Reading and Discussion #12

RESPONSE TO CHAPTER SIX:

1. How did the Ask Anansi game support critical literacies?

By making students “indigenous anthropologists” (Avila & Pandaya, 2013) students were challenged to look at their community South Los Angeles (“South Central”) as both insiders and outsiders.  Students were challenged to ask questions about their community and select important issues facing their environment.  This helped provide some input into the creation of the game, and determined the themes the game would cause them to investigate.  This asking questions and evaluating one’s own culture and community supports critical literacies. 

2. How did the Ask Anansi game support academic literacies?

Three things in the game supported academic literacies: First the log the students kept while figuring out the solutions to the clues caused them to keep a record of the deductive reasoning they were doing.  Second, the role play itself caused them to engage in real conversations with people in their school and community which helps “civic development” (Avila & Pandaya, 2013) by turning concepts in to actions.  Third, the frame narrative of the game was that the students had to somehow satisfy Anansi’s “insatiable need” for a “good story” (Avila & Pandaya, 2013), and this potentially helped students to view the project as a narrative. 

3. How did the Ask Anansi game support digital literacies?

Students used mobile phones, and iPods to communicate with the teacher, decipher clues, and log solving the clues.  Students also used the internet to do research when necessary to help make it through the various challenges of the game.  As the author points out, the way technology helped students use participate in the use of media without “overly relying on complicated digital tools” (Avila & Pandaya, 2013).  This integrated use of technology supported digital literacies.

4. What is meant by the term "reading the word and reading the world and writing the world"? Give an example from the chapter.

In the activity, students took what they read, and were made to apply it to the world by asking questions and evaluating their community as a group.  As “the class began enacting critical digital literacies practices in both online and physical environments” they were challenged to “build their own meaning and critique of the inequities within their lives” (Avila & Pandaya, 2013).  This activity then empowered the students to become active, rather than passive, citizens… thus equipping people who will write the world.

A QUOTE I LIKE FROM THE TEXT:

“Though students regularly engaged in mobile throughout this project… it was never the central pedagogical spotlight of this work.  Ultimately, the research that the students and I conducted yielded critical practice that decentered learning from the traditional classroom; it located engagement in the spaces that students explored critically and instilled literacies instruction within experiential community knowledge”  (Avila & Pandaya, 2013).

This passage provides an example of how digital media finds itself naturally integrated into a unit that causes students to learn about the world, and issues affecting their community.  The mobile phones and iPods were only a way to empower and enrich the experience. They were not the experience itself.  In this context, the use of technology seemed to serve as a model for the ideological perspective of literacy. 

References

Ávila, J. (2013). Critical digital literacies as social praxis: Intersections and challenges. New York: Peter Lang.