© 2007 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp. 214–223) doi:10.1598/JAAL.51.3.2
JOURNAL OF ADOLESCENT & ADULT LITERACY 51:3 NOVEMBER 2007214
Rebecca Luce-Kapler
Radical Change and wikis:
Teaching new literacies
i l i i
i li i
By using online, web-editing software,
teachers can develop new practices that
engage students in exploring new
literacies and help them gain
visual literacy skills.
“I have never made up my mind about
the literacy,” the sixth-grade teacher commented as
we discussed my upcoming research in his class-
room in which I would engage the students in dig-
ital literacy practices. He was expressing his
response to the rigid assessment culture in which
his students were required to take government ex-
ams focused on narrow print-literacy parameters.
He was hopeful that my work with the class would
broaden the literacy learning opportunities. I was
interested in seeing if student exposure to Radical
Change texts and experience with wiki writing
would encourage collaborative work and an un-
derstanding of connectivity as a different way to
learn and understand. As the study progressed,
however, the teacher and I were disappointed be-
cause students produced “e-literature” with small
chunks of mostly clichéd writing interrupted by
seemingly random collections of pictures with a
few hyperlinks.
We felt we had overestimated the students’
ability to understand and use the qualities of
Radical Change in a digital environment. Rather
than identifying the qualities of Radical Change
in the books and then using them in their writ-
ing, the students were more interested in identify-
ing how pictures made the stories “strange” or
“weird” and how they could create
such effects in their stories. It was not
until I closely examined the inter-
views, however, and looked at what
they had created that I recognized that
the students had connected to the vi-
sual dimensions of the texts and
adapted those qualities into their wiki writing. In
what follows, I describe how our focus on devel-
oping broad digital skills nearly led to our miss-
ing the subtler learning that was actually taking
place as students gained visual literacy skills, and
we developed teaching practices that engaged stu-
dents in exploring new literacies.
Radical Change and wiki
writing
Dresang (1999) identified a steadily increasing
trend in literature for children and young adults—
a trend she labeled as “Radical Change.” She care-
fully chose the word radical to point to its Latin
origins, radix, meaning “root.”“I think of the en-
tire body of existing literature for youth,” she
wrote, “as a sort of rhizome (a horizontal, root-
like structure), from which new developments
emerge in a random, spontaneous manner” (p. 4).
With the world awash in multimedia, character-
ized by fragmentation, juxtaposition of differing
forms, and demands for what Murray (1997)
Luce-Kapler teaches at
Queen’s University,
Kingston, Ontario, Canada;
e-mail rebecca.luce-
kapler@queensu.ca.

Radical Change and wikis: Teaching new literacies
JOURNAL OF ADOLESCENT & ADULT LITERACY 51:3 NOVEMBER 2007 215
called “kaleidoscopic” thinking, it is not surprising
that we see such qualities also emerging in litera-
ture.
Drawing on the nature of the rhizome,
Dresang (1999) identified three characteristics,
any or all of which might appear in a Radical
Change text: (1) changing forms and formats
such as new forms of graphics, new levels of syn-
ergy between text and pictures, nonlinear and
nonsequential organizations and formats, and
multiple layers of meaning and interactive for-
mats; (2) changing perspectives such as multiple
points of view both visual and verbal and previ-
ously unheard voices, including youth; and (3)
changing boundaries such as dealing with previ-
ously forbidden or overlooked subjects and set-
tings, new types of communities, characters por-
trayed in new and complex ways, and unresolved
endings. My study focused particularly on chang-
ing forms and formats because I was interested in
students’ use of digital technology to develop
their own Radical Change texts in response to the
picture books we introduced.
The technology I chose was the wiki because
it is an easily learned, open-source software pro-
gram that allows all users to access and edit the
pages on an ongoing basis (Dobson, in press;
Luce-Kapler & Dobson, 2005). Wiki is the
Hawaiian word for quick and beautifully describes
how users can, within minutes, create webpages.
From a wiki launch pad, (see Figure 1) one can
create a page, click on the “edit this page” link, (see
Figure 1
Wiki launch pad