- “literacy is no longer seen as situated only in cognition, to be studied only by psychologists. Literacy is deeply enmeshed in the culture, history, and everyday discourses of people’s lives…To look at literacy out of these contexts is to miss most (if not all) of what is happening” (6).
- “our long human history…has been enmeshed with all kinds of print and nonprint symbol making” (21).
- “online reading would change the act of reading in that the online reader might click on one hyperlink that another reader would not. The first reader would then proceed through the text in a completely different sequence than the second reader and so on” (5).
He also makes the following claims about teaching literacy:
- “in the world of an increasingly dizzying array of potential reflectors, students need to be able to look at all texts socioculturally” (6).
- “students should be able to both read critically and write functionally, no matter what the medium” (11)
- Characteristics of New Literacy Classrooms:
-- There are explicit discussions of the merits of using certain symbol systems in certain situations with much choice…
-- There are metadialogues by the teacher who models working through problems using certain symbol systems…
-- Students take part in a mix of individual and collaborative activities…
-- Classrooms are places of student engagement in which students report achieving a ‘flow’ state. (16)
Key Terms
- New Literacy Studies: “a specific sociocultural approach to understanding and researching literacy” (6)
- Literacy practices: “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives. In the simplest sense, literacy practices are what people do with literacy…Practices are not observable units of behaviour since they also involve values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships” (Barton and Hamilton qtd on 7)
- Critical literacy: “concerns itself with disrupting dominant social practices through resistant reading and writing texts…Those who write from a crucial literacy perspective suggest that teachers need to uncover these power dynamics for kids and that all voices in out classrooms need to be allowed to be heard, regardless of preference of medium” (7)
- New literacies: “the plethora of communication media available today” (12)
- Literacy: “a way of conveying meaning through and constructing meaning from the form of representation in which it appears…[N]ew literacies [are] not wholly dependent on technology…In short, there should be no form of representation that is not embraced or is out of favor in this world that is becoming dominated by textually mediated worlds such as games and chat rooms that are more transitory in nature…[New literacies] include the performative, visual, aural, and semiotic understandings necessary for constructing and reconstructing print- and nonprint-based texts” (12-3).