The New Literacies

Two large organizations of educators decided they had better work together to answer that question. The two groups—the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), which has been around for more than a century, and the International Reading Association (IRA; renamed the International Literacy Association [ILA] in 2014), a network with global reach—called their members together and got to work. Their task: predict what kinds of skills students would need for literacy in the next century.

Years later, they published a document they called a “clarion call” to anticipate “the more sophisticated literacy skills and abilities required for full participation in a global, 21st century community.” Within the document were a new set of expectations for students—“standards,” in education lingo—that gave teachers a sense of breadth of the challenges. It was time to stop talking about and thinking about literacy in the singular. Being literate in the twenty-first century meant possessing multiple literacies. It would mean understanding information presented in a variety of different formats and being able to create, critique, and analyze multimedia texts. Students would need to understand information in videos, databases, and computer networks. They would also need to better understand other world regions, languages, and cultures. Such is the challenge presented by a global economy in which youth will need to learn to compete and cooperate to build a shared future.

Educators have been trying out different labels for this new set of skills. The NCTE and ILA call them “21st Century Literacies.” Donald J. Leu, a professor of literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, calls them “the new literacies.” Jackie Marsh, a literacy professor at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, uses “technoliteracies.” Jeremy Brueck, an e-book and early childhood expert, prefers “transliteracy.” The Asia Society has referred to the demands for career-ready youth to engage as “global citizens” who demonstrate critical cultural, international, and linguistic literacies. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the Annenberg School at University of Southern California, emphasizes the need to focus on a new form of education equity, describing a growing “participation gap” in which low-income students have “unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youths for full participation in the world of tomorrow.”

Some educators have also opted to put new competencies for a digital age under the header of “media literacy,” a concept born long before the Web but still new enough to be redefined. Until recently, media literacy was often assumed to be about teaching students how to “read” commercials, critique promotional materials, and become aware of gender or racial biases in the way information is presented. But over the years, notions of media literacy have expanded to encompass the questioning and inquiry skills that help people see and understand how and why media is created. Then there's the category of “digital literacy,” which has evolved from “computer literacy.” Some people associate digital literacy with online survival skills, such as knowing how to protect passwords, stay safe from predators or bullies, and use Google. But it can also encompass entire constellations of new learning, such as how to create and express oneself using new media tools and how to become an active and responsible participant in a digital world.

In short, we've got this litany of literacies. Will their definitions ever be settled? Maybe not, and that may be by design. As Leu has written, “Their most important characteristic is that they change regularly; as new technologies for information and communication continually appear, still newer literacies emerge.”

But one thing is for sure: no longer is literacy only about reading print on a page. All sorts of other kinds of “reading” and other approaches to gaining knowledge have taken the stage too.

Teaching New Literacies to Young Children: A Work in Progress

Are kindergarten teachers or even preschool teachers ready to teach this expanded notion of literacy? Old-fashioned print is highly valued among educators in preschools and elementary schools, with good reason. The skills involved in reading print—the brain's ability to recognize letters and decode words—demand attention from teachers and parents and require practice from children. As explained earlier, those skills don't just arrive via osmosis. Add to that the limited hours in the day, the crush of parents' work schedules, and the breadcrumbs with which many early educators are paid, and it can feel like simply teaching print-reading alone is more than most can handle.

So the idea of expanding early literacy to early literacies—well, that seems like a tall order. It's one thing to teach twenty-first-century literacies to adolescents who, presumably, already have the basics and know how to read print. It's trickier to answer questions of whether literacies, plural, should be taught in the formative years of preschool and early elementary school.

In Discovering Media Literacy, a book focused on elementary school, authors David Cooper Moore and Renee Hobbs describe educators who are beginning to recognize that “reading comprehension cannot be confined to the medium of the printed page,” but it is rare to find such teachers below second or third grade. It can be tempting to just keep multimedia and online information out of the classroom in these early years and simply wait to introduce the other stuff when students pass their third grade reading tests.

But before doing that, let's back up for a second. Literacy in the younger years is not, and never has been, solely about reading print. Walk into a children's library and what do you see everywhere? Picture books, some with no print at all. Nor is early literacy only about reading books. Literacy has always involved speaking, listening, and writing. A student is not literate if she hasn't developed language skills, if she cannot listen and comprehend and then speak out loud (or use sign language) to communicate her ideas and needs, if she cannot use words to ask and answer questions, explain what she understands about the world, and signal her desires and emotions without acting out. Nor is a student literate if she cannot write. Though the physical act of writing can be difficult before kindergarten because of the fine motor skills required to use a pen or pencil, preschool educators encourage children to use crayons, to paint, and to “write” stories via dictation and using processes such as inventive spelling, through which young children express themselves without having to get spelling or grammar correct. In short, this broader notion of literacy skills is—or should be—already fully embraced in children's early years.

