New Literacies within the Elementary Math and Science Classroom 1

New Literacies within the Elementary Math and Science Classroom

Hannah Gunter

University of Georgia
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As a teacher, I have met many kids on this short journey throughout my career. This is

my fifth year teaching fourth grade, but for my first three years, I only taught Science. I am

privileged enough this year to not only teach Science, but also teach Math. Thus, I taught

approximately 130 students each year for three years. For the past two years, I have taught

approximately 50 students each year. Therefore, in the short five years of my career, I have come

into contact with 500 students over five years, give or take a few. With those 500 students come

500 backgrounds. 500 families. 500 various levels of culture, religion, and language. I have

learned that every year, I must modify and make accommodations to the things I did in past

years, but I am unable to really fine tune those things until I meet my students at the beginning of

the year. After learning about Discourses (Gee, 2015), I think more and more about tweaking

how I teach to meet the needs of my students academically, culturally, and socially. In this

research inquiry, I have sought out to learn more about incorporating different types of

technology use, culture in the everyday classroom, and content literacy into my Math and

Science classes.

Theoretical Framework

Many of the activities I plan in my classroom are meant for students to interact with peers

to build social skills. I believe this is a critical part of a teachers job. I want for my students to

be more than just tolerant to others; I want for them to be accepting of all people, no matter the

background. Teaching from a social constructivist perspective also focuses on learning as

sense-making rather than on the acquisition of role knowledge that exists somewhere outside

the learner, (Oldfather et al., 1999, p. 9). This part of the social constructivist theory has a

connection with the New Literacy Studies theory (NLS). NLS is a movement started in the
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1980s by a group of researchers that believed beyond the traditional view of literacy as just

reading and writing (Gee, 2015, p. 46). This group of researchers began questioning what it

really meant to read and write. Gee describes the bottom line like this: literacy surely means

nothing unless it has something to do with the ability to read. Read is a transitive verb. So

literacy must have something to do with being able to read somethingDifferent types of texts

call for different types of background knowledge and require different skills to be read

meaningfully, (p. 47). Because I am teaching a content other than reading and writing, I believe

literacy is being able to read something. Students must be able to comprehend the Math problem

or Science article, just like they comprehend a fictional novel or a poem. By using the social

constructivist theory and NLS, I will form lessons and ways of teaching Math and Science

around interacting with others socially and taking culture into consideration. I also must take into

consideration the way students talk to their peers and adults, interact with each other and with

books and technology, think about solving a Math problem or the whys behind Science concepts

, value learning and their school experiences, and believe in the connection between school and

home, (p. 49). Whether a student is a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner, I strive to

incorporate lessons that value and encourage all types of learning and all types of learners.

School Demographics

Gee (2015) says, Discourses are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking,

believing, speaking, and often, reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of

particular identities, (p. 4). I would venture to say most teachers today understand that our

students come to school with things that cause their negative or positive behaviors, people that

influence their speaking, and reasons they can or cannot read and/or write when entering
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Kindergarten. All students have economic challenges that affect the way they behave in school.

This identity that students bring with them to school from the beginning, also known as primary

Discourse (p. 173), affects how successful a student is academically and also how a student

interacts with other peers and adults. Understanding that students, especially in fourth grade,

come to school with a somewhat limited secondary Discourse (p. 174), or those identities shaped

by public institutions, experiences, and the people they encounter along the way, it is my job to

get to know their primary identity and plan lessons and activities that respect those identities and

also bring out the positives in their identities.

I believe it is important that students know their identity they bring with them to school is

important and they should be proud of it. Henderson Mill Elementary School is located just

inside I-285 in Atlanta. The address says Atlanta, but is close to the city of Tucker and North

Decatur. The school is approximately two miles from the Atlanta campus of Mercer University.

