New Literacies, Standards, and Teacher Education

Abstract

Introduction Information literacy is not a concept; however, impact of Information Age exacerbated its importance and expanded types of literacies (Smith, 2002). A general focus on library and literacy has now become a complex concept incorporating multiple literacies. Shapiro and Hughes (1996), recognizing this complexity, recommended that we conceive of literacy as a new liberal arts, one as essential as basic liberal arts were to educated persons in medieval society. addition, Breivik (1998) explained that recent and ongoing explosion of has entirely and forever changed landscape and described bottom line as: When will this campus embrace literacy programs? (p. 6). Dorr and Besser (2002) reported In addition to literacy--and traditional reading and writing or print literacy--other literacies have been or are emerging now as important (p. 6). The California State University System (CSUS, 1995) defined information competence as the fusing or integration of library literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, technological literacy, ethics, critical thinking, and communication skills (p. 2). Focusing on teacher education's role in relation to these literacies, Metcalfe (Dorr & Besser, 2002) stated: With proliferation of technology in public and private arenas, it is for teacher education programs to develop strategies for ensuring that teacher candidates are able to understand complexity of literacy. Teachers must be prepared to use technology for their professional growth and learning. addition, teachers need to be able to teach in ways that connect to students' lives and expand their students' understandings, knowledge and use of technology. (p. 4) The National Forum on Information Literacy (National Forum, 2002) was to work with teacher education programs to ensure that teachers could integrate literacy into instruction. However, in its Progress Report on Information Literacy (National Forum, 1998), Forum reported that no progress had been realized toward modification of teacher education and performance expectations to include literacy concerns. Literacy Standards absence of national standards, many departments of education and school districts began as early as 1989 to develop literacy competency standards. Some of these were very detailed and complex, such as those developed in Texas, California, and Louisiana (OERI 2002). Then with renewed interest in development of performance or outcomes based standards, professional organizations, including NCTE, NCSS, IRA, ECE, CEC, incorporated literacy competencies into program standards. As National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education planned for NCATE 2000, revised accreditation standards for school, college, department of education (SCDE) and focused on outcomes, constituent organizations were required to develop standards. The majority of professional organizations and state departments have revised standards, developed curricular emphases, and issued content standards. All of these or revised standards include components related to literacy, technological literacy, and/or other literacies. The American Association of School Librarians and Association for Educational Communications and Technology issued a significant publication, Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning (1998), which addressed P-12 competencies. Nine literacy standards were identified and levels of proficiency items within each standard and examples of potential situations and content-area standards were delineated. Then Association of College & Research Libraries (2000) issued its Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.