Time to See Things Differently in K-12 Literacy Education

• Edited on August 6, 2018

Miles Harvey, Ph.D.

K-12 literacy teacher training needs a technological paradigm shift and a pep talk.

As the average age of a video game player nears the average age of a teacher in this country, it appears necessary to bridge the media literacy gap between in-school literacies and out-of-school literacies. It’s time to prepare our next generation of teachers to meet the needs of our next generation of students. A new wave of literacy is upon our teachers, and many of them have little to no idea about how to address, use, or facilitate learning with technologies like virtual, mixed, or augmented reality in the classroom. For example, the idea that we teach print-based literature, but ignore video games as literacy is a travesty. Furthermore, the idea of using VR games as literary vehicles is an outlandish one to some teachers. Thus, I chose to center my dissertation research on this very topic.

How do we as teachers prepare students for that in which we are unfamiliar? Teachers need access to modern multimodal literacies in the teacher preparation program they are a part of, especially for those teaching language arts in K-12 classrooms. Students read and write in different ways than they did even five years ago, and the way they compose their thoughts through media has taken a huge leap forward in recent years. Coding is the new cursive, and even though code has no culture, I still refer to it as a language at times.

Teacher training needs to be ahead of the curve, and that’s why I use the PS4 VR, code.org, and other technologies in my graduate classes to help new teachers understand the way we make meaning in society is changing. The literary strategies of yesterday are often projections of student needs rather than culturally responsive interventions for student learning.

The literary strategies of yesterday have their place in schools, but they should not supersede the futuristic needs of students in and out of the classroom.