Hello, welcome to Module one. As we get started with the course in this module,

I want to take a few minutes to frame what exactly we're talking about when we talk about literacy as a social practice.

So first of all, when we talk about literacy, we're not just talking about the simple acquisition of reading,

writing skills, speaking and listening skills. Literacy is bigger than that.

It's a social practice. At its very most basic, it's the communication between two or more people.

There's you're always seeking to understand or be understood. There's a sender of messages and a receiver of messages.

So really, when we're talking about literacy, we're talking about all of the ways in which people use language and symbols,

gestures, different things in their everyday lives. So if you think about that, all of the ways that people use language in their everyday lives,

you can imagine that there's not just one way of doing this.

There are many, many ways of doing this, many literacies. This is going to vary from home to home, culture to culture, across time.

And usually there's some power involved in this and we'll get into that in a little bit.

But it has to do with what counts as literacy. So allow me to just dig in just ever so briefly to a little bit of theory here.

So when we think about acquiring literacy, there's this idea that James Gee,

a social linguistic researcher, has proposed between discourses with a little "d",

which is what we think about when we think about back and forth communication, and then Big "D" Discourses

and big "D" Discourses are those socially accepted ways of using language or expression or artifacts,

those ways of thinking or feeling or valuing and acting that helps us to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaning group or social network.

So think about in your own home, your own family. What are the socially accepted ways of being in your family?

How does your family use language? How does your family use expression or gestures?

So think about we have two different types of discourse that we learn our primary discourse are

those ways that we are socialized into using these languages and ways of being in our homes.

So every single child gets, you know, is socially socialized into their primary discourse.

Then we have our secondary discourses and these are the discourses that we the ways of being, the ways of using language,

the ways of valuing, the ways of acting that we have in our secondary institutions such as school.

It doesn't just have to be an institution. It could be a particular group you're part of.

For example, my husband's a fisherman and there are all these languages associated with fishing.

There's ways of being associated with fishing, things that people who identify as fishermen know or do or value.

So our primary discourse is those ones that develop in our homes.

Secondary discourses are those ones that we learn as we interact with other institutions.

So here's an example of primary discourse versus secondary discourse.

Think about texting, right? That's one of our ways of using language in our everyday lives.

So it certainly fits within this idea of literacy. Right?

And so we have mom here texting a child and saying, what does IDK,

LY and TTYL mean, because she doesn't know this text lingo and the child responds

with the definition, I don't know, love you, talk to you later.

That's what those things mean. But the mother does not recognize the secondary discourse that the you know, that many of us have picked up.

I mean, think about texting, language or even emojis and things like that and how they communicate.

That's not something that we learned. Well, it's becoming more more of a primary discourse for our youngest kiddos now.

But many of us didn't learn that, didn't, it was not our primary discourse.

That was a secondary discourse we learned as we became socialized into the ways of using text.

Right? So the mom doesn't understand that the child is defining those terms for her and says, OK, I'll ask your sister.

So that's one example. Now, let's bring it into what we would think about in a school space.

Right. And this image, you see a very, sort of, what I would almost call intense eye contact going on here.

Right. So can you imagine I know that I, with my own children, have said "look at me when I'm talking to you."

Right. Like, I expect them to make eye contact. And that's way in our culture, in the American culture, of conveying that you're listening.

Right. But in many other cultures, it's considered a sign of disrespect to look somebody in a position of power in the eye,

In some cultures, is a sign of disrespect. Look, anybody in the eye like that, but it's certainly when there's this power differential.

So imagine you have a student whose primary discourse is Korean, for example, and they come to school and you expect them to look you in the eye.

But that's not how they've been socialized. That's not a way of acting that they had at home.

So this is a new discourse that they have to learn, a secondary discourse, the ways of being in school versus the ways of being at home.

You can think about this also when you think about just languages, right.

Not just languages other than English, but also different variations of English, such as African-American vernacular English.

The way of using language at home differs from the expectations of using language at school.

And so when students have a very large mismatch between their primary discourse and their secondary discourse,

it just takes them a little bit longer to acquire that secondary discourse.

Whereas when you have a student whose ways of using language are more similar to

the ways that language and those ways of being and valuing and acting are in school,

there's less of a mismatch. And they're going to acquire that school literacy,

that academic literacy a little bit easier. As teachers, when we recognize that

there that there are these primary discourses and these secondary discourses,

we can help to bridge that gap and we can honor those primary discourses even as we're

working to provide access to the academic literacy or the secondary discourses.

So in a nutshell, when we think about this and we think about those home primary discourses and those ways of being that we learn at home.

All of that those languages,

those literacies that we've been using in our home and that we come to use in our other social settings all impact our identity.

Languages and literacies are wrapped up in our identity, in our ways of being.

And so what we want to do is help our students to identify positive identities with literacy.

And the way we use assessments impacts this.

So let's move on to talking about assessments here. First of all, assessments have power.

We all know this when we think about any of our

tests that service gatekeeper's, so it could be when we're thinking about state tests that our students take or it could be thinking about ACT or

SAT or GRE or some of those assessments that serve as predictors or acceptances into particular colleges or programs.

Right. There's power there.

They they define just, for example, our state tests, our state tests are used to literally define a school as failing or succeeding.

And our students can be then categorized as proficient or not proficient on the basis of these tests.

So there's power in those tests. We already know this, but in this course, we're really we're not going to be talking about those assessments.

In this course,

we're going to be talking about those formative assessments that we use as teachers in our classrooms to help guide our instruction.

So these are the formative assessments. They're actually forming our instruction and they're forming the learning that

students are getting and they're also forming those literate identities. Right.

So the assessments we use in our classroom have power too. They have power to guide our instruction.

They have power to support learning. So when we're thinking about literacy assessment,

we're really thinking about things that teachers are using to guide instruction and support learning.

Now, let's think about this in terms of take a look at this piece of literacy work, this is a literacy product that a student has created, right? Now,

you can look at this and you can, you know, make some judgments about it.

I'm sure that's what you're doing. That's what we do as teachers. Right. We look at this.

We make some judgments, right? Now, I want you to

imagine the different ways of responding to this piece of literacy work. So, in this image on the left, we see a teacher who,

from the body language, we can tell is probably not pleased with the work and might be saying something like, you know, "What are you talking about?

Girls don't play football." Right? Like that would be a way of responding that would impact somebody's identity.

Right? But in terms of literacy, think about that teacher responding and going,

"You did not put the proper space between your words.

We don't use all capital letters when we write. You know how to spell the word "to." All of those things

focus on aspects of the the piece of work that are not yet there.

Right? That could be a focus of instruction. On the other hand, if you look at the image on the right hand side,

you see a teacher who might be saying, "Oh, wow, I love how you really tried to sound out football here.

I can see the beginning sound. The F, right. The the you use that F for that fff sound."

So here we're honoring what is there. Right. And it has an impact in the way children come to see themselves, but also the way we talk about them.

You can imagine the teacher on the left hand side might be saying, "Well, this this child is really struggling.

This child really doesn't have very much literacy skills yet." Whereas the teacher on the right might be saying,

"You know, some of the things I see the student doing are using initial consonants to,

develop words, forming letters, working on putting spaces between words, drawing a picture to represent an image, a story."

So this teacher on the right, and again, I'm just the images are meant to serve as examples here,

But you see the point I'm making. The language we use to respond to students work and describe their development,

it has the power to shape their identities. So as we move into this module,

about what literacy assessment as a social practice looks like.