Defining New Literacies: Participation, Collaboration, and Communities of Practice

Unsurprisingly given the title of this week’s class, the readings from this set were all interested in exploring and defining the concept of “literacy/ies,” and in particular, “new literacies.” Gee defines literacies as “the mastery or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” within the context of his notion of primary and secondary Discourses. For Gee, all Discourses are embedded within particular cultural and social contexts that shape literacy practices within those Discourses. Building on Gee’s work, Lankshear and Knobel define literacies as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” (p. 4). In both definitions, the social nature of Discourse is emphasized—literacies and the texts they generate are both socially constructed and embedded within particular social and cultural practices.

For Lankshear and Knobel, new literacies differ from traditional literacies not just in that they use “new technical stuff,” or new tools and/or mediums enabled by evolving technologies to “generate, communicate, and negotiate” meaning in different ways from traditional reading and writing. More importantly, new literacies involve “new ethos stuff” in that they are “more ‘participatory,’ ‘collaborative,’ and ‘distributed’ in nature than conventional literacies” (p. 9). While literacy practices have always been social, new literacies are less “author-centric” and “expert-dominated” than traditional literacies (p. 9). 

The more participatory and collaborative nature of new literacies means that new members are more likely to learn through participation as opposed to overt instruction—for Gee in much of his later work on concepts like “affinity spaces,” this is a key way in which new literacies are changing the ways that learning happens, particularly for adolescents. In the 1989 article, Gee argues that one can only learn a “Discourse” through enculturation (as opposed to overt instruction). Gee differentiates acquisition from learning in relation to Discourse—one acquires a Discourse through participation while one learns about a Discourse through instruction. For Gee, acquisition is crucial to mastering the performance of a particular Discourse.

This argument was later echoed by Lave and Wenger (1991) through their concepts of “legitimate peripheral participation” and “communities of practice.” Loosely speaking, communities of practice are groups that share particular interests, crafts, or professions—in Gee’s sense, communities of practice also share the same secondary Discourse associated with that interest/craft/profession. Similar to Gee’s argument that one can only gain mastery in a Discourse through enculturation, Lave and Wenger argue that in order to become a part of a community of practice, novice members must have opportunities to engage in legitimate peripheral participation, or participation alongside expert members in activities that are key to the functioning of the community. Because new literacies are more participatory and collaborative, novice members have more opportunities to engage in legitimate peripheral participation than they traditionally have in conventional literacies.

Of course, new literacies generate their own new challenges to members of communities of practice, as Hammer explores in her article “Agency and Authority in Role-Playing ‘Texts.’” Hammer’s study looked at how “secondary authors,” or participants who construct scenarios within the already-existing world of a role-playing text, navigate challenges related to agency and authority between themselves and other community members. For these authors, the challenge is “exercising their authority within the group without…removing the possibility of meaningful participation by other group members” (p. 74). Because of the increasingly collaborative and participatory nature of these role-playing texts, group members often feel more entitled to a sense of authority and agency within the text than secondary authors are always inclined to grant. In this way, Hammer’s article demonstrates how the old problems of managing and balancing opportunities for participation within communities of practice still exist, even as new challenges emerge.

Encourage critical thinking and problem solving

What will encourage, motivate and stimulate students to become critical thinkers and problem solvers? Richard Miller’s “This Is How We Dream, Part 2,” architectural design includes “the best of humanities and the best of sciences” in one sustainable building. Miller suggests we post idea-driven documents that belong to no one on the web to show the best of what we are in the academy. We may be at a time in our collective history in which teaching courses across disciplines will best meet our students’ needs. For example, computer science programming classes, art digital media, physics, mathematics, philosophy—compositionists could choose a discipline to collaborate with based on interest or friendship with colleague(s) to bring what an instructor knows about the conversation in his or her discipline to the table for a course that incorporates a collaborative, across-discipline process. I, for one, would not want to sacrifice the connections between learning strategies and writing (Emig, CROSS-TALK, pp. 7-15). However, I repeatedly see pleasure at work in discussions of how we began and continue to incorporate computers into our lives. bell hooks writes in the last paragraph of TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS: “The classroom with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In the field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand…an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (p. 207).  If we, as composition teachers, do not want to step outside the border of our discipline, we still have options for interconnectivity within our community of scholars.

My argument is that visual literacy creates concepts in much the same way as writing. Sirc’s essay in WRITING NEW MEDIA argues for the use of Duchamp and Joseph Cornell’s boxes as models of “sustained inquiry” to scaffold through class members’ individual contributions to an interactive project (p. 140). Other examples of art that demonstrate concepts include: Rauschenberg and performance art. Wysocki argues for establishing a relationship to design that helps student to re-vision our relationship to it (WRITING NEW MEDIA, p. 173). Kristie S. Fleckinstein calls it “polymorphic literacy,” reading and writing that draw on verbal and nonverbal ways of shaping meaning (p. 613). I argue that both composition and visual, digital literacy instructors apply rigorous assessment and unwavering values about what it means to communicate conceptually through writing, images, and design: Look for opportunities to respond to the digital literacy infants now learn as they also begin to walk, talk, and engage cardboard picture books.

Collaboration and Negotiations

After reading Scott Warnock’s Chapters 10-18, I found myself drawn to two main ideas: collaboration and assessment. They may seem like two separate topics, but I am thinking about them in terms of collaborative assignments and how we would go about grading/assessing such assignments. Scott Warnock’s chapter on “Collaboration” is short, but when read in conjunction with the other chapters on “Assignments,” “Peer Review,” and “Grading,” it is clear that collaboration, cooperation, and the shared nature of knowledge are pivotal elements in Warnock’s ideas about an online class.

In Chapter 10, Warnock says, “If instead we see knowledge as being created by a community of knowledgeable peers and that learning is social, then peer review makes sense” (115).