New Literacies around the Globe

Policy and Pedagogy

Cathy Burnett, Julia Davies, Guy Merchant, Jennifer Rowsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317963332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de métodos de lectura

The increasing popularity of digitally-mediated communication is prompting us to radically rethink literacy and its role in education; at the same time, national policies have promulgated a view of literacy focused on the skills and classroom routines associated with print, bolstered by regimes of accountability and assessments. As a result, teachers are caught between two competing discourses: one upholding a traditional conception of literacy re-iterated by politicians and policy-makers, and the other encouraging a more radical take on 21st century literacies driven by leading edge thinkers and researchers. There is a pressing need for a book which engages researchers in international dialogue around new literacies, their implications for policy and practice, and how they might articulate across national boundaries.

Drawing on cutting edge research from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and South Africa, this book is a pedagogical and policy-driven call for change. It explores studies of literacy practices in varied contexts through a refreshingly dialogic style, interspersed with commentaries which comment on the significance of the work described for education. The book concludes on the 'conversation' developed to identify key recommendations for policy-makers through a Charter for Literacy Education.

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1 Changing Contexts for 21st Century Literacies

INTRODUCTION

This volume brings together the work of innovative literacy researchers and asks how their work might inform educational practice, and how literacy educators might, as a result, best prepare children and young people for the future. We contend that everyday literacy practices are changing rapidly in the face of new sociotechnical arrangements, and that these changes impact on students and schools in surprising and often unpredictable ways imbricated, as they are, with wider social, cultural and economic change. Other changes are widespread as well—education systems too, are in flux. Curriculum and policy reforms in many parts of the world have themselves produced considerable uncertainty, often propelling issues of communication, language and literacy to centre stage. And along with all this, there have been changes in the ways in which we think about literacy, and changes in the ways in which it is theorised and researched.

Ways of looking at literacy have developed in significant ways since its re-conceptualisation as a social practice (Street, 1985). The evolution of a tradition that is often described as the New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1991; Street, 1995), and some of the more recent directions that this has taken, are reflected in the chapters that follow. These newer directions have involved shifts in the object of study, so for example, literacy—or literacies have mutated and diversified as different populations have explored and taken up the possibilities offered by new media and digital communication. In fact from a social practice perspective, how we describe and define literacy, and ultimately what counts as literate behaviour is inseparable from its context—and that context, as we have outlined, is rapidly changing. These changes in the communicative context suggest that literacies are increasingly multiple, multimodal and mediated through new technology.

The chapters in this book bring together literacy research from across the globe, yet even with our best intentions to take a global view, we are aware of the partiality of the perspective we offer. In generating theories which attempt to conceptualise literacy irrespective of cultural and social context, it is the specific detail of particular instances that often test them to breaking point. As we see in the following chapters, viewing specific instances of practice against broader cultural frameworks, and across cultural spaces, emphasises how crucial context is—but at the same time, as we shall see context itself is a problematic concept. Thus we cannot assume that all social settings treat technologies in the same way.

The social model of literacy proposed by The New London Group (Cope & Kalantzis, 1999) and enshrined in the New Literacy Studies (e.g. Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee, 1991; and Street, 1984) signalled a significant step change in literacy studies away from what was a predominantly psychological model. In the psychological model, where emphasis is placed on a regulative understanding of literacy, the teaching of discreet skills such as those of spelling and grammar, for example, are paramount. As Street (1984) identified, such teaching tends to be about those skills that can be easily assessed and assigned to age groups (reading ages are typical of this genre). This approach depends upon an assumption that what is taught is transferable to any context; the objective is to identify ways in which learners can be taught how to do things; how teachers can assess skills acquired, and on how positive interventions to accelerate or support learning may be effected. This point of view has been construed negatively by many of those who have adapted a sociocultural perspective of literacy. For example Gee comments that:

… the traditional view of literacy as the ability to read and write rips literacy out of its sociocultural contexts and treats it as an asocial cognitive skill with little or nothing to do with human relationships.

