Contemporary Literacies

These papers, presented at the Understanding Language Conference in January 2012, address language and literacy issues found in the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. Select each title to view a video interview with one of the authors.

Practice in the Content Areas
1. Realizing Opportunities for ELLs in the Common Core English Language Arts and Disciplinary Literacy Standards
2. Mathematics, the Common Core, and Language

3. Language Demands and Opportunities in Relation to Next Generation Science Standards for ELLs

Language and Literacy
4. Language and the Common Core State Standards

5. What is the development of literacy the development of?

6. What does text complexity mean for English learners and language minority students?

Policy and Building System Capacity

7. Issues and Opportunities in Improving the Quality of Large Scale Assessment Systems for ELLs

8. The Challenge of Assessing Language Proficiency Aligned to the Common Core State Standards and Some Possible Solutions

9. Instruction for Diverse Groups of ELLs

10. Teacher Development Appropriate to Support ELLs

11. Challenges and Supports for ELLs in Bilingual Programs

12. Critical Policy Levers for Effective Implementation of Common Core State Standards for ELLs

13. Online Community for Teachers of ELLs

Is Seniority for Teachers Bad for Students? Explore various factors for and against the introduction of new teachers into a school system. 

This piece, created at the Digital Media and Composition Institute in June 2012, is a multimodal attempt to capture and compare both the physical and conceptual movement involved in dance and writing. The project is my first step towards further exploring the non-linear nature of composition as expressed in the movement of the body and of the mind. Please download a descriptive transcript, if you'd like.

Art Education, Dance

Multimodal Teaching and Learning Teacher feedback in dance tends to be highly imagistic, metaphorical, and, above all, multimodal. The verbal cues, metaphors, and vocalizations that indicate movement quality are accompanied by gestures and demonstrations of the movement phrase or transition in question. Simi- larly, “taking feedback”—whether offered to oneself, a peer, or the whole class—involves not only listening and making mental notes, but also incorporating new informa- tion, internalizing and digesting it in the body through the senses and muscles. Dancers are then able, for example, to more competently execute a revised version of a move- ment. They externalize the whole of what they have learned as organized expressive movement. Such struc- tures of interaction between teachers and learners in dance classes can support young women in developing skills, forming their identities, and developing agency...

Check out the whole website.  Educational materials that teach with dance and social studies literacies together!

William Kist (2005) posed this question at the end of his ethnographic study of six “new literacies” classrooms. We take up this question here to consider our attempts at supporting new literacy practices in our own classrooms. We are interested in discovering new ways to engage our students in practices of composing and comprehending texts that they find meaningful to their present and future lives. In our discovery of new ways of teaching and new literacy practices to promote, we have been drawn to new technologies that seem to have potential for facilitating new processes and practices. We both like to tinker with new technologies, and we are both easily excited by learning how other teachers have used new technologies in their classrooms.