Content Literacy for a Non-Education Major

Content Literacy is a concept that needs to be explored by each person. It will look different when you explore its work in your life and mine. Not to say that we won't have similar experiences, but a lot of our ideas and thoughts about it will be different. And that's a great thing!

For example: I have four older sisters, all of whom are married and have children. Two of them have decided to homeschool their kids in conjunction with a co-op group. In this group, the parents each have to teach a few classes during the school year. Over spring break, I spent some time with one of my sisters that is going through this process and she shared about some of what she's been doing. She is an extremely talented artist, so it's not surprising that the group asked her to teach some of the art classes. What is surprising though, is that they also are having her teach a couple of math classes. As I've said before on here, math is SO my thing. I love it and it makes sense to me. Not so much for my sister.

Of course I was interested in this class that she was to teach so I asked questions. My nieces piped in telling me that they were learning about circumferences. It seems like a simple enough subject, but for my sister who is 35 and probably hasn't had a math class since her freshman year of college, it might be difficult. She had to take the "basic" principals that she learned so long ago, and remember how she learned them. She had to put herself into her students' shoes and re-learn this subject. And this is what we all should be doing as teachers. A topic that may seem so basic to us will not be basic at all to our students. It's not just teaching a formula and how to plug numbers in. It's teaching kids the why and how behind that formula. My sister had to learn how to read as a math teacher and then as a math student again. If that isn't content literacy in action, I don't know what is!

And I think that this doesn't happen as often as it should. Parents should be helping their students with their homework, but often parents have forgotten the material and simply send their kids to tutors. What if we came up with a way for parents to remember how to read for those specific contents? Then they could help their students and maybe the students could help their parents as well? What would that look like?

Update: Apparently the class went well, (we talked on the phone last night) and my nieces seemed to understand the concept pretty well! I hope in the future to help my sister to create lesson plans for these math classes, possibly getting some artwork in return :)

What do y'all think?

"Content Literacy - the ability of someone to interact with and use strategies to interpret the content of some subject (in its own language) including being able to speak, listen to, read, and write in that language"

{Sassy}