The increasing popularity of digitally-mediated communication is prompting us to radically rethink literacy and its role in education; at the same time, national policies have promulgated a view of literacy focused on the skills and classroom routines associated with print, bolstered by regimes of accountability and assessments. As a result, teachers are caught between two competing discourses: one upholding a traditional conception of literacy re-iterated by politicians and policy-makers, and the other encouraging a more radical take on 21^st century literacies driven by leading...

Of interest in their own terms as a significant cultural practice, reading groups also provide a window on the everyday interpretation of literary texts. While reading is often considered a solitary process, reading groups constitute a form of social reading, where interpretations are produced and displayed in discourse. The Discourse of Reading Groups is a study of such joint conceptual activity, and how this is necessarily embedded in interpersonal activity and the production of reader identities. Uniquely in this context it draws on, and seeks to integrate, ideas from both...

In a struggling global economy, education is focused on core subjects such as language arts and mathematics, and the development of technological and career-readiness skills. Arts education has not been a central focus of education reform movements in the United States, and none of the current education standards frameworks deeply address the processes, texts and literacies that are inherent to arts disciplines. This lack of clarity poses a problem for state and district leaders who might be inclined to advocate for the arts in schools and classrooms across the country, but cannot find...

The rise of New Literacy Studies and the shift from studying reading and writing as a technical process to examining situated literacies-what people do with literacy in particular social situations-has focused attention toward understanding the connections between reading and writing practices and the broader social goals and cultural practices these literacy practices help to shape. This collection brings together situated research studies of literacy across a range of specific contexts, covering everyday, educational, and workplace domains. Its contribution is to provide, through...

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapid growth of international research in this area, accounts of a broader range of global sites,...

Approaching academic assignments as practical controversies, this book offers a novel approach to the study of digital literacy. Through in-depth accounts of assignment writing in college classrooms, Bhatt examines ways of understanding how students engage with digital media in curricular activities and how these give rise to new practices of information management and knowledge creation. He further considers what these new practices portend for a stronger theory of digital literacy in an age of informational abundance and ubiquitous connectivity.

Looking also at how...