Literacy in Action: Traditional Essay Gets a Digital Facelift

As I’m currently teaching two similar courses addressing literacy across content areas, I decided to test out a new idea. For one course, I wanted to “update” the traditional literacy autobiography assignment that is typical of courses like these. The traditional assignment (as I was even asked to complete while in college) asks students to define and trace their literacy development across meaningful experiences, highlighting sponsors and moments of discovery, resistance, and validation. In attempting to remix this project, I wanted to maintain the important analysis of identifying and reflecting upon literacy sponsors, as well as larger contextual factors (such as the impact of technological and economic shifts on our opportunities for engaging with literacies). However, I hoped to infuse greater degrees of creativity and control over format and structure along with greater relevance to the role of literacy in my students’ lives every day.

DIGITAL REMIX: Literacy in Action
For this project, I asked students to narrow the lens and focus only literacy encounters within the last week or so. Students could document these experiences in a variety of ways utilizing a variety of tools–with the catch that they needed to use a digital tool incorporating multimodal representations. The written reflections were completed in two parts: 1- a short personal reflection on the issues addressed above, and 2- a synthesis of findings across projects (including two other group members) focused on patterns of experience, similarities, and new perspectives not previously considered.
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As for the technology tools, students constructed prezis, movies, twitter accounts with snapchat selfies, instagram and tumblr accounts to document their experiences. Their work is filled with unexpected discoveries (moments of “I did not realize this was literacy”), the sharing of personal interests, and a lot of humor and personality! While the written reflection and expectations need some tweaking, there is a lot of opportunity to save this project from the drudgery of redundancy and make it meaningful for both authors and audience alike.
Looking forward to sharing some work as soon as I get permissions!