For Academic Literacies, the world is textually mediated; written texts and what informs them reveal elements such as subject-discipline practices. Furthermore, multi-modalities, for example, visual representation, inform written text, and multiple methods of inquiry, including interviews, shed light on written text production. In this article we…

This paper discusses the use of Burnett, Merchant, Pahl and Rowsell's (im)materiality literacy analysis framework to explore online and offline literacies in the lives of globally mobile children. The voices of these children have been little explored in New Literacies research. Globally mobile 'third culture' children who attend International…

Literacy policy and pedagogy in Aotearoa New Zealand have a strong discursive heritage of traditional literacies, which emphasise code breaking and meaning making with linguistic codes and conventions over other possible modes of communication. In a rapidly evolving landscape where changes in communication technologies give birth to new literacies…

There is growing interest in using digital multimodal composing (DMC) as an integral part of ELT pedagogy. While the use of DMC for multiliteracies development is well documented, the important question of how DMC can facilitate English learning is underexplored, particularly in EFL contexts. Drawing on findings from a DMC programme in China, this…

We report on research that explores students' literacy practices in six Norwegian primary school science classrooms during integrated science-literacy instruction. The study combines observational video data and interview data to examine students' encounters with and use of text, along with their views and experiences related to science and…

Multiliteracies pedagogy has played an important role in the way classrooms worldwide conceptualize literacy learning. And yet, some argue, its orientation toward literacy by design, with an ultimate focus on the production of transformed texts, may narrow the very possibility of opening students' social futures that it seeks to promote. Recent…

This article interrogates principles of ethnography in education proposed by Mills and Morton: raw tellings, analytic pattern, vignette and empathy. This article adopts a position that is uncomfortable, unconventional and interesting. It involves a deterritorialization/rupture of ethnography in education in order to reterritorialize a different…

Prior scholarship suggests that many boys are disengaged from school-based literacy because they do not see its value or significance in their lives. In response, this study investigates the role of popular culture and new literacies in motivating adolescent boys within secondary English. Drawing on sociocultural approaches to literacy research,…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

With the revolution that has taken place in the functionality and uptake of portable networked "smart" technologies, educators are looking to see what potential applications such technologies might have for school education. This article reports on a study on the use of portable personal computing devices in the early years of schooling.…

The article features a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled students to think in terms of design and multimodality. In an effort to innovate our own literacy teacher education work, we came together to devise a course that encouraged students to adopt a design lens to their thinking, planning, and assessing of literacy…

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls' residential secondary school in…

Our purpose in this paper is to foreground contextual issues in studies of situated writing practices. During a year-long case study in a rural Kenyan secondary school, we applied a number of ethnographic techniques to document how 32 girls (aged 14-18 years) used local cultural and digital resources (i.e., donated digital cameras, voice…

This keynote address will discuss the findings and implications stemming from a study of what literacy means for a group of 12 teachers and teacher educators. It will also discuss the factors that have caused the ongoing evolution of these ideas about literacy. Relying on the idea of a "permeable literacy continuum," which uses five…

This interview-based study suggests that the home schooling movement represents another literacy crisis. Home-schooled students may define their commitments to the public sphere in ways that conflict with the assumptions of community literacy and other pedagogical projects. Home schoolers may adopt the values of the "literacy frontier,"…