Expanding ideas about text

Like Kayla, it is so interesting to see how my view and understanding of literacy has changed so much from a child. If you were to ask me as a kid what literacy meant I wouldn't have known how to respond. I did however, have an excellent positive association with reading throughout my entire elementary career. Texts were fun, engaging, and interactive. Not until middle school did educational texts become challenging as I was not familiar with their contexts as we were required to read and write with lab instructions, political texts, atlases, etc. For better or worse, texts in the elementary school setting seem to be revolved around the personified short story. While I had learned to manipulate texts in writing for all of middle school and high school, not until an AP English Literature class did my real understanding of the how challenging the writing process can be, in order to communicate clearly and in a congruent fashion. I learned that text can say a lot of words without really saying anything at all. The idea of a strong central thesis forever changed how I analyze a given text. Now in college, the first thing I do when reading any given text is look for a proposition stated or put forward for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or to be maintained against objections.

ELED 323 at BYU also shaped and expanded how I thought about texts. If a text is a shared code of communication, "text" could be facial expressions between two people. If braille is a shared code for blind people that is read with touch, not eyesight, can the sculptor "read" the texture of his creation as he runs his hands around the ceramic wheel? Of course. I probably never would have accepted abstract ideas such as this. Because of these expanded ideas of texts, we include art, architecture, music, and multimedia into liberal arts humanities studies. We would be limiting ourselves if we only studied text in the traditional sense (literature). Lastly, one of the major ideas that really effected me as a student and future teacher was the idea of critical literacy, an idea championed by Giroux and Friere. The idea that we need to teach young children how to identify social injustices, underlying messages, and hidden agendas is educationally revolutionary. I was not taught this skill until college, even though this is skill required for our world of politically charged statements and manipulative marketing.