Literacy and Democracy: are they one and the same?

May 27, 2013 1 Comment

digitalwordcloudEffective communication is the cornerstone of a democratic and literate society. And everyone has the right to engage freely. There are few people in the western world who would disagree with this. But the reality is that there are groups of people who have a much more limited capacity to communicate, than perhaps, a generation ago.

To understand why this is, we must first understand the nature of a ‘literate society’. The boundaries of literacy are changing. Where once, literacy meant being able to read and write, these days literacy necessarily incorporates use of the various technologies and platforms utilised to interact meaningfully in society.

So much of our interaction occurs online, that limited access to the hardware (smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc)  means limited engagement. Shopping, watching television, booking accommodation and travel, or movie and concert tickets, paying bills, banking, and importantly – socialising, is increasing conducted in cyberspace. True, these are all first-world activities, but our reality is that if we cannot (or do not or will not) engage at this level, we cannot effectively consume or contribute to the society in which we live.

To all but the digital natives, these things do not come naturally. They need to be taught. And while once teaching our kids to read and write meant arming them with literacy for life, now teaching literacy means so much more than reading and writing. Literacy has become much more about being able to consume and create a range of multimedia in multimodal formats. Teaching kids to become life-long contributing literate members of society means providing them with the skills to decode a range technologies not yet invented, for purposes not yet defined, to engage in occupations not yet created or identified.

But what happens when subsections of the community are not able to access the tools required to become literate entities in this new and emerging technological environment? Are they relegated to a further position of disadvantage because of it? And who might these people be? The answers to these questions may surprise you. It’s not only socio-economic disadvantage that precludes people from engaging meaningfully.

Even if people do have access to the necessary hardware, if we don’t have the knowledge or skills to teach kids effective literacy, how do we teach them appropriate social and economic engagement?

And it’s not just kids who are in danger of becoming less-than-literate in a 21st century sense. There is a generation of older people who have not had access to digital instruction, and their children and grandchildren (gen x-ers and y-s) who may have adopted the technology but are self-taught and not necessarily offay with the ins and outs of effective engagement. It’s these generations who tend to leave themselves wide open and are overrepresented as victims of hackers, identity theft or trolls. And it’s these same generations who are teachers and parents. Therein lay the issue.

Kids are starting school with the knowledge and expectation that they can and will engage and perform technologically at a level that, more often than not, surpasses that of the adults in their lives. Parents and teachers want to do the best by their kids, but working in schools, I get to see both ends of the stick. I hear about kids as young as five accessing the internet on their ipods and DSs, in their bedrooms unsupervised, and scrolling through youtube videos looking for something to watch, and inadvertently accessing a Barbie video – a pornographic parody of a Barbie video. At five years old. At the other end of the scale is the 11-year-old who is not allowed access to social media of any kind, which means she is ostracised from her peer group socially and unable to engage effectively in digital citizenship lessons at school. Both sets of parents want the best for their kids, but both are damaging their kids in irreversible ways by not having a full understanding of what it is to be literate in a digital world.

21st century literacy is about ‘reading’ danger, communicating effectively, differentiating between a ‘selfie’ and sexting. 21st century literacy is about creating meaningful content, engaging in appropriate texting, understanding cyber etiquette, and locking down your profile. 21st century literacy is about understanding copyright and plagiarism, and recognising reliable research. And most importantly 21st century literacy is about knowing how to communicate via soundbite, image, video, and text — appropriately, positively, comfortably and meaningfully. How literate are you in the 21st century?

 

 

 

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The trouble with reading

April 29, 2012 4 Comments

“I used to read just because I really liked reading, now the thought of opening a book makes me wanna puke.”

I felt incredibly sad when a 13-year-old girl said this to me yesterday.

