'New Literacies", New Times:

How do we describe and teach the forms of

literacy knowledge, skills and values people
need for ‘new times’?

Professor Brian V Street

King’s College London

 'New Literacies", New Times

‘How will literacy practices be redefined in relation

not only to the emergence of digital technologies
but also to the emergent, blended forms of social
identity, work, civic and institutional life, and the
redistributions of wealth and power that
accompany economic and cultural globalization?
(Luke, A. (2003). ‘Literacy and the other: A sociological approach to literacy
research and policy in multilingual societies’. Reading Research Quarterly, 38 (1),
132-141., p. 133)

`what forms of knowledge, skills and values do

young people need to become effective, thinking
and acting citizens in the complex societies of the
21st century?’ ‘the changing social worlds of work
and citizenship require a new educational
response– new literacies’
(seminar rubric: ESRC Seminar Series Oxford 2005 ‘Political Literacy, Citizenship
and Democracy’)
 'New Literacies", New Times

Literacies across cultural contexts

MultiModality and New Literacy Studies

Globalisation, ‘Technology’ and
Literacy
Educational Responses

References
LITERACIES ACROSS CULTURAL
CONTEXTS

New Literacy Studies (NLS):

autonomous / ideological models

literacy events/literacy practices

"The Limits of the Local" /"What's New in

NLS?"

‘Literacies across Educational Contexts’

Modes and mode determinism?

One response to the growing role of technologies of communication in

our lives is to overstate their ability to determine our social and cultural
activity. This tradition has been evident in earlier approaches to literacy,
where over-emphasis on the “technology” of literacy (cf., Goody, 1977) has
led to assumption about the ability of literacy in itself, as an autonomous
force, to have effects, such as the raising of cognitive abilities, the generation
of social and economic development, and the shift to modernity. All of these
features of the autonomous model were rooted in assumptions about
technological determinism that the ideological model and new social practice
approaches to literacy have challenged and discredited. And yet, we now find
the same array of distorting lenses being put on as we ask, what are the
consequences of the present generation of “new technologies,” those
associated in particular with the internet and with digital forms of
communication? While these forms evidently do have affordances in Kress’s
(2003) sense, it would be misleading and unhelpful to read from the
technology into the effects without first positing the social mediating factors
that give meaning to such technologies. How, then, can we take sufficient
account of the technological dimension of new literacies without sliding in to
such determinism? A range of literature from different intellectual traditions
has begun to provide answers which, I suggest, if linked with the frameworks
provided by New Literacy Studies and by Multimodality, may begin to help
us “see” the new literacies in a fuller and more rounded way.

(Street, B 2006 New Literacies, New Times? NRC Handbook)

Monomodality/ Multimodality

The desire for crossing boundaries inspired twentieth century semiotics. The
main schools of semiotics all sought to develop a theoretical framework
applicable to all semiotics modes, from folk costume to poetry, from traffic
signs to classical music, from fashion to theatre. Yet there was also a paradox.
In our own work on visual semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) we, too,
were in a sense ‘specialists’ of the image, still standing with one foot in the
world of monomodal disciplines. But at the same time we aimed at a common
terminology for all semiotic modes, and stressed that, within a given socio-
cultural domain, the same’ meanings can often be expressed in different
semiotic modes. In this book …we move away from the idea that the different
modes in multimodal texts have strictly bounded and specialist tasks, as in a
film where images may provide the action, sync sounds a sense of ‘integration
code’, the means for synchronising the elements through a common rhythm.
Instead we move towards a view of multimodality in which it is therefore
quite possible for music to encode action, or images to encode emotion. This
move comes on our part, not because we think we had it all wrong before and
have now suddenly seen the light. It is because we want to create a theory of
semiotics appropriate to contemporary semiotic practice …. Today, in the era
of digitisation, the different modes have technically become the same at some
level of representation, and they can be operated by one multi-skilled person,
using one interface, one mode of physical manipulation, so that he or she can
ask at every point: ‘Shall I express this with sound or music?’, ‘Shall I say this
visually or verbally?’. Our approach takes its point of departure from this new
development, and seeks to provide the element that has so far been missing
from the equation: the semiotic rather than the technical element, the question
of how this technical possibility can be made to work semiotically, of how we
might have, not only a unified and unifying technology, but also a unified and
unifying semiotics.

Kress,G & van Leeuwen,T 2001 Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of
contemporary communication Arnold: London pp 1-2
Hetero-graphic texts: ‘The transfer of linguistic signs does not entail the
transfer of their functions and values’ (Blommaert 2004)

Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996) discuss the complex, multimodal design of
contemporary documents such as advertisements, textbooks, and video clips.
New forms of literacy have emerged in which the visual and the textual
combine in one sign. This forces text consumers to combine different
activities - "reading" as well as "looking at" - and synthetic (the whole sign) as
well as analytic (different constituent parts of the sign) decodings.
Furthermore, such forms emphasize the primarily VISUAL and MATERIAL
character of written text, and they advocate the visual as the point of entrance
into any text: "Writing is only one way of visualizing meaning, a very
exceptional one" (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996: 18). In fact, what we call
alphabetical writing may be a residue of original, more complex multimodal
ways of visualizing meaning, the result of a gradual restriction of the scope of
visualizing meaning to writing. In the same move, writing became less and
less an object of visual inspection - it became devisualized (and
dematerialized) - and it became the object of a new, exclusive activity- type,
reading. Kress 1996 expands the argument by looking at the development of
writing skills in children, arguing that children move from highly multimodal
representations of meanings (drawings with some written texts) to
devisualized "text only" representations. Learning how to write is unlearning
how to produce multimodal, visual meaning representations. This, it should be
underscored, is an ideological process. Every written document is a visual
document, and when we write we continuously deploy a wide range of
meaningful visual tactics (differences in font and size, lines, arrows,
indentation, etc.). Reading, similarly, involves the visual decoding of the
document. Thus, visuality is not lost in PRACTICE, but it is lost in the
IDEOLOGICAL CONCEPTION of the writing and reading process.
(Blommaert, J 2004 p. 655)

