That literacies (whoops, we’ve got “multiple” affecting the grammar to plurals) “must now be adaptable and bendable to meet whatever comes down the pike” is a fine notion of flexibility in understanding and ways and means of understanding, whether in text written with a goose quill on rough homemade paper or something on the next blog. But equally, it seems to me, the literacy of this “new age”, much like other ages really, it is critical to develop the confidence and the skills in the means of understanding and engagement in words and other forms to shape, make malleable, or just pound into shape with a mallet!, the world as it comes at us, to find the world malleable to our shaping into understanding that we as human beings can then share, argue about, and continue to make something new, and discover old verities and beauties. “Malleable” according to crazy old Joseph T. Shipley in his delightful “The Origins of English Words” is from the Indo-European root “mat”, which gives us tools for digging deep, like a mattock, and tools for pounding into shape, like a mallet — with related witchcraft notions of “malleus”, shape-changers and other such shamans and werewolves. The internet can be all of these things, and the word “malleable” when delved deep begins to reveal some of the powers we are amidst in the new ways of communication and connection and communion. “Networks”, for example, are surely not simply “good”, but it depends on what is networked. We admit that, for example, in calling the folks on our side, the good side, in WW II, “The Allies”, buddies all and so on, while the other side was “The Axis”, a decidedly nasty sounding word with little feel of connection and more of grinding, grinding, smaller and smaller around a grinding stone.

In my students, and in myself, i’d like to find much more courage and competence, the simple tools, like a mallet, perhaps, to make the flow of information coming at us every day in overwhelming shapes and cries something malleable to our making, like the good ol’ Village Blacksmith. These were in the old days the dubious folks, the maker of things out of fire and copper or iron or steel, the maker of weapons, the dark ones, like the lame Hephestaus or furious Loki. We need to recognize, i think, that this is the sort of energy we are releasing, or have already been released — and the task now is to make something of this abundance, to work it in a critical fire, to make the information malleable to our questions, our needs, our ongoing wondering — not once and for all, but ever making and malleable the world to our meeting and needs changing.

I take “malleable”, then, as something of a craft to adopt — rather than becoming “malleable” to whatever comes down the pike.

Does this make sense to anyone else? I cherish this mallet whack to the side of my head, like in croquet, send off from the set wickets far — and what happens then? Thanks Will — Fionn

BTW: Why doesn’t NCTE stop the reauthorization of NCLB instead of making new checklists?

There are no new literacies – there, I said it.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY
LITERACIES was adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee this month. Groups are always developing new literacies. I’ve
seen lists of information literacy, media literacy and others, and I’ve seen multiple lists about…

Great commentary & post here…as a current high school English Teacher who at times feels like I’m swimming upstream against the current testing trends in Michigan I can honestly say this “new” way of defining true literacy is long overdue…

Interestingly enough I just told my college-bound high school juniors today in my classes that they absolutely NEED a different view of “being literate”, because the world they face is so vastly & drastically different from the “old world” that their parents faced upon graduation from high school & even the university!

Our “definition” of “literate” must also be ever-changing & adaptable to the exponentially rapid changes happening worldwide with regard to how we process & use information effectively.

I like to tell my kids at school that they need to remember that “information is not yet knowledge, and knowlege is not yet wisdom”… We need to teach kids to creatively develop their own true “definitions” by becoming effective THINKERS Too…

Regards,
Amir

I appreciate your opinions and those of commenters as I find them insightful, but there is one thing I’d like to ask.

We can talk all day about constructivist learning theory, the potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom, network literacy and other things. However, is the value of personal development literature seriously considered as something that should be included by default in schools?

After all, isn’t self-directed and self-motivated learning the best type there is? Speaking as a student and someone who’s had a rocky relationship with formal education, I find that the problem isn’t with developing intellectual capacity but rather emotional capacity.

Personal development can achieve better EQ and I sincerely that passion-based approach to learning is the best one students can have.

Anyways, I better stop ranting now before this two pages of comments.

Any thoughts and feedback would be wonderful especially coming from the perspective of educators like you guys.

Cheers everyone!

Regards,
Amir