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We Don’t All Teach Literacy. We Do Teach Students, Though.
Whenever I tweet about pedagogy on social media, English / Language Arts (ELA) teachers always reply with “We’re all literacy teachers.” Few axioms unnerve me quite the way this one does and it comes up often.
I get it, too. In the age of Common Core State Standards, the adage has taken on a new level of urgency. Across the country, administrators put their English, science, and social studies teachers in one room and said “You’re all incorporating these standards into your classroom in this way.” Non-fiction texts such as articles and reports were connected to literacy markers like books and newspapers, all evidence of students’ ability to decode and make meaning of texts. Though math had its own set of standards (and science started to crowd review theirs), the push to label everyone literacy became too strong.
Of course, there’s precedent for this movement before David Coleman and company came to symbolize the movement. Folks across the spectrum, from Paulo Freire, E.D. Hirsch, Deborah Meier, and Ted Sizer, have put in works that influence our position today. Yet, I believe the current education zeitgeist suggests we all consider ourselves literacy teachers because … some expert says so.
Too much of the rationale infers that literacy matters more than every other subject in PK-12 education…
