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

2. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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)

14. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

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