Embodied Literacies

Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching is a response to calls to enlarge the purview of literacy to include imagery in its many modalities and various facets. Kristie S. Fleckenstein asserts that all meaning, linguistic or otherwise, is a result of the transaction between image and word. She implements the concept of imageword—a mutually constitutive fusion of image and word—to reassess language arts education and promote a double vision of reading and writing. Utilizing an accessible fourfold structure, she then applies the concept to the classroom, reconfiguring what teachers do when they teach, how they teach, what they teach with, and how they teach ethically. Fleckenstein does not discount the importance of text in the quest for literacy. Instead, she places the language arts classroom and teacher at the juncture of image and word to examine the ways imagery enables and disables the teaching of and the act of reading and writing. Learning results from the double play of language and image, she argues. Helping teachers and students dissolve the boundaries between text and image, the volume outlines how to see reading and writing as something more than words and language and to disestablish our definitions of literacy as wholly linguistic. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching comes at a critical time in our cultural history. Echoing the opinion that postmodernity is a product of imagery rather than textuality, Fleckenstein argues that we must evolve new literacies when we live in a culture saturated by images on computer screens, televisions, even billboards. Decisively and clearly, she demonstrates the importance of incorporating imagery—which is inextricably linked to our psychological, social, and textual lives—into our epistemologies and literacy teaching.

This book explores the impact of sensation, affect, ethics, and place on literacy learning from early childhood through to adult education. Chapters bridge the divide between theory and practice to consider how contemporary teaching and learning can promote posthuman values and perspectives. By offering a posthuman approach to literacy research and pedagogy, Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy re-works the theory-practice divide in literacy education, to emphasize the ways in which learning is an affective and embodied process merging in a particular environment. Written by literacy educators and international literacy researchers, this volume is divided into four sections focussing on: Moving with sensation and affect; becoming worldmakers with ethics and difference; relationships that matter in curriculum and place; before drawing together everything in a concise conclusion. Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy is the perfect resource for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of literacy education and philosophy of education, as well as those seeking to explore the benefits of a posthumanism approach when conceptualising theory and practice in literacy education.

An equity-conscious, culturally sustaining approach to literacy education. Every student comes to the classroom with unique funds of knowledge in addition to unique needs. How can teachers celebrate and draw upon the valuable literacies each child already possesses to engage them more effectively in school literacy practices? In Literacy for All, Shawna Coppola shows how a literacy pedagogy founded on anti-oppressive principles can transform the experiences of teachers and students alike. Using her framework, which highlights the social and cultural aspects of literacy, teachers can help students participate in literacy experiences that illuminate their individual strengths. Coppola’s book, an ideal introduction for equity-conscious literacy educators, shows how to design instructional and assessment practices that reflect both the cognitive processes and the social practices inherent in learning to read and write.

The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate.

Offering diverse and wide-ranging perspectives on gender, sexualities, and literacies, this volume examines the intersection of these topics from preschool to adulthood. With a focus on current events, race, and the complex role of identity, this text starts with an overview of the current research on gender and sexualities in literacies and interrogates them from a range of multimodal contexts. Not restricted to any gender identity or age group, these chapters provide a much-needed and original update to the ways representations and performances of gender and sexualities through literacy practices are viewed in educational and sociocultural contexts. Scholars share their insights and transformative visions that respect and embrace difference while creating space for new and deeper understandings of contemporary issues.

The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture brings together essays that offer compelling analyses of children’s bodies as they read and are read, as they interact with literature and other cultural artifacts, and as they are constructed in literature and popular culture. The chapters examine the ideology behind the cultural constructions of the child’s body and the impact they have on society, and how the child’s body becomes a carrier of cultural ideology within the cultural imagination. They also consider the portrayal of children’s bodies in terms of the seeming dichotomies between healthy-vs-unhealthy bodies as well as able-bodied-vs-disabled, and examines flesh-and-blood bodies that engage with literary texts and other media. The contributors bring perspectives from anthropology, communication, education, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, physical education, and religious studies. With wide and astute coverage of disparate literary and cultural texts, and lively scholarly discussions in the introductions to the collection and to each section, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child.

More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood draws on a long-term ethnographic research into the role of place, materiality and the body in the literacies of young children aged 12-36 months. It builds a picture of how children participate in, or become caught up in, literacies and language in the contexts of their everyday lives. Throughout the book, recognised understandings of young children are decentred in favour of experiential knowing of parents and communities, body-place knowing and ordinary affects. Abigail Hackett argues that young children's literacies are always more-than-human, involving sounds, gestures and movements between humans and nonhuman places and things. By paying close attention to the more-than-human nature of these literacies, which rely on bodies, places, animals, humans, objects and atmospheres for their ongoingness, a case is made for the decentring of young children. The book will be of particular interest to researchers looking at feminist-new materialism, posthumanism, affect theory, and critical literacy in early childhood settings.

Literacy researchers interested in how specific sites of learning situate students and the ways they make sense of their worlds are asking new questions and thinking in new ways about how time and space operate as contextual dimensions in the learning lives of students, teachers, and families. These investigations inform questions related to history, identity, methodology, in-school and out-of school spaces, and local/global literacies. An engaging blend of methodological, theoretical, and empirical work featuring well-known researchers on the topic, this book provides a conceptual framework for extending existing conceptions of context and provides unique and ground-breaking examples of empirical research.