Beyond the Page: New Literacies

in the Twenty-First Century

RAVEN BISHOP  ERIN COUNIHAN

Introduction de-siloing learning; in the same way that reading and

writing belong in every content area, the creation of
images, multimedia, data visualization, and social media
I n a rapidly evolving technological landscape, teachers
are constantly adapting to ever-changing definitions
of what literacy is and looks like in the classroom.
content have a place in the ELA classroom. The Common
Core State Standards support this; the English Language
Responding to “what’s next” in education, we argue Arts (ELA) Writing Standards and Anchor Standards
that to provide our students with the skills necessary for Reading highlight the need for supporting literacy
to be successful twenty-first-century citizens, we must with newer media: students should include “graphics
reimagine what it means to be “literate” and respond by (e.g., charts, tables), and multimedia when useful to
providing our students not only with opportunities to aiding comprehension” (W.7.2.A),1 “use technology,
read in multiple media, but also to produce across those including the Internet, to produce and publish writing”
media. (W.7.6), write “for a range of discipline-specific tasks,
While we have seen a shift in the types of texts purposes, and audiences” (W.7.10), and “integrate and
teachers are selecting for students to read (including evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats,
video, websites, and informational texts), what is including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words”
now needed is a shift in the way we teach students to (CCRA.R.7) (NGA & CCSO, 2010). Teachers of literacy
communicate. Students are no longer need to be more deliberate in teaching
merely consumers of information English teachers can be students to not just be able to read
media, but are increasingly the “content presented in diverse media
change agents in de-siloing and formats,” but to use those media
producers of it, managing multiple
social media accounts and YouTube learning; in the same way and formats to produce content.
channels, and designing websites, It is less important that students
that reading and writing
video games, and mobile apps. The gain the technical skills specific to
National Council of Teachers of belong in every content a particular technology, as these are
English (NCTE) describes twenty- area, the creation of constantly shifting—technologies
first-century literacies as “multiple, students learn in seventh grade are
images, multimedia, data likely to be significantly evolved
dynamic, and malleable” and
highlights the ability to “design visualization, and social or obsolete in a few years. What is
and share information” and “create important is that students learn to
media content have a place
multimedia texts” (NCTE, 2013). We produce varied content across a variety
want to emphasize this importance of in the ELA classroom. of technological domains. In this
producing—moving beyond the heavy article, we discuss three emerging
reliance on typographic writing—and asking students literacies, placing them in the context
to synthesize and create arguments across a variety of of the ELA classroom, and provide sample performance
media. tasks which can meet the CCSS standards highlighted
Middle school students have graduated from self- while attending to the production attribute of each
contained elementary school classrooms to siloed, literacy.
content-driven classrooms, yet outside of school they are
bombarded by information, often in multiple media and
1. We have chosen CCSS ELA standards for Grade 7 for
brief snippets. English teachers can be change agents in consistency throughout the document.

