Overview

What is a ‘contemporary’ understanding of literacy practices? How can ‘literacy’ be explained and situated? This book addresses literacy practices research, understanding it as both material and spatial, based in homes and communities, as well as in formal educational settings. It addresses a need to update the work done on theoretical literacy models, with the last major paradigms such as critical literacies and multiliteracies developed a decade ago. Kate Pahl draws on case studies to highlight experiences alternate from the traditional representations of literacy. She argues that the affordances of home and familiar spaces offer fertile ground for meaning-making. These resultant literacies are multimodal and linked to space, place and community. An important evaluative resource, this book details a range of methodologies for further researching literacy, describing ethnographic, visual, participatory and ecological approaches, together with connective ethnographies. This volume will appeal to academics and professions in literacy studies and language and education.

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9780567469618

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Reviews

Kate Pahl's work expands and extends the oft-invoked conception of literacy as a social practice. Through her research in neighborhoods, schools, and homes, she provides a persuasive and thoughtful exploration of the ways in which the daily reading and writing practices of people grow from - and perpetuate - specific histories, locations, and cultural contexts. She listens carefully to the stories people tell of their lived literacy experiences and, through theories of narrative and aesthetics, enriches our sense of how people encounter and imagine their identities and their communities. What's more, her use of participatory action research methodologies provides a compelling reminder of the need for researchers to collaborate with people in our communities to create knowledge and sustainable social change. -- Bronwyn T. Williams, Professor of English, University of Louisville, USA

Kate Pahl's work expands and extends the oft-invoked conception of literacy as a social practice. Through her research in neighborhoods, schools, and homes, she provides a persuasive and thoughtful exploration of the ways in which the daily reading and writing practices of people grow from - and perpetuate - specific histories, locations, and cultural contexts. She listens carefully to the stories people tell of their lived literacy experiences and, through theories of narrative and aesthetics, enriches our sense of how people encounter and imagine their identities and their communities. What's more, her use of participatory action research methodologies provides a compelling reminder of the need for researchers to collaborate with people in our communities to create knowledge and sustainable social change. -- Bronwyn T. Williams, Professor of English, University of Louisville, USA There are many reasons to read this book, not least to learn from Kate Pahl's methodological integrity and innovative arts-based approach to ethnography developed through sustained engagement with people and places in the Rotherham area. Bringing theories of material culture to literacy studies, Pahl shows us new ways of conceptualising and examining literacies in people's lives. Most importantly, perhaps, the book works - like many of the arts-based practices described - as a 'provocation' or an 'alternate space of resistance', gently challenging the deficit assumptions about one town that underpin and are reinforced by statistics, and celebrating it as a creative, magical place of stories, textiles, singing, dancing, glitter and gold spangled elephants. The localised, everyday examples provided here present literacies as inevitably inflected by broad social, economic and political movements, but also entwined with memory and hope. The book is a powerful response to those that seek to de-humanise people and places for political purposes. -- Cathy Burnett, Reader, Sheffield Institute of Education, UK

Author Information

Kate Pahl is Professor in Literacies in Education at the University of Sheffield, UK.

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