The neighborhood holds many supportive families who not only support the importance of their

childs education, but also support the school monetarily. The neighborhood students (I use the

term neighborhood to mean students who live in houses around our school) make up

approximately 30% of our student population. The other 70% of our student population reside in

one of nine apartment complexes that feed into our school. We house approximately 46%

Hispanic children, 25% African-American children, 18% Caucasian children, 5% Asian, and the

remaining 6% are comprised of many different nationalities including, but not limited to

Russian, Iranian, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern.

With the population of students I teach at school, some of them may not feel that their

home identity, or primary Discourse, is important. The students I teach are made up mostly of

Hispanic students with several African American students, a couple of Middle Eastern students,
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and only two White students. With all of the different cultures and identities represented, I must

teach students that their culture is valued in our classroom. After reading Gees book Social

Linguistics and Literacies: Ideologies in Discourses, I began to shape my lessons to try to allow

students to use their cultural norms within their activities.

New Literacies within the Classroom

Blogging

Something I have been convicted of many times throughout my professional career is

correcting a students grammar or speech patterns due to what I perceived to be the correct

way. I think back to times I have done this as a teacher, and I imagine that student immediately

deflates like a balloon that was popped with a safety pin. These mistakes I made during my first

couple of years teaching are mistakes that I have learned from. But it is also something I have to

be conscious about even today. Gee says all speakers, given their biological and cognitive

equipment, acquire an amazingly consisted and complicated variety of language (a dialect) as

children, (p. 15). I think this is an important point to make to teachers if I were holding a

professional development on New Literacies. If we think about the complexities of Standard

English, and we took a step back to really listen to our young students and think about the

language they hear at home, we would see that instead of demeaning our students home

language or dialect, we should plan for them to embrace it and showcase it.

One way of showcasing students work without focusing on the differences in language is

through blogging. In a fourth grade Math and Science classroom, blogging is an incredibly

beneficial tool to allow the teacher a glimpse into the students thought process. Blogging in

Math allows a student to write their steps and why they solved a problem the way they did and
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then allows a teacher to see if there are any misconceptions or if there is a way the student can

then build on that foundational knowledge. During this research inquiry, I allowed my students

to start blogging in a very simple way: through Microsoft Word on a laptop. I do have an account

with an educational blogging application, however, I am still in the process of teaching students

how to use this application. By the end of this year, my hope is that blogging will be an integral

part of my Math and Science class.

Social Media

By using this type of social media and others in an educational setting, it allows students

to open up a little more and take risks they might not take otherwise. I always read all of the blog

posts before they are posted on our website or printed out, so this process also allows the student

to feel safe in writing their thoughts without the fear of being made fun of because they made a

mistake or did not understand the concept.

This way of sharing information helps our English Language Learners (ELLs) time to

think before they write and find the words they want. In the article Social Networking,

Workplace, and Entertainment Literacies: The Out-of-School Literate Lives of Newcomer

Latina/o Adolescents, the author Mary Amanda Stewart (2014) reports out a study of Latino

immigrant youth she conducted that shares how social media and other out-of-school literacies

helped these immigrant youth become more successful in school. This article mimics the lives of

several students in my class and I began to think about the different literacies they encounter

when they leave the school building.

Being in fourth grade, they may not have the various social media accounts a high school

student would have, but they still use technology as a way of entertainment and keeping up with
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trends and news. After talking with several students about what they do when they leave school,

a conversation Ive had many times, but this time, with a more direct purpose, I learned that most

of them go home, call or text their parents to tell them they are home, and get on their tablet or

computer. They visit sites like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. During these conversations,

a few students told me they would go to a persons website based on something they liked on one

of these sites. They would read about this person or get ideas for clothing, cooking, a game, and

the list goes on. I have had my students blog in the past, but it was done as a response to a lesson.

I never thought of allowing the students to blog because that is part of their identity.