I was doing an exercise in tense with some twelve and thirteen-year-olds in my teen writers’ groups. I asked them to write a one-paragraph recount of a single event from the school holidays they’d just finished. It was a straightforward activity where they’d write in first-person past tense and then rewrite the same paragraph in first-person present tense. The focus was not on the content of the paragraph, but on the process of identifying and editing consistent tense. I thought it was a simple activity that would ease the kids into another term of writers’ group. I was wrong. It created chaos!

They groaned and complained and tried everything tactic under the sun to avoid doing the exercise. Eventually I conceded.

“Okay, let’s just talk about it then.”

“Nothing to talk about,” they chorused.

“What do you mean nothing to talk about? You just had two weeks holiday, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing!”

“You must’ve done something. What did you do after you got out of bed each morning?”

The discussion that followed was certainly NOT what I was expecting.

In my mind, school holidays meant chilling out with friends, maybe catching a movie or going shopping, sometimes a camping trip (even if it was in the 5 acre backyard), or (mostly) just relaxing in the sun by myself with a good book.

Reading  was my bliss. Everything else in my life melted away and I lost myself in another reality—a more exciting, alternate reality that was safer and kinder than the one I was living.  Reading created a space in my life where, for a few hours at a time, I didn’t have to deal with the stress or dysfunction that was my childhood. Reading was my peace. But I digress…

The kids in my writers’ groups are bright, engaged students and keen readers and writers. They hadn’t balked at a writing exercise before and I wanted to understand why. I targeted one of the more vocal/social kids and asked her to give me a blow-by-blow account of her first week of holidays.

“Homework, watch tv, wander around the house, more pretend homework…”

“You too?” one of the others asked.

I stayed silent as the conversation took off and the rest of the group joined in. I listened. And was surprised. And saddened. These kids spent their school holidays counting down the days until term started and they could get back to school. They didn’t have the freedom to just ‘play.’ They couldn’t have friends over or visit others and hang out doing kid stuff. Some didn’t have the freedom to choose what television programs or DVDs  they watched, or even what books they read. One even had the home wireless switched off before her parents left for work to prevent her ‘wasting time’ online.

Mostly, they had to do homework. But being in Year 7 they didn’t have a whole lot of set homework to do, certainly not enough to keep them occupied everyday of the holidays. So they did ‘pretend’ homework to appease their caregivers. They locked themselves in their rooms and spent the time online, or for those without access to internet, they read. Because there was nothing else they could do.

Their lives are about achieving academic success. And it seems that developing social skills and interpersonal communication skills that result from unstructured ‘play’ is not valued for these kids. Hearing them talk about how they feel being restricted to the family home, with or without anyone for company (some were only children with both parents working), was heartbreaking.

But I guess what was even more heartbreaking was witnessing the beginnings of the loss of reading for pleasure. Because, as they told me, there is nothing fun about being forced to read books that were not necessarily of their own choosing, just to pass the time.

Reading was becoming a pressure cooker—a vacuum into which they resisted falling. Resentment of all books was seeping into their consciousness. Some began to forget the pleasure of anticipation when they discovered a book they could really get into. The joy of browsing through a bookshop or library reading blurbs and flicking through the first few pages to find something that appealed was becoming part of a childhood they were being forced to leave behind.

As the pressure to achieve began to weigh heavily on them, reading became just one more thing they ‘had’ to do during an adolescence and young adulthood that spared no time for leisure in the race to university.

Those who managed to continue reading for the sake of reading, or reading for pleasure, did so as a clandestine activity for the more rebellious, as the older they became the more it was perceived as “time wasted” by some of the adults in their lives.

I’m not sure if it’s the nature of the selective school they attend, or if it’s a cultural thing (I suspect the latter), but I found it incredibly saddening. I know that literacy is a vital aspect to improving educational outcomes for all kids. But I’m not alone in the knowledge that literacy development will increase exponentially in kids across the academic spectrum if they can choose to read narrative that is relevant to them, rather than being forced to read for the sake of results.

