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The Long Road to Literacy:
Students Decode Ancient Writings
Vera Datsik (Russia)
From 2000 through 2004, our school was one of Saint Petersburg’s experimental sites for the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking program (RWCT). When our teachers began to implement this new educational approach, I, as the school librarian, joined right in.
In this article, I present a sample library circle session based on the RWCT approach and devoted to the theme The Long Road to Literacy.
The goal of the lesson was to acquaint students with the development of literacy and with different kinds of writing: from primitive symbolic objects to modern text messaging (mobile-to-mobile SMS). I didn’t want the lesson to be just another boring lecture; I intended it to be a joint quest for knowledge that would provide opportunities for the students to apply their intelligence to practical problem-solving tasks, work together, and prove something to each other. I was aiming for more than simply presenting new knowledge in an engaging, unusual form. Keeping in mind Lurye’s (2004) perceptive statement that “the subtlest matter of education is not methods. It is human relationships” (p. 4), I want my students to develop an ability to listen to the opinions of others and not to be afraid to assert their own.
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The Long Road to Literacy: Students Decode Ancient Writings