What Does It Mean To Be LITERATE?

When asked to define “literacy”, once upon a time the definition would have been simple: the ability to read and write. One of the main goals of our education system, past and present, is to teach students to be literate, right? In the middle school that I teach at, our school goal is, and has been for several years, to improve literacy among students. I'm sure if you compared school goals across districts, you'd find that many schools adopt one along these lines. But has the meaning of literacy shifted as we settle into the Digital Age? Are traditional reading and writing skills valued as much as they were previously? In order to promote literacy we as educators need to think about what it means to be literate in 2010.

So I took to Googling “literacy” – after all, that’s what we in the Digital Age do when we need to know what something means. Here are some of my favorite definitions for literacy in the 21st Century after a quick search.

Literacy is...

• "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society" (UNESCO, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136246e.pdf)

• "a complex set of abilities needed to understand and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture – alphabets, numbers, visual icons - for personal and community development. The nature of these abilities, and the demand for them, vary from one context to another. In a technological society, literacy extends beyond the functional skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening to include multiple literacies such as visual, media and information literacy. These new literacies focus on an individual’s capacity to use and make critical judgements about the information they encounter on a daily basis. However a culture defines it, literacy touches every aspect of individual and community life. It is an essential foundation for learning through life, and must be valued as a human right." (The Centre for Literacy, http://www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca/def.htm)

• "the ability to locate, evaluate, use, and communicate using a wide range of resources including text, visual, audio, and video sources." (Information Age Inquiry, http://virtualinquiry.com/inquiry/literacy.htm)

• NCREL's enGauge categorizes literacy into eight areas:

-Basic Literacy
-Scientific Literacy
-Economic Literacy
-Technological Literacy
-Visual Literacy
-Information Literacy
-Multicultural Literacy
-Global Awareness
(http://eev2.liu.edu/westburyII/jg/assignments/bette/engage_pdfbrochure.pdf)


And finally, the NCTE explains literacy as follows:

• "Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

-Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
-Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
-Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
-Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
-Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
-Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments"
(National Council of Teachers of English http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentdefinition)


So as we evolve our definitions of what it means to educate, what it means to learn something, what it means to know something, it makes sense that our definition of literacy too evolves.

I came across the following on the Canadian Education Association's website (http://www.cea-ace.ca/foo.cfm?subsection=lit&page=fra&subpage=wha&subsubpage=som) and found it good for a laugh. Not sure about its validity, but provides food for thought.