International Perspectives on Literacies, Diversities, and Opportunities for Learning

This book explores the conceptual framework, opportunities for learning, as a transaction between literacy learners, mediating agents, and the literacy content to be learned within social, cultural, and historical contexts. With contributions from top scholars from around the world, the chapters in this book provide a window into the varied ways learners, their families, educators, and researchers have co-constructed opportunities for learning in a range of PK-12 classrooms, community settings, and university classrooms across the globe. Building on decades of existing scholarship, contributors conceptualize literacy as social practice and discuss a variety of literacies―including engineering literacies, community literacies, and bilingual and multicultural literacies and more―through real-world and insightful examples. By situating literacy learning in the complex social, cultural, and historical contexts in which students, teachers, and families live and work, chapter authors provide nuanced, qualitative, and deeply profound views of literacy learning. Critical and informative, with a myriad of examples on co-constructed opportunities for learning, this volume is an essential text for graduate courses on literacy education, and for literacy researchers, teacher educators, and teachers.

Cynthia Brock is Professor and Wyoming Excellence Endowed Chair in Literacy in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming, USA.

Beryl Exley is Professor and Deputy Head of Learning and Teaching in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia.

Lester-Irabinna Rigney is Professor and Co-Chair of the Pedagogies for Justice Group of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, Education Futures Unit at the University of South Australia, Australia.