Your Literacy Story
Is there any ability more powerful than literacy? Literacy shapes the world we live in and all the possibilities that world holds for us. As English teachers, its important for us to maintain an awareness of just how powerful literacy is and of the fact that we do not gain literacy in a neutral environment. A person does not become an English teacher by accident, just as there are reasons some people never learn to read and write. Literacy is a socio-cultural construct.
The goal of this unit is to help you think carefully about your literacy beliefs and where those beliefs came from. To work toward that goal, we need to unpack your literacy story, one piece at a time. Hopefully, as you tell your literacy narrative, we will all together gain a deeper understanding of how literacy develops and therefore how we ought to go about teaching it.