E-Learning-Inclusivo (Mashup)

This post was written by Shelbie Witte, Don Latham, and Melissa Gross, editors of Literacy Engagement through Peritextual Analysis (ALA & NCTE, 2019).

As teachers and librarians with a love of texts, we encourage our students to engage with peritext often, and yet we encounter many students who are unfamiliar with the term and the language of peritext. Common peritextual elements such as the text cover, table of contents, and source notes provide opportunities for readers to increase their comprehension of and to think critically about a text. Many times, readers will skip the reading and viewing of peritext and begin with the text proper. By doing so, they are often missing critical information an author has included about the text and haven’t taken advantage of all the layers of meaning surrounding the text.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

It’s natural to want children and graduates to develop a set of all-purpose cognitive tools with which to navigate their way through the world. But can such things be taught? Carl Hendrick argues that general critical thinking skills cannot be so easily transferred from one context to another.

Being an air-traffic controller is not easy. At the heart of the job is a cognitive ability called “situational awareness” that involves “the continuous extraction of environmental information [and the] integration of this information with prior knowledge to form a coherent mental picture”. Vast amounts of fluid information must be held in the mind and, under extreme pressure, life-or-death decisions are made across rotating 24-hour work schedules. So stressful and mentally demanding is the job that, in most countries, air-traffic controllers are eligible for early retirement. In the United States, they must retire at 56 without exception.

Via Elizabeth E Charles, Yashy Tohsaku