Introduction and key questions
The objective of the project is to identify the emergent cultural forms and changing literacy practices across three sites - school, home and community - and to consider the implications for school education.
Through case studies of young people, a national survey and collaboration with secondary English teachers, the research asks:
- What are the principal 'cultural forms' with which young people engage across school, home and community?
- What are the 'digital literacy practices' across these three sites (which, how often, when, where, for what purposes)?
- What are the implications of these practices for education in and out of schools?
In addition to these aims, the project seeks to:
- develop and apply new tools for mapping and evaluating the 'cultural forms' with which young people engage when they use an array of digital technologies at school, at home and in the community. These include: mobile phones, text messaging, the Internet, instant messaging, online games, blogs, search engines, personal and fan websites, email, peer-to-peer technologies, digital video, music and imaging, and more.
- investigate the associated digital literacy practices, adapting techniques employed in studies of technology and cultural form, of everyday literacy practices, and of children and computing in the school, the home and the community.
Other important questions
As well as these aims and questions above, there are many others that motivate and inspire this project and other researchers in the area. These might be grouped in a variety of ways. Perhaps there are others you might add?
The challenges
- How will graduates learn to communicate in the globally extended networks now integral to many 21st century workplaces?
- How might schools take account of the changes to literacy practices that are likely to develop in the future and that are needed to support communication across linguistic, cultural and geo-political borders?
- How can teachers and researchers best handle the tension between calls for more innovative teaching and responsiveness to young people's lives and meeting demands for more high stakes assessment and greater centralised control of educational policy and curriculum?
- What role should schools play in teaching critical capability with new literacies and new cultural forms?
Language and meaning making
- How can we better understand the complex connections between visual, verbal and aural modes of representation and how readers construct meaning from these resources?
- What implications does this 'multimodal turn' have for traditional structures of knowledge and authority and for English and literacy teaching?
- Which cultural forms are important to young people today and which will be important in the future?
- What might the social practices that develop around these new cultural forms mean for schools and education?
Curriculum and pedagogy
- How might English teachers, many of whom are grounded by their education and values in the late age of print, work productively with students who spend more time reading the texts of multimodal websites, film, television and video games than they do the pages of printed novels?
- How might teachers, researchers and policy makers avoid deterministic hype about the 'impact' of technology on the literacies and social practices of young people, finding instead more complex ways of talking about the relationships and interactions?
- How might learning objectives, pedagogies and visions of future English classroom programs be modified to reflect the changes in literacy practices?
- What kinds of research approaches are best able to capture the continually changing nature of young people's social practices and uses of new cultural forms?
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