Media Dialogic and Reflection for 501 Literacy Course

Media Dialogic and Reflection

By Lisa Eaton

February 17, 2020

For Education 501 Literacy Course

I am basing my reflection on the comment my professor left for me in the Class 2 assignment journal entry for comments on reading Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines. I am so glad she gave feedback on Disciplinary Literacy in a clear and precise way because it made it sink in for me. She stated that “In general, disciplinary literacy includes the ways of communicating (including reading, writing, thinking, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing) that are unique to a particular discipline. In particular, it focuses on the thinking, skills and tools experts within a discipline routinely use.”  This was very helpful to me in defining what we mean by Disciplinary Literacy. It was short and sweet which I like.

            In creating my visual piece, the word that stuck out to me in this assignment instructions was “sensory”. My media representation is visual because I am a visual arts major. My piece illustrates sensory intake and outtake, such as seeing, speaking, listening, and thinking. What goes in comes out. I included reading with a book, writing with a pen, some typed text and an image of a cell phone for technology. There is an artist’s paint brush and palette for my discipline, although now in my coursework I am finding how much technology is involved in my discipline. It is not just traditional drawing, painting and sculpture. I even included some musical notes for listening.

K-12 students are exposed to sensory entities every day, like advertisements, smells, sounds and temperature. They are bombarded with visual images, especially with cell phones, laptops and tablets being used so frequently with the internet. I think a teacher’s role is to make sense of all of this in our world and communicate with students about how to think of how to most efficiently use this sensory information to better our world and better our lives. This is what it means to me to be literate in a certain discipline. The teacher’s role is to facilitate the understanding of all that students are bombarded with on a daily basis. This facilitation is involved in teaching and learning different disciplinary subjects.

In my field work the teacher is crossing over into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math). She says her Art class overlaps with the other subjects and she even has a separate room that her students go to outside of her traditional studio Art class that is called the STEAM room. This is in elementary school.  As an elementary Art teacher, I will have to communicate literacy across these disciplines, especially with Technology.

My image demonstrates my growing knowledge of Disciplinary Literacy because it represents the sensory aspects that a student experiences when learning to become literate in certain disciplines. It involves my discipline of the Arts. It involves technology. It represents the communication and movement of information within an individual when thinking and learning about a certain discipline and crossing over to other disciplines.