Digital Literacies, Digital Citizenship, and Teaching

Reading and writing are cross-curricular skills that are necessary for success throughout one’s entire educational career and subsequent stages of life. The acquisition of knowledge concerning writing, and the development of writing skills, affords students opportunities in life that might not have otherwise been available to them. Thaiss and Porter argue that writing is something that all teachers must do. As an English teacher however, there is perhaps more focus attributed to reading and writing within the classroom. As an English teacher then, it is my responsibility to help students tone and strengthen their reading and writing skills. One way of sparking students’ interest in the material, and getting them to work on both their reading and writing skills, would be by including opportunities for Discovery Writing: journal prompts, independent study units, responses to poetry, interpretations of various monologues or soliloquies, the list goes on! Through these kinds of assignments or classroom exercises, combined with teacher led instruction and basic structure, students have the freedom to choose the format, topic, and/or purpose of writing. Simply providing students with options, with alternative ways of demonstrating their knowledge and understanding of the material, is another way of allowing students to incorporate their own interests into their learning. This kind of creative freedom provides occasion for the material to become more meaningful and relatable to the students. Teachers must be able to motivate students to learn and become engaged with the content that is being explored throughout their lessons. Relatability is perhaps the most powerful tool that teachers have at their disposal in their attempt to engage students in their learning: students’ “understanding and skills will grow as they explore their world and engage in activities, for their own purposes, that involve reading [and] writing.” (“The Ontario Curriculum Grades 9 and 10 English.” 2007, p.5.) By making the classroom content they are learning relatable to them, students then become personally invested in the course and their learning. One of the tools that we, as teachers, can utilize within our classroom is technology. Students today have access to a fountain of knowledge; so much information is right at their fingertips. Students merely need to know how to properly access this information, and discern the validity of their sources. Helping students develop their digital literacy skills will provide them with the ability to use information and communicative technologies to find, evaluate, create, and deliver information. Once technology is introduced into the classroom, it is also important to think about our digital citizenship as individuals but also as a class.

An Example That Brings It All Together

In literature courses students are often taught to engage with themes that are presented throughout a novel study unit. Many of these themes are universal concepts which exist beyond the fictional realm of the novel being studied. When I taught “To Kill a Mockingbird” for example, and explored the ideologies surrounding the Ku Klux Klan and its 1915 Revival, I asked students: “Does any of this sound familiar? Does it make you think of anything that is happening now?” With these two simple questions I, or rather my students, were able to compare some of the bigoted comments emitted from particular characters of Harper Lee’s book, and the racist understandings of that period to some of the platform promises raised during the recent United States election. From there, an unplanned but educational conversation took place as we took a little time to examine the digital citizenship of the electoral candidates.

As a teacher, I hope to grasp on to as many of these kinds of opportunities as possible in order to relate the material that is being explored within my classroom, and its study, to my students’ modern world.