Practical Challenges to NLS (Response to “What’s ‘New’ in New Literacy Studies”)

Abstract

In the past twenty years, 'New Literacy Studies' (NLS), with its socio-cultural approach to examining literacy as it is acquired and used by members of various cultures in relation to structures of power and authority, has become one of the major theoreticalframeworks in literacy research. Street's seminal ethnography, Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984), marked the shift in the field of literacy studies from an ethnography of communication to a more perspicacious examination of power relations. In that book, Street exposed the autonomous model of literacy, which posits literacy as a decontextualized set of skills with universal application, as just another literacy ideology--one tied to specific views of the world and relations of power. This insight revolutionized the field of literacy studies. More recently, scholars have expanded the field by developing new, fruitful concepts, such as literacy ecologies (Barton, 1994), Discourses (Gee, 1996)[ ], and multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).