Week 1 Post: New Literacies as a Social Practice

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

Literacy is not often thought of a social practice but more of something that you work toward through education. Lankshear and Knobel (1992/94/97) caught my attention when they stated "Literacies are many, not singular" (p. 76). I feel that people normally think of literacy as being literate in mathematics, or in different forms of sciences,  being able to read and write to convey a message, reading a book and being able to analyze it and summarize it. However, our world's definition is expanding exponentially. Within the past couple of decades, this shifts in literacy have been a challenge for many people on a multitude of levels. 

If I think of my own life, I can remember before being in pre-school that I could turn on my father's computer in his office and start up a CD-ROM computer game, a task that he had to attempt multiple times before he was successful. Not only are there generational gaps in these new literacies, there are gaps between cultures, social statuses, and economic statuses. 

On a cultural level, I can think of the students I have had that were refugees. In the country they came from, they were literate in a variety of modes. They could understand their government (whether or not good things were happening), they could understand the injustices that were present all around them, and on a basic level of literacy, they could read and write to convey a message and understand a text. But upon entering a new country, they have to meet new standards of literacies. We don't notice all of the ways in which they must become literate in our society. We certainly don't recognize the literacy surrounding technology, which was mentioned throughout Durrant and Green's article, we take our technologies for granted, when to many refugees, it may be a new source for texts. It is a challenging shift from using texts in our lives for an informative use only, to using text to deepen our understanding of the world around us and have purpose in our learning lives. I can understand two different viewpoints on media literacy that were brought up in "Critical Literacy and Active Citizenship." First, it was mentioned that through texts and images, we are "able to become more active citizens, eager and competent to engage in forms of social transformation" (Lankshear & Knobel, 1992/94/97). I feel like this is the mindset of many people who come to our country; they want to make change in our society and they need to be able to read texts, understand texts, process texts, and use that to mold their opinions. We need to be educated to make significant change. On the other hand it was discussed how "the more information people have of their world... the more powerless they often feel" (Lankshear & Knobel, 1922/94/97). I know that from talking to many of my students, they feel that they are powerless, even if they have the ability to vote. But, they are not the only ones that feel that way. My students have not been exposed to many texts regarding the world around them, including their own world and government. Even people that have read texts and understood them, feel that with the knowledge they have gained about the happenings in their lives, they have no control over what happens, or as Lankshear and Knobel say, they lack "sociological imagination" (1992,/94/97). Even with all of the texts we have available to us, we all make sense of them in different ways which makes literacy as a social practice a very complicated concept. 

Having multiple forms of texts available is a gift to education in general. It is now possible to teach and learn through so many different modes. My students are in a very technology based classroom where it is necessary for them to use different forms of texts. They may utilize a video, a physical manipulation, an on-screen manipulation, an article, an illustration, and so much more. For them, they are not just receiving information, they are gaining a deeper understanding of everything surrounding what they are learning. They are using all of these different modes to solidify their understanding on a single topic. It is amazing to see how they are able to use multiple forms of texts to solidify their learning. These student are moving away from a traditional approach to texts, "such as books [that] have strict order at various levels, and given entry-points" (Gillen & Barton, 2010). They have shifted from the old norms and have moved into the new norms of "multimodal texts, with their organisation on visual principles, and their multiple entrypoints [that] offer and even expect the reader to construct the order of reading for her/himself" (Gillen & Barton, 2010). In an essence, these students are creating designing their own learning lives; they have the ability to learn in almost anyway that suits them. It is quite an amazing shift in education, and society in general.


 Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). Literacies: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Gillen, J., & Barton, D. (2010). Digital Literacies. Retrieved from:  http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/33471/1/DigitalLiteracies.pdf.

Durrant, C., Green, B.( 2000) Literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l(IT)eracy challenge? The Free Library (June, 1), Retrieved from: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/literacy and the new technologies in school education: meeting the...-a063132991.