We hear the word “literacy” all around us — all the time — by politicians, pundits, and would-be prophets, most of whom haven’t spent any time with a literacy learner in years. For those of us who invest our days, our weeks, our lives in building literate human beings, there is nothing so important as literacy. We search out deeper understanding of what it means to be literate. We hunt for ways to make literate behaviors more explicit for the young learners we teach. We analyze and parse our own literate behaviors, seeking insight into what it is that we do so automatically — so that we can break it down and show it to our student readers and writers.
