WHAT IN THE “WORlD”?: A CLOSER LOOK AT CRITICAL LITERACY

Purpose
This activity provides you the opportunity to analyze the components of critical and digital literacy regarding the increased demands for students and the workforce.
*Step One: Quickwrite
First, read and think about Alvin Toffler’s quote from page 414 of his work Future Shock:
“The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new directions – how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” answer;
* explain Toffler’s stated message. What is Toffler directly saying?explain Toffler’s unstated message. What is Toffler implying?
*Step Two: Defining Critical Literacy
respond to the prompts to help you build a definition of critical literacy.
1. Explain how your textbook defines critical literacy
2. Explain why advocates of critical literacy want to increase students’ critical and social consciousness.
3.Describe ways that teachers can engage students in dialogue.
4.Describe ways that students can examine multiple meanings of text through various perspectives.
5.Identify WHICH GROUP(S) would prefer that individuals not have critical literacy skills, and explain why they would feel that way.

*Step Three: Impediments to Critical Thinking
Read and consider the following definition of ethnocentrism:
Ethnocentrism: a tendency an individual may have to view one’s own race or culture as privileged, based on the entrenched belief that one’s own group is superior to others. Explain how you can connect to this concept and provide a specific example.
Read and consider the following definition of sociocentrism:
Sociocentrism: the assumption that one’s own social group is inherently and self-evidently superior to all others; social conventions, beliefs, taboos seen as “the only correct way to think and live” (Paul & Elder, 2008) . Explain how you can connect to this concept and provide a specific example.
*Step Four: Considering Different Perspectives
Read and think about the following question:
How do you come to know something you never knew, never knew you could know, and that upon knowing it, you won’t ever be the same?
explain how you can personally connect to this question.

*Step Five: Defining Digital Literacy
Read and think about the following quote from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, and then respond to the questions in the spaces provided below.
“A person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment… Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media, to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments.
(Retrieved on 6/16/14 from: http://www.library.illinois.edu/diglit/definition.html
1.How do you read online differently than reading offline? Why is this important to know in today’s society
2.What is the connection between digital literacy and critical literacy?

SAMPLE SOLUTION

Step 1
Toffler Direct Sentiments
In the statement he gave concerning education, Toffler meant that for a person to be said to be literate, he/she ought to do things beyond just reading and writing. The individual must be able to learn, unlearn, as well as relearn new concepts in life.
Toffler’s Unstated Message
By evaluating Toffler’s book, it is evident that there is a lot of information that is not directly presented. First and foremost, he implied that when a human being opts to change, it comes with a lot of changes in the person’s social interactions. The person…