Outcomes for Literacy

Ewan McIntosh describes himself as having been "part of the small but persistent team within Learning and Teaching Scotland who, for the past three years, has been pecking away at the definition of Literacy."

Yesterday, he wrote about the outcomes for Literacy in Scotland's new Curriculum for Excellence having been released for consultation. He writes that in the "Cover Paper" for the outcomes, text is defined as

novels, short stories, plays, poems, reference texts, the spoken word, charts, maps, graphs and timetables, advertisements, promotional leaflets, comics, newspapers and magazines, CVs, letters and e-mails, films, games and TV programmes, labels, signs and posters, recipes, manuals and instructions, reports and reviews, text messages, blogs and social networking sites, web pages, catalogues and directories.

and he quotes Maureen Watt, the Schools and Skills Minister's statement:

"We teach children how to understand, analyse and communicate using words on paper and rightly so. We're not going to stop that - indeed we want people to be properly equipped with better literacy skills.

"At the same time, of course, we get our news and information more from TV and the internet than from the newspaper. We communicate through email and text messaging and social networking more than writing letters.

"Young people are immersed in technology and the tools that help them create websites, blogs, videos and podcasts also allow them to be authors and publishers. They can reach a worldwide audience, so we have to teach them to do this well. We would be failing them if we just stand by and ignore these developments."

Read the whole statement here.