Notes on Religious Literacies in a Secular Literacy Classroom: Implications & Views (2014)

Skerrett, A. (2014). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading
Research Quarterly, 49, 233-250. doi:10.1002/rrq.65

“As with literacy scholarship and research, a just as troubling condition persists in public schoolstoday: anxiety, fear, and lack of professional knowledge and direction about engaging religious literacies in school (Bishop & Nash, 2007; Noddings, 2008). This silencing of religious discourses in school limits opportunities for the teaching and learning of literacy.” (p. 248)

IV. Implications and conclusions

1. For educational practice
1. There are opportunities for teaching and learning literacy while drawing on religious literacies.
2. How literacy education can be more fully informed with religious literacies must be substantiated through theorizing and description.
3. As shown in the present study, a teacher’s pedagogy of multiliteracies allowed continual connections among all context of and literacy; students draw on complex religious literacies to make meaning of the text; and emphasis on shared values and commitment must be stressed.
2. For literacy theory and research
1. With multiplicity in cultures and languages, with the rise of transnationals, research consideration of students’ literacy practices, including religious literacies in the classroom must not be muted.

Since they are potential tools for developing academic literacies.

Also, openness, respect and intellectual curiosity enables students to make use of students’ religious literacies across the official curriculum

2. Teachers should also explore their own religious identities, knowledge, beliefs, and practices and understand how these can also be manifested with their students.
3. Teachers, and those who teach and work with them in classrooms, may explore theoretical and pedagogical approaches that enable identification of, and productive engagement with, the range of potential resources for learning that students bring to school.

This will yoke interactions and can be productive how students’ religious literacies can bear fruitful relationship with other literacies that they and the curriculum value.

V. Personal Questions/Views

1. What components of literacy is she talking about?
2. Is it because they are children that they are not apprehended on these religious literacy expressions in the classroom?
3. The study provides a fresh perspective as to where religious literacy fits in the classroom and how it interacts with other literacies within the academic context.
4. The implications of the study invites decisiveness in the pedagogical framework schools adopt in order to harness multiliteracies without stripping student identities and curricular goals.