Reading for pleasure is a joy that ALL kids need an opportunity to experience. And to foster a lifelong love of reading, we need to allow kids access to material of their own choosing, to read at their own pace, in their own time. Whether that is under the covers in bed at night with a torch, or on the lounge at home in the school holidays, please, just let kids read fiction.

 

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Hunger Games and Chocolate Wars: suitable reading for kids?

April 9, 2012 Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, an assistant school librarian asked me if I thought The Hunger Games trilogy was suitable reading for a ten-year-old. I couldn’t give her an opinion because at that stage I hadn’t read it. I said I’d get back to her and borrowed the books from the library to read.

I wish I hadn’t.

It’s not because the trilogy wasn’t a good read, it was. It’s an engaging, fast paced, action-packed story with characters that are flawed, and real. Suzanne Collins writes the narrative in the first person from the perspective of key character 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen.

The premise is a post-apocalyptic dystopian society where annually, each of the twelve districts of the country Panem must select two children between the ages of 12 and 18 and put them forward as tributes for reality TV program The Hunger Games. The Capitol celebrates the kids, parades them before the audience, then forces them to kill each other while the whole country watches the ‘show’ live on television.

It is violent, and terrible, and gut wrenching. Watching confused, traumatised children murder each other in a desperate bid to get home to their families is heartbreaking. And experiencing the story from a 16-year-old who volunteers to take her 12-year-old sister’s place as tribute because she thinks she has a better capacity to kill and therefore stay alive a little longer before meeting her inevitable demise, makes it all the more horrific.

My first response was to empathise with the parents’ whose children were stolen from them by the Capitol, the ‘government’ of Panem, knowing that of the 24 children taken, only one would return alive. My second thought was to wonder how young readers deal with the horrendous (though at times stylised) abuses depicted throughout the books.

So I asked them. Adults who had read the books expressed concern about the violence and told me they wouldn’t allow their younger teens to read them. They didn’t want them exposed to concepts and emotions they weren’t ready to deal with. But kids had a different view. I had the first book with me when I visited a primary school. One of the Year 6 kids (11-year-old) asked me what I thought; I told him I thought it was awful. He responded with a shrug and a dismissive “yeah, but people are awful to each other,” and then went on to chat enthusiastically about a particular plot twist in the second book of the trilogy Catching Fire.

I was stunned. The school is in a middle class area in the northern suburbs of Sydney and I pondered on the casual acceptance of violence and abuse in the experience of this little boy. I put it to the kids at the high school I was at the next day. And I was very interested to find a similar analysis of those who had read the books.

These kids were the target demographic of 13+ readers. They acknowledged its violence and the ‘awfulness’ of the plot and confirmed the acceptance of the 11-year-old about people being awful to each other.

“Didn’t you watch Kony?” One kid asked.

I did. And then I realised. In the global technological context of our current society, these kids know that such atrocities actually do occur. In other parts of the world kids their age do get stolen from their families, and are forced to murder other innocents, or be murdered themselves. They’re maligned and abused and have to do terrible things to stay alive. And governments do little to stop it.  And families grieve.

They get it. And I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. I guess kids don’t hold on to innocence as long as they used to.

Years ago at uni, we had a similar discussion about The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. The Chocolate War is still banned from some school libraries in the States because of its explicit and violent content. It is a graphic depiction about bullying in the context of a Catholic Boys School. It too, is real and haunting. It’s about a targeted campaign of bullying against a boy who refuses to take part in the school’s chocolate drive. The characters are flawed and real and there is nothing stylised about the violence and abuse depicted.

The adults are too preoccupied or too focused on personal gain and promotion to challenge the status quo and the victimised boy suffers endlessly and needlessly, powerless to protect himself. The book was first published in 1974 and was a real wake-up call to educators and parents about the nature of bullying. It sparked, and continues to do so, many discussions and debates, not only about the nature of bullying but also about whether or not children should have access to such reading material, particularly at school.

