Remaking Community With Art Park, Ahram; Vasudevan, Lalitha; Wargo, Jon M. ...
Journal of adolescent & adult literacy,
March/April 2021, 2021-03-00, 20210301, Volume:
64, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.
Health literacy entails the knowledge, motivation, and competencies to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgments and decisions in everyday life concerning ...health care, disease prevention, and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life throughout the life course. It has become an essential concept in public health. It is considered a modifiable determinant of health decisions, health behaviors, health, and healthcare outcomes. Prior studies suggest highly variable levels of health literacy across European countries. Assessing and monitoring health literacy is critical to support interventions and policies to improve health literacy. This study aimed to describe the process of adaptation to Portugal of the short-form version of the Health Literacy Survey (HLS
-Q12) from the Health Literacy Population Survey Project 2019-2021, also establishing the health literacy levels in the Portuguese population. The sample comprised 1247 valid cases. The survey consisted of a brief questionnaire on the determinants of health literacy, plus the HLS
-Q12 questionnaire and the specific health literacies packages on digital health literacy, navigational health literacy, and vaccination health literacy. The results suggest that 7 out of 10 people in Portugal (mainland) have high health literacy levels and support the results of other studies concerning the main socioeconomic determinants of general health literacy. Furthermore, the results suggest that "navigation in the health system" tasks are the most challenging tasks regarding specific health literacies. The overall data suggest the HLS
-Q12 as a feasible measure to assess health literacy in the Portuguese population. Thus, it can be used in Portugal to assess the population's needs and monitor and evaluate policies and initiatives to promote health literacy by addressing its societal, environmental, personal, and situational modifiable determinant factors.
Digital competence is an evolving concept related to the development of digital technology and the political aims and expectations of citizenship in a knowledge society. It is regarded as a core ...competence in policy papers; in educational research it is not yet a standardized concept. We suggest that it is a useful boundary concept, which can be used in various contexts. For this study, we analysed 76 educational research articles in which digital competence, described by different terms, was investigated. As a result, we found that digital competence consists of a variety of skills and competences, and its scope is wide, as is its background: from media studies and computer science to library and literacy studies. In the article review, we found a total of 34 terms that had used to describe the digital technology related skills and competences; the most often used terms were digital literacy, new literacies, multiliteracy and media literacy, each with somewhat different focus. We suggest that digital competence is defined as consisting of (1) technical competence, (2) the ability to use digital technologies in a meaningful way for working, studying and in everyday life, (3) the ability to evaluate digital technologies critically, and (4) motivation to participate and commit in the digital culture.
Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy contributes to ongoing conversations about control of knowledge and different ways of knowing. It does so by analysing why media and information literacy ...(MIL) is proposed as a solution for addressing the current information crisis. Questioning why MIL is commonly believed to wield such power, the book throws into sharp relief several paradoxes that are built into common understandings of such literacies. Haider and Sundin take the reader on a journey across different fields of practice, research and policymaking, including librarianship, information studies, teaching and journalism, media and communication and the educational sciences. The authors also consider national information policy proposals and the recommendations of NGOs or international bodies, such as UNESCO and the OECD. Showing that MIL plays an active role in contemporary controversies, such as those on climate change or vaccination, Haider and Sundin argue that such controversies challenge existing notions of fact and ignorance, trust and doubt, and our understanding of information access and information control. The book thus argues for the need to unpack and understand the contradictions forming around these notions in relation to MIL, rather than attempting to arrive at a single, comprehensive definition. Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy combines careful analytical and conceptual discussions with an in-depth understanding of information practices and of the contemporary information infrastructure. It is essential reading for scholars and students engaged in library and information studies, media and communication, journalism studies and the educational sciences.
Over the years, a variety of frameworks, models and literacies have been developed to guide teacher educators in their efforts to build digital capabilities in their students, that will support them ...to use new and emerging technologies in their future classrooms. Generally, these focus on advancing students’ skills in using ‘educational’ applications and digitally-sourced information, or understanding effective blends of pedagogical, content and technological knowledge seen as supporting the integration of digital resources into teaching, to enhance subject learning outcomes. Within teacher education institutions courses developing these capabilities are commonly delivered as standalone entities, or there is an assumption that they will be generated by technology’s integration in other disciplines or through mandated assessment. However, significant research exists suggesting the current narrow focus on subject-related technical and information skills does not prepare students adequately with the breadth of knowledge and capabilities needed in today’s classrooms, and beyond. This article presents a conceptual framework introducing an expanded view of teacher digital competence (TDC). It moves beyond prevailing technical and literacies conceptualisations, arguing for more holistic and broader-based understandings that recognise the increasingly complex knowledge and skills young people need to function ethically, safely and productively in diverse, digitally-mediated environments. The implications of the framework are discussed, with specific reference to its interdisciplinary nature and the requirement of all faculty to engage purposefully and deliberately in delivering its objectives. Practical suggestions on how the framework might be used by faculty, are presented.
