Community - AFTER

My group ended up visiting seven different places during our literacy exploration in Novi. We visited the public library, a grocery store, a restaurant, a putt-putt and go-kart racing place, a middle school football game, a tutoring center, and a mall. We noticed that many of these places had literacies in common. For instance, all of the places we visited exhibited social literacy.
Something that surprised us was how each place we visited had so many types of literacy. When we began planning our project, we thought that it was going to be difficult to find places that shared each type of literacy. However, to our surprise, we had an abundance of literacies represented, no matter which place we went.
Driving around the community didn’t help me as much as the initial conversations that I had with my students about their community. I learned which places the students love to visit (like paradise park), and which places their parents drag them to (the grocery store). It allowed me to see all of the different literacies that my students are being exposed to on a regular basis. Even though they may not be consciously thinking that they are learning about/through literacy, they are experiencing and participating in multiple types of literacy at any given place.
Knowing that my students are using literacy in the community as well as at school will help me better reach their interests and needs. It will also help me remember that my students are getting access to literacy, even if they are not necessarily seeing books at home. As the Compton-Lilly article stated, it is common for us to blame students’ lack of literacy learning on the fact that our students’ parents are not giving them books at home. After discovering all of the places were literacy is hiding in the community, I can no longer use this as an excuse for my students not succeeding in literacy. I just need to push myself to include various topics from the community that my students are familiar with. If I include information in the classroom that is personalized for them, they will be more likely to stay engaged in my lessons and therefore be more successful at learning literacy!