Welcome!!

Welcome to my blog!

This blog is all about 21st century Literacies inside and outside the classroom. As a prospective teacher, what captures my interest is what exactly are the 21st century literacies? What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century and how does one teach literacy?  In our 4th year education class, we briefly overviewed the literacies:

From: https://zein4p27.wordpress.com/

• Critical Literacy 
• Media Literacy
• Moral Literacy
• Character Education
• Environmental Literacy
• Financial Literacy
• Global Literacy
• Multicultural Literacy
• Technological Literacy
• Mental Health Literacy
• Discipline-Based Literacies 

This blog is an inquiry into the nature of the literacies. I explore fundamental questions about their existence in the first place, their purpose within the 21st century classroom, their implementation or repudiation, other teachers perspectives, and my overall concerns with them.

First, a little bit about myself:

I am a 4th year student enrolled in the Concurrent Education program at Brock University. My teachables are English and history at the I/S level. In my spare time, I really enjoy reading philosophy! The expression, ‘you are what you eat,’ goes for reading too, ‘you are what you read.’ Be prepared, because sometimes I view stuff through a philosophical lens, or at least try to!

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As a beginning point of departure, why do we even have the literacies in the first place? In our postindustrial, postmodern, posthumanist society their seems to be a concerted effort to dismiss the conceptual frameworks of past educational paradigms. Traditionalist views of education have been pushed aside, assigned to the ashcan of history, only to be replaced by new, liberal, cutting edge schools of thought which systematically preach messages of multiculturalism and environmentalism. Meanwhile the shadow of American imperialism steadily increases, monstrously subsuming forgotten lands and distant peoples, while in Europe, Islamophobic rhetoric, established through a long tradition of European Orientalism, pervades the everyday. We are continually bombarded with a slew of  environmentalist messages, warning us that we face the inevitable brink of ecological catastrophe. In our consumerist society of mass hedonism, we buy the product on the shelf which advertises ‘green’ on the label. 

I wonder, is education merely reactionary to the symptoms of the economic market? Is the 21st century push for environmental literacy a stark realization of ecological damage we perpetually commit? Or perhaps, the purpose of education is to fuel the market economy? Taken as the latter, education harbours a more cynical Althusserian purpose of merely reproducing the means of production. What really does it mean to be a democratic citizen? Noam Chomsky seems to have a definitive answer to these questions:            

Noam Chomsky on the Purpose of Education

What this post ultimately fizzles down into is a reflection upon the System in which the educational act takes place. The System, what will be referred to as late capitalism, is the summative environment which dictates the incorporation of the literacies. Any profession, whether it be a teacher, electrical engineer, neurologist, custodian, etc. takes place within capitalism, and is therefore subject to the interpellative act of capitalist ideology.

The incorporation of the literacies within the classroom are already preordained with ‘metaphysical subtleties’ and ‘theological niceties’ stemming from larger systemic structures of capital. Any discourse, and any production of knowledge is subject to the mode of production which it has been produced within.

As self-acknowledged radicalism, I purport that any ‘true’ teaching of the literacies always either implicitly or explicitly produces a counterhegemonic ideological critique of capitalism. Did Freire not teach the unprivileged to read the world for themselves, and by doing so, allowed them to come to know the reasons for their poverty? In sum, the mainstream, hegemonic ‘literacies’ which will be taught in the classroom are meant to produce democratic citizens - as Chomsky avers, dumb, docile, and misled by a false consciousness. Meanwhile the ‘true’ literacies are kept veiled — while the teacher can guide the student to take off the veil, only the student has the power to remove it.