By bringing in these types of New Literacies, I meet students where they are most

comfortable and spend most of their free time. In the video Connected Learning: Anytime,

Anywhere, Everyone, Mimi Ito says that education today is not allowing kids the opportunity to

form their own ways of learning and gives them everything in nice, tied up packages. I see this

more and more every year I teach. Students are spoon fed information and not allowed to make

connections on their own due to timing, rigorous curriculum, and testing stressors. But this is

also the same idea with Discourses; Discourses are also not neat, tied up boxes with bows, but

rather Discourses are ways of recognizing and getting recognized as certain sorts of whos doing

certain sorts of whats, (Gee, 2015, p. 173). Students can produce a similar product to show their

learning, but they may go about it in different ways and that is ok. By using social media in my

classroom, my goal is to give students that freedom of figuring out their way of learning and

allowing them time to form their own connections between school-based learning and their prior

background knowledge.

Problem Based Learning: Stop-Motion Videos

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This year, my students did a problem based learning project on recycling. This project

involved some of the most engaging experiences for the students and they really took their

learning to a new level. I think the most exciting part for the students was they were not reading

from a book or writing a traditional essay. They were hooked because of an article we read as a

class about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. From this article, they researched more about the

problem of trash in our oceans and decided we could do something to help on a more local level.

Students created everything from 3-D posters to public service announcements to stop motion

videos. They were excited and engaged while doing all of these activities. It was such an eye

opening teaching moment because I saw how using technology and allowing students more

freedom with their learning caused less complaints, more ownership of their final product, and a

connection with the most challenging students.

Like I mentioned above, students worked endlessly on their posters for our recycling

campaign and enjoyed using iMovie and filming for their public service announcements, but the

activity they loved most was creating a stop motion video. This stop motion video told a story of

the journey of a water bottle as they went to be recycled, reused, or thrown into a landfill. The

students loved creating their backdrop, as well as creating their water bottle character. Most

students used their water bottle character creation as a way of self-expression, which was unique

to see because our state standards do not often leave much room for self-expression on a day-to-

day basis. One student said they felt important by using the computer and creating this video.

In a study done in Taiwan titled Stop-Motion to Foster Digital Literacy in Elementary

School, the authors write about how media production is a lifelong skill in todays world.

Students who have this skill set potentially could enhance effectiveness in communication,

develop creativity, and to develop a critical and analytical mind, (Cheung cited in Sun and
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Wang, 2016, p. 94). I do believe our students used their creativity most in this activity and had

fun figuring out how to use the stop-motion application on the iPad.

My next goal with stop-motion is to bring it into the Science classroom more and have

students create a stop-motion video with our force and motion unit that involves simple

machines. Sun and Wang (2016) discuss in their results that through manipulating concrete

objects, the abstract concept is physically presented. The elementary students [found] it easier to

relate the new concept to their previous experiences, (p. 99). This is such a critical aspect of

elementary school: getting from the concrete to the abstract. Stop-motion videos can help

students move across that bridge in a meaningful way.

Future Implications

New Literacies in an elementary Math and Science classroom can look like a lot of

various things. It can look like various types of technology and simulations to support the content

and it can look like a teacher putting aside their unintentional biases to allow their students a safe

space to learn and interact the best and most comfortable way they know how. In the future, my

Math and Science classrooms will incorporate more opportunities for students to feel welcomed

to learn any way they would like to. It will open up conversations on Math and Science

connections from home and will allow students to write in their own way and feel comfortable

doing it. It is my goal for any student who passes through my door to want to take their learning

home and also bring it back to school. I promise my future students they will always be allowed

to express themselves through blogging, the expansive types of social media, and new ways of

showing what they know.

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References

Gee, J. (2015). Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. New York: NY:

Routledge.

Ito, M. (2012, August 7). Connected Learning: Anytime, Anywhere, Everyone. Retrieved from

https://vimeo.com/47111399.

Stewart, M.A. (2014). Social Networking, Workplace, and Entertainment Literacies: The Out-of-

School Literate Lives of Newcomer Latina/o Adolescents. Reading Research Quarterly.

1-5. doi: 10.1002/rrq.80.

Sun, K.T. & Wang, C.H. (2016). Stop-motion to Foster Digital Literacy in Elementary School.

Media Education Research Journal, XXV, 93-102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3916/C51-

2017-09.