Tina article & the topic of Literacy

Christie S. Johnsons article, "Tina: A Portrait of Literature Awareness" shares the authors account of working with a low-income, at-risk student though a program with the Community Literacy Center of Pittsburgh. Furthermore, the experience causes the author to question and explore the broad concept of literacy. I found it interesting how the author shares that the young student, Tina, writes within "two literate communities: that of her inner city hight school English class and that of the literacy program in which she writes with support from peers and writing mentors" (pg 2). I think that this says a lot about how influential  a given situation can toward a resulting outcome. I think I have mentioned this before in another blog post, but I think it's important that we better understand the power of context and recognize its existence because I think as individuals, we often tend to overgeneralize and form false attributions, simply because of our own unawareness.

In regard to this whole topic of literacy and what exactly it is, Johnson provides some applications of literacy such as "literacy as the ability to recite familiar texts", "literacy as performance", and "literacy as function". Of the explanations Johnson provides, I think they are more applications of or reasons for literacy, rather then definitions of literacy. That said, before the author even got into these various descriptions, I formed my opinion that literacy is indeed the bland definition of having "the ability read and write" but I also think the definition of literacy should also emphasize how literacy is the most basic form of communication beyond body language. Thinking back to young children--babies cannot talk but they scream, kick, grab, cry, ect. to communicate their needs but we spend YEARS of our lives in school in order to progress our communication skills and learn the best ways to read and write. Here at Richmond, we even have entire departments dedicated to "literacy" (or major aspects of literacy) such as Communications and Rhetoric, English, and Leadership Studies to name a new.

When Johnson expands on one her specific experiences working with Tina, she stresses how she really wanted to get Tina to make reflections and channel those reflections to find her own self-image as both a student and individual. She mentions how Tina shared a lot about her school and family, which made me think about my experience at the Boys and Girls Club on Monday. My partner and I could really tell that the student we were working with loved telling us all about her life. Johnson states in her article that "reflections are valuable because they give writers a change to explain themselves" (pg 9). I think that is a tactic Julia and I can really utilize when we actually start getting to work on helping the student produce her digital story because she loves to talk and share. Since content is also a crucial element to a digital story and she is only a 6th grade student, I think the use reflection as an approach will help to inspire her ideas and what she really wants to say about her "pearl of wisdom".