New Literacies Stance in Teaching ELA

   When we start to think about new literacies and using it to teach in an English Language Arts classroom people instantly think about using fancy technology.  However, new literacies being taught in the classroom doesn't necessarily need to involve any technology because that's not the main focus.  Miller and McVee in Multimodal Composing in Classrooms talks about a grad student and her experiences of teaching and trying to incorporate new literacies into her classroom.  She learns through experience of what new literacies actually is because when she starts teaching in the beginning of the school year she has the students doing activities that are outside of the box and not traditional such as using music and sitcoms to teach about storylines.  She then starts to move back to the more traditional way of teaching when she moves into her unit on short stories which instantly loses students' attention.

   In the end she learns of how she teach using new literacies to keep her students' attention and learning.  Not all of the activities she has her students do involve technology which I find to be awesome.  Technology I believe is something that should be incorporated last and not used as a hook since it is possible to teach with new literacies with out the dependence on technology.  Many of the activities required students to pull from their own knowledge and experience from their surroundings outside of school such as music, television, and even video games.  Letting students build use what they know and love outside of the classroom and to bring it into the classroom is a great new way of looking at different literacies since it has evolved past just plain paper and print.

    I can imagine myself taking some of her ideas and trying to apply them to a classroom of my own because she used many great ideas for teaching on a whole other level.  There is a time and place for everything, but she incorporates a tiny bit of traditional teaching that students are still writing, but now they have a purpose and a connection to what they are doing.