The Hunger Games discussions are reminiscent of these. I think that as adults we underestimate the capacity of children to process what they read. Whether or not we want to accept it, many children are aware—some experience personally—the reality of violence and crime. And stories such as these reflect that awareness and give it a context for which adults can then generate discussion with them about the hows and whys of such things.

So the answer I would give the librarian who asked me? It depends of the maturity of the child reader and the capacity they have to process concepts of which they may or may not have awareness. I would suggest a parent or other adult read the books first so that they might have an understanding of the premise and concepts, and keep the discussion going as the child progresses through the books.

I don’t agree with censorship, I do believe in the value of discussion.

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Who do you write for?

March 9, 2012 1 Comment

Writing —like reading— is a very subjective pursuit. People write and/or read for a myriad of reasons, ranging from catharsis to leisure, as a profession, a boredom buster or in pursuit of knowledge. To achieve success in the field a writer needs to first develop an understanding of why they themselves write, then get to know why people read, and develop an understanding of the readership for which they write.

Sound daunting? It can be. But if you are serious about being a writer and you dream about making a living out of your writing, it’s important to understand every aspect of what makes a successful writer, apart from the obvious—having the ability to write! Rightly or wrongly, some of the most successful writers (particularly eAuthors) are not necessarily the ones with the best writing ability.

So how do you make sure that you are successful in attracting a readership to your book? As I mentioned before, thinking about why you write, what you write, and for whom you write is imperative. Understanding your target audience can mean the difference between your book collecting dust on a shelf (physical or electronic) or being consistently downloaded and read.

Writing for yourself is a fabulous thing to do, but don’t be surprised if others don’t engage with it at the rate you’d like them to. Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether or not anyone reads your work if building a readership is not your focus. What is meaningful and enjoyable to you personally may not necessarily be what appeals to others.

An experienced and successful author once told me that the road to success was to select a genre and stick to it. At the time, I dismissed this advice as being unnecessarily pejorative. But now, a few years down the track, I understand what she meant. An enormous amount of time and energy goes into building an audience, so it is more productive and effective to focus your energies on one particular demographic.

Firstly, you need to identify the genre in which you most enjoy writing. For me it’s young adult fiction. Probably because I spend a lot of time around this demographic. I am familiar with their vernacular, their behaviours, their hopes and fears and dreams. And their realities — harsh and unjust as they sometimes are. The old adage ‘write what you know’ works for me here. This doesn’t mean you (or I) will be stuck with the same genre forever, but it is a good idea to establish yourself first. When you become better known, you’ll be able to diversify, and carry your readership with you.

Once you have identified your genre (and sub-genre), you need to refine your target readership. Will it be gender specific? The novel I am writing now is a young adult crime fiction. The readership I am targeting is boys aged between thirteen and fifteen.  Typically with young adult fiction, boys won’t read ‘books for girls’ but girls will read everything, so targeting this narrowly will enable me to capture of broader audience than my focus.

The next step is to think about the components necessary to draw this group in. Of course, I am speaking very generally here, but boys of this age typically prefer fast-paced, action-packed narrative that is outcomes based. They also prefer series. How do I know this? Apart from the anecdotal information I pick up working in a high school as a writer-in-residence, I did my research.

Local libraries are a great resource for info about reading behaviour. So too, are bookshops (those left standing). Pick a less busy time to visit either and ask those who work there about popular titles, plots, and demographics. I’ve had some fabulous conversations of this nature with people for whom books are a passion. Arts sections of newspapers commonly run features about book trends, bestseller lists are indicative of genres that are popular and will reflect local as well as national or international trends.

Another important thing to think about is matching content, plot and storyline, to the demographic. There is no point targeting 30-35 year old men for your readership if you are writing romance—they won’t read it. Now, I’m sure there are probably men in this age group who love reading romance (but may never admit it); there are always exceptions. But I’m speaking generally; you need to consider ‘the group’ you are targeting, rather than individuals within it.

