More to Know: TheWondrousWorld of New Literacies In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published “Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” which issued a double warning: adolescents are 1) becoming disengaged from real books and literature; and 2) functioning as little more than “passive participants” as they read digital books. More than a decade later, it’s clear that just the opposite is true. Indeed, as Jen Scott Curwood, one of the leading researchers of digital literacy writes, “Digital literacy practices are more participatory, collaborative, and distributed than conventional print-based literacy.” Curwood (2013) explains that youth “use technology as part of critical inquiry to express and define themselves as they build relationships with their peers through online social networks. Adolescents are engaging in remarkably sophisticated analysis and discussion about their favorite books as they write, create art, produce video, and design role-playing games that often surpass what’s expected of them in the classroom. They are drawn, in particular, to dystopian novels such as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and fantasy literature such as J. K. Rowlings’s Harry Potter (Wilhelm and Smith, 2013). Curwood suggests that not only are fans using this literature to inspire and shape their own multi-modal creative expressions, they are “critically engaging” with the text in affinity spaces— in this case primarily virtual spaces where adolescent fans gather to share their knowledge of and enthusiasm for these books. Those who gather in affinity spaces around books explore a wide range of “new literacies”— blogging, remixing (drawing together content from diverse sources to create something brand new), cultural artifacts, curating and sharing photos, gaming, networking online, editing wikis, creating music videos, and building apps. In the process, we can see the natural fluidity and flexibility of learning when it’s not limited by conventional structures and expectations. Students are fully engaged and work together to shape their own experience. Learning flows from one medium to another ,and each student contributes what he or she does best. Not all students must know the same thing at exactly the same time as is so often the expectation in traditional school settings (Gee and Hayes, 2013). What’s more, students are creating work for real audiences—not just the teacher or the “hypothetical, generic audiences” of school. As a result, students make precise and sophisticated calculations about their linguistic and design choices—choosing those features that will most appeal to their very real peer audiences (Curwood, 2013). Since they are creating content for their peers, students also engage in “ongoing cycles of feedback”—mentoring, advising, and supporting each other. Knobel and Lankshear (2014) suggest that schools typically “privilege teacher feedback over peer feedback on work in progress.” Hence, assessment “tends to be summative and focus on technical details with little in-process” guidance.
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CHAPTER 3: EQUITY
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