(Gee, 1996:46).

In the social model of literacy, the emphasis of research has been less prescriptive and more descriptive (see Cameron, 1995). The social paradigm has sought to describe ways in which literacy is used by individuals and groups; to this end much of the research (e.g. Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Barton et al 2007; Street, 2001; Tusting, 2013) has been ethnographic in texture. In many ways New Literacy Studies (NLS) research has a history of being democratic, seeking to value what literacy participants are doing, as opposed to assessing against a particular standard or set criteria; literacy researchers have watched how people do things; researchers learn from their research participants what literacy is—the users are the experts. NLS research is about understanding what people do, understanding literacy as an aspect of human behaviour. Within NLS the idea of context has been fundamental. Associated with this, as has been much documented, two key concepts which have been much used within the field—the literacy ‘event’ and the literacy ‘practice’. Arrow & Finch (2013:131) explain that the term ‘event’ refers to specific interactions, modes of communication and text that in turn constitute literacy practices (Barton & Hamilton, 2005). Events are therefore observable instantiations of practice—and we can conceptualise practices as an extrapolated understanding of an array of associated events, so that we can talk about the practices of letter writing, game design or graphic novel writing, for example. Notwithstanding the above, and as some of the chapters in this volume suggest, it is sometimes difficult to isolate the boundaries of specific events, and that contexts whilst important, are also difficult to define. The move away from what Street referred to as ‘the autonomous model of literacy’, has not resolved our problems; indeed choosing to understand from the users what literacy is, as opposed to simply viewing it as a code, we have expanded our purview immeasurably in our attempt to capture the changing nature of literacy as a lived experience.

In preparing this volume we were keen to capture the essence of changes in how literacy is used and described. We were keen to show not only how these changes are reflected in the different ages and stages of the student population, varying as they do between and within communities, but also in different parts of the world, too. In many ways this is a challenging task, demanding a full study in its own right, so instead we have attempted to illustrate what we think are significant themes, by selectively including a variety of studies that point up key issues, but yet work together to help us in teasing out some more general tendencies and themes in literacies around the globe. In order to achieve this, an editorial commentary is woven through the chapters that follow, providing a coherent thread that draws on each chapter, indicating connections between the chapters, and binding them together in order that they can address current concerns in literacy policy and pedagogy.

In this introductory chapter we set out the context for that work, beginning with an exploration of discourses of globalism in order to identify the ways in which the concepts of ‘global’ and ‘local’ are taken up by the editors and contributors. We then identify what we see as the major influences that are shaping literacy policy and curriculum, illustrating these with some selective examples from different parts of the world. We conclude with a brief discussion of the different ways in which ‘newness’ is represented in this work. It is not then our intention to provide some sort of overview of (new) literacies, but rather to look at some important contemporary issues and how they are being addressed and interpreted in different ways, and in different contexts.

AROUND THE GLOBE?

It’s perhaps inevitable that the phrase ‘around the globe’ when used in a contemporary context, conjures up the idea of globalisation with all its associations with universalism, interconnection, late capitalism and so on (Law, 2004). However, this book is not about globalisation, or the globalisation of education, or even about global education, although we will be addressing the spread of educational ideologies, the different ways in which technologies are taken up in education, and the effects of population mobility—all of which could be characterised as manifestations of what Appadurai (1996) refers to as ‘global flow’. But by doing this we are not suggesting that there is movement towards an era of open and democratic sharing of ideas about literacy pedagogy, or that all educators and policymakers have an equal voice in the current debate, yet we are interested in the ways in which influence works. So in this respect our critique of the global follows that of Massey, who argues that:

The imagination of globalisation in terms of unbounded free space, that powerful rhetoric of neoliberalism around ‘free trade’, just as was modernity’s view of space, is a pivotal element in an overweaning political discourse. It is a discourse which is dominantly produced in the countries of the world’s North (though acquiesced in by many a government in the South). It has its institutions and its professionals. It is normative; and it has effects.

