21st Century Literacy vs. The Current "Measure of Our Success"

I will admit that I left class with a similar feeling to Maria's as she noted in her blog tonight. I wasn't sure what we were meant to understand by "adolescent literacy" - I assumed that we would need to consider how reading other than what is found in textbooks and writing other than the answers to the questions at the end of those chapters. How would we incorporate stories and novels and such into my classroom? I thought about how I read The Magic School Bus: Lost in Space to my 6th grade science students before they began their planet projects, and I wasn't sure how you would ramp that up and how it would really fit in with the science modules Jefferson County mandates for their middle school science classrooms. And while I'm still unsure on the issue of how I will fit literacy into my own classroom, I recognize that it's far more than reading science-related stories together to enhance my students' learning.

In particular, it threw my issues with my reading enrichment class into a revealing light. I was assigned a group of students about 2 years below grade level in reading, and I was to use Scholastic's reading program Read XL to help my students learn the reading/writing skills they lacked. They were supposed to read through series of short stories, each section devoted to a different skill but with the exact same structure as all the previous sections. They were bored out of their minds and totally uninterested (as was I), and because of that they were not engaged in learning. Like with Collin in chapter 1 of Adolescent Literacy, my students did not connect with their subscribed "low-level" reading class. They sense that the administrator's - and by extension I as a new science teacher who had no idea how to teach reading - are "just completely out of it" and have "no clue" what they're capable of (10), and so they don't connect and they don't engage. Not only do we need to teach our kids more than simple academic literacy skills (i.e. 21st century literacy skills), we need to treat them with respect. Not only are these "catch them up" texts not engaging, they send a message that keeps our students turned off - "we don't expect you to be able to learn and utilize literacy skills in anything more complex than a short story." That doesn't do anything for their learning or their self image.