Making Literacy Real: Theories and Practices for Learning and Teaching

Making Literacy Real is the essential reference text for primary education students at undergraduate and graduate levels who want to understand literacy theory and successfully apply it in the classroom. Doctoral students will find this a useful resource in understanding the relationship of theory to practice.

The authors explore the breadth of this complex and important field, orientating literacy as a social practice, grounded in social, cultural, historical and political contexts of use. They also present a detailed and accessible discussion of the theory and its application in the primary classroom.

The book covers:

• Defining literacy: multimodalities and new literacies
• Digital literacies
• New literacy studies
• Critical literacy
• Sociocultural-historical theory
• Connecting theoretical frameworks
• Implications for teacher education and literacy research

Each chapter examines a theoretical model, accompanied by a discussion of case study material with a leading proponent of the field, including Barbara Comber, Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, Barbara Rogoff, and Brian Street.

Joanne Larson is Michael W. Scandling Professor of Education and Chair of the Teaching and Curriculum program at the University of Rochester’s Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, USA. She received her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. Larson’s ethnographic research examines how language and literacy practices mediate social and power relations in literacy events in schools and communities. She is currently collaborating with Rochester community residents on a participatory action research project examining changes associated with transforming a local corner store into a cornerstone of healthy living. Her book Radical Equality in Education: Starting Over in US Schooling (Routledge, 2014) makes the case for beginning with assumptions of equality instead of inequality in education. She is the editor of Literacy as Snake Oil: Beyond the Quick Fix, Second Edition (Lang, 2007) and co-editor with Jackie Marsh of Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (Sage, 2013). Larson′s journal publications include research articles in Research in the Teaching of English; Written Communication: Linguistics and Education; Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and Discourse and Society.

Jackie Marsh is Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she conducts research on young children′s play and digital literacy practices in homes, communities and early years settings and primary schools. Her most recent publications include Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture from the 1950s to the Present Day (with Bishop, 2014) and Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (edited with Larson, 2013). Jackie is an editor of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.