This week’s guiding questions:
What are some literacy issues in the US?
What are the causes of those problems?
What are some solutions to literacy problems in the US and in the world?
Activity 1: This week’s topic is: literacy issues in the US. What are they? Can you list 5 or more without looking them up? Next, google this topic and see what comes up. Is your list similar to what you found online?
It’s difficult to pinpoint all the literacy challenges that we face in this country (hence the title of this week’s unit). Before we dig into literacy practices in different cultures and communities, let’s survey some of the problems out there. Here are 6 issues that I found. If you would like to add another one, with a source that explains it, please let me know. Here, out of the 6 soures, read/ watch 5 (or 6 if you’d like).
Activity 2: Read “This Type of Illiteracy Could Hurt You.” This is a piece from the New York Times. If you haven’t claimed your free account yet, you can do so here.
Activity 3: Watch “The Illiteracy-To-Prison Pipeline,” a TEDx Talk by Brandon Griggs.
Activity 4: Read “The Relationship Between Incarceration and Low Literacy.”
Activyt 5: Watch “How America’s public schools keep kids in poverty” by Kandice Sumner.
Activity 6: Watch “Tackling American’s Illiteracy Problem.”
Activity 7: Watch Face the Issues with LVR on Childhood Literacy.”
Activity 8: Take Quiz 1 on Blackboard.
Activity 9: Write your literacy narrative. Submit the final product on Blackboard by the end of week 3.
Literacy Narrative: 2-3 pages (4% of your final grade)
Your task is to write a personal literacy narrative of a specific moment you were acculturated into the literacy practices associated with one community of which you are a member. For example, your community may be your family, your neighborhood, your school, your church, your friends, etc. You can choose to write your paper chronologically (e.g., childhood, adolescence) or thematically. I encourage you to explore possible tensions that arise from participating in literacy practices of multiple communities. For example, how are the literacy practices different from your home to your neighborhood?
