When teachers give students knowledge, they are preparing them to be real life, functioning members of society. The contemporary definition of literacy is, "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts" (Beecher, 2023). With this definition in mind, we can see how important it is to expose students to different texts with views of all kinds. This allows for students to gather evidence and form their own opinions surrounding real life scenarios. This is essential if schools wish to prepare their students for college and careers. By including things like current events into classrooms, students are able to take small bits of information about the world around them without being totally thrown to the wolves.
There was a Ted Talk we had to watch for an assignment in this class. The Ted Talk was hosted by Sydney Chaffee. She talked about how many teachers disagree with connecting social justice to the classroom and for teachers to stop being social justice warriors. I agree with Sydney on this and responded to the class discussion with: if we put education in a vacuum, we are putting the kids at a disadvantage because we would be showing them that their identities and experiences don't pertain to what they're learning and vice versa. It is important to connect social justice and education because students need to be able to understand history and how it is connected to everything around them. This pertains directly to the literacy of students. When I am teaching students about argumentative essays, it is not just about fulfilling the common core requirement that will carry them through academia. It is about the underlying skills they develop. These skills being: the ability to critically think about someone's argument, analyze it, and then be able to judge it based on the knowledge they gain. This sets them up to become active members of their community and builds the fundamentals they need to change the world. This should be any teacher's dream. It is incredibly important for schools to incorporate life skills into curriculum, so students care more about and have more of a say in what they learn and how they learn it.
Work Cited Beecher, C. (2023, July 19). Chapter 1. what is literacy? Multiple Perspectives on Literacy. Methods of Teaching Early Literacy. https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/teachingearlyliteracy/chapter/what-is-literacy-multiple-perspectives-on-literacy/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLiteracy%20is%20the%20ability%20to,materials%20associated%20with%20varying%20contexts.