This week our
group, me and 5 other members took a trip around the city on a city bus, in
order to dig into the potential of learning literacy in the most comment
place--a bus. The six of us split up and took different observation tasks once
we got on board. We spent half an hour observing and recording the physical
environment of the bus, the people and their activities, the oral languages of
people on board, and the vocabulary that was used on the bus. Then we came
together again to share what we learned and what we thought.
I have to say
that this experience is fairly new to me, since I have taken the bus for
hundreds of times to school, yet I have never really paid such close attention
to the surroundings, the passengers and the vocabulary in the bus. I have taken
the task to observe and records what the people on bus were like and what they
were doing, and I found that people on board were from different age groups (from
infant to elderly), and gender groups. Some people were talking with each
other, while some were sitting quietly, and there were also people calling
through phone and playing with smart phones.
After talking
and sharing with our group members, I found it is interesting that the bus
could be a good situated learning environment for literacy development for
children, because there were lots of written languages and oral (informal)
languages formed and exhibited on the bus, and some only make senses in the
particular context. For instance, on the bus, there were many small signs
nearby the window says, “pull to signal”. Almost everyone, who takes the bus
knows what the phrase means, that is, pull the string in order the make a
signal to the driver that someone is getting off in the next stop. However, in
a context of the bus, the three words easily cover the meaning of the whole
sentence and it make senses to the passengers. Similarly, there were a few
other signs like the “emergency exit” exhibited on the bus that can be
interpreted as “bus literacy”. So, when children are on a bus, they are exposed
to the particular bus literacy environment that can help them learn about a
piece of real life, other than the “schooled literacy”, which sometimes doesn’t
make sense to them.
Lots of schoolteachers
think that reading is just about the students naming the words correctly, and
maybe pass the tests and more. But it is more than that. The article The Donut House: Real World Literacy in an
Urban Kindergarten Classroom (Powell & Davidson, 2005) has greatly
inspired me that literacy makes less sense to students when they are just taught
the reading and writing skills without applying them to the real-world events.
As Powell and
Davidson has mentioned in the Donut House article, as literacy instruction
become more test-driven, we, the educators must ask ourselves what are the
ultimate goals for our students studying literature. The answer is certainly
not merely to pass the test, it is far more that that: to help the students to
learn about the world and their lives through literacy, and to gain confidence
and willingness to make a positive change to the world.
After this field
experience, and reading about the importance to make literacy learning situated
in the Donut House article, I am very inspired to see a good way to help young
children be engaged and interested in literacy. The community literacy dig is a
good way to find out what is out there in our everyday life, in the most
ordinary community that could be valuable for the young readers to learn.
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