Literacy and Education

Kate Pahl, Jennifer Rowsell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781446201350, 9781446201343
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290064
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Literacy and Education continues to be an accessible guide to current theory on literacy with practical applications in the classroom. This new edition has a new focus on the ecologies of literacy and on participatory and visual ways of researching literacy.

The new edition examines

- new literacy studies

- material culture and literacy

- digital literacies

- the ecological, place-based approaches to literacy education

- timescales and identities, and

- ways in which research has moved on to inform literacy education.

Classroom teachers, teacher trainers and students of literacy will find this a user-friendly guide to new theory in literacy education, clearly demonstrating how to implement this theory in the classroom in a way that is inclusive and listens to the students of today.

1

The New Literacy Studies and teaching literacy: Where we were and where we are going

The following vignette was written by a participant in a high school study. Using the principles of New Literacy Studies and multimodality, Winston found his way into writing.

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Vignette: Rutgers admission letter

By Winston Charlebon (pseudonym)

For many years, the small Caribbean Island of Haiti has been shunned by the world. Children have been starving, families have been homeless and the government has been negligent. The murders will never be reprimanded; the kidnappers celebrate showing no remorse for their actions while they spend their ransoms on life’s vices. The children’s clothes are saturated with dirt; their hands are worn down from strenuous labor. Their shoes are torn and old, their feet are swollen and blistered from the countless miles they walk. Their evangelical families pray to God anxiously waiting his return. For them Judgment Day is a liberation from this terrible life they live. January 12, 2010 their prayers were not answered. Instead, an earthquake ravaged through the capital city. People ran trying to escape the flying debris. The elderly were too weak to run and could not evade a horrible fate. And children studying in their classrooms were crushed by heavy bricks and wood and could not even say goodbye to their loved ones. My loved ones were right in the midst of it. They were left with literally nothing, not even their lives. People heard about the earthquake and read about the earthquake and read the news report but very few people actually know what is occurring in Haiti and in other countries today. That is why I co-founded the Multicultural Awareness Group in order to help educate my fellow peers about different cultures that they might know about. Rutgers University is a unique university because of its immense diversity. If I am fortunate enough to be accepted into this university, I intend to take advantage of its diversity and use it as an opportunity to educate others about cultures that most individuals have not heard of. For many years, the small quintessential town of Princeton has attracted people from all over the globe. The children have been well fed, their families live in big houses, and the government has always been extremely gracious towards them. Violence is almost unheard of and any crime is punished severely. The children wear the latest designer clothes. The most expensive and fine jewelry hug their necks and wrists. Their hands are soft and smooth. Their fingers are pampered and manicured. However this is not how I have lived in Princeton. I lived in a small house with 7 people to share three bedrooms. I would make my own dinner and didn’t have anyone to do my work for me. If I am accepted into Rutgers University, I will be able to open the eyes of several other students to a variety of different cultures, which would greatly benefit the diverse environment.

Reprinted with permission from Winston, October 11, 2010

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Key themes in the chapter:

• Literacy as a social practice
• Literacy as an event and a set of practices
• Literacy as a global and local practice
• Literacy as faith-based
• Literacy as critical

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INTRODUCTION

Imagine that you are teaching students, like Winston, who have been identified as ‘underachieving in literacy’. These are young people who come from a number of different backgrounds. Jennifer first met Winston when he was in a 9th Grade support English class when he expressed little interest in reading and writing. When she encountered Winston he was struggling in English class and he showed little interest in reading literature and ‘the canon’, Shakespeare and Homer, and writing formal essays were not his favoured literacy practices. In his out-of-school life, Winston listens to rap, hip-hop, contributes (constantly) to Facebook, and takes photographs of his neighbourhood.

• How would you teach Winston?

Four years after meeting Winston, he came to see Jennifer with his Dad to discuss what he needs to do to get accepted into Rutgers University. Winston was a different young man, more serious, confident, and mature. During our conversation, we talked about writing a short narrative that captured him and that gave a specific picture to the reader about how he would contribute to Rutgers. We talked about his family and his aspirations and what inspired these aspirations. What resulted from the conversation is the first vignette in this book as a powerful signifier of enacting how to understand New Literacy Studies in a classroom. Clearly, something shifted with Winston and his relationship with English and writing formal essays. Winston attributes his change of heart to a supportive family and to good teachers at his high school. Jennifer still corresponds with Winston, who did not end up at Rutgers University but at a university further afield and he is very happy. Winston’s thoughtful narrative is very much in the spirit of New Literacy Studies, in that it demonstrates his awareness of:

• Lived cultural practice
• Local–global connections
• Identity issues
• Felt emotions

The vignette depicts the dramatic change Winston experienced as he completed high school. Jennifer recollects his gradual socialization and eventual enjoyment of English over his years in high school. The vignette begins a journey into key themes introduced in this chapter and themes that run throughout the book.

