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Literacy as social practice

David Barton, Lancaster UniversityBarcelona, May 2006

www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk

What is literacy?

• Social practices inferred from events, and mediated by texts

• Different literacies in different domains of life

A textually mediated social world

• Contemporary social interaction characterised by– Changes in materiality

– Changes in semiosis (meaning making)

– Social life becomes textualised

Our approach

• Analysis of literacy practices as a starting point for understanding contemporary interactions. – Theory of literacy as social practice

– Plus empirical ethnographic methods

– Plus model of impact

Local literacies

• Organising life• Personal communication• Private leisure• Documenting life• Sense making• Social participation

Reflections on local literacies

• From individual to community• Funds of knowledge

• New technologies and changes in family relations

• Changing relations between home, school and workplaces

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Contemporary change

• Educational change – Critical engagement with discourses of educational

change

• Changing workplace practices– Work lives structured by engagement with texts

• Globalisation– Local forms of appropriation and resistance

– Literacy as a lens exposing the central tensions of KBE

Issues for literacy research

• Texts across contexts?

• Different modes of meaning making?

• Changing nature of learning?

Some references:

D. Barton, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell, Second edition 2006, in press.

D. Barton & M. Hamilton, Local Literacies: Reading And Writing In One Community, Routledge, 1998.

D. Barton and K. Tusting (eds.) Beyond Communities Of Practice: Language, Power And Social Context. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Questions for discussion

• In your country, is the relation between home, school and workplace changing, and what it the role of literacy in this?

• How are new technologies changing the relation between people within families?