Technology & 21st Century Literacy in a Time of Accountability Jennifer Kingma Wall, Adjunct Professor Department of Secondary and Special Education Montclair State University

National Educational Policy Recent National Educational Policies Critique NCLB Race to the Top Common Core Content Standards Limited definition of “scientifically-based” research Favors process-product models of education Commodifies teaching & learning process Normalizing lens Market-driven philosophy National Educational Policy

Narrowing the Curriculum in Literacy Education CCSS limit the scope and sequence of curriculum Reading: skills limited to inferencing, predicting, identifying main ideas, and understanding words in context, measured by multiple choice questions Writing: skills limited to traditional 5 paragraph essay under timed conditions Narrowing the Curriculum in Literacy Education

21st Century Literacies NCTE definition Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes 21st Century Literacies NCTE definition

Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments 21st Century Literacies

Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996, 2000) Goals: “to extend the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies, for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate” (p. 61) to argue that “literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms with information and multimedia technologies” (p. 61) Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996, 2000)

Umbrella term under which many literacy phenomena are encompassed (21st century literacies, online literacies, digital literacies, etc.) “Identified with an epochal change in technologies and associated changes in social and cultural ways of doing things, ways of being, ways of viewing the world (world views), and so on” (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, Leu, 2008, p. 14) New Literacies

Qualitative Research Study The purpose of this study is to investigate how three high school English teachers think about and plan their literacy instruction using multiliteracies and new literacies frameworks, in the context of accountability stemming from national educational policy. The study will also focus on the Discourses reflected in the teachers’ thinking about and planning of their literacy instruction. Qualitative Research Study

Discourse as a theoretical lens Discourse: “Ways of combining and integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity” (Gee, 1999, p. 21) Focus on the various Discourses circulating in teachers’ descriptions of their thinking about and planning of literacy instruction, specifically Discourses of a Multiliteracies framework, a New Literacies framework, and National Educational Policy Discourse as a theoretical lens

Emerging Data: Narrowing of the Curriculum “I used to have kids at the Freshman level do a little bit more drama-based stuff, political cartoon creation and analysis…I don’t do that much of that anymore. When I first started working there it was project-based learning was the big thing and then we started to get more college-prep writing. So that’s really taken ahold so I’ve done less of the project stuff.” Emerging Data: Narrowing of the Curriculum

Emerging Data: Technology for Technology’s Sake “They want you to always use technology but they’ll push forth a gadget. One year it was SMART Boards and you had to use and document it. This year it was iPads. Last year was Edmodo.” “Once you fulfill your PEP, that’s it.” “We had to do a cross-campus using a Tandberg teleconference system, we had to do a wiki…everybody was there. … Once that was over and documented and sent in, we never heard from them again the rest of the year. That was my second year teaching and I was like, ‘I get it now.’” Emerging Data: Technology for Technology’s Sake

For more information, contact me at wallj@mail.montclair.edu Thank you!