Sam Branz

1/21/2015
ED 318
Reading Response #1
Literacy Manifesto Then and Now

I believe students need to be surrounded by a wealth of literature in the classroom.

Students should have access to an enormous amount of literature in their schools.
Literature does not only encompass books but magazines, newspapers, audio books,
blogs, and so on. Students today face a much wider variety of literature than in the past.
Allowing students access to various and plentiful sources of this literature can help create
voracious readers. Kelly Gallagher (2009), the author of Readicide: How schools are
killing reading and what you can do about it, stipulates that students should be immersed
in a book flood in the classroom and that these books should be interesting to the
students, not simply classics that teachers think students should be reading.

I believe students should be exposed to literature pertaining to the world around them.
When students have the chance to give voice to their concerns on the happenings
of the world around them, they feel more a part of the world. One thing that has travelled
with me from a class in seventh grade was our weekly chat on national and world events.
One of my teachers regularly scoured newspapers, websites and so on to find the class a
meaningful and thought provoking article to read. The teacher would pass out the article
to each person in the class to read through. When we were finished reading the article we
were to silently read until the rest of the class was also finished. Once we had all read the
article, we would spend the rest of the class time talking about what this article meant;
what we were confused about; what we thought about the writing; whether there was a

Sam Branz
1/21/2015
biased view or if we thought that something was being withheld from the reader; and
what it meant for our society.
I enjoyed these discussions, as each person in class was given the ability to state
their own views and any theory we had about the article was accepted and discussed, no
matter how far-fetched. As a direct result of this experience, I feel I can more easily
discern whether there is a bias at work in a news source or whether the source I am
looking at is credible. Students who are given these skills are more likely to think
critically about the world they inhabit and make more informed decisions. The students
we teach today will someday be making the decisions about how this world works. I

would have them informed and prepared to make the right decisions.
I believe students should be given small but meaningful goals to work toward in class to
further their literacy.
Students should be given small goals to work toward during the school year. As
these goals are met, they make new goals and so on and so forth. I believe that a student
should be able to look back in their goal notebook and see how much progress they have
made over their time in school. Guthrie (2007) writes Positive self-evaluations lead
students to feel efficacious about learning and motivate them to continue to work
diligently. Overcoming small obstacles and documenting the process sends a powerful
message to students: look at how far you have come; you can do anything as long as you

give your best effort and never give up.

I believe students should be allowed to re-read books they are fond of.

Sam Branz
1/21/2015

Students who are given the chance to re-read a book that they are interested in are
given the chance to master the material they are reading; the words they read become
easily recognizable and they are able to recall their meaning in other literature they come
across. Students may also have an affective response such as being comforted or made
happy by the mere action of reading that particular book again. I am comforted when
reading the Harry Potter book series by J. K. Rowling. My grandmother and I would stay
up late into the night, her crocheting while I read the books. I would stop at the end of
each chapter and recap what I read for her. We would share our thoughts and predictions
for what would come next as well. I still relive these affective moments when I re-read
the Harry Potter series.

Sam Branz
1/21/2015
My Venn diagram was at first a challenge. I then re-read my manifesto and looked back
on the three readings we read. I was surprised by how many of my beliefs were demonstrated in
the articles by Flint (2008), Zwiers (2010), and Guthrie (2007).
The quotes, An inquiry model suggests that learning is best achieved when students are
invited to participate in making decisions about their learning process. and Any time people
are engaged in reading and writing events, they are constructing social relationships with others.
support my beliefs that students should have access to a wealth of literature, students should be
able to re-read books they find interesting, and students should be exposed to literature
pertaining to the world around them (Flint, 2008). Students need to have a role in their education,
whether it be choosing the book they read today or choosing the type of animal they would like
to research and present information on to the class. Knowing the students in your classroom and
what they are interested in learning can help you motivate and engage them in subjects while
building reading comprehension.
Engagement can be boosted as well when students are given the ability to choose the
literature they interact with. This can be demonstrated through the quote, A critical literacy
ideology empowers students to actively participate in a democracy and move literacy beyond
text and into social action (Flint, 2008). During my seventh grade class, we were also able to
request a topic for the next weeks article from a list of topics handed out by our teacher. This
enabled my teacher to control the content we were being exposed to in such a way that the
subject would have been in line with the standards he wished to teach us and also in line with
what the majority of the class was interested in reading about.

Sam Branz
1/21/2015
Positive self-evaluations lead students to feel efficacious about learning and motivate
them to continue to work diligently from Guthrie (2007) also supports my assertion that
students should be given goals throughout the school year that they can look back on. For
myself, it is very rewarding to see that I have passed certain goals I have made for myself
whether they be chores, homework, personal, or academic.
Multimodal literacies ( linguistic, visual, auditory, and spatial modes) children are
exposed to, through interactive digital media, play a significant role in the ways they access and
use text. also supports my belief that students should be exposed to many different sources of
literature. Students do not come to class only having seen books in their parents houses.
Students now see billboards, movie menu screens and movies, blogs, e-books as well as a myriad
of other sources.

Sam Branz
1/21/2015
Works Cited
Flint, Amy Seely. (2008). Literate lives: Teaching reading & writing in elementary classrooms.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Gallagher, Kelly. (2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about
it. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
Guthrie, John T., Hoa, A. Laurel W., Wigfield, Allan, Tonks, Stephen M., Humenick, Nicole M.,
& Littles, Erin. (2007). Reading motivation and reading comprehension growth in the
later elementary years. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32, 282-313.
doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2006.05.004.
Zwiers, Jeff. (2010). Building reading comprehension habits in grades 6-12: A toolkit of
classroom activities. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, Inc.