But not all literacy skills are easy to bring down onto the rug, into story time, and throughout the classroom. In classrooms of three- and four-year-olds, especially, it should not be assumed that the adults in charge have expertise in teaching young children early literacy. Huge variation exists across child care centers, preschool programs like Head Start, and pre-K classrooms. Yes, for sure, some teachers are great. They have acquired skills that are just what you would want for children; they are well prepared and well credentialed. They have class sizes that are manageable and coaches to help them improve their teaching. Other teachers…well, it's not really accurate to call them teachers. Many have little more than a high school degree or did not have a good education experience themselves. Nearly all have the gift of a strong commitment to caring for children, but too few have the required foundational knowledge about science-based early learning pedagogy or child and brain development. Most are paid poorly: entry-level child care teachers earn barely above the minimum wage. And they often don't receive the training they need to handle children's inevitable behavioral problems, let alone introduce them to reading and writing using appropriate techniques for three- and four-year-olds.

Which teacher will your child get? In many states and localities, the answer depends on the flushness of your bank account. If you live in a place that expects parents to pay for preschool, you may not be able to afford to give your children the experience of a good teacher. Some options do exist for very poor families: One example is Head Start. But quality varies, and many low-income families are too “rich” to be eligible for it anyway. In 2014, a family of four had to be making less than $27,000 a year or have other extenuating circumstances to qualify.

The calls for more access to high-quality pre-K are trying to rectify this fundamental unfairness. Expanding kindergarten is also critical; there are still many states and school districts that offer kindergarten for only half of the school day, and some parents have to pay fees if they want their children to attend class after lunch. Leaders and advocates have been trying to fix these disparities by injecting public dollars into new systems comprised of schools and private organizations, and in many states and cities progress is being made. Research is showing good results with public pre-K in the Boston Public Schools and Tulsa Public Schools, and new programs in New York City, San Antonio, and Seattle, among other cities, are underway.

In other words, raising children to be “twenty-first-century literate” will require an infusion of public investment in the early years. Not only should all children have equal access to trained teachers in child care centers, preschools, pre-K, and kindergarten—not to mention the primary grades of first, second, and third—those teachers will need to be trained in teaching literacy far beyond the ABCs and the basics of decoding print. First, they have to make sure to include the rest of traditional literacy: helping children learn to speak, listen, and write well. Then they need to figure out how and when to introduce literacies, plural.

And here's where we come to the depth of the challenge: there are no well-known, tried-and-true curricula for teaching young children how to use online information or think critically about visual information while they are simultaneously learning to read print, listen, and speak in full sentences. This is uncharted terrain. There are no landmark studies that establish milestones for twenty-first-century literacy, digital literacy, or media literacy at age three, four, or five. It is not even clear yet what kinds of research questions need to be asked. Leading thinkers in media literacy are still testing out the best approaches for late elementary school, let alone the years before second or third grade. We have arrived at a stage of early experimentation.

Scouts for New Literacies in Early Education

Thankfully there are a few guides to this new stage. One is Faith Rogow, a media literacy consultant in Pennsylvania who is among the founders of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. Rogow has spent her career considering what young children need to become critical creators and consumers of media. She knows that teaching with technology and media can make early childhood educators nervous, so she usually starts her tour with a reassurance, such as this quote from some of her recent writing: teaching media literacy “does not mean abandoning books in favor of electronics. It's not a competition. After all, books are a media technology and a quick visit to a few websites makes it clear that one cannot be media literate without being print literate.”

Another mistaken assumption is that teaching new literacies to young children is about teaching them to use a mouse, tap on an app, or log in to a website. But that is not what media literacy requires at all. The point is to build the habits of mind and the skills of critical inquiry that spur learning no matter where the text comes from, no matter whether the image is on paper or a screen. When children are introduced to an array of communication tools, they can gain the building blocks of understanding how ideas are disseminated, how books are created, how media is developed, and what kinds of decisions drive the process. These kind of literacy skills, Rogow writes, “extend well beyond equipping children to use technology; they prepare children to succeed as lifelong learners in a technology-rich world.”

So where do we start and how young do we go? What might that kind of teaching look like?

Rogow pointed us to Vivian Maria Vasquez and Carol Branigan Felderman, two early childhood professors who have been collecting and dissecting examples from schools and preschools around the United States and Canada. In their book Technology and Critical Literacy in Early Childhood, they show what this kind of teaching entails at what ages. Let's open the door to one of the classrooms and take a look.