Literacy Education Helps Children Build Identities

Furman Master of Arts in Education graduate Reilly Mahan discusses her experience as a literacy teacher and how the lessons she learned at Furman help her teach effective communication and identity building to students who have a broad range of backgrounds and skill sets.

What has Furman taught you about teaching Literacy in the classroom?

Literacy encompasses so much. It’s not just reading and writing, but also communication in general. Many of its standards have to do with how you are get your point across clearly.

In the classroom, it’s important to help our kids develop those skills of communication, so they can use that in their own life. It’s not just a skill for the college and career ready, even though that is extremely important. Literacy is also how you live in this world, are successful in this world, are understood for what you’re trying to say, and how you want to present yourself. I take that part of it really seriously through identity building, the way we view the world and the way we want the world to view us.

I think for kids, it really helps to see lots of mentor texts where you’re using a lot of simple picture books. Even as they get older, picture books are always working for that. You can take out short phrases or paragraphs or narratives and use that to really drive home any sort of point you may have of summarizing, tone, mood, or following what the author is doing.

The biggest hurdle that I have almost every year, is having kids whose general reading level ranges being all over the place in one classroom. You can have high expectations for every single student, but if you put your entire lesson up on (a high) level, these kids are not going to just make a giant jump out of nowhere, they’re going to fall behind. You need to start with one grand concept.

I think all kids can reach critical thinking standards at any level, but the way you measure that. “Do they have mastery?” usually involves reading and writing, which is going to be a different skill. We have to have the differentiation for all the different groups; the different criteria and ways to measure mastery in every different group. That’s usually what we deal with on a daily basis. That’s what is going through a teacher’s mind and what we’re doing every day.