"A vision of literacy for adolescent learners in Ontario schools might be described as follows:

All students are equipped with the literacy skills necessary to be critical and creative thinkers, effective meaning-makers and communicators, collaborative co-learners, and innovative problem-solvers. These are the skills that will enable them to achieve personal, career, and societal goals.

Students, individually and in collaboration with others, develop skills in three areas, as follows:

• Thinking: Students access, manage, create, and evaluate information as they think imaginatively and critically in order to solve problems and make decisions, including those related to issues of fairness, equity, and social justice.

• Expression: Students use language and images in rich and varied forms as they read, write, listen, speak, view, represent, discuss, and think critically about ideas.

• Reflection: Students apply metacognitive knowledge and skills to monitor their own thinking and learning, and, in the process, develop self-advocacy skills, a sense of self-efficacy, and an interest in lifelong learning.

As this vision for adolescent literacy suggests, literacy involves a range of critical-thinking skills and is essential for learning across the curriculum. Students need to learn to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. Teachers support them in this learning by not only addressing the curriculum expectations but also considering, and purposefully teaching students about, the literacy demands of the particular subject area. Literacy, critical literacy, and mathematical literacy are essential to students’ success in all subjects of the curriculum, and in all areas of their lives.

Many of the activities and tasks that students undertake in the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit studies curriculum support them in their ability to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. These include researching, participating in discussions, viewing media, communicating with words and with the body, connecting illustrations and text, exploring Indigenous world views and knowledge systems, developing a better understanding by learning from the experiences of diverse Indigenous individuals, respectfully listening to knowledge through storytelling, role playing to create meaning through stories, and – especially important for kinesthetic learners – communicating through physical activity. Students use language to record their observations, to describe their critical analyses in both informal and formal contexts, and to present their findings in presentations and reports in oral, written, graphic, and multimedia forms. Understanding in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit studies requires the understanding and use of specialized terminology. In all First Nations, Métis, and Inuit studies courses, students are required to use appropriate and correct terminology, and are encouraged to use language with care and precision in order to communicate effectively."

Access the TVDSB FNMI Resource Site for further resources:

https://sites.google.com/gotvdsb.ca/tvdsb-fnmi/home