The point of all of this is that, in the present globalized world, we encounter
more and more instances of texts moving from the peripheries of the world
system to its centers, and this move in space is also a move across different
economies of literacy, involving differential allocation of function and value
to texts as they travel across these economies, and a transition from
orthography to heterography. Consequently, the relativity of functions needs
to be placed against the wider frames of different economies of linguistic
resources on a worldwide scale. The inferior value of texts from the
peripheries - for instance, from Africa - is relatively PREDICTABLE and
SYSTEMIC: Given Africa's peripheral position in the world system, resources
that have exceptional value there do not necessarily have this value in Europe.
The transfer of linguistic signs does not entail the transfer of their
functions and values [my emphasis]; the latter is determined by the general
structure of the world system, by global patterns of inequality.
As linguists and anthropologists, we can reconstruct the value of such
dislodged, displaced, hetero-graphic texts. In fact, perhaps we are the only
ones capable of restoring and reconstructing non-local, orthographic meaning
in such texts, meaning understandable FOR US. The problem, however, is that
we have to engage in expert practices in order to retrieve such meanings; they
do not come automatically. The voice of the communicating subject has to be
reconstructed and restored, for it is not in itself hearable.
Hence, the image of "freedom" attached to these literacy practices sounds
literally out of place. The inconsistencies and different forms of coherence
observed by Fabian (2001) in his Shaba texts may be a feature of freedom and
may offer immense semiotic opportunities to their producers in Shaba. As
soon as they start to travel across the world, however, all these features
become objects not of difference but of INEQUALITY. The opportunities
offered by particular, creative forms of literacy in Shaba or Burundi may turn
into foci of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and injustice elsewhere.
Opportunities, just like function and value, do not as a rule travel along with
the texts; they are often left behind. In the global system, values of semiotic
forms are not always exchangeable, and consequently, whereas writing may
be a tremendously rich instrument for social mobility in the peripheries, it
may be just a problem in the center - a problem of "fixing," of tying subjects
to their place of origin with its own economies of literacy. In sum, it may
become a problem of denying mobility to communicative resources.
(Blommaert, J 2004 p 661).

Blommaert, J 2004 ‘Writing as a problem; African grassroots writing, economies of

literacy and globalization Language in Society 33; 643-671
Fabian,J 2001 ‘Keep listening; Ethnography and reading’ in his Anthropology with an
attitude 53-69 Stanford; Stanford University Press
Kress, G and van Leeuwen, T 1996 Reading images; The grammar of visual design
London; Routledge
Clifford, J 1992 ‘Traveling Cultures’ in Grossberg, L , Nelson, C & Treichler, P (eds.)
Cultural Studies Routledge: London pp. 96-116
 MULTIMODALITY AND NEW
LITERACY STUDIES.
Multimodality has … attempted to redress the emphasis on writing and
speech as the central, salient modes of representation, in favour of a
recognition of how other modes – visual, gestural, kinaesthetic, three-
dimensional – play their role in key communicative practices. So one major
emphasis in work on multimodality is to develop a “language of description”
for these modes, that enables us to see their characteristic forms, their
affordances and the distinctive ways in which they interacting with each
other. Likewise, those in the field of New Literacy Studies (NLS) have
attempted to provide a language of description for viewing literacy as a social
practice in its social environments. Again there is an intent to change many
emphases of the past – especially in educational contexts of the most varied
kinds – from literacy as a static skill and to describe instead the multiple
literacy practices as they vary across cultures and contexts. A social semiotic
theory (of multimodality) is interested in sign-makers, sign-making and signs;
In being interested in signs it is interested precisely in what signs ‘are made
of’, the affordances, the materiality and the provenance of modes and sign in
that mode. In being interested in sign-makers and in sign-making necessarily
it is interested in the social place, the history and formation of the sign-
makers, and in the social environments in which they make their signs. A
social semiotic theory of multimodality can attempt to expand its domain to
include the features of the sign-maker and of the environment of sign-making;
it would do so by treating all of the world as signs – the practices, the
characteristics of social organization, and so on. And at times that is
necessary. In most cases it is better by far to say: but look, there are those
whose work is concerned precisely with these issues, who have their tools,
different tools. Your own tools become ever less useful, and their tools are so
much more effective – whether those of sociology, of anthropology, or the
varieties of ethnographic methods.
A theory of literacy as social practice addresses similar questions but with,
perhaps, a focus upon a narrower range of semiosis – the uses of reading and
writing, although always in association with other modes, such as speech or
visual representation. What New Literacy Studies has added to traditional
approaches has been the recognition that reading and writing vary across
cultural time and space – the meanings associated with them vary for
participants and are rooted in social relationships, including crucially
relationships of power. Indeed, the very definitions of what counts as literacy
already frame social relationships of literacy and what people can do with it –
as we see in increasingly narrow Government demands on curriculum and
assessment. How these schooled literacies relate to those of everyday social
life, with its multiple literacies across different cultural and institutional
contexts, is a key question raised by NLS and for which, at present, schooled
literacy advocates are not providing answers. Researchers in NLS, with their
ever expanding vision of literacy in society, have developed research methods
and concepts for addressing such questions.
This is timely and necessary precisely because burning issues in
representation and communication have proliferated along with the profound
changes in the social, cultural, economic and technological world, issues for
which there are as yet no answers. In that context the need is to open up
questions; and bringing the compatible and complementary approaches of
NLS and Multimodality to bear, offers one means of getting further. For one
thing, while both approaches look at broadly the same field, from each of the
two positions the field has a distinctive look: one that tries to understand what
people acting together are doing, the other tries to understand about the tools
with which these same people do what they are doing. Each has defined its
objects of study – practices, events, participants on the one hand, semiosis,
modes and affordances, genres, signmakers and signs on the other. From each
of these further questions follow, uncertainties open up. What is a mode, how
do modes interact, how can we best describe the relationship between events
and practices, how do we avoid becoming the agents producing the new
constraints of newly described and imposed grammars?

