Week 9: Cultural Literacy

Cultural literacy can be defined as “knowledge of history, contributions, and perspectives of different cultural groups, including one's own group, necessary for understanding of reading, writing, and other media.” This definition of cultural literacy is not unlike many of the definitions we have come up with. Many of the definitions of literacy have included the ability to have deep knowledge about something and having the ability to read, write, and use forms of technology to process and communicate your information. I am learning that every person is born with the ability to conform to the culture that we are born into. There is research that says that a person’s culture is “non-instinctive” and we are not “genetically programmed” or drawn to a particular type of culture. I have also learned that a person’s culture is an ongoing development, meaning that it is a collection of every environment and experience that we have had. Humans aren’t usually aware of their culture because they consider what they are doing everyday to be normal. It is only when a person steps into the environment of a new culture that they are able to compare and contrast their culture to those of others. Culture can also change over time rather than over an area of land. The general culture of East Lansing has greatly evolved from the seventies to today.  In my placement my students attend a Spanish class once a week. They are focused on learning new vocabulary words and phrases. But cultural literacy is more than just learning a new language. It is also about understanding the history and aspects of people’s everyday lives that they find important. I feel that if the Spanish teacher at my placement provided more insight to the different Spanish speaking countries, their customs, and traditions, the students would be gaining much more cultural literacy than they are now. I have been learning a lot about Glogster, my chosen technology for this project. I feel as if my group and I have made a smart choice by choosing Glogster because it incorporates many different types and aspects of technology. This mirrors cultural literacy because a person’s cultural literacy is dependant on a number of different factors, and not just one. Glogster can help us create a virtual poster incorporating links to other websites, photographs, text, slideshows, and videos. I like Glogster because it can allow my group and I to cover cultural literacy from many different perspectives and angles. One of the limitations with this technology is that we have not yet figured out a way to make it interactive. We can have links to other websites that have interactive activities, but the actual Glogster website doesn’t have this feature. Our class blog website allows us to view other people’s blogs and reply to them. I feel that this would be a positive addition to our virtual poster. It would also promote the sharing of different cultures, which is our ultimate goal for this project. This virtual poster is going to be different in many ways from traditional teaching materials that would take place without technology. The virtual poster will not have enough room to take on large amounts of text and explanation. Instead, the textual information needs to be concise, condensed, and appealing to the eye because there are so many other things going on within the poster. In place of much of the traditional text movies, photographs, and links can be present. We will have to make sure that these alternate ways to present information are saying exactly what we would have said in words. I feel that this poster may be more engaging for students than traditional methods because it is visually stimulating and incorporates many things that kids enjoy doing such as games and movies.