And don’t underestimate the power of sourcing information word-of-mouth. Find other readers. If you are a writer, then you will be a reader and know other readers. Ask them. If you write for adults, join a book club where you get to hear and participate in discussions about books. You’ll learn the likes, dislikes and preferences of other readers. And seek out and talk to people in the demographic for which you want to write. If you can write narrative with plots that people want to read, there is a higher probability that well-written books will sell. Consultation is invaluable in developing plot. Knowing where to find and how to target your chosen readership to promote your work is for another post.

 ”Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” Sylvia Plath

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How appropriate is your writing?

February 3, 2012 2 Comments

I have a question for authors: do you consider conceptual content in the creation and development of your narrative to target specific subgroups within the Young Adult field? Or do you write for a general Young Adult demographic and hope that the readers will find your work?

The reason I ask is because this morning I was looking at the reading ages of Year 7 students assigned to my writers’ groups. One of the groups is comprised of 12-year-old girls with reading ages of 17+. Reading ages are based on a student’s level of understanding of the text before them and 17+ is the highest score they can get. It means that these 12-year-olds are capable of reading material that is way beyond their chronological age.

It creates an interesting dilemma. Being able to understand what they are reading at a cognitive level doesn’t necessarily mean they have the social or emotional maturity to process it. I know firsthand. I was one of those kids. Starved for appropriate reading material as a child, I was constantly scouring my house for any book (magazines didn’t do it for me) that may have found its way inside, irrespective of content appropriateness.

You see, I grew up in a household of non-readers who did not understand my voracious need to consume reading material. They tried to accommodate my need to read by giving me books for birthdays and Christmases. But they were kids’ books—understandable I suppose, given that I was a kid.  And I would devour them in hours and be left yearning for more.

There was the odd occasion when a popular-culture book would find its way into the house and I, in all my juvenile wisdom, would pinch it from my mother’s bedside table, take it back to my room and read until the early hours of the morning.  Of course, reading Mills and Boone at age ten probably scarred me for life. But the book that terrified me for years was The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty. I was eleven when I read that. And with catholic religious instruction in my early childhood, I was convinced that the devil was alive and well and would possess me in my sleep. I spent the next few months walking around like a zombie because the nightmares that plagued me left me so sleep deprived I could barely function. At about the same age, I read Jaws (1974) by Peter Benchley. Reading that meant I was too terrified to swim. I wouldn’t get into the water. Any water. Not even my cousins three-foot deep above-ground swimming pool. Just in case.

There was no reading material available to me to fill the gap between cognitive development and social/emotional development. The two don’t necessarily advance at the same rate, and the disparity can sometimes be great. So without having someone around with enough awareness of the issue and knowledge of the literary world who can guide and advise, a child can be left flailing while attempting to fill a void they cannot identify and of which they have no understanding.

Thankfully, nowadays there are a few more options for young readers with chronologically older reading ages. In the technological context of childhood these days (ugh, I sound sooo old), information is so much more readily available to kids. They’re able to get online and seek out titles. They can search library catalogues themselves, they can source books from author websites, read blogs, join reading and book communities and connect with other readers like them. But there still seems to be a bit of a gap in the market.

I asked this particular writers’ group what kind of material they like to read. They’ve mostly all read the Harry Potter and Twilight series (remember they are 12), but many also enjoy the classics from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. The Cherub series by Robert Muchamore was very popular as “something to get lost in to pass the time”, and the Tomorrow series (Tomorrow When the War Began et al) by John Marsden also featured highly. Romance, fantasy and mystery, were genres of choice.

None of these authors (except Bronte and Austen, of whom I was not even aware until I’d reached high school and found the library) were writing when I was young. And I’m pleased to note that for the past ten years or so, more authors (many of whom dealt with similar reading issues themselves as children) are developing a greater awareness of the need to target their narrative to specific groups of kids.

So again, my question to authors is this: do you consider conceptual content in the creation and development of your narrative, and target specific subgroups within the Young Adult field? Or do you write for a general Young Adult demographic and hope that the readers will find your work?

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