Beyond the Page ■ bishop and counihan 39

Visual Literacy
Metros (2008) defines visual literacy as “the ability
to decode and interpret (make meaning from) visual
messages and also to be able to encode and compose
meaningful visual communication” (p.
102). With the proliferation of devices We must teach students to
that make not only taking but sharing
wield data to construct an
photographs and videos so simple that
1.8 billion photographs are shared per argument.
day on social media (Meeker, 2014, p.
62), the need to attend to visual literacy is becoming as
significant as attention to typographic literacy.
Middle school marks a particularly critical moment
for visual literacy instruction. Young adolescents
receive their own smartphone, on average, at age 10,
and nearly 50 percent of all middle schoolers will have a
social media account by eighth grade (Donovan, 2016).
With access to these technologies begins “the rise of
a new visual vocabulary. Photos, along with emojis,
video snippets, GIFS, and other imagery, are replacing
written language for many of the things we once
relied on words to express” (Hempel, 2014). Without
the thoughtful integration of visual literacy in our
classrooms, students will be left to navigate an onslaught
of visual content without first becoming literate in it.
Further, with their smartphones, they become not only
viewers, but producers and publishers of images. It is
therefore important that students, so well versed in the
proliferation of images, also experience lessons that
provide guided discourse across their associated sharing
platforms.
Performance Task for Visual Literacy
Thematic photo essay
Prior to reading Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again,
students are tasked with taking a photograph that
represents a family tradition in order to connect with the
text’s theme of cultural and family traditions. Students
post their photographs in Padlet, an online bulletin-
boarding tool. Students then view and comment on their
peers’ work, much in the same way they would in various
social media outlets, but in Padlet’s private space that can
be viewed only with access to the project’s unique URL.
Teachers can use Artful Thinking (Palmer & Tishman,
2006) strategies developed by Harvard’s Project Zero
to help students gain skills in critical
viewing which will help them better
discuss the images within the context
of the text-related themes. (Figure 1).
Numeracy
The term numeracy has begun to creep into ELA
teachers’ lexicons, but it is not yet addressed in common
Content Area Reading texts. Much as a math teacher
might ask, “Why should I use reading strategies in my
math class?” an ELA teacher might question being asked
to teach numerical literacy. Numeracy is an “appreciation
of common numerical sense with a depth of reasoning
and critical thinking around how numbers change
our world” (Pearse & Walton, 2011, p. 2 & p. 4) or,
simply, “the ability to use mathematics in everyday life”
(National Numeracy, n.d.). We emphasize that twenty-
first-century literacy must ask students to show evidence
of numeracy by using numbers to produce arguments—
we must teach students to wield data to construct
an argument, not just to prove an understanding of
numbers in a reading.
Numeracy is alluded to in the CCSS Writing
Standards, where students are asked to include
“graphics (e.g., charts, tables), and multimedia when
useful to aiding comprehension” (W.6.2.A), and write
“for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and
audiences” (W.6.10) (NGA & CCSO, 2010). However,
asking students to “include graphics” is not enough;
we need to teach students to synthesize ideas from a
variety of sources across media and produce their own
quantitative arguments to strengthen language-based
arguments. We need to go beyond including a brief
chart or graph to summarize data in a text—although
that is important—and teach students to actively seek
out quantitative supports and craft clear, purposeful

CONNECTIONS FROM readwritethink

Students develop quantitative reasoning and critical thinking by analyzing descriptions Lisa Storm Fink
tables for content, language, and organization with a particular focus on verb tense www.ReadWriteThink.org
selection, and then writing descriptions of tables themselves.
http://bit.ly/1tSolCV

40 Voices from the Middle ■ volume 25 ■ number 4 ■ may 2018

Figure 1. Portions of a thematic photo essay and discussion conducted using Padlet. The entire exchange can be viewed
online at https://padlet.com/ravendbishop/9phyvkpvpipz
numerical representations to support their own authentic
arguments.
Performance Task for Numeracy: Infographic
After reading Hoot by Carl Hiaasen, students research
a contemporary issue of interest then craft a one-page
infographic on their important topic. Synthesizing data
from teacher-selected sources (e.g., National Geographic
for Kids, the World Wildlife Federation, http://kids
.nationalgeographic.com/explore/nature/hooray-for-
siberian-tigers/, https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/
tiger) and from responses from student-generated
survey questions, students develop a clear thesis, which
they support with a series of visual and numerical
representations of the data they have collected. Although
images and words are important in an infographic,
contextualizing the story behind the data should be
the primary focus for the students and for the readers.
Students can create print infographics using word
processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, or online
Beyond the Page ■ bishop and counihan
tools, such as Piktochart or Easel.ly, that can be published
to a school website or social media page. Students can also
present their infographics in an oral presentation using
the presentation features built into Piktochart. (Figure 2).
Emerging Realities, Emerging Literacies
As new technologies emerge, publishers are seeking ways
to connect viewers between the page and the screen. This
is why in 2015 The New York Times sent its Sunday paper
subscribers a Google Cardboard viewer to view virtual
reality (VR) content accompanying print articles—and
made the content available without special equipment in
digital subscriptions (Wang, 2015). Meanwhile, multiple
print media are using augmented reality (AR) to enhance
readers’ experience and understanding by allowing
readers to access additional content by scanning printed
pages with smartphone apps. For example, filmmaker
and artist Ram Devineni introduced his groundbreaking
AR-enhanced graphic novels Priya’s Shakti and Priya’s
Mirror as a response to rape culture in India. The books
41
 allow readers to access anti–sexual violence media by
scanning the pages with an app (Petronzio, 2015); the
books are now being implemented in school curricula in
Delhi (Dupere, 2016).
Augmented and virtual reality are the most recent
technologies to change the ways in which a reader must
be literate. It is easy to make the case for including
opportunities for students to experience reading
these technologies; again, we stress the importance of
producing within the media. While this may seem a
daunting proposition, there are creation platforms that
make AR and VR surprisingly easy to create and share
for middle school classrooms.