These themes are:

1	Literacy as ecologies. By ecology we mean that literacy exists in places, as a set of actions by particular individuals that is in a network of other actions around literacy.
2	Literacy is an embodied practice that requires movement and action (e.g., scrolling, tapping, reading, sliding) and as an embodied experience it requires more modes of representation than ever, i.e. multimodality.
3	Critical literacy has always been important, but it is more important than ever that we critically frame the diverse texts our students use.
4	Literacy is still hand-made and artifactual, and it relates to real worlds and embodied experience.
5	Writing takes place in the home, in the street and in the school. This activity can be invisible and is materialized in different ways such as gardening and textiles.
6	More than ever, literacy is about digital and immersive worlds. It is also about challenging the binaries between the online and offline.
7	Literacy exists within curricular objectives and frameworks. We can’t forget as educators that we need to negotiate our own philosophies and understandings of practice with curricula objectives and in the book we try to mediate new ideas with more traditional notions, such as academic literacy.
8	Literacy has a different logic that we uncover in the book, a logic more in line with twenty-first-century needs and practices.

The view of literacy as a social practice has been around for some time now. In writing this second edition of Literacy and Education, it is clear that the field has indeed moved on. Our aim in the second edition is to update our accounts of New Literacy Studies to see how this understanding of literacy can be applied to classrooms in new times, with potentially more immediate demands than in 2005. In this chapter, the concepts behind the idea of literacy as a social practice will be explained and then contextualized within important studies that have contributed to the field, five years on. What continue to be central to New Literacy Studies are the key ideas of literacy events and literacy practices.

The moment of composing a text can be described as a literacy event, an event in which literacy forms a part. Now, five years on, it is even more pressing to open up a definition of text to any kind of entity from which an individual makes meaning. For instance, a contemporary literacy event might be writing on someone’s Facebook wall about an event that happened and getting immediate feedback from friends and family. Part of the composing process for a text draws on a meaning maker’s experience of literacy practices. Winston pulls on his experience of creating voice in narratives through deft attention to detail and using the correct register for the reader. Working within a persuasive narrative, Winston knows how to rhetorically structure his argument so that the reader recognizes his unique contribution to a place. This view of literacy as informed by patterns of practice can be contrasted with a view of literacy as a set of skills. In this book, we argue that it is possible to combine an understanding of literacy as a set of skills with an understanding of how we use literacy in everyday life. In fact, we argue that if we bring these understandings together, it helps. What is more, we consider how the idea of literacy as a social practice encourages our students’ writing and reading development in classroom settings.

Winston’s vignette is a fitting segue to look at contemporary New Literacy Studies because it illustrates that when students draw on cultural experiences they have had in their lives, they have more fluency in their writing. Students may come from different parts of the globe, and then learn within an urban space. They may live in a remote rural community, on an island, but be connected to the world through the Internet. If literacy is understood as a global and social practice, this helps us understand why children need to communicate not only across different cultures, but also in relation to changing global communication.

• How can Winston access fluent writing?

Here we explore ways of engaging students who have rich experience of the world in writing so that they can access academic literacy. When Winston drew on his own experience, culture, lived history to write his admission essay, he drew on his identity as a teenager and child who knows about the reality of a culture under tremendous strain and arduous conditions. He speaks Haitian dialect, and this history and culture informs his perspective. At the same time, Winston lived in Princeton, a privileged university town in the United States. Locating his global identity within his local identity brings power, force, the everyday into his narrative.

Students within everyday and global spaces need to both pull on their global identities and make a success for themselves within local learning contexts. Literacy very quickly moves between local and global. At one moment you can be having a Facebook conversation with your friend down the corridor and, in the next moment, you can be emailing your Granny in Buenos Aires. In the book, we signal the thread between the local and the global. In Chapter 4 the spatial nature of literacy is explored, and we consider how an understanding of place and space can help shape literacy practices. Power comes into these discussions, as place-based literacies are connected to more powerful or less powerful spaces (Comber, 2010).

When our students write and read, they infuse these practices into their identities. Literacy learners bring their identities into the making of meaning, and as they learn to read, or put marks on a page, their marks are inscribed with that experience. This book connects to new ideas about the relationship between literacy and identity and how this works in classrooms. You will also consider what this perspective does to aid classroom practice. Identities are complex, made up of hybrid and multiple experiences. Identities shape our literacy practices. These identity-infused literacy practices are then taken up in school and encounter different literacy practices.

• How can we e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword by Barbara Comber
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of terms
• 1 The New Literacy Studies and teaching literacy: Where we were and where we are going
• 2 Multimodal literacies: New ways of reading and writing
• 3 Children’s texts go to school
• 4 Literacies in the community
• 5 Literacy and identity: Who are the meaning makers?
• 6 Navigating new literacies for new times: Shaping curriculum and pedagogy
• Conclusion to the second edition of Literacy and Education
• References
• Index