Literacies In and Out of School in the United States

Abstract

Reading and writing stand front and center in a digital age. Yet the digital turn has yet to permeate schools in anything approaching transformative ways. In no area is this more evident than literacy education, where 20 th century reading and writing practices are still the coin of the realm. We argue that literacy practices that occur outside of school, which are now largely digital, have outstripped long-held understandings of what literacy can be. If literacy in formal educational contexts, like schools, is to flourish, it must reach a rapprochement with the digital textuality that is part and parcel of twenty-first century communication. It must also embrace an ethical turn, recognizing the important role that contemporary literacy practices play in civic and democratic action. After reviewing the major theoretical traditions that have shaped research on the relationships and borders of literacy in and out of school, we introduce more recent perspectives that focus on the nature of textuality and authorship in a digital age, such as multimodality and design, and perspectives concerned with changing political and social contexts, including "super diversity" and local-global relationships. We preview what we believe will be the dominant influence on literacy and literacy pedagogy in the near-term future, and that is the global, as our world grows simultaneously smaller via digital connectivity and more divided via ideological and economic disparities. We suggest that literacy educators and researchers, both those whose focus is school-valued forms and those who celebrate youth-centered production of a range of types of texts out of school, should redouble their efforts to craft conceptions of literacy and to support instances of literacy practice that position youth to work to solve local and global problems and to become ethically alert and audience-sensitive communicators, as well as to develop their personal capacities for meaning making.