Creating Cultural Awareness through New Literacies: ECI 521 Teaching Literature for Young Adults
Question: How to build cultural awareness and empathy from using new literacies the classroom?
ECI 521 Teaching Literature for Young Adults focused on how to incorporate new literacies in the English classroom. Since this was one of the first classes I took a few summers ago there was an emphasis on how to incorporate web 2.0 tools in the classroom which I was not accustomed to. I am also ashamed to admit that I was not that familiar with the plethora of multicultural novels available for young adults to read. For my ALP assignment I decided to create a project that focused on these two aspects of my teaching that didn't even exist at the time. I created the assignment based on Pink's theory of empathy and the importance of getting to understand another culture. This was the best way to address the problem of all the stereotypes and intolerance that a good amount of cultures face. I quickly learned that students want to learn about diverse cultures, because despite a few differences, we are all HUMAN BEINGS. Students begin to realize that we share the same human elements with people from all around this world. My ALP assignment has students engaging in several types of new literacies (Wiki Pages, Flip Cameras) to understand the different cultures of the world.
Multicultural ALP Video:
ECI 521 Teaching Literature for Young Adults focused on how to incorporate new literacies in the English classroom. Since this was one of the first classes I took a few summers ago there was an emphasis on how to incorporate web 2.0 tools in the classroom which I was not accustomed to. I am also ashamed to admit that I was not that familiar with the plethora of multicultural novels available for young adults to read. For my ALP assignment I decided to create a project that focused on these two aspects of my teaching that didn't even exist at the time. I created the assignment based on Pink's theory of empathy and the importance of getting to understand another culture. This was the best way to address the problem of all the stereotypes and intolerance that a good amount of cultures face. I quickly learned that students want to learn about diverse cultures, because despite a few differences, we are all HUMAN BEINGS. Students begin to realize that we share the same human elements with people from all around this world. My ALP assignment has students engaging in several types of new literacies (Wiki Pages, Flip Cameras) to understand the different cultures of the world.
Multicultural ALP Video: