This article was written and Published by Bill Bass — January 16th, 2025
Today’s classrooms must go beyond reading and writing skills.
As a former high school English teacher, I constantly find myself looking for the stories in the world around me. Whether they happen through social media platforms or face-to-face conversations, our stories define us. They help us understand ourselves and learn from each other.
However, this means that we must be able hear the stories around us and be literate enough to amplify them.
What Is Literacy for K–12 Students Today?
In some ways, literacy has become harder to define in 2025. When I was in high school, a teacher told me that if I could read and write, I could consider myself literate. When I think about the students that we serve today, I see that being literate is so much more than it once was.
As educators, we’ve defined numerous important literacies. Reading and writing are at the core and are crucial skills, but we also talk about being digitally literate, technologically literate, financially literate, media literate, visually literate and more. These are literacies we must teach our students, and each is an important element that helps us prepare and understand the stories we tell.
What we call these skills is less important than recognizing that they all feed into what it means to be literate in the digital age.
As advances in technology make our world more complex, and information continues to be more widely accessible, we need to recognize that literacy is not a defined list of skills and knowledge. Rather, we should see literacy as something that is constantly evolving.
In 2019, the National Council of Teachers of English released a position statement titled “Definition of Literacy in the Digital Age.” This statement has helped me consider how literacy evolves over time, and there are many elements in it that push my thinking. The one I often return to is, “As society and technology change, so does literacy.”
Technology’s Impact on Student Learning and Literacy
Technology is a constantly moving field, and one that I have dedicated much time and attention to throughout my career. It allows us to craft stories in creative ways and share them with a broader audience than ever. It has changed our society, bringing us together and helping us find our voices.
To be literate in the digital age, we must be able to critically think about the ways technology impacts our decisions and shapes our thinking.
As we think more broadly about literacy, we should recognize that in our schools, everyone teaches literacy in some form or fashion. Because these tools shape so much of the lives of our students, it’s no longer OK to avoid technology in the classroom.
Students need our guidance to recognize and analyze the impact technology has on their lives. They need to know how to make good decisions when it comes to technology. These things are key to being literate in the digital age.
WATCH NOW: Deploy the right technologies for your K–12 students.
Schools are meant to explore thinking and learning in different ways. Education is meant to broaden our paths and sometimes give us pause. As educators, we are in a unique position to create intentional experiences.
Each person has a story to tell, and the ways that we tell our stories reflect the ways that we see the world. How we tell and understand stories greatly depends on the experiences we’ve had in and out of school.
Literacy will continue to evolve, influenced by many things. Recognizing these influences changes the way we approach each other and how we relate to ourselves, and it can help to bring clarity to our stories.
