When Heather Harrigan's students want to express an idea -- words on paper aren't the default medium.
It might be a painting, or a film, or images combined with text in a PowerPoint presentation.
"Anything that communicates an idea is a text," says Harrigan, who teaches English at Bowness High School in the city's northwest.
"I tell students that one of my favourite texts at my house is the garden. It speaks to who the people in the house are, what we believe."
Literacy, in Harrigan's classroom, is about making sense of the world and an unending barrage of information.
It's an educational approach consistent with both the curriculum of the Western Canadian protocol and a growing movement most often referred to as New Literacy. According to a leading researcher, though, the label is still under discussion.
"It's called multi-literacy, intermediality, media literacy, and multimodal literacy," says William Kist, an associate professor at Ohio's Kent State University.
"We don't have agreement right now on the terminology, even within our own field. You can define it as broadening our concept of literacy beyond just print."
Kist devotes an entire chapter of his most recent book, New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media, to the work being done at Bowness High School. He says most North American classrooms are ill-suited to the way today's students think and communicate -- and the society they will inhabit as adults.
"These kids go home and instant message 10 friends while downloading MP3 files, watching a movie and talking on the phone," Kist says.
The Internet has altered the way they absorb information, from a linear, one-page-after-another process to the random, individualized flow of hypertext jumping.
Technology has also equipped them to express themselves differently.
The language of text messaging looks like hieroglyphics to many adults. Creating a soundtracked, streaming-video web page is, literally, child's play.
Kist says New Literacy classrooms use multiple forms of expression, balance individual and collaborative work, are rich with choices and encourage extensive discussion.
He calls the Western Canadian Protocol language arts curriculum a leader. It integrates reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing and representing.
Seen as an evolution of educator Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, the broadened view of literacy accepts different styles of learning and expression. It also recognizes that many students have been left behind in literacy education that primarily valued a single form.
According to Statistics Canada, 42 per cent of Canadians do not have the literacy skills to function adequately in society.
Twenty-six per cent of those with the lowest literacy skills are unemployed, compared to four per cent of those with high skills.
Acknowledging that literacy means more than reading and writing printed words, sets more people up for success in learning, Harrigan says, and allows everyone a chance to express what they're learning.
"Included with all of their texts is a rationale," she says. "They have to demonstrate the purposeful choice that makes meaning of what they're studying.
"We live in a very complex world, filled with an enormous amount of information and ideas, coming at people at a tremendous rate. Knowing how to deconstruct that information is part of being literate."
ldohy@theherald.canwest.com
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Next Thursday, hundreds of volunteers will hit the city's streets and take your donations for children's literacy programs across Calgary
Colour Photo: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald / Taylor Smart, 15, looks at a
project in his Grade 10 class at Bowness High School. The school was used in a
book by a Kent State researcher about the concept of New Literacy, which
broadens the concept of literacy beyond print.