Gunther Kress and Brian Street 2005 ‘Multi-Modality and Literacy Practices’ Foreword to
Travel notes from the New Literacy Studies: case studies of practice. edited by Kate Pahl and
Jennifer Rowsell Multilingual Matters edited by Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell Multilingual
Matters pp. vii-x
GLOBALISATION, ‘TECHNOLOGY’
AND LITERACY

Artefacts and Figured Worlds

Literacy as ‘Objects’

Bringing objects into play

 Artefacts and Figured Worlds

We propose to strengthen a practice theoretical approach to

literacy studies by specifying the space of literacy practice,
examining in particular the locally operant figured world of
literacy identities in practice, and artefacts.
Figured worlds are invoked, animated, contested, and enacted
through artefacts, activities, and identities in practice. Cultural
worlds are continuously figured in practice through the use of
cultural artefacts, or objects inscribed by the collective
attribution of meaning . An artefact can assume a material
aspect (which may be as transient as a spoken word or as
durable as a book) and/or an ideal or conceptual aspect. These
objects are constructed as a part of and in relation to recognized
activities. Artefacts meaningful to the figured world of literacy
might include blackboards or textbooks (in the classroom),
reading assessment scales, road-signs or signing ceremonies (in
public space). Such artefacts "open up" figured worlds; they are
the means by which figured worlds are evoked, grown into
individually and collectively developed. Artefacts are social
constructions or products of human activity, and they in turn
may become tools engaged in processes of cultural production.
Significantly, a particular person may even, in practice, be
collectively constructed as a social artefact. Individuals
regularly get construed as symbols of something-say of beauty,
or intelligence, or geekiness. They can then be used to signify in
the figured world. People constantly produce artefacts that may
become important in refiguring cultural worlds, giving flesh to
new identities, and so eventually transforming habitus. Cultural
artefacts are essential to the making and remaking of human
actors. In the theoretical strands interwoven by Holland et al
(1998), humans plus artefacts compose hybrid actors. Writing in
the 1920s,Vygotsky and other members of the cultural historical
school envisioned a fusion of humans and cultural artefacts.
Through Vygotskian semiotic mediation, such artefacts are
central to humans' abilities to modulate their own behavior;
cognition and emotion. In such practices, the reliance on
artefacts as tools of self-management can become routine to the
point that one resorts to them out of awareness, automatically. ..
Holland et al argue that, while social positioning becomes
embodied as habitus and generally remains out of awareness,
semiotic mediation through cultural artefacts offers one means
of acquiring some voluntary control over one's thoughts,
feelings, and actions. In other words, the social construction of
appealing, culturally plausible artefacts in a figured world offers
an opportunity for social change, one person at a time.

Bartlett ,L and Holland,D 2002 'Theorizing the Space of Literacy Practices' in Ways
of Knowing University of Brighton pp. 12-13
 Literacy as ‘Objects’

Latour recognizes that objects have roles to play, independent of

other (human) agents, in the conduct of various activities. In his
essay "On Interobjectivity" (1996), he names two of the key
social roles played by objects in human life. One of them is to
hold steady a certain frame such that a discrete interaction can
take place and another is to mediate and aggregate events - to
relocate them - in a network of events. So, for instance, if you
enter a bank to arrange for a loan, your interaction with the loan
officer is framed by a number of objects, beginning with the
building itself; the furniture, and so on, proceeding to forms,
files, documents, contract, calculator, computer, data bases, the
presence of which enables you to interact as loan applicant to
loan officer in a focused way. The objects help to stabilize a
piece of reality so that even if the two of you engage in friendly
banter about some other subject there is still no confusion about
what the two of you are doing. Things hold you in place.
Moreover, these same objects - forms, files, contract, calculator,
computer, data base - aggregate your loan transaction for use in
other settings; you become part of somebody else's calculations
- at the local bank, in a regional clearinghouse, maybe
eventually (we hope not) in bankruptcy court, etc. Eventually,
perhaps, your transaction, aggregated, enter s into decisions by a
distant stockholder or makes its way into a debate on the floor
of the U.S. Senate. How you and the loan officer enact the local
practice of doing loans may vary considerably. The engagement
may be casual or formal, encouraging or hostile, brief or
meandering. And the literacy aspects may be negotiated in a
variety of ways that could be socially meaningful to the place in
which the transaction takes place. But the interest rates, the
disclosure language, the reporting mechanisms, the counting
machines all will transform this local literacy event into
somebody else's meaning and send it into somebody else's
setting where the meanings of the original context will not
matter. Objects especially provide for and speak to connections
beyond the here and now. Manufactured, delivered, positioned,
still there when the talk around them or about them or through
them has stopped, objects mediate our interactions with other
places and other times. Instruments gauge, count, compile,
classify, sum up, save, send. Objects are animated with human
histories, vision, ingenuity, and will, yet they also have durable
status and are resilient to our will. Our objects are us but more
than us, bigger than we are; as they accumulate human
investments in them over time, they can and do push back at us
as "social facts" independent and to be reckoned with. We find
this an accurate description of literacy in its historical, material,
and especially technological manifestations.
Brandt,D & Clinton,K 2002 'Limits of the Local: expanding perspectives on literacy
as a social practice' in Journal of Literacy Research Vol 34 No 3 pp 344-5 (337-356)
 Bringing objects into play

