As we discuss the strategies of questioning, visualizing, etc. I can’t help but think this is a literacy twist off of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. We have learned and many of us have observed that students today do have multiple intelligences. Some students like the hands on learning while others are more linguistic and sometimes intrapersonal. I think this is true for literacy. We could definitely make the argument for multiple literacy’s just based on the readings and our class observations. The majority of the students I have are very visual learners. My students need to be able to see it to understand it. It’s not enough to just say a sphere with certain dimensions. Students need to be able to actually visualize a sphere and the best way is to make a connection to something they already know. Some students have an auditory literacy, in that they need to hear the words, story to better grasp it. No matter what literacy students hold, it’s our jobs as teachers to tap into each. I wonder the result if a teacher were to differentiate by literacy strategy. The question that has come up for me is how do we define knowledge vs literacy?
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I'd like to make Ari the next sherpa
I tried an image to word association as a review for an upcoming Eart Science Test. We reviewed some notes and I had students read aloud and think of images or other words that they associated with them. The feedback semed to be pretty good. I'll know when I grade the exams on Tuesday....pc
I'm glad that you compared this to MI theory. It's a natural question and I find that your question about knowledge vs. literacy is an interesting one. "Knowledge" feels to me more like a fixed source of information - certainly it is an amalgam of the kinds of things we talked about last week - text, conceptual, and word knowledge as well as prior knowledge of the world. "Literacy" feels more fluid, more situated, more about the exchange or communication between the learner and knowledge. That's the distinction I personally make for myself. I think a key difference to me is that I think of literacy as a set of social practices which are fundamental not only to how we take in / absorb / integrate knowledge but also to how we express ourselves. Because of that, multiple literacies (or ML) emphasizes the connections between identity and power. Multiple intelligences (MI) theory focuses more on the individual, rather than the social, and knowledge, rather than the interaction of social practices. There's a sense whenever you talk in terms of intelligences that there's something fixed about it and I guess I prefer the more situated approach to thinking about literacy. We aren't born as illiterate beings! We are constantly interacting with our surroundings even when we can't speak or read or write! The ways that MI theory plays out in the classroom is that people try to present information to reach a variety of learning styles and to have students do assessments that allow many intelligences to be demonstrated. I think that the implications of multiple literacies would lead to similar implications for teaching, yes, but also with an explicit awareness towards the ways classroom and individual discourses interact - some of the things that Delpit and Finn addressed earlier on. There you go - my theoretical bias.
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