tendencies, reviewing their own team’s playbook, and running countless simulations during
practice sessions. In addition, they continually receive new information via radio, by signals
from coaches scattered around the field, and orally from teammates when they huddle before
a play. Each of these activities involves a different form of literacy because the quarterback is
continuously gathering, evaluating, and communicating information. But in addition, the quar-
terback is engrossed in a cultural context, the game of football, with its own goals and rules,
goals and rules that it took years to master. Football requires its own areas of competence or
literacy in order to engage in the conversation (or play the game).
An appreciation ofcontextis crucial for understanding this modern concept of literacy. A
word means different things in different contexts. For example, if a teacher said that a mid-
dle school student’s report was “bad,” the student who received this evaluation would prob-
ably get upset. But if a fellow student declared that the same report was “B-A-D,” it would be
cause for celebration. The wordbadclearly means different things in these different cultural
contexts. As noted earlier, even the wordliteracymeans one thing in standard usage and
something very different to educational theorists.
Some educators are trying to reconcile traditional and contemporary ideas about liter-
acy. The October 1999 theme issue of the highly regarded magazineEducational Leadership
argued that teachers and school policymakers needed to promote “learning the basics of
reading and writing, grammar and spelling” as well as the ability of students to participate in
conversations in different arenas and use information garnered from diverse sources (Tell,
1999, p. 5).
Articles in this theme issue discussed programs for improving student performance in
reading and writing, and the importance of mastering specialized literacies, including numer-
acy, science literacy, arts literacy, media literacy, information literacy, and technology liter-
acy. Numeracy, or quantitative literacy, involves the ability to comfortably use basic arith-
metical skills, but also includes competency with complex statistical, computer, interpretive,
and technical communication skills. A person with numerical literacy must understand as
well as calculate; she or he must be able to draw inferences from numbers and use them to
make judgments. Science literacy requires knowledge of scientific facts, concepts, and theo-
ries and an understanding of the scientific approach to evaluating hypotheses using reason
and experimentation. Information literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy, although
they start from a different focus, are clearly intertwined, involving students in acquiring and
evaluating sources of information. Similarly, art literacy shares much in common with music
and literature.
So, how many literacies are there? By some definitions, there is at least one for each area
of study and academic skill. However, I think it is more useful to limit ourselves to two gen-
eral categories of literacy:critical literacy(which involves thinking, understanding, and acting
on the world) andmultiple literacies(which include finding, processing, and using informa-
tion from different media and fields of study).
JOIN THE CONVERSATION—DO YOU SPEAK MATH?Before looking at the questions that follow, carefully observe the room around you. Then
write a paragraph describing the room.Questions to Consider:- What are the key descriptors you used in the paragraph to describe the room?
LITERACY 185