Literacy From a Different Perspective

Curled up with a book

Last September, we did a series of posts on math and science education. This month we’re going to take a similar look at reading and writing education.

One of Ira Socol’s recent blog posts has really gotten me thinking about reading, writing, and literacy. In it, he describes curling up in bed with a good story.

When you read that last sentence, what did you mentally picture? A book, maybe a leatherbound classic or a paperback crime drama?

But does a story have to be a printed book? Ira Socol is dyslexic and uses a number of audio tools to consume text. Does an audio book count as reading? What if he uses his computer with a tool that highlights words while the computer-generated voice speaks them? Is that reading? If someone is blind and uses a Braille text, is that reading? If you curl up in bed with a laptop or Kindle, are you still reading?

Is it only reading if we’re talking about printed text? Is literacy something broader than reading books and writing essays?

Socol describes it this way, talking about traditional educational perspectives on reading:

They see reading as a decoding skill set – fair enough. I see reading as a comprehension and analytical art, and I’m not so desperate to have everyone base their reading in alphabetical code-breaking. It is a nice trick to know, but after a certain point, I’m not going to waste student time on decoding. There are more important things to learn.

Using his phrase, does reading have to constitute “alphabetical code-breaking”?

One of the aspects of developing online learning that I love is how it can actually be more accessible than traditional face-to-face education. I don’t think that’s even just for students with diagnosed learning disabilities; I think well-designed online learning can provide choices for a variety of learning differences and styles. When you don’t have a lock-step linear structure, you can empower learners to find their own learning path. When we provide a variety of media, participants will often naturally gravitate towards the resources that are most supportive of their personal learning needs.

At one of my previous instructional design jobs, we added podcasts to every online course. The text for those podcasts was already available for reading, plus students could view Flash presentations with the audio. For the podcasts, we basically separated the audio from the presentations and made it available on iTunes. I admit I was skeptical. Frankly, if I was a student there, I’d probably just read the text version because it would be fastest. What would be the value of just having the audio?

Curled up with a laptop

I was wrong. As soon as we rolled out the podcasts, the compliments from students started arriving. Not every student used them, of course, but the ones who did loved that they could listen to the content anywhere. A number of students commented how they listened to each podcast repeatedly to get the information. They clearly found this audio valuable to their learning. These weren’t necessarily people with any identified learning disability or vision impairment, just individuals who could learn better from audio. Is their literacy less because they listened to the content instead of reading it?

That brings us back to Ira Socol’s post. I won’t pretend that he isn’t controversial or that his ideas don’t generate some heated conversations on his blog. But I find his perspective of reading and literacy to be very intriguing. Do you agree or disagree with him? Is literacy about analysis and comprehension or about decoding letters? When he listens to an audio book or uses text-to-speech to consume text, is he reading or not?