Bringing objects into play, according to Latour, allows us to understand

that society exists nowhere else except in local situations but also to
understand that, with the help of objects, lots of different kinds of
activities can be going on in and across local situations - including
aggregating, globalizing, objectifying, disrupting or dislocating. He
writes
...if we wander inside IBM, if we follow the chains of command of the
Red Army, if we inquire in the corridors of the Ministry of Education, if
we study the process of selling and buying a bar of soap, we never leave
the local level Yet there is an Ariadne's thread that would allow us to pass
with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the
nonhuman. It is the thread of networks of practices and instruments, of
documents and translations. An organization, a market, an institution are
not supralunar objects made of a different matter from our poor local
sublunar relations The only difference stems from the fact that they are
made up of hybrids [of people and things] and have to mobilize a great
number of objects for their description. (Latour, 1993, p. 121). With
Latour's insight we are no longer confined to thinking about "the local" as
that which is present in a particular context and "global" as that which is
somewhere else or as something that bears down on local contexts from
the outside. Latour replaces this dichotomy first by emphasizing that
everything is local. No larger forces or larger social structures sit out
somewhere in space bearing down on us: All is made of local
interactions. However, local events can have globalizing tendencies and
globalizing effects, accomplished often through the mediation of
globalizing technologies [such as literacy].

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press.
Latour, B. (1996). On interobjectivity. Symposium on "The lessons of simian
society." Mind, Culture and Activity (www.ensmpfr/-latour/Articies/63-
interobjectivity.htm).
 EDUCATIONAL RESPONSES

Real Time Strategy Games; ‘Rise of

Nations’ (RoN)

A Wireless Network Project in a US Girl’s

School

Lowrider Art; Latino Visual Discourse in an

Hispanic Academic Summer Program

Learning the Trade; Scribes in Mexico

The National Literacy Strategy in the UK

Children's Out-Of-School Literacy

Practices
Genre/ Mode Switching in Academic
Contexts
Educational Responses
‘… the aim would be to engage children critically in the
borderless flows of data, information and image that
characterise information economies - using both digital and
print media. It would entail working intertextually across
various cultural and historical texts and discourses. What this
kind of literacy might enable is the modelling of 'position-
takings' that actively remediate one's position - both in terms of
the capital flows that make forms of work possible and
available, but as well to manage the information flows of
images, representation and text that constitute identity and
ideology, and, finally, to engage with other Cultures and bodies
across time and space.
(Luke,A and Carrington, V 2002 ‘Globalisation, literacy, curriculum practice’ in R
Fisher, G. Brooks and M. Lewis Raising Standards in Literacy Routledge/ Falmer;
London p. 247)
“A social practice approach to literacy in use pushes us towards
recognising the considerable overlap across … boundaries as
people, texts and practices track through different settings and
scenes: children move between home and school; teachers and
facilitators bring ‘sedimented’ features of their background and
‘habitus’ to bear on their educational practice; schools and other
formal institutions of education bring in moving image media,
performances and cultural models from outside of the school
walls; whilst projects involving literacy, rap music, oral and
visual performance may bring in features of schooled
education”. (Street, B 2005 ed. Literacies across educational contexts: mediating
learning and teaching Caslon Publishing: Philadelphia, p. 2)
Implications of New Literacy Theories for
Educational Policy and Practice

As … theories of context and literacy continue to

develop, it is important that they connect with issues of
educational policy and practice. Ethnographically- based
literacy studies have inspired many teachers and literacy
practitioners with their accounts of the diversity of
learners, literacy practices, and contexts and with their
insights about the ideological content of school-based
literacy. But such literacy studies are open to criticism
that they have not developed a practical alternative
pedagogy for literacy. Understandably, those working
within this ethnographic framework seem to prefer
description and analysis to prescription... Teachers may
be convinced by the insights of NLS, but they must work
within the increasingly narrow constraints of the school
system ... while sociolinguists argue that varieties of
literacy are structurally equal and practice theorists decry
the arbitrary dominance of one form of literacy over
another, practitioners must decide whether and how to
teach dominant literacies without becoming complicit in
the reproduction of power. (Kim, 2003)
This is a major challenge for literacy educators, whether
teaching in K-12 schools or adult education programs.
Better theories about how contexts shape literacy
practices should help teachers to see the literacy events
in their classrooms and programs in relation to the
multiple contexts in which they are situated, including
the local classroom context and the broader and more
distant contexts of home, community, and beyond. Good
theory may provide educators with increased
opportunities to perceive, understand, and create
literacies that can appropriately inscribe and mediate
these polycontextual and heterochronic spaces. Insights
derived from such research and the theory-building it
would drive could help educators to develop new models
of language and literacy education with applications to
improved curricula and programs.
(Reder, S and Davila, E 2005 ‘Context and Literacy Practices’ in Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics 25, 170-187)
Real Time Strategy Games; ‘Rise of Nations’ (RoN)

This social aspect of RoN; and games in general, makes RoN and other
games the focus of what I … call an "affinity space". An affinity space is
a place or set of places where people can affiliate with others based
primarily on shared activities, interests, and goals, not shared race, class,
culture, ethnicity, or gender. They have an affinity for a common interest
or endeavor (like RoN). The many websites and publications devoted to
RoN create a social space in which people can, to any degree they wish,
small or large, affiliate with others to share knowledge and gain
knowledge that is distributed and dispersed across many different people,
places, Internet sites, and modalities (e.g. magazines, chat rooms, guides,
recordings). Distributed and dispersed knowledge that is available "just in
time" and "on demand" is, then, yet another learning principle built into a
game like RoN. Too often in schools knowledge is not shared across the
students, is not distributed so that different students, adults, and
technologies offer different bits and pieces of it as needed, and is not
garnered from dispersed sites outside the classroom. RoN has no such
problems.

