The knowledge that we are preparing our students for jobs and sometimes whole occupations that do not currently exist has been around for some considerable time now. The educational philosophy that has emerged as a result is that we need to teach our students to be independent learners, to be fluid and flexible, and to work collaboratively and co-operatively. This is a high ideal but one that as teachers we can work towards incrementally by considering the ‘changing landscape of communication’ (McDougall 2007) particularly in regards to literacy for the ‘visual generation’.
The current Critical Literacy approach to teaching English emphasises skills in both appreciation and expression. Our students must be able to identify linguistic techniques and evaluate their effectiveness and then judiciously apply them to their original texts. Consequently, we need to provide our students with a variety of learning opportunities to analyse and create meaningful and effective texts. Inherent in this approach is an acknowledgement that as teachers we won’t have all the answers and that we won’t always agree; however our goal is to explore what being literate means for our students in recognition of the multimodal nature of communication and texts in today’s learning environment.
McDougall, J. (2007). Engaging the visual generation: some Queensland teachers come to terms with changing literacies. Screen Education(46), 130-137
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