New Literacy Studies, New London, and Their Discontents: Theorizing Literacy From and in Practice

• In Event: Activist Literacies: Theorizing Literacy in and Across Communities of Practice

Abstract

As literacy researchers, our work has been influenced by frameworks articulated by the New London Group (1996), empirical and theoretical work in New Literacy Studies (e.g., Gee, 1999a; Street, 1995), multimodality (Kress, 2003), and related research conceptualizes literacy as multiple and multimodal, socially and locally situated, shaped by contexts and politics, varied purposes, and cultural and linguistic diversity. These scholars have produced powerful conceptual frameworks for making sense of literacy and language use in local contexts. Yet as former teachers and teacher educators, we remain concerned about what we perceive to be a disconnect between robust theoretical models of literacy proliferated in research communities, and what we regard as the no-less rich theoretical perspectives generated by teachers, engaged in the intellectual labor of constructing and enacting theories of literacy from the locations of diverse schools, communities, and classrooms.

This paper explores the potentials of practitioner research to provide alternative epistemic, methodological and pragmatic responses to the pressing need for productive theoretical models of literacy and more critical, transformative, and progressive literacy pedagogies. These responses are generated from practice, frequently articulated in what we have described elsewhere as counter-practices— resistant and relational pedagogical interventions in classrooms, grounded in consequential connections with students, and local and translocal knowledge communities and social movements (Authors 2 & 1, 2010; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

Through an analysis of the public texts and discourse of the immigrant rights organization The New Sanctuary Movement, we will unpack how activists mobilize various literacy practices and socially-located ways of knowing, in order to enact a vision of justice for immigrant families. Then, we explore examples of how classroom- and community-based literacy researchers have themselves attempted to leverage collaborative resources to constructively disrupt and develop alternatives to the residual, seeming perpetuity of autonomous models (Street, 1995), in forms of skills-based conceptions of literacy and transmission-oriented pedagogies. We use this work as the basis for theorizing the role practitioner research can play in creating spaces for scholars and teachers to co-cultivate and communicate nuanced and productive literacy theories and practices, developed from understandings of students’ individual and communal languages, cultures, and identities.

Authors

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania