Top 10 Things I Learned in "Teaching Reading in Content Field"

10. Blogging is easier to do than I ever knew (especially on Google Blogspot)! And so addicting! It was like opening a present whenever I would check to see if any comments were added to my blog and there was one!




9.  Literacy has been redefined to include language, writing, social constructs and cultural conventions, as well as psychological dimensions and a person's way of being in the world, including nationality, sex, and class, which Dr. James Gee calls Discourse. There is a whole new field of study now called Literary Studies.. "mushfake" is a cool word to describe faking it within a Discourse you don't have mastery in.




8. Discourses, with a Capital D, are multiple (reading for science, reading for language arts, being a student in school, being a student on a soccer field, etc., etc.)and people will learn many over their lifetime.  Discourses are multi-faceted and people need to learn them through an apprenticeship program with chances to practice in order to become a master and literate in any Discourse.

Image via Wikipedia

7.  The Web can be seen as a continuum, like a library of data which is controlled by one central creator on one end, and a polar opposite where information is decentralized, collaborative, and connected to many other sites of information. This end can be edited by any viewer and then corrected or changed by any other. (and a responsive school of fish can be correlated to an emergent knowledge system!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_pN88xJotM   (at time 4:43)

Image by kharied (vacation!!) via Flickr

6.  While blogging is fun, it is harder for me to discuss in online audio chat forums without video. I am just too visual, and not seeing people's faces while talking is not a part of my Discourse on school discussions. I need to work on that. I would start thinking about what was written on my computer screen while I was talking and lose my train of thought! And my train of thought jumps the track easily enough as it is!

5.  Teaching reading literacy requires more than just instruction in decoding words and testing on finding facts within a text. Students need modeling on the actual mental tools that master readers use to navigate difficult texts, textual cues that indicate important information is going to be coming in the text, metacognition, and much more. After learning this methods, they need time to
practice the skills within actual content based writings.

Image via Wikipedia

4. Teaching as a Master reader requires thinking about the mental tools one uses to navigate a particular Discourse. This is harder than it sounds!

Image by davesaunt via Flickr

3.  We can think of text as simply marks on a page that do not convey anything until a reader's mind brings all their background, emotions, images, to the words and this transaction between the readers' mind at a particular time and the marks happens in the act of reading. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?








2.  The best atmosphere for literacy to occur is one that is collaborative between student (apprentice) and teacher (master), safe for students to share any problems that they have with text, and personal. Students are given ample time to think about their mental processes and thinking (metacognition), practice modeled behaviors and skills, think critically about new information, and be exposed to many different types of text and approach them from stances both aesthetic and efferent.







1.  Literacy is an ongoing process throughout our lifetimes and no one is literate in everything. Literacy requires more than just an ability to read words, we have to be able to make connections with previous knowledge and and be able to use the information in new and creative ways.