New Literacies as Social Practice--Jan 23, 2015

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).




As our understanding of literacy has transformed from our ability to simply comprehend a text to our ability to critically interact with it; literacy has become a significant and powerful tool in our daily social practices. The quote by Gillen and Barton, located above, points out to the multitude of purposes that we use new literacies for. With the advancement of technology comes the introduction of new literacies and with new literacies comes new possibilities of interacting, learning, collaborating, and engaging with multimodal texts in our every days lives. As Lankshear and Knobel (2011), literacy is no longer defined as basic reading and writing abilities and with the importance of literacy into today's work environment, it is no longer thought of as a basic skill taught in elementary school, and improved effortlessly with age. Since the creation of blogs, wikipedias, and other forms of social media, literacy, used as social practice, becomes very distinctive and dependent on the type of text. Lankshear and Knobel (2011) focus on the distinctive nature of collaboration through blogging and wikis, explaining that both wiki and blogs work through users collaboration, but are done in completely distinct ways that are unique to the site's purpose. For example, collaborative interactions within blog entries tend to involve discussion between users who interact with the blog's content; however, wiki users collaborate through the use of roles, which mean users may not directly talk with one another, but they do collaborate to create and maintain the websites content as a whole. Wilber explains in her article Beyond New Literacies that in the past literacy involved interacting with unchangeable texts; interaction with it was usually only on an individual level. However, texts are becoming more and more changeable, allowing for open authorship and collaboration.


Wilber, similarly to Gillen and Barton, explains in her article Beyond New Literacies that, "The field of new literacies focuses on how language and literacies are shaped by the ongoing development of new tools and technologies and their roles in daily life." As long as technology continues to advance literacy and language will be created to keep up with it. As an educator, especially as an educator of literacy, I must find ways to incorporate new literacies into my teaching. As push towards the common core continues, educators are asked to implement collaborative learning into the classroom; however, we fail to recognize that students of this generation have mastered many collaborative skills already, thanks to their use of social media. Using multimodal texts in the classroom, including blogs, twitter, etc, will give students a chance to collaborate with one another for educational purposes. It will also give insight to the ways students are interacting with the text, thinking about the text, and transforming the text to fit into their understanding of the world, which is truly the most valuable reward of literacy.










Works Cited




Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New literacies (3rd ed.). Berkshire, England ; New York: Open University Press.




Wilbur, D. (n.d.). Special themed issue: Beyond ‘new’ literacies. Online.