English in Education Vol.46 No.3 2012 DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2012.01134.x Book Review Literacies: social, cultural and historical perspectives. Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel. Peter Lang Education (2011). ISBN: 978-1-4331-1024-5 £92 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-4331-1023-8 £26 (paperback) This collection brings together only a small selection of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s many publications in New Literacy Studies (Lankshear’s online research and publications list runs to 49 pages). Their partnership mirrors the dual aspect of New Literacy Studies: new ways of thinking about literacy and new (mainly digital) forms of literacy. Lankshear and Knobel met in 1992, when Lankshear had already published papers on popular literacy that are reproduced in this volume. Knobel was already alert to technology-led changes in literacy forms: she had begun programming in logo within her teacher education programme in 1984. The essays in this book form a history of the development of their thinking, and of the developing paradigms of New Literacy Studies, over more than 20 years. The volume encourages us to evaluate their achievement in the kind of academic polemic that they have made their own. The first chapters, by Lankshear alone, engage with the socio-historical meaning of literacy. ‘Ideas of Functional Literacy’, written in 1985, warns policymakers in his native New Zealand of the dangers of following American and British practice by promoting programmes in ‘functional’ literacy. The problems of this concept have been rehearsed many times, but Lankshear’s critique is fundamental: the ambitions inscribed in the concept are politically naive, if not wilfully perverse; literacy is not a panacea for social ills. ‘There is simply no chance that making all people functionally literate can put them in the way of a job’ (p.11). Functional literacy, Lankshear argues, is an exercise in domestication, and the values underlying such programmes are dehumanising. ‘The Dawn of the People’, from 1986, describes a very different kind of literacy programme, through which more than 406,000 Nicaraguans gained ‘Alfabetización’ in a few months during the National Literacy Crusade of 1980. ‘Alfabetización’ involved learning to read through ‘a direct relationship between the words … and [the reader’s] own reality and circumstances’. A Corresponding author: john.hodgson@uwe.ac.uk © 2012 The Author. 261 English in Education © 2012 National Association for the Teaching of English. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA English in Education Vol.46 No.3 2012 Book Review desire for meaning drove this learning, and syllable recognition (Spanish being phonetically much more regular than English) was a tool rather than an end. Lankshear develops this theme of literacy for empowerment and social change in a chapter on the struggle for the working class press in 19th-century England. He cites O’Neil (1970) distinction between ‘being able to read’ and ‘being literate’, arguing that the working-class press battled to create and transmit a ‘proper literacy’ that engaged workers in understanding the causes of their condition. Knobel’s individual contributions to the collection tend to focus on classrooms, young people and technology. In her first journal paper (published in 1993), ‘Simon Says See What I Say: Reader Response and the Teacher as Meaning Maker’, she analyses a transcription of herself reading and discussing a story with a class of primary schoolchildren. Given the power relationships of the classroom, the children are effectively reading her (in order to try to get the right answer) rather than the text. This is ground covered many years earlier by Barnes, Britton and Rosen in Language, the Learner and the School (1969), but Knobel foregrounds the concept of teacher ideology. In ‘Ways with Windows: what different people do with the “same” technology’ (written in 1997), Knobel compares four different literacy events where young people in different settings were using similar technology. Year 5 students in a small rural school in a ‘disadvantaged’ region of Australia used various media to explore the theme of invention. By contrast, another geographically isolated school involved Year 10 students in producing a HyperCard presentation for Speech Night. The third literacy event was a humorously irreverent use of PowerPoint software by a 15-year-old using characters from The Simpsons. In the fourth event, young people produced an alternative to official representations of Brisbane’s ‘Valley’ area. Knobel comments that technical proficiency (as taught in school) accounts for rather little of the variation between these young people’s ways of using Windows. ‘I’m not a Pencil Man’ (from 2001) focuses on ‘Jacques’, a grade 7 student who fails at school literacy exercises but runs an out-of-school lawn mowing business for which he has produced a flyer. Knobel argues that the case of Jacques, and similar students, underlines the importance of teaching literacy in ways ‘that are not confined to code breaking or operational literacy practices’. ‘Critical Literacy and Active Citizenship’, by both authors, uses Gee’s concept of Discourse to critique contemporary [1992] Australian approaches to citizenship education which, they claim, do not take into account the ‘New Times’ of globalisation where shifting populations face problems of constructing and negotiating identities and loyalties across borders. Lankshear’s ‘Literacy and Empowerment’ (written 1997) problematises the ideas of both literacy and empowerment, arguing that citizens can become more successful by learning how to operate within dominant discourses, but that truly powerful literacy consists in having a meta-knowledge of discourses that enables mastery, evaluation and critique. Lankshear’s application of discourse criticism in the 262 © 2012 The Author. English in Education © 2012 National Association for the Teaching of English. Book Review English in Education Vol.46 No.3 2012 following chapter, ‘Language and the New Capitalism’ (also from 1997) cites Castells (1993) to describe key features of the ‘new’ capitalism, and moves to describe what Lankshear calls the increasing instrumentalisation, individualisation and commodification of language and literacy, for example the language of ‘competence’. This chapter makes a breathless attack on what Gee et al. (1996) call the ‘new work order’, and its polemical discourse requires further exemplification. The shift of focus in the following chapters shows the influence of de Certeau’s (1984) accounts of the practice of everyday life. ‘For all the value there is in addressing critical analyses of media texts and other cultural artifacts … it is also important to understand how consumers take up these commodities.’ In ‘Do We Have Your Attention?’ (from 2002), Lankshear and Knobel enlarge on the then new concept of the attention economy of the internet, on the production and consumption of zines, and on ways in which virtual communities find tactical means of inhabiting cyberspace. This is illustrated by a case study of the ways in which buyers and sellers on eBay use the ratings system. Further examples of contemporary new literacies include ‘multimediating’ (working in a number of windows at the same time and communicating in different ways with different communities), blogging, and guerrilla literacies such as culture jamming (Adbusters’ skilful alteration of advertising hoardings is an example). Students who are immersed in such practices, Lankshear and Knobel suggest, have an ‘insider’ mindset that makes them largely indifferent to and amused by the quaint practices of schooling, which often exploit new technologies in an ‘outsider’ manner merely as new ways of doing the same things. In a later chapter on Web 2.0 Perspectives, Lankshear and Knobel reprise the meanings of ‘new’ literacies. A new literacy practice, they suggest, must integrate ‘new technical stuff’ with the kinds of qualities and values currently associated with Web 2.0. It will privilege participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralised expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, sharing over ownership, experiment and innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, relationship over information broadcast, DIY creative production over professional service delivery, and so on. A chapter on Digital Remix gives several examples of such literacies: ‘photoshopping’ (various forms of image remixing); music and music video remixes, where remix musicians make individual or collaborative use of software such as GarageBand and Cakewalk; anime music videos (music clips that use animated Japanese cartoons as their visual resource); Machinima – the process by which fans use video game animation engines to create movies; fan fiction and fan art; and serviceware mashups, the merging at the program level of two or more application interfaces (the production of new ‘apps’ for mobile phones and tablets is a current example). They suggest that remix practitioners need technical knowledge (knowing their way around tools for encoding meaning), discourse knowledge (bringing cultural knowledge to bear on the task) and evaluative © 2012 The Author. English in Education © 2012 National Association for the Teaching of English. 263 English in Education Vol.46 No.3 2012 Book Review knowledge (how to enhance or improve the practice to better fulfil the interests of those who engage in it or are impacted by it). This analysis has obvious relations to Green’s (1988) three-dimensional concept of literacy in general as having operational, cultural and critical dimensions. However, digital remix practices, as described here, seem far away from the classroom, and the authors admit that it would be odd to think of others teaching the practitioners to incorporate the three dimensions into their work (p. 329). Indeed, it is difficult to relate some of these practices to everyday classrooms. Are all ‘literacies’ of equal value? ‘School literacy’ is frequently disparaged in this book, but in particular contexts it may mean more than ‘correct spelling’ or ‘being able to read and write for no obviously meaningful social purpose’ (p.165). ‘Literacy and Empowerment’ gives an account of a higher and lower stream in a girls’ school where the lower stream girls ‘didn’t seem to realise that claims advanced in text or in classroom lectures should be checked and cross checked for accuracy and meaning against (a range of) “authoritative” sources’. They saw school literacy as being a matter largely of transcribing the teacher’s words as notes and ‘learning them up later’. It seems that the girls in the higher stream had a more productive notion of school literacy, one not so far away from the ‘powerful literacy’ (a meta-knowledge of discourses) described in the same chapter. Any student undertaking the scheme of work on The Face of Starving Africa described in ‘Critical Literacy and Active Citizenship’ would need to deploy strong comparative critical intelligence and knowledge. Lankshear and Knobel make no reference to Bernstein’s (1996) concept of horizontal (informal) and vertical (schooled) literacies, nor do they consider why New Literacy Studies appear to have made few inroads into everyday curricula (Moss 2001). Their polemic has a slightly constrained range of reference: Foucault is an unnamed mover behind James Gee, and Brian Street (1984), who is mentioned once but is not listed in the chapter references, might have gained further recognition in relation to the concept of literacy as a social practice. (The book suffers from several omissions in both references and indices.) However, the final chapter does give a detailed account of a classroom, or rather an intensive summer course in a Newfoundland ski lodge, part of a master’s degree programme with a literacy specialisation. The ski lodge offered a ‘bounteous’ learning environment with its multiple levels of inside/outside open space and high-speed, unfettered internet access. Over the four weeks of the course, participants learned to become video makers and teacher researchers. Although the course tutors instructed the participants on such matters as effective internet searching, the key principle here was collaborative self-help: ‘Google is your friend.’ Participants learned through mutual practice, collaborating both in person and online, working on Gee’s (2007) principle of ‘performance before competence’. The main purpose of the course was to improve capacity for writing academic research, which seems by definition a ‘school’ or ‘academic’ literacy. The book concludes rather appropriately with a 264 © 2012 The Author. English in Education © 2012 National Association for the Teaching of English. Book Review English in Education Vol.46 No.3 2012 case study of closing the gap between the learning culture of the conventional classroom and that of some online popular culture affinity spaces (p. 356). But a professionally autobiographical collection of essays has a valedictory feel. Where will Lankshear and Knobel go from here? John Hodgson University of the West of England References Barnes, D., Britton, J. and Rosen, H. (1969) Language, the Learner and the School. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. London: Taylor and Francis. Castells, M.. (1993) The information economy and the new international division of labor. In M. Carnoy, M. Castells, S. Cohen and F. Cardoso (eds) The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Reflections on Our Changing World. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gee, J.P. (2007) Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy. New York: Peter Lang. Gee, J.P., Hull, G. and Lankshear, C. (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Sydney and Boulder, CO: Allen & Unwin and Westview Press. Green, B.. (1988) Subject-specific literacy and school learning: a focus on writing. Australian Journal of Education, 30 (2). Moss, G.. (2001) On Literacy and the Social Organisation of Knowledge Inside and Outside School. Language and Education 15 (2). O’Neil, W.. (1970) Properly literate. Harvard Educational Review, 40 (2) Street, B. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. © 2012 The Author. English in Education © 2012 National Association for the Teaching of English. 265