Literacy, Language, and Learning in Biology and Drama

At first, I wasn't sure how useful a literacy class would be to my future career as a teacher, but now I'm convinced that I won't teach a day without applying the methods, ideas, and research I learned during this course. On the first day of class, I would have told you that literacy is all about "reading" a literal "text," with letters and words, but my definition has changed so much since then.

To me, literacy instruction is all about giving students the ability to "read" their entire world, their whole lives, as a "text". Teaching literacy is not only teaching students how to understand the texts they encounter while learning the content in your class, but giving them the tools to understand texts in the future, and the power to teach themselves to understand any text they may encounter. In my classes, students need to understand (either through reading or other forms of acquisition) scripts, textbook entries, journal articles, writing prompts, models, demonstrations, performances, diagrams, experiments, films, and web sites. I now know that literacy instruction is critical to students' understanding of these "texts," and that I must support their "reading" and "writing" in these various forms, and teach them how to grapple with all of these texts in the future.

In my science classroom, I am especially excited to teach my students how to "read," compare, and create representations, and to ask critical questions about the representations they see. The comprehension and vocabulary strategies will make my traditional-text-based assignments for effective and useful for my students. And hopefully, using what I learn in this class, I can even reach out to students with different intrinsic motivations or native languages. 

I imagine that a perfect integration of literacy instruction into my content areas would result in this: 

Students of all languages, backgrounds, and cognitive abilities interpreting these "texts," understanding what they mean in other contexts, asking critical questions about the creation and presentation of the text, and being able to  transfer their understanding of the content and their literacy skills into every aspect of their lives.

Wouldn't that be beautiful! I feel like literacy instruction brings a more well-rounded feeling to content-areas, because it gives students' skills that they will absolutely use every day of their lives. Even if they don't become professional biologists, or choose to ignore biology for the rest of their lives, they will have the skills to make sense of all the "texts" that inform their world.