Course Description
An overview of the ambiguities and tensions created by a current move from the long established autonomous model of reading to the New Literacy Studies (NLS). It also addresses the implications of NLS for teaching students to comprehend a wide range of texts.
Athena Title
NEW LITERACIES
Non-Traditional Format
Delivery mode is asynchronous. Course design requires collaboration with other students. E-mail daily, discussion boards weekly, wiki-blogs daily, and Skype/other similar technologies as needed. Written feedback will be given to students on assignments weekly.
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The course objectives are to: 1. Provide an overview of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions that gave rise to the New Literacies, and 2. Involve teachers and researchers in using the NLS as a framework for teaching reading and conducting research
Topical Outline
* The impossibility of separating text-mediated social practices (e.g., reading and writing) from the larger world of gestures, contexts, values, tools and spaces * The theoretically different stances scholars take when they work within a "New Literacy Studies" framework * The cultural and historical implications of "less powerful" and "more powerful" literacies, especially in current times when educational institutions are bending to restrictive views of literacy teaching and learning * The ways in which texts, power, and identity are linked, as well as the pedagogical implication of this linkage * The tensions inherent in accounting for the local within the global (and vice versa), particularly in relation to designing research studies * The impact of digital technologies on the changing nature of literacy * The ways in which categorization is achieved (and deconstructed) by adults and youth working within digitally mediated environments
Syllabus
Public CV