One of the best ways to cultivate this sort of attitude is through role-playing and skits. When students engage in such practices they are forced to place themselves in points of view of others. This mental dexterity encourages problem solving in various different levels. Such instructional opportunities are rich, and impart lifelong lessons about interaction, communication, and human nature. Beginning with a scenario or problem, encourages students to engage in ways like role-playing or other creative brainstorming, group activities. Instead of making these “special days” or “fun days” at the end of a unit, these sorts of practices should be mainstay. Contemporary students crave these sorts of interactions. Communication and information exchange fills the day of the 21st century student’s life. Instead of avoiding or regulating such interests, we should be encouraging communication. No era has had such availability of communication and information resources. This is the new literacy as explained by Nichole Pinkard, founder of Digital Youth Network – one of the five schools showcased in Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century. In that documentary, Pinkard said, “Literacy has always been defined by the technology. Before the printing press, your ability to orally recite something meant to be literate. And so, as technology has made things cheaper, we're now saying, "Well, hmm, is someone literate if they cannot critique media, take media in, if they're only talking in traditional text?" That's a question to answer today, but what will that mean in 2020?
I would venture to say that they won't necessarily be considered as being literate” (PBS Teachers). If we truly want to develop lifelong learners, how can we continue to ignore the greatest changes in society’s and the culture’s dynamics? This is a unique time in history: more information is available to more people – more so than any other time in history! Yet we ignore these resources every day. As Pinkard says, literacy no longer means the ability to simply read and write. This is not a new phenomenon, for literacy has evolved throughout the entirety of human history. Prior to the invention of the printing press, literacy meant oral tradition – the ability to memorize narratives (such as the Illiad and the Odyssey). When the printing press was invented literacy meant the ability to read and write books, newspapers and pamphlets. Today literacy refers to new media, and incorporates visual, audio, and interactive qualities unseen in any other format. Literacy has changed but has also expanded. The Homers was rare; Gutenberg expanded communication to those that could afford it; and today the internet is free to use at any public library across the country (not to mention its continual global expansion). Progress and expansion are the key components to literacy today. How does the modern day school system utilize and serve this change in literacy? Innovative schools are using: experiencing over telling, demonstrating instead of lecturing and creating in place of memorizing. Those who continue to favor autogamous models in fear of not meeting State standards, should know that it is impossible to be new media literate without the basics of 20th century literate – the means at which this literacy is achieved, only needs to change.
Pinkard explains: “Media work builds on top of traditional literacy. And if a kid hasn't had art, they don't understand color. If they don't understand shapes and circles, then it's very hard for them to ... to say, "Oh, we want to do graphic design… You can't write a movie unless you create a script first. Oftentimes, great songs have to be written down. So, the final product we're seeing is often the video format, but so many traditional forms of literacies go on” (PBS Teachers). I argue that digital media is not the only form of literacy needed in the 21st century, but that creativity and creative thinking are forms of literacy as well. Under the work by Edwards and Csikszentmihalyi’s research, we can frame creativity as a discipline unto itself. In the new allogamous education system, which shifts the autogamous paradigm to a model that starts with a PBL and ends with innovative solutions, we can see creativity as being the language, the dynamic and the skill needed to succeed. In her article, Study: Many College Students Not Learning to Think Critically, Sara Rimer points to the dire need for such an institutional change. “An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education” (Rimer). This staggering truth, supports the institutional change needed in the US education system. I identified, early on in this paper, that the education system is failing not because of those popular ideas which riddle our public discourse, but because we are falling behind our global competitors in scores and in creativity. We have to stop thinking of creativity as “artistry” and realize it is innovation, problem solving and decision making. “Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills” (Rimer).
The reason students are not succeeding in higher education, is because they are illiterate – they are creatively illiterate which means the foundation of their learning is not prepared for higher education. It is time to make the paradigm shift. It is time to overhaul the current educational model and transform. It is not enough to identify the problem, but schools need to be remodeled both in structure and mission. To truly improve teaching and learning, we need to examine what it means to learn in the 21st century.
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