What do I learn?
Literacy is fantastic, fabulous, and more than I used to believe.
Literacy embraces everything if I may say so. When I used to think that literacy is only ability to read and write, I believe that most of the people are literate because they have those skills.
Then, now everything changes, my perspective changes. I could not define what kind of literate people would be, what would be the best criteria for it.
All of these questions remain unanswered, and I believe the answer would also change from time to time because the definition of literacy always develops from time to time.
Literacy and text are related each other. And nowadays, the word text does not only refer to the printed text but also the digital and visual text including image and film. Then the literacy also embraces all of the stuff from the printed text to the digitalized text. It is not only ability to read and write but also ability to view.
It does not only mean that we can use the skills, but also how we can get the meaning from that, how we can use the information in it to create another information, how we can get know of the author, how we can understand what they express, and also how we notice the design of it. More than that, it is also about how we acknowledge the purpose of it and then reflect ourselves and make use of it.
It is a shame for me because I learn a lot from literacy, but it is still hard for me to combine every knowledge I know into a useful article and to conclude what literacy is. It is better me to say that everything we face now in this world is part of literacy activities. We could not be separated from literacy because we have that for our daily life; reading news, playing phones, reading the ingredients of foods, watching TV, reading an advertisement in the street, reading a sign in your room, and more literacy activities we barely notice.
So, what should we do then? Helping children from a very young age to be more critical in literacy activities, making them realise the significance of literacy, helping them to understand the meaning of every text they would see, encouraging them to be more aware, and letting them be more creative.