Performance Tasks for New Realities

Figure 2. A sample infographic created with Piktochart.
View online at https://magic.piktochart.com/output/
23591931-endangered-tigers
Augmented reality
In conjunction with The Wednesday Wars by Gary
Schmidt, a class completes a research-based AR bulletin
board. Each student is given a topic to research and uses
the web application HP Reveal (www.hpreveal.com) to
create an aura—content that appears around a trigger
image when scanned with the HP Reveal app—to teach
their topic; this can include video, images, web links, or
text. After creating the auras, students’ trigger images are
printed and posted on a bulletin board, and readers then
use the HP Reveal app to scan images and read each AR
report. (Teachers can create a class account to monitor
the auras students can access). (Figure 3).

Virtual reality
After writing an
informational text about
wildlife in a specific
ecosystem, students create
a VR experience using
Co-Spaces (www
.cospaces.io). Students
search for public domain
360-degree photographs
of the ecosystem (consider
www.wpanorama.com)
and upload them into
the Co-Spaces interface.
Students then add
images of wildlife using
search features or upload
from a teacher-curated
Figure 3. Example of augmented poster. In order to view the augmented reality story (right), folder of images (PNG
readers download and open the free HP Reveal app, follow ProfCouni, and scan the trigger format images with clear
image (left). Readers then select an image, which will take them to videos, articles, images,
backgrounds work best),
and a virtual reality tour to tell a story of the Vietnam War protests around the country. (See
add clickable captions
References for sources used to create this aura).

