Literacy, Literature - Assumptions or Beliefs
    1. We must continually account for student’s dispositional (affective/ emotional) responses to literature and strive to make it positive for a variety of types of literature and genre. Therefore, we must provide a variety of different types of literature and genre for which students respond in a positive manner.
    2. Children’s literature is essential for the development of an educated citizenry. It must be included in the planned, enacted, and experienced curriculum from a very young age.
    3. Children’s literature has undergone significant changes over the years and we assume children’s literature is evolving with significant changes now and unimaginable changes in the not too distant future.
    4. There are many sources to help locate children's books, authors, activities, literature selection aids, and literature review sources.
    5. Research related to children's literature is helpful to teachers.
    6. Multiple forms of literature and media must be used to facilitate the achievement literacy.
    7. Instructional methodologies and strategies must include a variety of literature and media integrated with students' lives and local and global cultures.
    8. Literature must be studied in a manner that allows students to have significant intellectual and emotional transactions with a variety of literature and media in a manner that develops their self-efficacy and appreciation of literature.
    9. Students must be introduced to a wide variety of artists, authors, composers, poets, producers, actors, actresses, musicians, playwrights, and illustrators along with their works to understand the human side of those who create children's literature.
    10. Students understand and analyze children's literature and its literary elements by feeling free to respond to their experiences with literature and by being intellectually challenged and push to greater understanding.
    11. Assessments is necessary to learn what students know and where to to start with each of them to facilitate their understanding, use, and enjoyment of literature.
    12. Literacy is more than understanding and having skill in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and creating and interpreting graphic representations.
    13. Literacy is required for all media life including books, television, signs, radio, music, movies, and anything that students can think, imagine, feel, share, critically analyze, and evaluate.
    14. Today's students are more prone to being literate in pop culture: TV, movies, music, videos, electronic games, and the use of electronic audio and video equipment and advertising than in textual material. Therefore, as teachers we can and must use the background students have in popular media to scaffold greater understanding of stories and elements across media and within different pieces of literature to facilitate their learning and guide them to greater literacy within in different media, particularly those dependent on text to tell a story.
    15. Since literacy is being able to communicate ideas and feelings in different media, talking in the classroom among classmates must be modeled and facilitated to not only increase student's language skills, but to increase their ability to practice the processes of literature and media.
    16. All children learn. Maybe not at the same level or the same thing when the participate in the same activity. However, their responses to the same piece of literature is a natural form of differentiation that can be used to challenge students to greater personal understanding if we are willing to accept that not everyone has to learn the same thing.

Dr. Robert Sweetland's notes