Living Literacies

An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced in the everyday across varied spaces and populations. This book approaches literacy as lived and experienced in the everyday. A living literacies approach draws not only on such official, schooled activities as reading, writing, speaking, and listening but also on such routine, tacit activities as scrolling through Instagram, watching news footage, and listening to music. It goes beyond well-worn framings of literacy as an object of study to reimagine literacy as constantly in motion, vital, and dynamic, filled with affective intensities. A lived literacies approach implies a turn to activism, to hopeful practice, and to creativity. The authors examine literacies through a series of active verbs: seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making. Case studies--ranging from an exploration of photography as a way to shift perspectives to a project in which adults teach young people how to fish--show lived literacies in both theory and practice. With these chapters, Pahl and Rowsell, along with contributors Collier, Pool, Rasool, and Trzecak, make it possible to see literacy in everyday activities, woven into the modes of seeing and knowing. By disruption and activism, literacy can encompass a wide array of practices--exchanging information at a school gate or making a collage. Grounding theory in the sites and spaces of their research, working with artists, photographers, poets, and makers, the authors issue a call to action for literacy education.

An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced in the everyday across varied spaces and populations. This book approaches literacy as lived and experienced in the everyday. A living literacies approach draws not only on such official, schooled activities as reading, writing, speaking, and listening but also on such routine, tacit activities as scrolling through Instagram, watching news footage, and listening to music. It goes beyond well-worn framings of literacy as an object of study to reimagine literacy as constantly in motion, vital, and dynamic, filled with affective intensities. A lived literacies approach implies a turn to activism, to hopeful practice, and to creativity. The authors examine literacies through a series of active verbs: seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making. Case studies—ranging from an exploration of photography as a way to shift perspectives to a project in which adults teach young people how to fish—show lived literacies in both theory and practice. With these chapters, the authors position literacy differently. They make it possible to see literacy in everyday activities, woven into the modes of seeing and knowing. By disruption and activism, literacy can encompass a wide array of practices—exchanging information at a school gate or making a collage. Grounding theory in the sites and spaces of their research, working with artists, photographers, poets, and makers, the authors issue a call to action for literacy education.

This work explores the lives and literacies of different generations of people living in two areas of London at the end of the 20th century. It contrasts these two to symbolize the link between poverty and wealth in Britain at this time.

Challenges an autonomous model of literacy instruction in favor of one that recognizes and builds on students’ facility in navigating other rhetorical contexts.

For this essential collection of readings on literacy and language, Teresa Grainger has carefully chosen journal articles and book chapters which offer significant and serious insights into the world of literacy in the twenty-first century.

The Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, a comprehensive overview of research on this topic, extends conceptualizations of literacy to include all of the communicative arts (reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing) and the visual arts of drama, dance, film, art, video, and computer technology.

Combining language research with digital, multimodal, and critical literacy, this book uniquely positions issues of transcultural spaces and cosmopolitan identities across an array of contexts. Studies of everyday diasporic practices across places, spaces, and people’s stories provide authentic pictures of people living in and with diversity. Its distinctive contribution is a framework to relate observation and analysis of these flows to language development, communication, and meaning making. Each chapter invites readers to reflect on the dynamism and complexity of spaces and contexts in an age of increasing mobility, political upheaval, economic instabilities, and online/offline landscapes.

City Literacies explores the lives and literacies of different generations of people living in two contrasting areas of London at the end of the 20th century: Spitalfields and the City. This contrast outwardly symbolizes the huge difference between poverty and wealth existing in Britain at this time. The book presents a study of living, learning and reading as it has taken place in public settings, including the school classroom, clubs, places of worship, theatres, and in the home. Over fifty people recount their memories of learning to read in different contexts and circumstances.