Gee, J 2004 Situated Language and Learning; a critique of traditional schooling

Routledge: London p. 73
A Wireless Network Project in a US Girl’s School

Ever since it had implemented its laptop program, Ridgeview struggled

with a number of contradictions between traditional schooling and
ubiquitous Internet access. As one teacher put it, "We have opened
Pandora's box." Even as Ridgeview had heavily invested in providing
Internet access to its students, it has also structured, over three years'
time, an array of implicit and explicit means of closing this access. In
short, Ridgeview was a contradiction of social spaces: on the one hand it
presented itself and technically structured itself to be an "open" wired
social space for 21st Century girls, while on the other hand, official
school practices and discourses domesticated, or pedagogized (J. C.
Street & Street, 1991), potential openings of space-time provided by the
wireless network. In official school practice, the wireless network was
"rewired" or closed off and anchored in ways that reproduce traditional
school space-time.
The following example illustrates a number of aspects of the
pedagogization of digital literacies, and more generally, the use of the
laptops and network at Ridgeview. All of the 9th grade English classes
were sent to the library during different class periods to conduct research
on a poetry project. The project, assigned over a few weeks, included
gathering several poems around a common theme, formal explications of
two poems, a forward, and other work. On the library visit, the teachers
and the librarian put a great deal of emphasis on the idea that the girls
should privilege the material space of the library over access to texts in
virtual space. .. several well-schooled assumptions about space-time are
built into this activity that are made more evident by the eventual
responses of the girls. Among them, everyone was directed to follow the
same sequential path in searching for information, print texts were
primary to digital texts, "checking websites" was associated with home
space-time, and the built environment was primary over the virtual.
While my intent is to describe typical school-sanctioned digital practices,
several of the girls' individual practices during a library visit are
indicative of the difficulty of structuring and enforcing a single space-
time with the wireless network and the developed histories of information
searching that the girls were bringing to the event. While the first girl we
observed entered "American Poets" into the search engine Google, the
second one pulled a book from a library shelf and used Yahoo to first
verify whether the author was American (a project requirement). A third
girl attempted a power search of the card catalogue on fairy poems, with
no results, while a fourth, her partner, searched for fairy poems in
Google. A fifth girl had brought a book of poems with her from her
friend's locker and browsed through it. None of the students that we
observed followed the sequential, ordered path across resources and
space-time as ordered by the librarian and teachers, and only a minority
used "power searching" or the online card catalogue.
Beyond commonplace notions of how school space is regulated by
classroom walls and time is regulated by class periods, this example
illustrates other features of the pedagogization (J. C. Street & Street,
1991) of space-time as it relates to digital literacies at Ridgeview. [One
response might be that] wireless networks and digital literacies are
distracting and damaging to school processes and goals. Indeed, such an
implication is entirely sensible. Ubiquitous digital literacies would
seemingly do little to support and improve the project of traditional
schooling when we hold its social-spatial practices stable. But, we might
also be willing play with the idea of "damage." For some youth, their
self-selected digital literacy practices and rhythms do indeed inflict
damage on school-sanctioned structures of space and time. Spatial and
temporal boundaries, assumptions of mono-spatiality, temporal
sequencing, surveillance and safety are destabilized and challenged. How
might schools and educational thought more generally respond to such
challenge—or damage—besides taming and closing off unruly social-
spatial practices?

(Kevin M. Leander, 2005 ‘Home/schooling, Everywhere: Digital Literacies as

Practices of Space-time’ Paper to AERA Montreal Sig Writing and Literacies)
Lowrider Art; Latino Visual Discourse in an Hispanic Academic
Summer Program

We had asked the HAP (Hispanic Academic Summer Program) students

to submit two or three pieces of writing and any artwork that they
wanted. Joaquin submitted just one short piece of writing but two pieces
of artwork, including a full-page drawing that used distinctive
iconography (see Figure 1): an Aztec pyramid, an Aztec warrior, a
mythological god in the figure of a feathered serpent, and a Mexican flag.
This kind of artwork, most often created by Latino adolescents in the
United States and identifiable by its use of distinctive iconography like
Mesoamerican pyramids, figures from Aztec and Mayan mythology,
lowrider3 cars, cholos and cholas, is commonly called 'lowrider art'
because Lowrider magazine and Lowrider Arte magazine publish
drawings sent in by readers.
I asked Joaquin about how he chose what to submit.
I really didn't know how to use certain words and use certain styles of
writing to express everything. But I knew how to draw it and put it out
there. . . . It's the same sort of thing, like when they found the first
drawings in the caves. It was just the bison and people hunting, they
didn't have written language but right there they were saying, we were
hunters, we survive, we did it. So just by looking at that you read off of
it.
When he was twelve, Joaquin felt better able to express his meanings
visually than through his writing. He sees drawing as an ancient, efficient
means of making meaning, that a viewer has only to see an image and
"read off of it" to apprehend its meaning. I asked Joaquin what he would
have said about this drawing in 1994.
Back then, 1 just would have been like, oh I like Aztecs so I put these
here. And I like pyramids, they're here. . . I would have said these were
things that make up me. . . . I could have probably said something like
that's actually me [Aztec warrior], that's actually my house [pyramid] and
that's what I believe
[feathered serpent] and that's where I come from [flag of Mexico]. It was
that simple.
I asked Joaquin what he remembered about making this drawing. I had an
idea of what I wanted to do. . . . I was like, man I should draw an Aztec
pyramid because that's what I like, Aztecs, you know, people, structures,
something to do with not really religion but faith and stuff like
that. . . . This is a very early example of it, but nowadays I can pretty
much tell a story in one picture. Joaquin is now a skilled artist striving to
become a film-maker, confident of his visual abilities and developing his
writing abilities to translate his visions for films into screenplays.
In the summer of 1994, Joaquin created a memorable text, a drawing that
"pretty much tell[s] a story in one picture," a semiotic narrative that uses
cultural icons to tell where he came from, and that was worth keeping.
He "put" his cultural heritage "out there" so that any reader of the
anthology could "read off of it." But I couldn't read or comprehend it
until years later, because I saw it as an elaborate doodle, not as a visual
text communicating a particular meaning. Unbeknown to me when I was
teaching HAP students, Joaquin and his peers were communicating
messages about their cultural heritage through visual texts that they
created and that we published.
Figure 1. Joaquin's drawing published in the 1994 Hispanic Academic Summer
Program Anthology, with permission: The East Bay Consortium of Educational
Institutions. (attached in .jpg)
3 A lowrider is a genre of customized car associated with the Mexican American
community. Lowrider cars are lowered to the ground, ride on small, custom wheels
and skinny tires, and often feature elaborate paint schemes (frequently including icons
found in the Mexican American com munity).
4The term cholo generally refers to Mexican American working class youth who
dress distinctively and who often organize themselves into clubs or barrio-centered
gangs. The cholo dress style is frequently associated with lowriding (Stone 1990,
120). The close associations of low riders, cholos, and gangs means that the terms
Iowriders and cholos (denoting males) and cholas (denoting females) are considered
derogatory by many people.
Lowrider Art' has been published since 1992, when editors of Lowrider "decided they
were receiving enough art to publish a separate magazine devoted entirely to the
genre of lowrider art" (Grady 2001, 175).

