Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment. Updated February 2013 Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee November 19, 2008 Context for NCTE’s 21st Century Literacies Framework The NCTE definition of 21st century literacies makes it clear that the continued evolution of curriculum, assessment, and teaching practice itself is necessary: Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.
Elements of the Framework. American Writers: Teacher Resources - Theodore Drieser. Sister Carrie. Theodore Dreiser (drī´sər, –zər), 1871–1945, American novelist, b. Terre Haute, Ind. A pioneer of naturalism in American literature, Dreiser wrote novels reflecting his mechanistic view of life, a concept that held humanity as the victim of such ungovernable forces as economics, biology, society, and even chance. In his works, conventional morality is unimportant, consciously virtuous behavior having little to do with material success and happiness.
While his style and language tended to be clumsy and plodding, he played an important role in introducing a new realism and sexual candor into American fiction. Dreiser was born into a large and poor family. His education was irregular, but, with help from a sympathetic high school teacher, he spent the year 1889–90 at the Univ. of Indiana. In The Financier (1912), he turned his attention more specifically to American social and economic institutions. Seamus Heaney on BEOWULF. And now this is ‘an inheritance’ – Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked In the long ago, yet willable forward Again and again and again. The poem called Beowulf was composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first millennium, in the language that is today called Anglo-Saxon or Old English. It is a heroic narrative, more than three thousand lines long, concerning the deeds of a Scandinavian prince, also called Beowulf, and it stands as one of the foundation works of poetry in English.
The fact that the English language has changed so much in the last thousand years means, however, that the poem is now generally read in translation and mostly in English courses at schools and universities. The poem was written in England but the events it describes are set in Scandinavia, in a ‘once upon a time’ that is partly historical. We know about the poem more or less by chance, because it exists in one manuscript only.
Fing. So.