on international literacy initiatives.
• Connect on social media to learn about new projects and initiatives. Follow @ILAToday on Twitter and also search for ideas with #InternationalLiteracy or #WorldLiteracy.

Possibilities abound to promote literacy worldwide. By connecting with people in your local literacy organization and with people engaged in literacy work around the world, our ability to read, write, and communicate will, as ILA promotes, connect us with people and empower all of us to achieve things we never thought possible.

Leandra Elion is the chair of the International Projects Committee for the Massachusetts Reading Association, a 2016 ILA Award of Excellence recipient.

This article originally appeared in the January/February issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine.

“Any questions?” asked a member of our district leadership team at our quarterly meeting. I braved the silence and looks from my colleagues that were meant to hush me, and raised my hand. I stood up and asked, “What path is available for those of us in coordinator and coaching positions?”

She did not have an answer.

Literacy coaches, reading specialists, and literacy coordinators all have an important place in U.S. schools. ILA’s research brief, “The Multiple Roles of School-Based Specialized Literacy Professionals,” coined a new term to represent all of these roles: the specialized literacy professional. While ILA specifically refers to school-based professionals, district-level literacy professionals also provide a wealth of knowledge to districts, schools, teachers, and students. Because my experience has been at the school and district level, I know that these professionals are not always able to increase their content knowledge unless they pursue learning experiences on their own.

The literacy professional for a school (or school district) is often the first person sought out for advice, strategies, data review, or observation. In order to provide effective coaching and assistance, these literacy professionals need to continue to develop their own skillsets and stay abreast of the latest literacy research. If the school or the district is not providing professional development opportunities, literacy professionals must find them independently. This can be time consuming and overwhelming if you do not know what to look for.

Literacy professionals should first complete a self-assessment to determine their areas of strength and weakness. The Literacy Clearinghouse provides an easy-to-score self-assessment for elementary literacy professionals that would be a great starting point. Meeting with other literacy professionals in the area is another way to expand your skillset; you can each present on your most proficient areas (based on self-assessment results) and learn from one another.

To be a successful literacy professional, you have to continue to evolve and grow, just as we expect of teachers and students. Seek this evolution and growth on your own, if necessary. Children are depending on it.

Turkesshia Moore is a literacy specialist with Wilson Language Training. She most recently served as a K-5 literacy coordinator in Greensboro, NC. She is currently pursuing her Ed.S. Degree in Educational Leadership. Her interests include the relationship between parental involvement and student achievement, providing adequate funding and effective instruction in rural communities, and the effect of generational dispositions of education on current student achievement.

A boy’s father is his first hero. Not only does the son look up to his father as his role model, but he also looks to his father for guidance. A child watches his father’s every move. He is watching when the father is aware. He is watching when the father is not aware. Sons imitate their fathers far more often than fathers wish to admit.

For children, actions speak louder than words. In schools where African American boys may show little to no interest in reading, imitation can be a positive force in their reading success.

Research shows that a boy who has a father as a reading role model during his early literacy years is more likely to develop the behaviors of a literate person. This fact creates a powerful charge for a father as a reading role model. Although a father who promotes reading can change his son’s entire future, some boys lack father figures in their homes. School administrators and literacy leaders can still reap the benefits of black male reading role models by adding African American dads to their literacy programs at schools. School administrators and literacy leaders can celebrate the idea that black male students can identify with other black males who are willing to serve as reading role models.

Below are three simple ideas to get started:

• Promote the idea of community. In the book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau), Coates explores the "beautiful burden" an African American father has in educating his son. This beautiful burden is one the entire male community can shoulder. Reach out to the dads in your community to encourage their involvement in literacy programs.

• Invite African American dads to share their stories. A father who didn’t like reading as a young person may still show a reluctance for reading as an adult. Invite fathers to the classroom to tell stories and share experiences. In my work as a literacy leader, I was able to find male relatives of a former Harlem Globetrotter, a Tuskegee Airman, and a Buffalo Soldier. These men shared stories that were passed down to them by these great men in history. As the literacy leader, I found books that dovetailed these experiences and ask the guests to read them to the class as side dishes to their stories.
• Promote literacy through short pieces. Poetry is a fun form of expression. Hold a poetry slam night and promote the likes of Gil Scott-Heron, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. And don’t overlook our contemporaries like Tupac Shakur and Will Smith. Men tend to be attracted to short literary pieces that pack big punches.

You can access the content you need for themed literacy programs on sites such as The Poetry Foundation, Poem Hunter, and All Poetry. In order to find the men in your community who wish to get involved in your literacy program, distribute a survey. Celebrate the volunteers by promoting them on your literacy website. It doesn't hurt to offer food, either! 

With a little effort, a literacy leader can fill the literacy program with dads who are eager and willing to share their stories. 

Rachel Slaughter is a doctoral candidate specializing in literacy education at Widener University in Pennsylvania. Her research interest centers on promoting reading in African American males with the help of African American males as reading role models.

Rachel Slaughter will present a session titled “Add African American Dads to your Literacy Programs and Watch Magic Happen” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17. For more information, download the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits app or visit ilaconference.org/app.

