5/6/13 Reflection on Changing Literacies for the 21st Century

Post date: May 8, 2013 5:07:33 PM

Fasick, Adele M.. "Changing Literacies for the 21st Century." From boardbook to Facebook children's services in an interactive age. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited, 2011. 57-73. Print.

Illiteracy is a huge problem in the world right now and is caused by several issues that have added up over the years. One of those issues would be the amount of books in indigenous languages. There are very few reading materials in some languages due to either few publishing companies or because the national language has been changed enough times that it is hard for the country’s residents to keep up. Teaching has also been a problem. In South Africa students have younger siblings with AIDS that they go home to take care of because they don’t have parents to help and also teachers are dying of AIDS or being moved around so much due to political wars that they are not stationary at a school long enough to be able to help.

Even in the United States, we do not offer enough multicultural or multilingual books for immigrants to be able to have enough material to practice their reading. Further than that, as we enter the digital age, there are multiple different sorts of literacy that children must learn in order to keep up. They need to be print literate, information literate, visually literate, media literate, and multiculturally literate.

If we could develop a travelling collection of multicultural literature within the Midwest public libraries and do programs with them as they arrive in order to draw more attention to them, children may grow to be more aware of accurate representations of other cultures. Some libraries already do this, as well as sending out bookmobiles to families with children who live out in the country and might not necessarily have books to stimulate their children’s minds with over the summer. Not many rural libraries in Iowa have a collection of multilingual books, except for a few scattered Spanish ones. There are many more Spanish immigrants coming to work in the fields and factories who have children that need to be catered to as well. They learn English at school, but an important aspect of learning to read is to be read aloud to and that is why we need more multilingual books in these areas.