Literacy for Lifelong Learning: Responding to

the Challenge

Julia Davies

The University of Sheffield United Kingdom

Talkin’ bout a revolution: New Literacies, New

PracticesDr. Julia Davies

Literacy as:

FunctionalCriticalSocialNew / DigitalMulti-modal

Functional Literacy

A person is literate when he (sic) has acquired the essential knowledge and skills which enable him to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group and community, and whose attainments in reading, writing and arithmetic make it possible for him to continue to use these skills towards his own and the community’s development.

(Gray 1956:24)

Critical Literacy

‘Reading the word’ but also

‘Reading the world’

(Freire and Macedo, 1987)

Critical Literacy is…

learning to read and write as part of the processes of becoming conscious of one's experience as historically constructed within specific power relations. The goal of critical literacy … is to challenge these unequal power relations.

(Anderson and Irvine 1993:82)

1. Literacy is not a neutral technology, it is always ideologically situated. It is shaped by power and, in turns, shapes subjects and discourses (Freebody and Luke, 1990)

2. Critical literacy practices can foster political awareness and social change (Freebody and Luke, 1990)

3. Learners own cultural and semiotic resources should be utilized within classrooms and their critical stances towards these should be recognized and extended (Comber, 2001; Dyson, 2001; Vasquez, 2001).

…

…

Text design and production can provide opportunities for critique and potential transformation of discourses of power (Janks, 2000; Vasquez, 2004).

(From Larson and Marsh, 2005)

Literacy as a social practice

Literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity located in the space between thought and text

(Barton and Hamilton, 1998: 3).

…there are different literacies associated with different domains of life. Contemporary life can be analyzed in a simple way into domains of activity, such as home, school, workplace. It is a useful starting-point to examine the distinct practices in these domains and then to compare, for example, home and school, or school and workplace.

 (Barton and Hamilton 1998:9)

…. impossible to separate out from text-mediated social practices the bits concerned with reading or writing (or any other sense of literacy) and to treat them independently of all the non-print bits, like values and gestures, context and meaning, action and objects, talk and interaction, tools and spaces. ….. ‘Literacy bits’ do not exist apart from the social practices in which they are embedded and in which they are acquired.

(Lankshear and Knobel, 2006:13)

New Literacies

»‘more collaborative’, »‘less individuated’, »‘more distributed’ »‘participatory’

(Lankshear and Knobel, 2006)

The communicational landscapes of today, their relation to current forms of work and to current forms of pleasure, demand a recasting of our thinking about representation in the most far-reaching form. The world, now, is no longer a world in which written language is dominant.

(Kress 1997:5)

Citizenship journalism

Constructing local/global texts

Key Question for Pupils:

What do a news blog and newspaper website do that a printed newspaper doesn’t, and vice-versa?

Social Networking

and more….

The digital era has allowed us to cross space and time, engage with people in a far-off time zone as though they were just next door, do business with people around the world, and develop information systems that potentially network us all closer and closer every day. Yet, people don't live in a global world - they are more concerned with the cultures in which they participate.

(Boyd: 2006)

These are the places where young people can piece together their own identities, celebrate an emotional sense of togetherness and stand apart, if only temporarily from the adult world that surrounds them. ‘Streets’ are places betwixt and between cultures, neither entirely owned by young people nor fixed adult domains. As such they comprise ‘contradictory cultural landscapes’ from which signs of autonomy and separateness are both created and inevitably blurred.

Matthews, Limb and Taylor (2000) ‘The Street as Third Space’ in Holloway, and valentine Children’s Geographies, Playing, Living, Learning London:

Routledge 63 - 79

The space of the home … dominated by parents, accommodates their identity as a child, but not as friend ... construct a …place of intimacy, an open channel of contact

•Motivation•Local interest•Focus on the ‘everyday’•Thickening existing social ties •Less interested in ‘new associations’•Engagement with complex texts•Guidance and support needed

Learning from social networking:

How can Web 2.0 develop media literacy?

• Products and services enable manipulation of and reflection on data.

• Collaboration and participation are key factors – can encourage group critical reflection.

• Fosters agency and creativity of individuals e.g. citizen journalists.

• Easy and free access to web-based software

• Web 2.0 products and services have great potential for work on the media.

• Pupils can create blogs, wikis and web pages for relaying news as well as exploring the way in which news is created and reported across Web 2.0 platforms.

• Web 2.0 is changing the nature of journalism and the newspaper industry – contemporary pupils can be at the forefront of tracing these changes and their implications.

• New literacy practices are needed for new times – educators need to take risks and explore potential.

Effective literacy draws on a repertoire of practices that allow learners, as they engage in reading and writing activities, to….

* break the code of written texts by recognizing and using fundamental features and architecture, including alphabet, sounds in words, spelling, and structural conventions and patterns;

* participate in understanding and composing meaningful written, visual, and spoken texts, taking into account each text's interior meaning systems in relation to their available knowledge and their experiences of other cultural discourses, texts, and meaning systems;

* use texts functionally by traversing and negotiating the labor and social relations around them -- that is, by knowing about and acting on the different cultural and social functions that various texts perform inside and outside school, and understanding that these functions shape the way texts are structured, their tone, their degree of formality, and their sequence of components;

* critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral -- that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people's ideas -- and that their designs and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways.

(Luke and Freebody, 1999)

Free software to play with:

• www.blogger.com• www.flickr.com• www.evoca.com• www.audacity.com• www.seedwiki.com

Thanks for listening

Julia Daviesj.a.davies@sheffield.ac.uk