LITERACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: THE HOPE AND THE PROMISE

Today information about the world around us comes to us not only by words printed on a piece of paper but more and more through the powerful images and sounds of our multi-media culture. Although mediated messages seem to be self-evident, in truth, they use a complex audio/visual “language” which has its own rules (grammar) and which can be used to express many-layered concepts and ideas about the world. Not everything may be obvious at first; and images go by so fast! If our children are to be able to navigate their lives through this multi-media culture, they need to be fluent in “reading” and “writing” the language of images and sounds just as we also teach them to “read” and “write” the language of printed communications.

And full understanding of such a “text” involves not just “deconstruction” (analysis) activities but also “construction” (production) activities using a range of multi-media tools now available to young people growing up in today’s media culture. This explosion in information has presented a major challenge to the world of formal education. For centuries, schooling has been designed to make sure students learned facts - which they proved they knew by correctly answering questions on tests. But such a system no longer works when facts-for-life are not needed! What is needed today is for students to learn how to learn, how to find what they need to know when they need to know it. And to have the thinking skills to critically analyze and evaluate whether the information they find is useful for what they want to know.

Schools and classrooms must be transformed from being storehouses of knowledge to being more like portable tents providing a shelter and a gathering place for students as they go out to explore, to question, to experiment, to discover. Teaching must be distinguished from “banking.” No longer is it necessary for teachers to deposit information in students’ heads. Teachers no longer have to know all the answers, to be a “sage on the stage.” Instead teachers are becoming a “guide on the side:” encouraging . . . guiding . . . mentoring . . . supporting the learning process. Creative classrooms today are ones where everyone is learning, including the teacher.

Likewise, curriculum, classes and activities must be designed that will engage students in problem solving and discovery, in learning how to learn. Some call it “inquiry-based learning.” Using today’s multi-media culture, which includes print but is not limited to it, provides a nearly limitless resource for acquiring a range of skills, e.g. how to identify “point of view” by examining how camera angles influence how we think about the subject being photographed or how to determine whether information is bogus or not by learning to evaluate websites on the Internet. The transformation of our culture from an Industrial Age to an Information Age is why a new kind of literacy, coupled with a new way of learning, is critical in the 21st century.

We hope that the theory and practice of media literacy education, along with the resources, information and networking available at this website, will provide the framework — and the tools — to bring the promise of an empowering 21st century literacy to every child.

— oOo—

The author is Administrative Assistant II at Santos Ventura National Senior High School