Cowan, P 2005 ‘Putting it out There; revealing Latino Visual Discourse in the
Hispanic Academic Summer Program for Middle School Students’ in Street, B 2005
pp. 146-8
 Learning the Trade; Scribes in Mexico

Newcomers picked up their trade by working with other people. asking

questions. and watching more experienced scribes. The need to work,
win clients and secure an income were important incentives for scribes to
take on new types of documents and forms. Sometimes when they did not
have a customer to attend to they would stand afar,
watching an old timer (uno de Los viejos) work. If they were friendly
with another scribe they could ask specific questions about documents:
How are they written? What do they entail? How are they used? When
given the opportunity. they carefully scrutinized documents prepared by
clients for typing. The scribes and the clients referred to watching others
and looking over somebody else's writing as fyandome, paying attention,
a stance that provided them with models for texts and information about
how to create them. When Felipe received an unfamiliar document to
copy, he spent time

fijandome, fijandome porque me gusta fijarme. Ver como una redaccion

ya me gusta, o sea como le dijiera pues . . . [aprendi] en la practica yo
creo. Pienso que ver, leer ciertos oficios, ciertos documentos, se fija uno
en como empieza, como es el cuerpo de la carta y como termina, la
terminacion. Y ver que asunto, que clase de asunto es.

paying attention, paying attention because I like to pay attention. I like to

look at how something is written, how it goes, how can I tell you, I guess
I learned through practice. I think that looking, reading certain letters,
certain documents, paying attention to how it starts, what the body of the
letter is like and how it finishes, the ending. And see what it is about,
what subject matter it is.

Felipe noticeably ends his description of looking at a text with knowing what
it is about. He uses the word asunto, a word in Spanish that means subject,
topic, matter, affair. But it carries another connotation similar to Eugenio's
view that his work as a runner helped him write better letters. By being
concerned with the asunto as well as the form. Felipe believed that in order to
produce a document. it was necessary to know how the forms and letters
would be used in the world.
Kalman, J 1999 Writing on the Plaza: mediated literacy practices among scribes and clients
in Mexico City Hampton Press: NJ pp 39-40)
 The National Literacy Strategy in the UK

‘… the National Literacy Strategy Framework privileges particular types of

texts and producers of texts. All references to producers of texts use the words
‘writer’, ‘author’ or ‘poet’, and there is no mention of producers, directors or
creators. It could be argued that the term ‘ author’ is used in a generic sense to
include authorship of televisual and media texts, but the word is most
frequently used in conjunction with terms that relate to the written word. This
privileg-ing of the written word is clearly stated in supporting documenta-tion.
The Teachers’ Notes on Shared and Guided Reading and Writing at KS2
(DfEE, 1998b) suggest that, ‘Although the emphasis in the Literacy Hour is
upon books, children should have plenty of opportunity to read a range of
media texts (DfEE, 1998b, p. 7). This marginalisation of media texts can also
be identied in the current National Curriculum (DfEE/QCA, 1999). Media
texts are not men- tioned at all in the key stage 1 orders. At key stage 2, it is
suggested that the reading curriculum should include: a range of modern
action by significant children’s authors; long-established children’s action; a
range of good-quality modern poetry; classic poetry and myths, legends and
traditional stories (DfEE/QCA, 1999, p. 54). This tradition is, as I have
contended, long-established within primary literacy education. In a small note
on ICT tucked away within the margins of the text, it is suggested that, Pupils
could use moving image texts (for example, television, film, multimedia) to
support their study of literary texts and to study how words, images and
sounds are combined to convey meaning and emotion’ (DfEE/QCA, 1999, p.
54). This is a clear prioritisation of print-based texts, with media texts used
merely to support children’s understanding of the former.
… the primary literacy curriculum needs to reconsider the definition and
scope of literacy in a new media age and adapt accordingly (Kress, 2003),
recognising that the kinds of texts which are important and relevant to
contemporary children’s lives are very different from those promoted … in
the early years of the twentieth century. Thus, the development of a culturally-
relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) is not so much concerned with
simply reflecting and valuing children’s cultural choices in an effort to ensure
that schooling is relevant and meaningful, import-ant as this is, but with
ensuring that the kinds of texts that are cre-ated and analysed within the
literacy curriculum are embedded within popular, socio-cultural literacy
practices, practices which are transforming the epistemological foundations of
literacy (Lankshear and Knobel, 2003).

(Marsh,J 2004 ‘The Primary Canon: A Critical Review‘ British Journal of Educational
Studies, ISSN 0007-1005 Vol. 52, No. 3, September 2004, pp 249– 262)
‘Does School Literacy Reflect the Semiotic Systems Young People Use?’