(Massey, 2005:83)

Instead of ‘global’ we could, as an alternative, place our emphasis on an idea like ‘translocal assemblages’ (McFarlane, 2009). This is suggestive of the ways in which complex and multiple forces coalesce as place-based events—events that are partly constituted by the exchange of ‘ideas, knowledge, practices, materials and resources across sites’ (McFarlane, 2009:561). Not so easy to include in a book title, but a more fitting account of how discourses of language and power intersect with socioeconomic status and the ownership of mobile technologies in South Africa (Chapter 2), and a better description of the multiple social networking practices of newly arrived migrants in Canada than that afforded by globalisation (see Chapter 7).

However, ideas do travel between localities, and although there is nothing new in this, their influence is increasingly felt in education. Whether this is the spread of practical classroom ideas like the use of De Bono’s ‘Thinking Hats’ (Nichols, 2006), pedagogic literacy theory such as the genre approach (Hyland, 2002), or larger scale ideological influence, such as that exerted by Hirsch and his US-based Core Knowledge Foundation on the English National Curriculum (Abrams, 2012), it is clear that a variety of influences come to bear upon practitioners and policymakers, and it is likely that the rapid diffusion of information on the internet has increased the volume and spread of ideas such as these. However, we strongly contend that this does not lead to homogeneity, since it is quite clear that local interpretation always determines how ideas are understood, interpreted and how they interact with other forces—to put it another way, we might replace the idea of ‘the global’ as an undifferentiated universal space with an understanding that ‘the global is situated, specific and materially constructed in the practices which make each specificity’ (Law, 2004: 563).

Technologies travel, too, particularly as multinational corporations seek out new markets for their products, but access to them, and the uses to which they are then put, are also patterned by a nexus of influences. A number of researchers in this collection focus their gaze on the use of mobile technologies, but in each instance the challenges, interpretations and practices are distinct. Take for example, the complex ways in which trainee hairdressers perform identity in their interconnecting web of on/offline practices, embedded as they are in the night-time economy of a city in the North of England (Chapter 5), and contrast it with the work of teachers and first-graders working with portable technologies in US Mid-West (Chapter 3). For all the widespread circulation of digital devices, their application could not be more heterogeneous. A singular narrative of the transformative effect of technology falls then at the first hurdle, with or without recourse to cautions against technological determinism. Yet still the materiality of these devices matters, and the ways in which they impact on literacy practices and literacy educators is important to consider, even if the result paints a complex and diverse picture.

Discourses of globalisation have also been particularly influential in political rhetoric. The inevitability of competition in the global economy was a key theme in the UK for New Labour governments (Watson & Hay, 2003), and the circulation of these and related ideas has no doubt fuelled the increased interest in international comparisons of educational performance. As a result, the idea of benchmark standards that allow for comparison across very different contexts—from Chicago to Paris to Singapore continues to seduce education policymakers whose reputation often rides on such measures. Dominant amongst these are the OECD’s comparative measure of educational performance, the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) which covers 65 member countries from Albania to Vietnam, and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) with a similar international reach across 35 countries. But of course the extent to which these measures are genuinely international is questionable. China, with an estimated population of 1.3 billion is not included in either, and although the country’s rapid economic growth led to membership of the World Trade Organisation (WT0) in 2001, and subsequent reform of basic education, it has yet to compete in this arena. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of global economic competitiveness cuts across a wide segment of policy reform and is repeatedly framed in terms of an educational emphasis on 21st Century skills.

21^ST CENTURY LITERACIES AROUND THE GLOBE

With all the above caveats in mind, to take seriously the idea of new literacies around the globe we became interested in how this idea is framed within curriculum and policy. What do different policy initiatives identify as ‘new’ literacies, practices and epistemologies in the face of modern-day complexities? The phrase ‘21st century literacy’ has become a fashionable, even a pervasive way of describing new literacies, and it carries with it the built-in assumption that we think and act differently when we use new technologies and new media.¹ This assumption often fuels the call for radical curriculum reform and the adoption of new pedagogies and in its extreme form is even used to challenge the relevance of educational institutions themselves (Merchant, 2012). Around the globe, different countries have offered their own distinctive interpretation of 21st century skills. In this section, we profile a selection of initiatives that relate to themes featured in the chapters that follow. These are certainly not comprehensive, have had varying levels of impact and some have now been superseded by other policies. They do, however, exemplify different ways in which ‘21st century skills’ have been conceived by policy-makers.

