What's Hot in Literacy?
The
what’s hot survey is used to show what the hot topics are in the areas of
reading and writing as well as to shift conversations in education to what is
most important at that time (International Literacy Association, 2018). The ILA
(2018) states the following as their goal, “…to continue to expand the reach of
the survey for 2018 while maintaining an intimate conversation that allows
literacy professionals to share their own views in an unprompted fashion”(p.
4).
I
thought it would be interesting to compare the topics from this list to a topic
that I, as a literacy educator, feel is important in the realm of literacy
education. For a recent assignment for my Issues and Trends in Curriculum
course, I was asked to choose an issue in education that I felt passionately
about and to become an activist for that particular issue. I was also asked to
create an original hash tag that represented the issue -
#putthetimerawayandjustread. The issue I chose deals with students not having
the time to read for meaning and enjoyment, instead we are constantly asking
them to read faster in order to pass a test that was merely intended to be a
screener in order to help teachers determine which students may have
difficulties in various areas of reading. Instead, this test, has become more
of a summative assessment that so many schools are putting an immense amount of
pressure on. In turn, this puts pressure on our students and they are no longer
reading for enjoyment, meaning, or even accuracy. They simply want to read for
speed, often asking how many words they got in one minute when they read aloud
to teachers. The whole point in reading truly is to get meaning from the text,
but instead we have forced students to worry about how many words they can read
in a minute with the timer in our hands.
When
I look at the list of what’s hot in current issues of literacy education, I do
see many important topics. Each of these topics is important for various
reasons. While I feel that it is important to take away the pressure to read
for speed and I know many other educators feel the same way, this topic did not
make the list. I know that in Iowa, the FAST test has been made into a “big
deal” and maybe this is not the case in other states or areas of the world and
that could be indicative of why it didn’t make the list. However, if this
pressure is being put on our teachers and students around the world, it should
be on this list as one of the most important issues. A professor from the
United States shared the following, “I think it’s interesting how literacy
trends come and go, but there are some basics, some essentials, that we can’t
leave behind. Kids need basic skills, and they need to learn to love reading.
All the rest follows from that. If we develop wide readers, they have the tools
they need to learn what they want” (International Literacy Association, 2018).
I think what this professor shared is so important. If we want to develop
life-long readers that read for many different purposes and intentions, we need
to give them the skills they need and help them develop a love for reading in
order for that to fall into place. If we continue to expect students to word
call as fast as they can, their love for reading will be squashed, which is
currently happening. As our students grow older and become independent adults,
they will not read to learn new things, improve themselves or their practices,
and they will also not read for enjoyment. If you think about it, where do we
get most of our information? We read about it! If our kids don’t have the
basics for reading or a love for reading, this important habit will not
continue throughout their lives and could leave them stagnant and not striving
to improve.
If
this is an issue in other areas of the world, I would urge educators to take a
look at their practices concerning fluency instruction and assessments. Dig a
little deeper into those practices and have important conversations on how to
change the focus from reading for speed to reading for meaning. After all, if
students aren’t getting any meaning from what they read, what was the point in
reading it? Let’s help our students becoming life-long readers/learners who
take the meaning from what they read and do something with it!
References:
International Literacy Association.
(2018). What’s Hot in Literacy. Retrieved from:
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