Dale Allender: Key Note comments

October 10, 2008

In terms of 21st century literacies, in the next ten years we will see Increased Global Interaction, hyper localism, extreme diversity and increased out of school learning. In terms of diversity, it’s not just race anymore. It’s play out in age, gender, and even extreme religious views on education. Dale Allender’s, the director of NCTE-West, mentioned that age is an extreme diversity issue we will see in the college classrooms as move further into the 21st century classroom. This concept is intriguing because this will shift how our classrooms are going to look. In an age of stem cell research and DNA mapping, our population will grow older and older. A larger gap will grow in our classrooms, and we need to find new ways to connect people.

According to NCTE, 21st century readers and writers need to:

*develop proficiency with the tools of technology
*build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
*design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
*manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
*create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
*attend to the ethical responsiblities required by these complex environments

This list is much more about the content than the connections. Many of my colleagues at the college and high school levels both complain that they don’t have time to teach skills when they need to teach content and concepts. I assert that these skills will be life long talents–cross curricular and beyond the classroom–and, in many ways, more important than the content of that course.

Posted in NCTE, conferences, curriculum