In the UK, the New Labour vision of a 21st Century Schools System (DCSF, 2009) set out a surprisingly conservative view of the conditions and dispositions required for the 21st century. Good literacy, numeracy and ICT skills are repeatedly mentioned—sometimes abbreviated as ‘basic skills’, but there is little to suggest any change here, or for that matter, any recognition of new literacies. Subsequent reform in education provision in England has been even more retrogressive with the emphasis being placed on phonics in the initial stages of schooling, and then spelling and grammar later on. The discrete and often decontextualised presentation of literacy-as-a-basic-skill has characterised recent policy initiatives. And in further changes, even the ICT curriculum has been abandoned, soon to be replaced by computing and coding—the latter, in an influential report, being referred to as ‘the new Latin’ (Livingstone & Hope, 2011). Interestingly though, this area of the curriculum is the one that is most influenced by the rhetoric of global economic competitiveness: ‘High-tech, knowledge-intensive sectors and, in the case of video games, major generators of intellectual property, these industries have all the attributes the UK needs to succeed in the 21st century’ (Livingstone & Hope, 2011: 4), and this is used as a platform for arguing for a more specialised and technical kind of digital literacy. This is a rather different take on videogame technology than that offered by Beavis in Chapter 6.

If literacy education in England is characterised by a strict adherence to standards and accountability, Finland with its impressive track record as a front-runner in PISA scores, has a reputation for educational innovation and exemplary pedagogical frameworks. The Finnish government has invested heavily in teacher education and has been committed to a decentralised curriculum with high levels of teacher autonomy. Finland is one of four founding members of the 21st Century Skills Project, with a government strategy that underlines how ‘Knowledge, creativity and innovation are the cornerstones of society and its development’ (MoE, Finland, 2003). In a report on education in Finland (MoE, Finland, 2012), the measures required to equip students for the 21st century are outlined. These are listed as: better access to the arts and arts education; internationalisation; education and working life; and, lifelong learning. Being a part of the global initiative, Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills Project (ATCS, 2013), Finland subscribes to the constellation of skills that the ATCS emphasises: 1. Collaborative problem solving—which represents the idea of working together to solve a common challenge, involving the contribution and exchange of ideas, knowledge or resources to achieve the goal, and 2. ICT literacy—which includes learning through digital media, such as social networking and simulations, as well as technological awareness. It is suggested that each of these elements enables individuals to function effectively in social networks and contribute to the development of social and intellectual capital. We will see how some of these skills are reflected and refined by the work of contributors to this volume.

Like Finland, Singapore is a partner in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Literacy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword: Literacy and a New Global Citizenry?
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Changing Contexts for 21st-Century Literacies
• 2 Global Forms and Assemblages: Children's Digital Literacy Practices in Unequal South African Settings
• 3 Paper Pterodactyls and Popsicle Sticks: Expanding School Literacy through Filmmaking and Toymaking
• 4 Conceptualising Collaboration in Hybrid Sites: Playing Minecraft Together and Apart in a Primary Classroom
• 5 (Im)material Girls Living in (Im)material Worlds: Identity Curation through Time and Space
• 6 Literature, Imagination and Computer Games: Videogames and the English/Literature Curriculum
• 7 A Tale of Multiple Selves: Im/materialising Identities on Facebook
• 8 Young Children and Interactive Story-Apps
• 9 Mobility, Authorship, and Students' (Im)material Engagement with Digital Media and Popular Culture
• 10 New Meaning-Making Practices: A Charter for Literacy Education
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index