A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century

The (im)materiality of literacy : the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research.

This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing existing sociocultural perspectives on literacy, the article draws attention to the significance of relationships between space, mediation, materiality and embodiment to literacy practices. This in turn emphasises the importance of the subjective in understanding how different locations, experiences and so forth inflect literacy practice. The article concludes by drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the ‘baroque’ to suggest that this focus on articulations between the material and immaterial helps us to see literacy as multiply and flexibly situated

The Time Devil runs amok: How I improved my creative practice by adopting a multimodal approach for a specific audience.

This research illustrates how teacher-writers can improve their craft and pedagogy by writing for a specific audience, namely school children. It also illustrates why they might do so. It interrogates what was learnt from an innovative collaboration between a university teacher-education department, an inner-city secondary school and the United Kingdom’s National Maritime Museum (NMM). Multimodality (Barnard 2019) inspired the project: local spaces, institutional settings, historical objects, photographs, pictures, time-travelling films and narratives motivated the teacher-writer and participants to read and respond imaginatively to the world. The author found that the project caused him to “remediate” his own practice: to transfer “existing skills in order to tackle new genres” (Barnard 2019: 121). This process enabled him to become a more effective writer and teacher. The research shows that the problem of multimodal overload – having too much choice regarding what to write about and the many forms writing can take – can be circumnavigated if participants are given both autonomy and constraints. It illustrates in some depth how the concept of reciprocity is vital to adopt if writers are to improve their craft

Learning from Ninjas: young people’s films as a lens for an expanded view of literacy and language

This article examines young people’s films to provide insights about language and literacy practices. It offers a heuristic for thinking about how to approach data that is collectively produced. It tries to make sense of new ways of knowing that locate the research in the field rather than in the academic domain. The authors develop a lens for looking at films made by young people that acknowledge multiple modes and materiality within their meaning-making practices. We make an argument about the cultural politics of research, to consider how the language and literacy practices of young people are positioned. We argue for more consideration of how language and literacy appear entangled within objects and other stuff within young people’s media productions, so as to trouble disciplinary boundaries within and beyond literacy and language studies

Caticorns and Derp Warz: Exploring children's literacy worlds through the production of comics

This article examines how an after-school comics club made a space for children’s literacy practices. 21 8- to 10-year-olds took part in the ten-week project. During that time the children made their own comic strips, and worked in groups to create their own self-initiated publications. These comics were sold at two comics fairs, which were collaboratively planned and organized. In this article the multimodal medium of comics will be explored. The concept of children’s literacy worlds will be discussed in relation to identity. Text World Theory will be examined as a framework for analysing children’s literacy worlds, with a particular focus on the bidirectional relationship between the discourse world and the text world. Action Research as a methodology is considered. Text World Theory is then used to interrogate the literacy worlds of two groups of children, examining the interplay of the discourse world and the text world of the two comics created. The article argues that the space for children to create their own, self-initiated narratives plays an important role in children’s meaning making and exploration of identity, through a bidirectional relationship between their discourse and text worlds. Finally, the article offers suggestions for future practice

“We txt 2 sty cnnectd”: An African American Mother and Son Communicate: Digital Literacies, Meaning-Making, and Activity Theory Systems

This research demonstrated how an African American mother and son communicated with each other via texting and instant messaging (IM) at home. Data from a 2007 larger ethnographic case study of a family’s digital literacy practices were collected and analyzed. Situated within the framework of New Literacy Studies and multimodality, this research explored: a) how and why an African American mother and son communicated through texting and IM, b) how this family drew on multimodal meaning-making resources, and c) how texting and IM between these family members demonstrated the potential to change the perceptions of literacy researchers regarding the dynamics of family structures

Quilts of authorship: A literature review of multimodal assemblage in the field of literacy education

This literature review and narrative vignette draw on Social Symbolic Mediation, Social Semiotics, and Discursive Positioning theories to explore a theoretical model I call Authorship as Assemblage. Specifically, this paper challenges linear pathways to meaning-making by comparing authorship to quilt-making. Quilts afford unique arrangements of assemblage, including the capacity to embed, layer, interweave, and hybridize material. Here, I argue educators need to re-evaluate linear notions of literacy paths in today’s participatory culture

An Introduction to the New Literacy Studies

Article信州大学人文社会科学研究 7: 25-30(2013)departmental bulletin pape

Display cases, catalogues and clock faces : multimodal social semiotic analysis of information graphics in civil engineering

Abstract: This paper investigates the social semiotic practices surrounding use of information graphics within the specialized discourse of civil engineering. It combines the theoretical considerations of multimodal social semiotics and New Literacy Studies, which offers a conceptualisation of meaning-making as social practice. Methodologically, the paper draws on data collected as part of a two-year ethnographic investigation into the meaning-making practices introduced to students in a civil engineering higher education program offered by a large, public university in Johannesburg, South Africa. Data was collected through observation and reflection on the part of the researcher, as well as through collection of documentary artefacts..