Literacy for the iGeneration

We didn’t have class on Tuesday and instead joined two other sections of the diversity class (the weekend, initial certification students) for a presentation by AIDS Rochester. I wasn’t sure about the utility of going to this presentation since it really is geared toward people who haven’t taken a diversity class before, and all my students have (I assume at least), but I learned a great deal and there were good questions asked. I was a little disappointed in that we didn’t get a chance to talk much about the implications of AIDS/HIV for children, either as youth with HIV or who have family members affected by the virus. But we did have a good conversation about advocacy after the presentation, so that in and of itself was worthwhile. One of the issues raised is the sometimes difficulty in speaking up against bigoted statements or discriminatory practices. I posted to Blackboard a collection of material from Teaching Tolerance that provides some tools for doing just that. You can also access them directly from their website.

I’m looking forward to Tuesday’s class. We’re going to hear Dr. Karen Sangmeister talk about the pedagogy of respect and how it’s instantiated in teacher talk. Then we’ll spend the rest of class wrestling with the concepts in Living Narrative and doing some analysis of various talk and text using the 5 dimensions as well as some discourse analysis (deictics and modals). I’m interested in seeing what connections the students make to literacy and language acquisition.