City Literacies explores the lives and literacies of different generations of people living in two contrasting areas of London at the end of the 20th century: Spitalfields and the City. This contrast outwardly symbolizes the huge difference between poverty and wealth existing in Britain at this time. The book presents a study of living, learning and reading as it has taken place in public settings, including the school classroom, clubs, places of worship, theatres, and in the home. Over fifty people recount their memories of learning to read in different contexts and circumstances.
This work explores the lives and literacies of different generations of people living in two areas of London at the end of the 20th century. It contrasts these two to symbolize the link between poverty and wealth in Britain at this time.
An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced in the everyday across varied spaces and populations. This book approaches literacy as lived and experienced in the everyday. A living literacies approach draws not only on such official, schooled activities as reading, writing, speaking, and listening but also on such routine, tacit activities as scrolling through Instagram, watching news footage, and listening to music. It goes beyond well-worn framings of literacy as an object of study to reimagine literacy as constantly in motion, vital, and dynamic, filled with affective intensities. A lived literacies approach implies a turn to activism, to hopeful practice, and to creativity. The authors examine literacies through a series of active verbs: seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making. Case studies--ranging from an exploration of photography as a way to shift perspectives to a project in which adults teach young people how to fish--show lived literacies in both theory and practice. With these chapters, Pahl and Rowsell, along with contributors Collier, Pool, Rasool, and Trzecak, make it possible to see literacy in everyday activities, woven into the modes of seeing and knowing. By disruption and activism, literacy can encompass a wide array of practices--exchanging information at a school gate or making a collage. Grounding theory in the sites and spaces of their research, working with artists, photographers, poets, and makers, the authors issue a call to action for literacy education.
This book is an interdisciplinary text exploring the learning and educative potentials of cities and their spaces, including urban and suburban contexts, at all stages of life. Drawing on the insights of researchers from diverse fields, such as education, architecture, history, visual sociology, applied linguistics and sensory studies, this collection of papers develops and demonstrates the connection between experience, in all its dimensions, and informal learning in the city. The chapters discuss various sensory domains of experience, considering visual, embodied, and even sexual dimensions in relation to what and how learning operates, and the contributors reflect on their learning and inquiring experiences in the city, with special reference to topics such as narrativity, ‘race’ and ethnicity, equity, urban literacy, re-generation, participation, representation and oral histories.
Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role reading played in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. The "ubiquitous urban texts"--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York.
This practical book examines how teaching media in high school English and social studies classrooms can address major challenges in our educational system. The authors argue that, in addition to providing underserved youth with access to 21st century learning technologies, critical media education will help improve academic literacy achievement in city schools. Critical Media Pedagogy presents first-hand accounts of teachers who are successfully incorporating critical media education into standards-based lessons and units. The book begins with an analysis of how media have been conceptualized and studied; it identifies the various ways that youth are practicing media, as well as how these practices are constantly increasing in sophistication. Finally, it offers concrete examples of how to develop a rigorous, standards-based content area curriculum that embraces new media practices and features media production.
English is now a global phenomenon no longer defined by fixed territorial, cultural and social functions. The Routledge Companion to English Studies provides an authoritative overview of the subject area. Taking into account the changing conceptualisations of English, this Companion considers both historical trajectories and contemporary perspectives whilst also showcasing the state-of-the-art contributions made by the established scholars of the field. The Routledge Companion to English Studies: provides a set of broad perspectives on English as a subject of study and research highlights the importance of the link between English and other languages within the concepts of multilingualism and polylingualism investigates the use of language in communication through the medium of digital technology covering key issues such as Digital Literacies, Multimodal Literacies and Games and Broadcast Language explores the role of English in education taking account of social, ethnographic and global perspectives on pedagogical issues. This collection of thirty-four newly commissioned articles provides a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the dynamic and diverse field of English Studies and will be an invaluable text for advanced students and researchers in this area.
Literacy and Development is a collection of case studies of literacy projects around the world. The contributors present their in-depth studies of everyday uses and meanings of literacy and of the literacy programmes that have been developed to enhance them. Arguing that ethnographic research can and should inform literacy policy in developing countries, the book extends current theory and itself contributes to policy making and programme building. A large cross-section of society is covered, with chapters on Women's literacy in Pakistan, Ghana, and Rural Mali, literacy in village Iran, and an 'Older Peoples' Literacy Project. This international collection includes case studies from: Peru, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Mali, Nepal, Iran, Eritrea, Ghana.
Providing an overview of contemporary research into early childhood literacy, this handbook deals with subjects related to nature, function and use of literacy and the development, learning and teaching of literacy in early childhood.
Hilary Janks addresses key questions about literacy and power in this landmark text that is both engaging and accessible. Her central argument is that competing orientations to critical literacy education − domination (power), access, diversity, design − foreground one over the other, but are crucially interdependent and need to work together to create possibilities for redesign and social action that serve a social justice agenda. She examines the theory underpinning each orientation, and develops new theory in the argument for interdependence and integration. Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, constantly moving from one to the other, the text is rich with examples of how to use these orientations in real teaching contexts, and how to use them to counterbalance one another. In the groundbreaking final chapter Janks considers how the rationalist underpinning of critical literacy tends to exclude the non-rational shows ways of working ‘beyond reason’ − pleasure and play, desire and the unconscious − and makes the case that these need to be taken seriously given their power to cut across the work of critical literacy educators working from any orientation.