Despite the multimodal character of screen-based texts and the process of text
design and production, reading educational policy and assessment continue to
promote a linguistic view of literacy and a linear view of reading. This fails to
connect the kinds of literacy required in the school with the "out-of-school
worlds" of most people. The government's National Literacy Strategy
(Department for Education and Skills, 1998) for England is one such policy. It
is informed by a linguistic and print-based conceptualization of literacy in
which the focus is on "word", sentence, and text. At the same time,
governments' strategies herald the power of new technologies to change
everything. The multimodal character of new technologies produces a tension
for traditional conceptions of literacy that maintain written language at their
centre.
Traditional forms of assessment continue to place an emphasis on students'
handwriting and spelling, skills that the facilities of computers make
differently relevant for learning. At the same time, assessment fails to credit
the acquisition of new skills that new technologies demand of students, such
as finding, selecting, processing, and presenting information from the internet
and other sources . I want to suggest that the multimodal character and
facilities of new technology require that traditional (print-based) concepts of
literacy be reshaped. What it means to be literate in the digital era of the 21 st
century is different than what was needed previously. If school literacy is to
be relevant to the demands of the multimodal environment of the larger world
it must move away from the reduction of literacy to "a static series of
technical skills" or risk "fostering a population of functional illiterates". In
short, school literacy needs to be expanded to reflect the semiotic systems that
young people use.
Jewitt,C 2005 ‘Multimodality, “Reading” and “Writing” for the 21st Century’ Discourse;
studies in the cultural politics of education Sept. p. 330 (pp 315-331)
 Children's Out-Of-School Literacy Practices

A study by Denny Taylor, published in 1983, documented the rich vein of

literacy practices in homes. Taylor's detailed ethnographic studies of
American families, suggested how parents brought a strong diversity of
literacies which incorporated different identities and narratives. Taylor argued
that these narratives should be used to tell schools how to teach literacy
(Taylor, 1983).

In many research studies, there has been evidence that has backed up Taylor’s
findings and has helped educators appreciate the complex literacy practices
children engage in at home. For example, Heath's study of the literacy
practices of two different communities in the Carolinas helped us understand
different patterns in literacy practices from school patterns (Heath, 1983).
There have been fewer studies of children's text-making at home. Kenner's
study of bilingual children revealed many different sorts of texts being
produced by children at home, including word searches, cards and letters
(Kenner, 2000). Studies of children's popular culture and literacy found that
many children responded to the videos and games they played with,
incorporating dance, songs and stories (Marsh and Thompson, 2001). [Here]
we look at how children's texts develop and change as they go to school. How
do they start out, at home, and what happens to them when they go to school?

Vignette: home-school texts crossing sites

This example comes from a study of a Turkish child, Fatih. Fatih was 5 , when
he was observed at home and at school. His mother Elif, was Turkish, and had
come to the UK from Turkey when she was a teenager to be married. Elif had
another child, Hanif, 8. Fatih was having some difficulties with school and
was only attending part-time. Elif, Fatih and Hanif lived in a public housing
estate in a busy street in North London. Fatih liked to draw, model and make
birds at home (Figure 3.2). He also made bird models at school, and was
observed in the classroom pretending to be a bird. He used model materials to
make birds, and frequently drew or made birds at home and in the family
literacy class he attended. He described how he loved chickens, and when he
visited his home village, he liked to chase the chickens. The meaning of the
bird slowly became clear. Elif was stroking the head of her other son, Hanif,
saying 'little bird'. 'Bird?' I said. 'Yes' she said. 'I call them "Bird", "Kus" in
Turkish' she said. As the research study progressed, over a two-year period, I
watched how Fatih extended his interest in birds across the two sites of home
and school.

HOME AND SCHOOL AS LINKED

Fatih clearly kept his interest in birds across the two sites, and even developed
the bird theme when at school (Figure 3.3). This linking between home and
school has been noted as a key theme for researchers. Both Hull and Schultz
(2002) and Street and Street (1991) have commented on how it is important to
look at the continuities between home and school, rather than the
discontinuities. In this example, the cross-over between home and school can
be seen in the form of Fatih's bird-making practices. This episode shows how
texts become artefacts that acquire meanings across sites. By understanding
that process, the nature of the home-school boundary can also be rethought.
While it is perceived by parents and teachers as a point for separation, the
school-home border can be bridged. Fatih was able to duplicate text- making
at home and at school successfully. Texts operate as both external artefacts,
but as 'tools of identity', they bridge gaps (Holland et al., 2001). Text-making
was one constant Fatih had between home and school. In both spaces he had
access to paper, pens and scissors. By making texts across sites, he is able to
make the bird fly into the classroom.
Pahl, K And Rowsell J. (2005) Literacy and Education: Understanding The New Literacy
Studies in the Classroom. London: Sage pp59-61
GENRE/ MODE SWITCHING IN ACADEMIC
CONTEXTS

THOUGHTS/ IDEAS free flowing; not sentences

TALK/ DISCUSSION some explicitness; interlocutor

Language mode - Speech patterns

NOTES some structure, headings, lay out

use of visual as well as language
mode’

OVERHEAD Key terms, single words;

Lay out, use of images, semiosis
Artefacts

WRITTEN TEXT joined up sentences; coherence/

Cohesion; if academic then formal
conventions; editing and revision

GENRE: type of text eg formal/ informal eg notes/ letters/ academic

essay

MODE: ‘a regularised organised set of resources for meaning-making’

Eg image, gaze, gesture, movement, music, speech, writing

DISCIPLINE: field of study, academic subject

Eg geography, chemistry; Business Studies; Area Studies

SWITCHING/ TRANSFORMATION: changing meanings and

representations from one mode (eg speech) into another mode (eg
writing); often involves just a different ‘mix’ of both modes eg writing/
layout; eg Joaquin’ s drawing has both images and text
 QUESTIONS:

How do genres/ modes vary across disciplines/

subjects/ fields?

How do academic literacy practices vary from

informal literacy practices?

How can an understanding of New Literacy

Studies, Multimodality and ‘Literacy as Artefact’
help in the development of literacies for ‘new
times’?
References

Blommaert, J 2004 ‘Writing as a problem; African grassroots writing, economies of

literacy and globalization Language in Society 33; 643-67
Cowan, P 2005 ‘Putting it out There; revealing Latino Visual Discourse in the Hispanic
Academic Summer Program for Middle School Students’ pp. 146-8
Department For Education And Employment (DFEE) (1998a) National Literacy Strategy
(London, Hmso).
Department For Education And Employment (DFEE) (1998b) Teachers’ Notes On Shared
And Guided Reading And Writing At Ks2 (London, Hmso).
Gee, J 2004 Situated Language and Learning; a critique of traditional schooling Routledge:
London
Jewitt,C 2005 ‘Multimodality, “Reading” and “Writing” for the 21st Century’ Discourse;
studies in the cultural politics of education Sept. pp. 315-331
Jewitt, C 2006 Technology, Literacy and Learning; a multimodal approach Routledge;
London
Kalman, J 1999 Writing on the Plaza: mediated literacy practices among scribes and clients
in Mexico City Hampton Press: NJ pp 39-40
Kress,G & van Leeuwen,T 1996 Reading Images: the grammar of visual design Routledge:
London
Kress,G & van Leeuwen,T 2001 Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of
contemporary communication Arnold: London
Kress, G 2003 Literacy in the New Media Age Routledge: London
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995) Towards a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, American
Educational Research Journal, 32 (3), 465–491.
Lankshear, C and Knobel, M 2003 New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom
Learning Milton Keynes, Open University Press
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press.
Latour, B. (1996). On interobjectivity. Symposium on "The lessons of simian society."
Mind, Culture and Activity (www.ensmpfr/-latour/Articies/63-interobjectivity.htm).
Leander, Kevin M. 2005 ‘Home/schooling, Everywhere: Digital Literacies as Practices of
Space-time’ Paper to AERA Montreal Sig Writing and Literacies
Luke,A and Carrington, V 2002 ‘Globalisation, literacy, curriculum practice’ in R Fisher,
G. Brooks and M. Lewis Raising Standards in Literacy Routledge/ Falmer; London
Luke, A. (2003). ‘Literacy and the other: A sociological approach to literacy research and
policy in multilingual societies’. Reading Research Quarterly, 38 (1), 132-141.
Marsh,J 2004 ‘The Primary Canon: A Critical Review‘ British Journal of Educational
Studies,.52:3,pp 249– 262
Street,B 2005 The Limits of the Local – ‘autonomous’ or ‘disembedding’? International
Journal of Learning, Volume 10, 2004 pp. 2825-2830
Street, B 2005 ‘Applying New Literacy Studies to Numeracy As Social Practice’ in Urban
Literacy: communication, identity and learning in development contexts edited Alan
Rogers UIE Hamburg pp.87-96
Street, B.V and Street J.C. 1991 ‘The Schooling of Literacy’ in D. Barton and R.Ivanic
(eds) Writing in the Community London; Sage pp 143-66
Taylor, D 1983 Family Literacy: Young Children Learning to Read and Write Portsmouth,
NH; Heinemann
Tufte, E. R. 1997 Visual Explanations: images and quantities, evidence and narrative
Graphics Press; Cheshire, Connecticut pp 16-17
Recent Books applying New Literacy Studies in Educational Contexts

BLOOME, DAVID, Stephanie Power Carter, Beth Morton Christian, Sheila Otto and Nora
Shuart-Faris 2005 Discourse Analysis and the Study of Classroom Language and Literacy
Events – a microethnographic perspective Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah NJ
LARSON Joanne AND MARSH Jackie (forthcoming) Framing Literacies: Studying and
Organizing Literacy Learning Sage: New York
LEWIS, C., ENCISCO,P and E B MOJE (forthcoming) New Directions in Sociocultural
research on Literacy Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (e).
MAHIRI, Jabari 2004 (ed) What Kids Don't Learn in School: literacy in the lives of urban
youth New York: Peter Lang
McCARTY, T 2005 ed Language, Literacy and Power in Schooling Lawrence Erlbaum:
Mahwah NJ
PAHL, K and ROWSELL J. (2005) Literacy and Education: Understanding The New
Literacy Studies in the Classroom. London: Sage
ROWSELL, J AND PAHL,K (forthcoming) eds Travel Notes from the New Literacy
Studies: Case Studies in Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd
STREET, B 2005 ed. Literacies across educational contexts: mediating learning and
teaching Caslon Publishing: Philadelphia

What’s New?’ Debate

Brandt,D & Clinton,K 2002 'Limits of the Local: expanding perspectives on literacy as a
social practice' in Journal of Literacy Research Vol 34 No 3 pp 337-356
Brandt D & Clinton,K 2005 ‘Afterword’ Rowsell, J and Pahl,K eds Travel Notes from the
New Literacy Studies: Case Studies in Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd
Kress,G and Street,B 2005 ‘Multi-Modality and Literacy Practices’ Foreword to Travel
notes from the New Literacy Studies: case studies of practice. edited by Kate Pahl and
Jennifer Rowsell Multilingual Matters pp. vii-x
Reder, S and Davila, E 2005 ‘Context and Literacy Practices’ Annual Review of Applied
Linguistics 25, 170-187
Street,B 2003 ‘What's 'new' in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to
literacy in theory and practice’ Current Issues in Comparative Education. 5(2) May
12 , 2003 ISSN: 1523-1615 http://www.tc.columbia.edu/cice/