This article shares the case of a student‐driven investigation into social issues from an eighth‐grade civics class at an American school in Mexico. Through vignettes about the teaching and learning ...process, the author argues that a focus on students’ inquiry into their social contexts rather than on specific social justice content is a key practice when teaching for critical democratic literacy, especially when teachers and students come from different social contexts. This article offers a concrete example of how foregrounding students’ critical questions can help move students toward social justice–oriented citizenship.
Interpreting health information and acquiring health knowledge have become more important with the accumulation of scientific medical knowledge and ideals of patient autonomy. Health literacy and its ...tremendous success as a concept can be considered an admission that not all is well in the distribution of health knowledge. The internet makes health information much more easily accessible than ever, but it introduces its own problems, of which health disinformation is a major one.
The objective of this study was to determine whether objective and subjective health literacy are independent concepts and to test which of the two was associated more strongly with accurate judgments of the quality of a medical website and with behavioral intentions beneficial to health.
A survey on depression and its treatments was conducted online (n=362). The Newest Vital Sign was employed to measure objective, performance-based health literacy, and the eHealth Literacy Scale was used to measure subjective, perception-based health literacy. Correlations, comparisons of means, linear and binary logistic regression, and mediation models were used to determine the associations.
Objective and subjective health literacy were weakly associated with one another (r=0.06, P=.24). High objective health literacy levels were associated with an inclination to behave in ways that are beneficial to one's own or others' health (ExpB=2.068, P=.004) and an ability to recognize low-quality online sources of health information (β=-.4698, P=.005). The recognition also improved participants' choice of treatment (β=-.3345, P<.001). Objective health literacy helped people to recognize misinformation on health websites and improved their judgment on their treatment for depression.
Self-reported, perception-based health literacy should be treated as a separate concept from objective, performance-based health literacy. Only objective health literacy appears to have the potential to prevent people from becoming victims of health disinformation.
Background This article explores the possibilities for conceptualising and doing critical disciplinary literacies (CDL) in (teacher) education. Aim By revisiting and adapting Luke and Freebody's four ...resources model, we consider the critical questions that teachers and teacher educators could ask about knowledge, practice, and text and/or representation within different disciplines. Setting Our use of the word 'critical' in CDL is therefore underpinned by traditions of critical literacies in which power and identity are fundamental to participating in disciplinary fields. Methods Using two cases as illustrative examples of CDL in context, one from science education and one from geography education, we demonstrate how our CDL model reveals possibilities for doing critical literacies across the curriculum and with disciplinary content knowledge and practice. Results Each case illustrates the pedagogical utility of the CDL framework for: (1) relating the disciplines to students' lives and (2) demystifying the processes of producing disciplinary texts. Conclusion We end with a call to action for student teachers, teachers, and teacher educators to explore the pedagogical utility of our CDL model by identifying the dominant texts of their (inter/trans) disciplinary work, interrogating the privileged sign systems as well as assumptions about imagined audiences of disciplinary texts, and (re) designing text and practice by drawing on multiple sources and approaches to representing knowledge and engaging in social action. Contribution In this article, we build on scholarship in critical literacies, disciplinary literacies, and teacher education by adapting and applying Luke and Freebody's four resources model to different disciplinary texts and practices, with implications for pedagogy at school and higher education contexts.
Multimodal composing using digital media has long emphasized forms of meaning making that extend beyond printed text to include a wider range of available semiotic resources. However, recent research ...has complicated this notion by highlighting how this availability does not follow inevitably from digital tools but arises from the interplay of their often invisible infrastructures (e.g., hardware, interfaces, algorithms, code). Using data from a technology‐rich humanities classroom, the authors explore three frictions that surfaced as students worked within and against these infrastructures to create a collaborative digital story. The authors show how attending to such frictions can open opportunities for inquiry and instruction related to the hidden infrastructures that condition multimodal composing in digital environments. Critical understandings of these infrastructures can support educators in creating more equitable conditions for multimodal literacy learning.
The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt “struggling reader” and “struggling writer” labels.
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