Literacy Reflective Essay

Literacy is the ability to gather, process and utilise information to effectively understand situations. Literacies encompass a range of different areas, such as numeracy and digital technology, not just reading and writing. They are the key to using different information to make sense of a range of materials associated with varying contexts and are vital in effective communication. As a current University of Tasmania student, I understand how important literacies are and am eager to build and extend my knowledge as a pre-service teacher.

The majority of what we do in life is determined by what we are exposed to in differing learning environments as we age. Growing up, I was exposed to a range of different activities in and outside of school which have advanced my learning. Simple things such as having Eric Carle’s 1969 picture book ’The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ read to me before bed, or listening to nursery rhymes are literacies that provide us with essential life experience from a young age.

My favourite type of literacies in school were always humanities but in particular, English. My extensive interest in the subject in college gave me the confidence to challenge myself to study more complex ideas like Marxist

I need to have confidence in myself that I can succeed. I am adamant that as the course progresses this will occur. In the future, I can build and extend my literacies by choosing to study subjects that I have found challenging in the past, like numeracy. Numeracy has always been my biggest weakness and this shows in my faculty numeracy test result, which I did not pass. It has been 2 years since I engaged in a maths class so it was hard to get my head around the questions. I struggled to remember formulas for different equations and my already weak background in the subject aided my