Conversation Starters
Starters or Stoppers? That is the Question.
“At its best, literacy starts conversations that can bring
people closer together in understanding and connectedness. Literacy falls short
of that promise when what passes for sharing books actually interrupts or stops such
conversation.
Ideally, literacy, like
conversation, is a means for offering others information, feelings and
experiences. Authors carefully craft what they wish to express hoping readers
thoughtfully consider their messages. This sharing, across space and time,
represents a slow, asynchronous initial interchange that models and can lead to
further in-person conversations about the content of written messages.
As young children progress into
formal education, they are taught the technicalities of reading and writing, of
course, but to yield fully literate graduates, those technical skills
must not supplant but complement the abstract understanding, hopefully
developed years earlier, that literacy is a formidable, human communication
tool. Literacy serves most powerfully to book-end personal inquiry. And it is inquiry—investigations
that extend one’s own life experiences—that is at the core of independent human
learning. When children (and adults!) reflect upon their lives’ experiences,
learning occurs most efficiently and completely when their inquiry is focused
upon what they find most interesting.
So,
if caring adults invite a child to share about his own interests when reading a…”
