From 'Reading' to 'New' Literacies (PDF)

FROM 'READING' TO 'NEW' LITERACIES Literacy is now center stage in education policy, curriculum development, and everyday thinking about educational practice. It is hard to credit that just two or three decades ago the term 'literacy' hardly featured in formal educational discourse. Instead, there...

FROM 'READING' TO 'NEW' LITERACIES Literacy is now center stage in education policy, curriculum development, and everyday thinking about educational practice. It is hard to credit that just two or three decades ago the term 'literacy' hardly featured in formal educational discourse. Instead, there was a long-established field known as 'Reading'. This was mainly grounded in psycholinguistics and associated with time-honored methods of instruction for teaching new entrants into school how to decode printed text and, secondarily, how to encode text (Lankshear  Knobel , 2006). Lesson 1. The Background of New Literacies (Anderson ,1966; Lankshear  Knobel , 2006) Prior to the 1970s, 'literacy' was used generally in relation to non-formal educational settings, and, in particular, in relation to adults who were deemed to be illiterate. 'Literacy' was the name given to programmers of non-formal instruction -- not associated with formal educational institutions like schools -- that were offered to illiterate adults to help them acquire basic abilities to read and write. At this time within Britain, North America, Australasia and similar countries, official statistics obtained for census measures and the like indicated almost zero levels of adult illiteracy. Such adult literacy initiatives as existed in these countries were small-scale, largely voluntary endeavors involving adult literacy tutors working with individuals or small groups of learners. Indeed, within First World English speaking societies, 'literacy teaching' was the name of marginal spaces of non-formal education work intended to provide a 'second chance' for those whose illiteracy was often seen as directly associated with other debilitating or dysfunctional conditions and circumstances. These included 'conditions' like unemployment, imprisonment, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, inferior physical and psychic health, and so on. The situation was different in the Third World of so-called 'developing countries'. In these countries, relatively few people received formal education. Often as many as 80 per cent or more of the adult population was illiterate relative to popular measures of the day -- such as lacking reading abilities roughly equivalent to second or third grade levels of primary school (Anderson ,1966; Lankshear  Knobel , 2006). During the 1950s, and again in the 1990s, it became fashionable among development theorists to associate a country's 'readiness's for 'economic take-off' with attainment of a certain level of adult literacy across the nation. For example, during the 1960s it was widely argued by development theorists that having at least a large minority of the male population achieve literacy was a precondition for underdeveloped nations to 'take off' economically (Anderson ,1966; Lankshear  Knobel , 2006). A figure of at least 40 per cent of adults (especially males) deemed literate in a population was seen as the threshold for economic development. This became a rationale for promoting adult literacy campaigns throughout many Third World countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a strategic component of economic and social development policies. Illiteracy was seen as a major impediment to economic development, and literacy campaigns were prescribed as cost-effective measures for developing the minimal levels of 'manpower' needed to give a country a chance for economic take-off. These campaigns were usually undertaken as non-formal programmers aimed at adults -- although children often participated -- conducted outside the education system as such (Anderson ,1966; Lankshear  Knobel , 2006) First, by adopting and developing 'literacy' as their key word, sociocultural oriented theorists, researchers, and educators sought, among other things, to bypass the psychological reductionism inscribed on more than a century of educational activity associated with 'reading'. They wanted to keep the social to the forefront, and to keep the 'embeddedness' of literacy within larger social practices in clear view. This was often subverted, however, when reading specialists and experts simply adopted the term 'literacy' without taking up its substance (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Second, the scope and amount of formal educational activity in the name of literacy that was funded and sanctioned by official government policy, guidelines and directives reached impressive levels (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Literacy quickly became a considerable industry, involving public and private providers of diverse goods and services at different rungs on the education ladder. Adult and workplace literacy programmers received formal recognition, funding, and credentialing in a manner previously unknown. Funding to providers was usually pegged to achievement outcomes and accountability procedures. In countries like Australia, national and state level policies actually factored workplace literacy competencies into the awards and remuneration system, providing incentives for workers to participate in work-related and work based literacy programmers, many of which were conducted during company time. Adults and workers whose language backgrounds were not in the dominant/official language of the country were often specially targeted (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Third, at the same time as literacy assumed a larger and larger focal presence within the recognized role and scope of formal education, it also began to assume loftier status in terms of how it was defined and understood by many educationists (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). It was as if educationists who believed that education should involve much more and count for much more than was generally associated with the term 'literacy' responded to its new pride of place by building more into their conceptions of literacy in order to defend and preserve more expansive educational purposes and standards. This trend is apparent in a variety of areas and initiatives. These include, among others, concepts and ideals of 'cultural literacy', 'critical literacy', 'technoliteracy', 'higher order literacies', 'three-dimensional literacy', 'powerful literacy', 'multiliteracies', and the like (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Lesson 3. The Pragmatic Sense of 'New' Literacies This paradigmatic sense of 'new' in relation to literacy is not concerned with new literacies as such but, rather, with a new approach to thinking about literacy as a social phenomenon. As it happens, numerous scholars who are associated with the New Literacy Studies paradigm are researching and writing about the kinds of practices we are calling new literacies. But that is simply a contingency (Lankshear  Knobel, 2006). The 'New' of New Literacy Studies and the 'new' of new literacies in the sense we are discussing here are quite distinct ideas. By the same token, and for reasons we hope become apparent in this book, we think that new literacies in the way we understand and describe them here can really only be researched effectively from a sociocultural perspective, of which the New Literacy Studies is an example. Our idea of the ontological sense of 'new' is intended to relate directly to new literacies of the kinds under discussion here This trend is apparent in a variety of areas and initiatives. These include, among others, concepts and ideals of 'cultural literacy', 'critical literacy', 'technoliteracy', 'higher order literacies', 'three-dimensional literacy', 'powerful literacy', 'multiliteracies', and the like (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). The terms 'ontological' and 'ontology' are being used in multiple ways in the context of talk about new technologies and new social practices involving new technologies, so it is necessary that we spell out what we mean by our use of 'ontological'. In simple language, we are using 'ontological' here to refer to the 'nature' or 'stuff' of new literacies This trend is apparent in a variety of areas and initiatives. These include, among others, concepts and ideals of 'cultural literacy', 'critical literacy', 'technoliteracy', 'higher order literacies', 'three-dimensional literacy', 'powerful literacy', 'multiliteracies', and the like (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). To say that 'new' literacies are ontologically new is to say that they consist of a different kind of 'stuff' from conventional literacies we have known in the past. It is the idea that changes have occurred in the character and substance of literacies that are associated with larger changes in technology, institutions, media and the economy, and with the rapid movement toward global scale in manufacture, finance, communications, and so on This trend is apparent in a variety of areas and initiatives. These include, among others, concepts and ideals of 'cultural literacy', 'critical literacy', 'technoliteracy', 'higher order literacies', 'three- dimensional literacy', 'powerful literacy', 'multiliteracies', and the like (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006).