Article 4

Mannion, G & Miller, K. & Gibb, I. &Goodman, R. (2009). Reading, writing, resonating: striking chords across the contexts of students’ everyday and college lives. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 17 (3), 323-339.

This article reports the research done with a situated, socio-cultural approach which helps researchers notice how contexts and practice co-emerge. This research project inquired the interface between literacies in students’ everyday lives and their formal college coursework. The article reported data collected from two student case studies of a three-year research project. Their findings indicate that if contexts and their associated literacies are co-emergent and co-determined by each other, then literacy skills don’ simply “transfer” between contexts but are better seen as resonant across context. The authors concluded some strategies for “enacting a critical, ituated-yet-polycontextural literacy pedagogy that pays respect to students’ everyday literacies as a valuable resource base in formal coursework.

The theoretical framework of this research addresses concepts like: new literacy studies (NLS), “transfer” in teaching and learning, recontextualisation, learning as “becoming” (through learning in one situation) and “design” (a similar process of recontextualisation through literacy),

Identification through literacies, border literacies and bordering literacies, aspects of literacy practices, resonance through literacy, etc.

This article in theory resonates with the ideas from the course LLSS538, and helps me better understand how researchers understand literacy and practice in searching for a more efficient pedagogy.

The other reason I selected this article is that the researchers of this project deeply studied students’ daily life and the connection between their daily literacies and their academy.

Together with the articles learned in LLSS538, this article offered a different zoom for me to read literacy and literacy teaching.

Yet, a question raised behind the promising results: what is the influence of new literacy studies upon the production of classic works? Or, what is the relationship between the NLS and the production of classic works?