21st Century Literacies

Howard Gardner contends that "literacies, skills, and disciplines ought to be pursued as tools that allow us to enhance our undertanding of important questions, topics, and themes." Today learners become literate by learning to read and write.  They can analyze, compare, evaluate and interpret multiple representations from a variety of disciplines and subjects, including texts, photographs, artwork, and data.  Learners can then form their own opinions and form their own point of view.

However in the 21st century literacy is everything from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms. They are linked with life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. According to the NCTE twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
  
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
  
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
  
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
  
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
  
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

• References:  Retrieved from: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/

on 18 March 2012

• Retrieved from: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentdefinition

on 18 March 2012

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