We have 50 years of research that proves family engagement is an important strategy to improve student outcomes—so why is it still so hard to achieve? Educators, just like families, don’t get an instruction manual on how to build effective home–school partnerships. That’s why it is so important that schools and districts spend time building the capacity of all the key stakeholders to work together in meaningful ways to improve student achievement.

Building the capacity of families and teachers to work together begins by planning purposeful family engagement events that provide families with literacy strategies they can use at home to support their children’s learning. Those events must contain five essential elements that help families and educators develop the capabilities, connections, cognition, and confidence to work as partners to improve student learning.

• Family engagement events or activities must contain a relationship component. Trusting, respectful relationships are the foundation of true partnerships.
• Every training event or activity should leverage the strengths of families. They should be partners in both the planning and the implementation of every event and all of the events should be differentiated to meet the individual needs of families.
• All of the events and activities should be designed to support student learning. Providing families with new strategies they can use at home to support what students learn in the classroom is one of the best ways to link families to their children’s learning.
• Every event should include opportunities to work in groups. The best family engagement events provide many opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and dialogue.
• Finally, every family engagement event should provide opportunities for practice and feedback using a variety of strategies. Families who feel more confident using new strategies are much more likely to continue using them at home, and confidence increases with practice.

Family engagement increases student achievement, but it doesn’t happen overnight and there is no single strategy that will work for every family or every school. Taking the time to build the capacity of both families and school staff to build effective partnerships is the only way to move from random acts of family engagement to truly engaging all stakeholders.

Sherri Wilson has worked in the field of family engagement at the local, state, and federal level for more than 20 years and is a founding board member of the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement. She is currently the director of Consultative Services at Scholastic.

Sherri Wilson will present a workshop titled “Building Capacity to Engage All Families” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Graphic novels, video games, blogs, and more. With the growing list of media choices to use in your literacy teaching, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. How do you narrow down your options to figure out what’s best for you and your students? And what are the best ways to use this media to support literacy and language arts development over time?

In our work as classroom teachers and literacy researchers, we’ve learned that different kinds of media come with important considerations for how to choose and use them effectively in your teaching practice. Though we continue to learn more every day, we’d like to share what we’ve gathered so far.

Social media: Considering students’ everyday writing practices

Social media can be effective for broadening the space of the classroom, as it allows for an increased, potentially interactive audience wherein the students are largely in charge of creating and designing content. In my research, I have explored how students can use varying social media platforms for writing and have found that students seem to use social media platforms differently based on their understanding of the classroom norms in conjunction with their understanding of the platforms. For example, students tend to write more formally when designing websites but less formally and more personally when creating blog posts or posting to Instagram. It is important to consider the goals of the unit when selecting a platform as these will likely affect how the students write within that platform.

Video games: Bridging virtual worlds and life experiences

Leverage students’ enthusiasm by asking them to connect their gameplay to topics covered in class. For example, a number of teachers have engaged students who are passionate about Pokémon Go by connecting the game to important topics such as biology, geography, and literature. A different approach, however, is to examine the practices of students around video games and other digital media and to use those as points for discussion. The ways that students research and learn online about a game like Pokémon Go, for example, could spark a discussion about Internet literacy and how to tell which sources are reliable.

Visual media: More than just a motivator

It might be tempting to select visual media in the hopes of engaging apathetic students. However, visual media is not the proverbial magic bullet of education. Rather, it comes with its own challenges and can prove frustrating for students unfamiliar with approaching these texts analytically. I’ve watched students quit reading a graphic novel because the images were too chaotic for them to process. That said, preparing students with the terminology and functionality of the medium can go a long way in supporting their literacy experiences. In comics, what is a gutter and what does it do? In film, what distinguishes between a fade and a cut and why do they matter? When students have these tools, they are better prepared to view and discuss these texts.

Literacy educators have the power to transform the way students engage with texts across all kinds of media forms. We hope these thoughts will help you take your own literacy practice to the next level.

Earl Aguilera is a former high school English teacher, K–12 reading specialist, and current doctoral student at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the role of new media literacies for students learning through and about digital technologies.

Olivia G. Stewart is graduating from Arizona State University, where she focused on digital literacies and literacy practices while using digital technologies. Her dissertation work reflected these interests as she studied how students use varying social media platforms for writing and how these uses effect “what counts as writing” in students’ increasingly digital literacy practices.

Kelly M. Tran is a researcher of games and learning. She is particularly interested in the communities around games and the informal teaching and learning that occurs between players.

Dani Kachorsky is a former high school English language arts teacher whose love of comics, film, and young adult literature led her to put these visual media in a place of prominence in her classroom instruction. Her experiences in the classroom influenced her research interests in visual and multimodal literacy.

Earl Aguilera, Olivia G. Stewart, Kelly M. Tran, and Dani Kachorsky will present a panel discussion titled “Beyond the ‘Fakebook’ Profile: Engaged and Purposeful Literacy Instruction Using Alternative Media” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.