literacy or literacies?

If we rethink literacy (traditionally reading and writing) as literacies (meaning making in certain spaces) we begin to reconceptualize what education is, what learning is and where it all comes from. Traditional education focuses on skill and drill education, teacher delivers content to student, then quizzes mastery of content. The content is delivered in a classroom setting, removed from the context to which it is relevant (besides the classroom) so the mastery of the content is appropriate to the classroom but no where else. If we instead begin to see literacies as ways of making meaning in spaces, we’re always already looking to the context to situate the learning practices and the content. An example of this is you are sent to mars on a mission to teach baseball to martians. You can’t show video, you have no baseball tools, you have no pictures, you have no other human helpers, can you teach martians baseball? The point of this exercise is to see that once you begin explaining baseball and inevitably fandom to the martians, the game and the fandom will take on a life of it’s own. Do we define baseball without fans? Can we extract the rules of the game and still call it baseball, or is the rest of it (the uniforms, player, owners, fans, hot dogs, beer, bats, gloves, cards, etc) all a part of baseball? All that extra stuff adds a little something to our idea of baseball, and can be different for each individual person. We all make meaning differently in that context. For the uberfan, the score is super important and all the calls made by umpires affect their concept of baseball. For the fair-weather fan with free tickets, the ball park nachos are a part of baseball and add to their concept of baseball. So if we turn this on education, the teaching of science in an elementary school classroom is content that is out of context. Students experience science everyday, and experience rules of science everyday by falling off the monkey bars, but are forced to learn gravity in a textbook through text. Higher education is slightly better with the contextualization, but also dealing with students who have incorporated abstraction of content into classrooms as part of the entire schooling process. So, given this reconceptualization of literacy to literacies how should we be envisioning the classroom to help students learn both content and higher level learning skills? How do we move this online?