Literacy Learning Is a Community Commitment: Partnerships and Possibilities

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Prioritizing Culture and Community in Literacy Learning (Table 20)

Abstract

Literacy instruction is often oversimplified as a pendulum with constructive practices on one end and explicit skill driven instruction on the other. Literacy development is more complex, however, making it less accessible for community members to understand. This debate is currently playing out in the popular press and social media forums as the “Science of Reading” (SoR) verses “Balanced Literacy” with surface level discussions of both failing to fully represent the scholarship of literacy development. Becoming a reader and writer and continuing to develop those skills and strategies through adolescence in ways that allow critical literacy practices to develop to navigate a complex, text saturated world, is a balance that is not fully represented by one frame or one institution.

Author

• Heather Kenyon Casey, Rider University