During those three weeks, we took a revolutionary approach to teaching reading and writing by examining the text from different pedagogical approaches—using music, dance and performance—and finding themes that intrigued us and that we would like to explore further.

To unbind literacies means to unstitch knowledge, to examine a text and see what holds it together, what makes it meaningful and rich. And then, after that thorough examination, when you bind the book back together, you create a “new” text, a remixed version of the “original” one, one that “shows” how everyone worked together to understand and make the text our own.

None of this could have been possible if there had not been any collaboration, no construction of meaning together. Making learning visible and having students participate in creating that meaning was key in having all of us share ideas that would otherwise not have occurred to us had we done it on our own. I believe that this is what made this—“unbiding of literacies”—so meaningful: working with others to solve problems, to think about ideas, to share our thoughts, to be able to take risks, to ask questions and find answers together. Also, it was this collaboration what made learning fun and long lasting. And so the literacies we learned and applied during this course were not just a set of “rules” students must acquire during their schooling, but rather, they became skills students used all the time while learning how to analyze and think about literature, about how to communicate with others effectively and become participants of their own education.   

At the end of our study, those of us who participated were asked what the most important lesson we had learned from this experience was, and all of us—without exception—responded that because we had felt heard and valued, because we were asked our opinions and because they were taken into account, we felt part of something meaningful, original and life changing.

Camila Gamboa
English Teacher