42 Voices from the Middle ■ volume 25 ■ number 4 ■ may 2018

to the images using the easy coding tools provided,
and add a soundtrack to make the VR experience
more immersive. Finally, students view their peers’ VR
creations in the Co-Spaces app with a low-cost VR viewer
like Google Cardboard or without a viewer on any web-
enabled device. (Figure 4).
Conclusion
The shift in the way information is presented and
consumed in the twenty-first century necessitates a
shift in our definition of literacy—literacy must include
students producing content across varied domains.
To best prepare literate citizen leaders, ELA teachers
must adapt and continue to engage students who learn
differently and whose texts come in a variety of new
formats; we need to recognize the importance of new
literacies—inside and outside the classroom—and create
Figure 4. VR content created in Co-Spaces can include images, sound and clickable captions. View this example
on a computer by going to https://cospac.es/UDG2 or by scanning the QR code and launching the scene in the free
Co-Spaces app.
Beyond the Page ■ bishop and counihan
lessons that go beyond the written and spoken word. A
failure to do so leaves students behind their peers who
have opportunities to communicate through multiple
technological formats.
According to the Partnership for
21st Century Learning (p21) Framework for 21st Century
Learning (2007),
Learning and innovation skills increasingly are being
recognized as the skills that separate students who
are prepared for increasingly complex life and work
environments . . . and those who are not. A focus
on creativity, critical thinking, communication and
collaboration is essential to prepare students for the
future.
Beyond reading information in a variety of media,
students must also be able to communicate by producing
across media. “To be effective in the 21st century, citizens
43
. . . must be able to create, evaluate, and effectively
utilize information, media, and technology” (p
21,
2007). Synthesizing and organizing information across
media asks students to use higher-order thinking, to
evaluate sources, and to be literate (both as consumers
and producers) across media; adding to traditional
literacy skills a command of images, numbers, and
emerging technologies will help students become truly
literate citizens of the twenty-first century.
References
Donovan, J. (2016, May 19). The average age for a child getting their
first smartphone is now 10.3 years. TechCrunch. Retrieved from
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/19/the-average-age-for-a-child-
getting-their-first-smartphone-is-now-10-3-years/
Dupere, K. (2016, Oct. 2). New augmented reality comic book shows
the resilience of acid attack survivors. Mashable. Retrieved from
http://mashable.com/2016/10/02/priyas-mirror-acid-attacks-
india/#V67KL5.AGPqi
Hempel, J. (2014, June 4). Words are dead. Here’s what will replace
them. Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/
Hiassen, C. (2005). Hoot. New York, NY: Yearling.
Lai, T. (2011). Inside out & back again. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Meeker, M. (2014, May 28). 2014 Internet trends. [PowerPoint].
KPCB. Retrieved from http://www.kpcb.com/blog/
2014-internet-trends
Metros, S. (2008). The educator’s role in preparing visually
literate learners. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 102–109.
doi:10.1080/00405840801992264National Council of Teachers of
English (NCTE). (2013, Feb.). The NCTE definition of 21st century
literacies. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/positions/
statements/21stcentdefinition
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA),
Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSO). (2010). English
language arts standards. Common core state standards
initiative. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/
ELA-Literacy
National Numeracy. (n.d.) What is numeracy? Retrieved from
https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/what-numeracy
Palmer, P., & Tishman, S. (2006). Artful thinking: Stronger thinking
and learning through the power of art. Cambridge, MA:
Raven Bishop is a National Board Certified Visual Arts Educator with more than 10 years teaching traditional and digital art and
is now an Instructional Technologist at Washington College. She can be reached at rbishop3@washcoll.edu.
Erin Counihan taught English at all levels in grades 6 through 12 and is now training the next generation of teachers as
Coordinator of Secondary Education at Washington College. She can be reached at ecounihan2@washcoll.edu.
44 Voices from the Middle
Project Zero Harvard Graduate School of Education. Retrieved
from pzartfulthinking.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/09/
ArtfulThinkingFinalReport-1.pdf
Partnership for 21st Century Learning (p21). (2007). Framework
for 21st century learning. Retrieved from http://www.p21.org/
our-work/p21-framework
Pearse, M., & Walton, K. M. (2011). Teaching numeracy: 9 critical
habits to ignite mathematical thinking. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin.
Petronzio, M. (2015, May 7). New ‘walk-in comic book’ uses
augmented reality to show sexual assault survivors as heroes.
Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2015/05/07/
priyas-shakti/#biSkOAZ5CmqM
Schmidt, G.D. (2009). The Wednesday wars. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt.
Wang, S. (2015, Nov. 9). News outlets left and right (and up,
down, and center) are embracing virtual reality technology.
Neiman Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.niemanlab.
org/2015/11/news-outlets-left-and-right-and-up-down-and-
center-are-embracing-virtual-reality-technology/
Augmented Reality Resources
Gillon, S. Ask Steve: Campus unrest in the 60s. Vietnam War
protests. Retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/
vietnam-war/vietnam-war-protests/videos/ask-steve-campus-
unrest-in-the-60s?m=528e394da93ae&s=undefined&f=1&free
=false
Newsela. (2017, May 2). The Vietnam War: Tragic conflict in Asia
affected an American generation. Newsela. Retrieved from
https://newsela.com/read/lib-history-vietnam-war/id/29905
Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Retrieved from http://www.you
visit.com/tour/vvmf
Vietnam War Protest. (n.d.). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved Sept.
1, 2017 from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wiki
media.org/
Vietnam War Protests: The beginnings of a movement.
History.com. Retrieved September 1, 2017 from http://
www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-protests
Williams, Y. Sound Smart: Vietnam War protests. Vietnam War
Protests. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/topics/
vietnam-war/vietnam-war-protests/videos
■ volume 25 ■ number 4 ■ may 2018
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