Week 5 Post

This week, I found the jutxtaposition of  the pieces by Street (2013) and Knobel & Lankshear (2014) to be excellent jumping off points in reminding me of some of the aspects of New Literacies with which I'm already familiar and then pushing my thinking to include pieces I had either let fall away from memory or had never considered.

A piece of Street's (2013) piece that I found extremely helpful in framing how I read new literacies this week, was this idea of literacy practice as opposed to a literacy event. This idea (largely resulting from Heath-excited to hear more about her next week from Beth!), that a literacy event occurs within the social models of literacy that readers bring with them to an event or literacy encounter was a theme I saw throughout. To put it more eloquently in Street's (2013) words, new literacies consider literacy practice to be "not only attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy events, but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind" (p. 78). For me, this statement incorporates issues of identity, agency and power.

We come to literacy practices, having experiences that have shaped and formed our identities. The shaping, authoring and re-authoring of those identities occur within the context of broader cultural and social processes, which, in turn, provide us instances of agency in resisting or conforming to the ways in which our identities are co-constructed (thank you, figured worlds). The degree to which we have access to opportunities for agency and re-authoring in our cultural and social contexts, though, is largely impacted by existing power structures.

But wait…

When I think about New Literacies, I thought I was supposed to be focusing in on technology???

 

Enter: Knobel & Lankshear (2014)

I was happy to have read this piece second because Street (2013) did a nice job of setting me up with some grounding theoretical ideas to then enter this piece. The biggest takeaway I added from Knobel & Lankshear (2014) was framing New Literacies as focusing "on ways in which meaning-making practices are evolving under contemporary conditions that include, but are not limited to, technological changes associated with the rise and proliferation of digital electronics" (p. 97).

Ahhhhh, I see now (at least I think I see…for today). The mistake I had made in interpreting New Literacies was a lack of acknowledgement of the way that meaning making occurs in contemporary conditions. I appreciate the vagueness of this language because it allows me to think about how identities may be interpreted in contemporary ways differently than they ever have been before. For example, Anna began mentioning a GSA beginning at her school last week, and Christina brought up the importance of fluidity in queer theory. New Literacies, then, allows me to think about how someone in Anna's school might author and reauthor themselves very differently in a school setting today (contemporary times) than 20 years ago (or maybe not). What this theory is letting me think about more is time. In our conversations related to figured worlds, we discussed the importance of reaching into the past and being aware of future self, but I don't think I paid as much attention to the idea of "contemporary" in the same way this theory is allowing.

Finally, there were a few key points that I took away from Knobel & Lankshear (2014) that strongly filtered my reading of Wohlwend (2009). This idea of New Literacies having a different "ethos" from traditional literacies was particularly powerful, specifically this shift in literacy practices that are more participatory and collaborative in nature rather than individually-focused. This willing collaboration, then, which Knobel & Lanksehar (2014) linked nicely to literacy worlds within technological spaces, values input from others who are not necessarily experts related to the authoring.

Without Street's (2013) initial frame and Knobel & Lankshear's application of these ideas to cyberspace, I don't know if I would have read Wohlwend's (2009) piece through a New Literacies lens. If I'm not mistaken, I don't know that she states that she's drawing directly on New Literacies, but rather frames her theoretical lens as a "critical sociocultural approach." Then, I thought, but wait…that describes exactly what new literacies is. DUH.

After reading Wohlwend's (2009) first few sections, I was like, GIRL, you've got so many theories tied together in here. Please write my synthesis paper for me. Mediated discourse, social semiotics, cultural studies of media, feminist postructuralist perspectives on girlhood…and she wove them so well!

What I took from this piece, within the frame of New Literacies, was the idea that this small group of little people, acting often as a collaborative group and valuing the input of their peers over experts (i.e., teachers or movie creators), entered into these various activities (as used by Wohlwend's model) in very contemporary times, which, in turn, framed the way they played out these literacy practices. I'm specifically thinking about the film that Zoe authored near the end of the piece. She was actively resisting identity norms that have been authored by large multi-million dollar production companies as to what it means to be a princess. She does this in school but she also brings with her larger cultural and social experiences that frame her literacy practices. She collaborates with her peers (to a certain extent) to negotiate meaning in the contemporary times in which she lives, adding layers to her identity as well as those around her.