By MEGAN GARNETT
Student Reporter
A life of loving books and promoting literacy is one that Alva Public Library director Sandra Ott-Hamilton has always known.
She grew up in a home where studying encyclopedias with her brother replaced television and chores could be negotiated with reading.
Literacy is a constantly evolving topic and it has more to do with technology than ever before.
“Literacy is vitally important,” Ott-Hamilton said. “Not having those skills can severely impact someone’s self-esteem, and if that is impacted, it can also affect the jobs they can get and choices in life that they are not going to have.”
She explained that illiteracy goes beyond not being able to read, do math or write.
Even the word illiteracy is problematic, according to University Scholar and past president of the International Literacy Association (ILA), William H. Teale. “For a lot of people, when they hear the word illiteracy, they think that means people have no idea about reading or can’t read at all; in a lot of places, within certain countries, that may be the case,” Teale said. “There are plenty of people in the world who I believe don’t have adequate literacy skills and whose reading and writing skills are lower than they could or should be. I think it’s more like they’re not adequately literate to be able to give them the opportunities of life that they should have.”
Teale went on to explain that rather than categorizing a person as literate or illiterate, it makes more sense to think of it in a more linear way.
“There’s a continuum that exists along the lines of literacy from people who have very minimal skills, to people who have very highly developed skills,” he said.
Some factors leading to inadequate literacy can be related to home and environment where reading books and writing do not have a large emphasis in the home.
ILA Director of Public Affairs Dan Mangan said the association has provided teachers and leaders of all levels with resources and expertise and has set the standards and agendas for literacy instruction and evaluation for 60 years.
The ILA has built a global community of literacy practitioners that spreads across 75 countries and has developed and managed dozens of global projects addressing literacy issues across the developing world from Macedonia to Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
“Our research journals, publications, advocacy, professional development and standards for literacy educators have shaped and refined the instructional skills of tens of thousands of educators and, through their professional efforts, brought the gifts of literacy to millions of learners in all walks of life,” he said.
The importance of literacy is something that the ILA believes strongly is a basic human right.
“Literacy learning is the most fundamental education, the learning through which all other learning flows,” he said.
Without strong literacy skills, most people will struggle to realize their full economic potential and will not be able to function fully as citizens in democratic societies, take advantage of their legal rights, or find personal fulfillment, he explained; Research has established correlations between high levels of illiteracy and poor health, as well as criminal activity.
Deeper than the traditional problems with literacy is what literacy experts are calling the digital divide. This phenomenon is characterized by a lack of experience and understanding of what is known today as basic technological skills. This can be because of a lack of accessibility in areas of poverty or lower socioeconomic status.
“The digital divide, both in terms of access to devices and broadband as well as knowing and using specific digital literacies, is real,” Hicks said. “To the extent that demographic gaps exist, we know that people who earn lower incomes are the minority and are less likely to be digitally literate.”
Having less of an education in the digital aspects of literacy would most likely put people in those demographics at a disadvantage, especially when compared to their more digitally literate counterparts.
According to PEWInternet.org, the primary concern with the digital divide is not as much that people don’t have access to computers, but to what degree people are able to use current digital technologies.
The Pew Research Center released information showing a correlation between adult experience with technology for both career and personal use and socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity and subsequently, access to necessary technologies. It was also concluded that adults whose digital skills were in the less proficient range often couldn’t use computers or mobile devices for the use of searching for a job, thus furthering the problem.
Although a range of factors can contribute to inadequate literacy in children, Teale agreed that socioeconomic status was one of the biggest factors leading to literacy problems in the United States.
“There are devastating effects of poverty, one of which is that it’s pretty clear from the statistics that overall as a group, kids who grow up poor don’t do as well in reading and writing in our school system as kids who don’t grow up poor,” Teale said.
“By the same token, we should really pay attention to the fact that there are plenty of poor kids who grow up economically stressed who do just fine with reading and writing. If you grow up in economically stressed conditions, it doesn’t mean that you’re less capable of achievement in literacy or that you’re going to do really poorly in literacy.
“It’s not that they can’t, but it’s that we don’t have yet the kinds of systems that we need to be able to reach all of those kids”
The emergence of technologies is changing the way educators teach and students learn exponentially.
Professor of English and education at Central Michigan University Dr. Troy Hicks agreed, “I think that our individual experiences, as well as evidence drawn from many research studies, do show that technology, when used in critical and creative manner, can have positive effects on students’ literacy,” he said.
He explained that people need to help students think about when, how and why they are using different devices and services.
“Moreover, we need to invite them to be curators and creators of information, not just consumers,” he said.
Mangan said access to effective instruction and reading materials is critical, as well as having well-stocked libraries and providing digital media resources.
“A school can be resource and access rich,” Mangan said, “but ineffectual with respect to the digital literacy learning taking place in its classrooms.”
He explained that teachers need “strong formation and professional development with respect to the types of digital literacy instruction that will truly prepare students to function in the 21st century economy.”
Teale agreed that the developments in technology have paved the way for the future of literacy.
“There’s no doubt about the fact that the digital technologies that we’ve developed over the last 10 to 15 years especially, but even going back as far as 20 and 25 years, have changed the fundamental nature of literacy,” he said. “They’ve changed what it means to be a literate person in 2017.”
Teale explained that if a person tried to define what literacy means, it would be a significantly different definition than what was known to be a literate person in 1977. He said the definition of literacy is still evolving in the minds of the American people. “That’s something that I think we’re still working on,” he said, “We’re still trying to understand what implications [technology] has for education in our education system in the United States.”
He concluded that digital technologies have essentially redesigned literacy.
“They also are already changing the way we think, but they’re going to change the way we think even more in 50 or 200 years,” he said. “I think if people understood that a little better, they’d understand why it’s so important that we need to … reinvent the way we conceive of literacy and therefore, reinvent the way we teach literacy.”