Working Literacies

What are working literacies?

One of the early challenges of the project was to define what we are calling working literacies. Although the term itself continues to be contested by CLAAS faculty, all of the participants agree that “working literacies” refer to the skills and ideas that are most central to their courses – ideas and skills that students will be able to use beyond college in their roles as active, informed citizens in a complex and changing society.

There is also agreement that investigating student learning through the lens of working literacies leads to insights about university coursework and teaching. All of the CLAAS faculty confess that they too often and too easily form misguided assumptions about the kinds of knowledge or abilities students have when they arrive in their courses. By providing ways for students to develop the knowledge or abilities within courses rather than expecting that students already have these, more students have opportunities to succeed.

While grant funding for the project is terminable, the CLAAS model has been a powerful one that will continue to seed the development of active, integrated courses at the University of Wyoming and beyond.

The following models are examples of how working literacies can function in course design:

Mastery Concept

In the traditional education system—and general education courses in particular—course materials do not readily move beyond the boundaries of subject content. Students struggle without a built-in foundation of fundamental and technical literacies, and they do not necessarily make the link to social application.

This mastery diagram is one way of depicting a more integrated model of general education in which working literacies become central to the course content. In this model, students receive sufficient training in fundamental and discipline-specific (technical) literacies to effectively learn the course content. Content is taught by actively making connections between subject material and the socio-political world, and successful students complete the course with an ability to apply the subject knowledge in settings beyond the classroom.

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Spiral Concept

A second model similar to Jerome Bruner's spiral curriculum depicts how working literacies provide a framework for the entire course. The number and specific kinds of literacies (represented here as literacies 1-3) vary with each class. Subject content is taught by way of literacies, which are reviewed and assessed repeatedly throughout the term. By providing a foundation of working literacies, we believe that students will be more likely to internalize the most important concepts of the course and retain this knowledge in their role as citizens.

Click on the courses listed under Quick Links for specific information on how faculty are redesigning classroom instruction and assessments to align more closely with the working literacies they have identified in their courses.

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