The place of technology

“Digital, Hybrid, and Multilingual Literacies in Early Childhood”, by Aria Razfar, begins with a simple question: What counts as literacy in early childhood? Is literacy simply the ability to read and write? Or is it more complex? The decades have shown an unprecedented growth in the variety and proliferation of electronic and digital media and of children’s access to that media. Multimodal activities - activities that semiotic (meaning), digital (technological), and multilingual tools - are therefore crucial to children’s acculturation into the modern world. Of course, at the moment, it seems as though my students are more tech-savvy and adept at navigating this world of informational technology than I am. I suppose this means I need to “up my game” so that I remain a valuable resource.

In addition to he need for students to learn how to use these tools to function in the modern world, these tools are also simply part of their everyday life. Razfar states that literacy development is a “dialectic, collaborative, effort of the community of learners rather than a solitary act,” and that learning should be “natural, purposeful, and appropriate to the child’s environment.” To me, this means that for instruction to be effective, it must be engaging and for it to be engaging, it needs to connect with what children already know, care about, and are interested in- a meeting of minds, so to speak. As much as I may be out of the loop, connecting to students through modern technology and technological practices such as online chatting, film-making, video gaming, etc. If teachers (such as myself) pay attention to this aspect of their students’ lives, “links to school become more viable and cognitive growth is promoted.”

The article went through four anecdotes about mediational tools. The overall consensus is that multimodal instruction, and instruction that values the languages and cultures students bring to the classroom, is in no way detrimental to student learning and that “children can benefit from enriched repertoires of media text.

My one hesitation in regard to this article is that there is a focus on learning and using the technology that students are already familiar with to promote learning, to the detriment, it seems, of other modes of learning. 

"Tech Zombie"

There is an incredibly rich world outside of the world of technology. I love to read. I love studying cultures, past and present, and trying to understand multiple ways of interpreting the world. And I love to take long walks in the woods to reflect. I think that the fast-paced, highly stimulating technological world we live in detracts from these things that take time, that require us to slow down, that require us to think deeply rather than react immediately. So once again, as I have stated in several blog posts now, I think it is about finding balance – in this case, a balance between the need to educate students in and with technology and to share with them the beauty of older traditions (such as reading books…). School should, to my view, teach children multiple ways of interpreting the world, so they can both function in the world and find a way of being that reverberates in their Self.