Article Summary: Literacy Education for a New Ethics of Global Community

Article Summary
Literacy Education for a New Ethics of Global Community
by Allan Luke

New Literacy Used:
I created a blog and wrote my review using blogging through www.blogspot.com.

In Allan Luke’s piece titled “Literacy Education for a New Ethics of Global Community,” I felt like he was speaking to my soul. I grew up in a then-small town in Johnston County where I really wasn’t able to get the cultural reading experience growing up that I had in college. As a matter of fact, my first year at Meredith College was the first time I really remember reading and studying another culture when I read “In the Time of the Butterflies” by Julia Alvarez.

As a teacher, I want to expose my students to many different cultures during their time in my classroom. I want them to read and write from critical, but respectful positions about all of the texts that I didn’t have the opportunity to analyze when I was young. Luke’s main point of his article was that the goal of the teacher should be not only to teach students how to read, but also what they should do with texts and how to properly explore them. We have to infuse in our students the belief that not all texts are the same and not all points-of-view that are covered in a text are the only ones available; we must teach them to look at every story from many different angles.

I also liked what Luke said about reading and writing in reference to culture. He mentioned that these two are things that every culture does, however, not every culture embraces the idea of diversity. Literacy can be a passport through which our students are able to use their imaginations to travel and experience other ethnicities, times and worlds. This is an experience that we should encourage in our classroom as often as possible.

Luke also discusses the importance of not supporting a “parochial literacy” that only allows our students to practice literature that falls within their community boundaries. Teaching children about literature in different cultures can give them a very rich real-world experience that helps mirror people physically thousands of miles away in regards to what is going on in their own lives. It is also imperative that we teach students how to embrace and live together in a world where we have the freedom to both express and appreciate our individual differences in a respectful way.

In conclusion, I challenge us all as teachers to do what Luke suggests in his article and question the ultimate purpose of education and ask how it can help us bridge between the local and the global to create a more understanding and collaborative world all together.