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.

Table of contents

With the rise of new technologies and media, the way we communicate is rapidly changing. Literacies provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy pedagogy within today's new media environment. It focuses not only on reading and writing, but also on other modes of communication, including oral, visual, audio, gestural and spatial. This focus is designed to supplement, not replace, the enduringly important role of alphabetical literacy. Using real-world examples and illustrations, Literacies features the experiences of both teachers and students. It maps a range of methods that teachers can use to help their students develop their capacities to read, write and communicate. It also explores the wide range of literacies and the diversity of socio-cultural settings in today's workplace, public and community settings. With an emphasis on the 'how-to' practicalities of designing literacy learning experiences and assessing learner outcomes, this book is a contemporary and in-depth resource for literacy students.

English and Literacies introduces pre-service teachers to the many facets of literacies and English education for primary students.

Pushing forward research on emerging literacies and theoretical orientations, this book follows students from different tracks of high school English in a "failing" U.S. public school through their first two years in universities, colleges, and jobs. Analytical and methodological tools from new literacy and mobility studies are employed to investigate relations among patterns of movement and literacy practices across educational institutions, neighborhoods, cultures, and national borders. By following research participants’ trajectories in and across scenes of literacy in school, college, home, online, in transit, and elsewhere, the work illustrates how students help constitute and connect one scene of literacy with others in their daily lives; how their mobile literacies produce, maintain, and disrupt social relations and identities with respect to race, gender, class, language, and nationality; and how they draw upon multiple literacies and linguistic resources to accommodate, resist, and transform dominant discourses.

Social Literacies develops new and critical approaches to the understanding of literacy in an international perspective. It represents part of the current trend towards a broader consideration of literacy as social practices, and as its title suggests, it focuses on the social nature of reading and writing and the multiple character of literacy practices.

Covering key terms and concepts in the emerging field of posthumanism and literacy education, this volume investigates posthumanism, not as a lofty theory, but as a materialized way of knowing/becoming/doing the world. The contributors explore the ways that posthumanism helps educators better understand how students, families, and communities come to know/become/do literacies with other humans and nonhumans. Illustrative examples show how posthumanist theories are put to work in and out of school spaces as pedagogies and methodologies in literacy education. With contributions from a range of scholars, from emerging to established, and from both U.S. and international settings, the volume covers literacy practices from pre-K to adult literacy across various contexts. Chapter authors not only wrestle with methodological tensions in doing posthumanist research, but also situate it within pedagogies of teaching literacies. Inviting readers to pause, slow down, and consider posthumanist ways of thinking about agency, intra-activity, subjectivity, and affect, this book explores and experiments with new ways of seeing, understanding, and defining literacies, and allows readers to experience and intra-act with the book in ways more traditional (re)presentations do not.