KAT Promotes Literacy for Democracy

Reflections on Literacy

Addressing Your Concerns:
Literacy: Necessary but NOT Sufficient

Gleanings from the Field:
From Vocabulary Exercises to KAT Applications

Notes about the Centerfold Lesson
Using KAT to Enhance Literacy, Comprehension & Civic Action

CenterFold Lesson
Aspects of the Literacy Issue for KAT Study

Adding to Your Resource Base

BreakOut Lesson
Literacy for Democray

Gleanings from the Field:

From Vocabulary Exercises to KAT Applications

Without certain words, it’s hard to think about certain ideas. To deal with complex ideas and concepts, we need not only the words, but we also need enough experience using them to construct and deconstruct their meaning.

This is why we help students develop vocabulary – not only to improve their performance on high stakes tests! – but also to introduce them to important concepts and processes. But memorizing new vocabulary and even using new words in a sentence aren’t enough. To obtain reading and listening comprehension, and to position themselves effectively in a global society, students must engage with the material in an active, authentic way.

KAT expands comprehension because students integrate the new concepts directly into their work.

For example, take a KAT issue that focuses on public health aspects of school lunches. Nutrition, vegetables, diabetes, government surplus commodities, subsidies, inspections, price incentives, and ‘break even’ are all concepts that fourth graders can learn and use to understand how and why school cafeterias run the way they do. A moderately literate taxpayer attending a school board meeting might be somewhat baffled by a debate on whether or not to outsource the District’s food service to a private vendor or to make it a self-sufficient entity within the District. But students who have learned these terms and concepts in the process of improving their cafeteria food will have a working understanding. The hands-on application of what may seem like sophisticated concepts is how KAT enhances basic literacy as well as health, civic, and economic comprehension. This broader literacy comprehension is knowledge that is then applicable to other situations.

Another example could be a recent KAT study on safe drinking water. Watershed, hydrologic cycle, bacteria, water treatment, parts per billion (PPB), leaching, lead solder, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are just a few of the terms and concepts that made drinking water policies and processes accessible to students rather than leave them as mysteries.

Literacy isn’t just reading words and matching them to definitions. Functional literacy in a democracy requires a civic body that comprehends the meanings and uses of the concepts. KAT expects students to become literate newspaper readers and rigorous researchers. KAT uses essential readings on important community issues as its “text.” KAT students practice literacy across all subject fields.

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