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Carmel Bernardo
Cole Chilla
SEDC 710
May 18, 2016
Literacy Survey
My baseline understanding of literacy from the first class was literacy, the ability to read
and write. Then I partnered up with Chad and came up with the ability to establish a
connection with language, and how it is used may vary in order to understand what is written
based on skills. Sadly as an education major, I actually couldn't define literacy in my own
words. I had to google it. Personally, I've struggled with literacy in terms of expressing myself
verbally, at times with my writing, with certain discourses. It may be a common struggle
amongst other people, but it's discouraging when you're at lost for words and there's so much to
express.
In the beginning of the semester, I thought literacy practices just consisted of selected text
used to only satisfy the common core requirements, and teachers didn't accommodate students
who had difficulty learning the material because they had to keep the class moving along to
cover material that led up to the state test. Throughout the semester, my understanding of literacy
has progressed beyond knowing the basics and I've learned in depth: the meaning of literacy, its
importance, the classroom instruction, the impact it has on the classroom, resources used to
assess the materials needed to assist my lesson, strategies used of adaptations for students who
struggle with key components, pre-assessment and assessment strategies.
This broaden my understanding of all the work a teacher has to carry out to insure the success of
the students which starts with a successful lesson plan.

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I, first, got a glimpse of what literacy was from the classs first reading What is
Literacy by James Paul Gee, which is where I learned the term discourses as another way to
describe a content-area or a linguistic unit. It confirmed my knowledge of language as being an
essential factor of literacy learning because that's the biggest barrier. Gee states that, Americans
tend to be very focused on the individual, and thus often miss the fact that the individual is
simply the meeting point of many, sometimes conflicting, socially and historically defined
discourses(Gee). I was well aware of the impact of literacy in the classroom. Even with my
basic understanding of literacy, I knew that literacy was the fundamentals to assist in learning
and working with all content-areas as far as reading and writing. Even though I didn't mention
language in my baseline definition, I was well aware that it was a necessity. However, I did learn
that all content-areas aside from ELA had their own literacy. I use to associate these discourses
as having terminology, but later I learned that terminology was another word for academic
language. Therefore, the impact of literacy affects all content-areas and students performance.
The article, Imagining a New Kind of Self: Academic Language, Identity, and Content
Area Learning by Jeffrey P. Wilhelm (2007), was very informal to my knowledge of literacy
because it discussed how to help students learn academic language and how it is used for
various kinds of disciplinary work which leads into a couple of tips on how to engage students
into academic language instruction such as, framing instructional units or curricular topics as
inquiry because it assist students with a reason to learn and help shape them as students who
can identify themselves as knowledgeable beings (Wilhelm). Another tip, Wilhelm states,
Inducting students into new ways of being, apprenticing them into new roles and identities,
acculturating them into new communities of practice[imagining] yourself as a new and
particular kind of person(Wilhelm). I started to use these tips in class by thinking of myself as

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a teacher. By keeping the goals of a teacher in mind, my thought process worked as if I had
students that needed help learning new knowledge within their discourse and how I would
approach assisting them.
I learned about literacy in relation to self formation. In Margaret C. Hagoods Critical
Literacy for whom?(2002), she discusses critical literacy in terms of identity and subjectivity
and how they relate to one another. She argued that students are impressionable, and texts
organizes a readers thinking, views and sense of self (Hagood). By Hagood mentioning that, I
learned that identity, in relation to literacy, is formulated by text as somewhat of a reality, and
subjectivity is being able to shift through roles and take it on as as a perception, making the text
questionable. It wasn't only limited to text. It included music, clothing, media, and formulaic
images and students used both identity and subjectivity when dealing with all (Hagood). This
reading moved my thinking the most because it's so hard to take being a dancer as an identity
because different dance circuits, such as videos, schools, auditions etc, have a different take on
what a dancer is and what being involved in dance entails. Students from public schools,
especially males, have a hard time identifying themselves within dance when there's no solid
dance background. I believe text and other sources will aid in their understanding of what
different roles (producer, choreographer, tech etc.) are available in dance.
The class resources that moved my thinking on applying literacy practices in my
classroom was using the common core standards with the lesson plan standard alignment
template because when we went over it in class, I learned that in order to follow the standards,
teachers need to understand that what students know and what students are able to do are
separate abilities. I also found that Hesss Cognitive Rigor Matrix moved my thinking because
my class will have to read text and write critiques based on live performances and taped

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performances. Moreover, it will help assess how my lesson plans are helping students achieve in
reading and writing and help assess what students know and are able to do. It goes together with
the lesson plan standard alignment template.
The pre-assessment of my students will help determine which components of literacy
needs to be focused on; however, all components of literacy, decoding, fluency etc., are
important for my classroom practice classroom because when used all together, student have a
greater chance to be excellent readers and writers. In my classroom, I will exercise different
teaching strategies to help students learn, like our class because students learn differently from
one another. However, the one of the best strategies is when students are divided into groups and
have to build upon one another's responses using text evidence, that were led by questions from
the teacher, about what was read. Students often learn better with peers.
Overall, I feel that I've progressed in understanding literacy and how it may be used in
my classroom instructions in any content-area. I have helpful tips and resources to assist me with
my lesson plans, teaching and overall my journey as a teacher.

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Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. What Is Literacy? Web. 18 May 2016.
Hagood, Margaret C. Critical Literacy for Whom? Web. 18 May 2016.
Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Imagining a New Kind of Self: Academic Language, Identity, and Content
Area Learning. Web. 18 May 2016.