I recently finished a course about integrating literacy into all subject areas. While the course focused on strategies for teaching reading and writing skills outside traditional language classes, I began to question literacy as a concept. To me, literate people can derive meaning and information from media. But what does literacy mean in 2024? Are we still assuming that literacy is primarily about interpreting books and articles? Is that an appropriate assumption to make?
Books have been relatively unchanged since the invention of the printing press. An author has something to say; the message gets written and distributed on paper. Centuries of this static medium have let researchers and educators learn about the reading process. There are ways to reliably test literacy skills when the medium is text. However, it feels like the medium is changing.
I have not done a deep dive into the history of the internet, but my personal experience is that it is evolving at an extreme pace. In the two decades since I was in college Apple released the first iPhone, Facebook and social media hit the scene, internet blog writing took over legacy outlets, YouTube has become a place for serious learning, podcasts inform us as we do chores, TikTok in some ways has replaced YouTube for learning, and now artificial intelligence and virtual reality are just around the corner.
Since the 2000s, it feels like there is a big new medium that young people jump on every few years. Once the medium is settled, educators and tech entrepreneurs work to bring learning to these new media. These are worthwhile endeavors, but how many use research-backed best practices? How do we teach young people to be “TikTok literate” if TikTok is so new? Research moves slowly. By the time researchers find how people develop TikTok literacy, and that research is turned into actionable strategies, and those strategies are dispersed to teachers through professional development, young people will be on to the next medium. On top of generational shifts, there are demographic differences in who is using which social media service. This fragmentation of media usage where people learn and get their news makes things even more difficult to teach literacy.
I guess my question is, “How do we meet our students where they are if where they are is constantly changing?”. If our students see value in learning from non-traditional sources, we should help them develop the appropriate literacy skills. But how do we get the data we need to make informed decisions about teaching strategy before the medium is obsolete?
The Keasy Depot 