Living Literacies: Rethinking Literacy Research and Practice Through The Everyday

An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced in the everyday across varied spaces and populations.

This book approaches literacy as lived and experienced in the everyday. A living literacies approach draws not only on such official, schooled activities as reading, writing, speaking, and listening but also on such routine, tacit activities as scrolling through Instagram, watching news footage, and listening to music. It goes beyond well-worn framings of literacy as an object of study to reimagine literacy as constantly in motion, vital, and dynamic, filled with affective intensities.

A lived literacies approach implies a turn to activism, to hopeful practice, and to creativity. The authors examine literacies through a series of active verbs: seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making. Case studies—ranging from an exploration of photography as a way to shift perspectives to a project in which adults teach young people how to fish—show lived literacies in both theory and practice. With these chapters, the authors position literacy differently. They make it possible to see literacy in everyday activities, woven into the modes of seeing and knowing. By disruption and activism, literacy can encompass a wide array of practices—exchanging information at a school gate or making a collage. Grounding theory in the sites and spaces of their research, working with artists, photographers, poets, and makers, the authors issue a call to action for literacy education.

Jennifer Rowsell is Professor of Literacies and Social Innovation in the School of Education at the University of Bristol, UK.