REFLECTION - My Discovery of Literacy and Future Plans

Before engaging with this course I held a shallow view of the meaning of literacy and numeracy.  I believed literacy simply focused upon the structure of written or spoken languages and numeracy involved knowing one’s time’s tables or knowledge of how to perform more complex mathematical calculations.  I believe this view will be shared by almost all of my future students.   

As I began to read further into the topic I was astonished by the depth and breadth that literacy covers.  Virtually, every minute of one’s active day, they are likely to be engaged in some form of literacy or numeracy.  This could be within personal conversations, telephone calls, writing, texting, surfing the internet, playing games - electronic or otherwise, sports, banking, cooking, knitting, and inclusive of thinking.  Each one of these activities, and thousands of other unmentioned examples, involve the need for literacy or numeracy skills. 

During this course I have discovered how literacy and numeracy activities arise from social and cultural interactions with others through their need to communicate and create some form of symbolism, sound or gesture to interpret and make sense of their experience.  I can now understand more clearly how difficult it must be for people; particularly, whose English is their second language, to grapple with an educational system offering learning experiences similar to the way I experienced literacy and numeracy more than thirty years ago.  I can also see that today’s students’ are required to internalise and communicate using many more literacy technologies than I had as a student; furthermore, they are also required to extend their knowledge across a much broader range of cultures due to globalisation bought about via the rapid increase in literacy technologies over the past two decades. 

As a future teacher I am responsible for students’ individual development of literacy and numeracy.  I feel I need to prepare a simple learning experience template that will both capture the experiences of my students’ as well as to allow me to plan lessons that use these student experiences to my best advantage.  I want my students to make sense of information and relate to real life experiences in their own world or socio-cultural environments.  I also want to develop a repertoire of teaching strategies aimed at guiding and scaffolding students to engage with as many different literacy technologies as possible as well as to understand how literacy and numeracy may exist in many similar and completely different forms, applications and meanings as a result of the many cultures that exist worldwide.