In this book, Damiana Gibbons Pyles guides readers through the fast-changing landscape of digital streaming services such as Netflix and explores their impact on children’s and teens’ identities. Children interact with streaming media in novel, hidden, and unforeseen ways that shape their digital, material, affective, and embodied worlds. By analyzing how Netflix represents gender, race, and ethnicities, Gibbons Pyles explores how this new media phenomenon portrays and influences young people’s development and sense of self, and how streaming media pushes children and teens to particular ways of being in its interfaces, algorithms, and content. Drawing primarily on Bakhtinian, feminist, and female Black scholarship, her incisive analysis reveals how the new media streaming phenomenon molds children’s understandings of their ways of being in the world. Ideal for scholars and graduate students in literacy education, media studies, and communication, the text is an illuminating view into the hidden role of streaming services as an essential, complex component of literacy scholarship.

This book presents a new vision of literacy that frames meaning-making and communication in relation to individual, collective, and ecological needs. Building on the concept of the pluriversal, Perry explores how literacy education can support multiple ways of being and becoming. In so doing, Perry rejects limiting and skills-focused definitions of literacy and instead embraces a more profound conceptualisation that reflects the boundless potential of literacy practices. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, Perry connects literacy education with semiotics, philosophy, sustainability studies, and geopolitics to argue for the urgency of a pluriversal model of literacy that combats a normative, neo-colonial understanding of reading and writing. Offering a unique contribution to the field of literacy studies, this book demonstrates how literacy is a semiotic process and literacy practices can connect learner needs with pathways to social, ecological, and cultural sustainability. With Perry as a guide, this illuminating book invites readers to join the journey into literacies beyond words, to arrive at a more holistic and inclusive understanding of what literacy practices are and can be.

Educators will find in this book an opportunity to examine the multiple, dynamic identities of the students they instruct and to consider the ways in which all teachers and students are shaped by their social and cultural settings. The volume is the first to examine theories of identity and elementary literacy practices by presenting data in a teacher-friendly format. The chapters highlight the influences of school and, to some extent, home contexts on students' identities as readers and writers, and give numerous implications for practice. McCarthey collected data from three sites in which teachers implemented writing workshop and literature-based instruction in grades 3-6. This book focuses on the students in these sites, who were from diverse cultural and social backgrounds. By providing information about the contexts in which students read and wrote, McCarthey demonstrates the power of the teacher-student relationship, the importance of the classroom curriculum, and the influence of parents and peers on students. Published by International Reading Association

Literacy and Literacies is an engaging account of literacy and its relation to power. The book develops a synthesis of literacy studies, moving beyond received categories, and exploring the domain of power through questions of colonialism, modern state formation, educational systems and official versus popular literacies. Collins and Blot offer in-depth critical discussion of particular cases and discuss the role of literacies in the formation of class, gender, and ethnic identity. Through their analysis of two domains - those of literacies and power, and of literacies and subjectivity - they challenge received assumptions about literacy, intellectual development and social progress and argue that neither 'universalist' nor 'particularist' accounts offer satisfactory approaches to the phenomenon. This is a sustained exploration of the domain of power in relation to literacy. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in anthropology, linguistics, literacy studies and history.

This book explores the dynamic range of literacy practices in and out of school that are reconstructing youth gender identities in both empowering and disempowering ways and the implications for local literacy classrooms.

How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. They emphasize how identity comes into play in education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession.

This volume explores how educators can leverage student proficiency with new literacies for learning in formal and informal educational environments. It also investigates critical literacy practices that can best respond to the proliferation of new media in society. What sorts of media education are needed to deal with the rapid influx of intellectual and communication resources and how are media professionals, educational theorists, and literacy scholars helping youth understand the possibilities inherent in such an era? Offering contributions from scholars on the forefront of media literacy scholarhip, this volume provides valuable insights into the issues of literacy and the new forms of digital communication now being utilized in schools. It is required reading for media literacy scholars and students in communication, education, and media.