New Literacies, New Agencies?

The chapters in this book introduce an array of theoretical constructs from education, sociology, linguistics and media studies, while presenting a new inside perspective on new literacies research in Brazil. They provide a useful set of ideas, tools and analytical frameworks for researchers, teachers, and students concerned with technology-enhanced education and social inclusion.

From students as teachers' pets to teachers as Second Life avatars, or from being ridiculed for not knowing your syntax to ridiculing others through multimodal remixing, something has changed in the way people are acting and being acted upon through literacies. From parallel text processing «under a cloud» to text-as-process enhanced by cloud computing, or from one laptop per child to several laptops left behind by children in creative spoken interaction, learners and educators' actions through and around texts and technologies provide quite a telling example of such changes. From writing as technology to blogging as a tool for fostering critical mindsets within complexity, or from automatized knowledge acquisition routines to new forms of relating to knowledge and new perspectives on autonomy, social ordering and Self constitutional processes defy binaries such as agent/structure, global/local, social/technical, virtual/real, or even human/non-human. In this volume a team of scholars from some of the most prestigious Brazilian universities address these issues, and illustrate them with findings from research on the interplay between new literacies, digital technologies and social action in and out-of-school. The chapters introduce, or revisit, an array of theoretical constructs from education, sociology, linguistics and media studies, while presenting a new inside perspective about how research on new literacies is being carried out in Brazil. Altogether, they provide a very useful set of ideas, tools and analytical frameworks for researchers, teachers, and students of Education, Language and Arts and Communication worldwide, especially those concerned with technology-enhanced education and social inclusion.

Autorentext

Eduardo S. Junqueira holds a PhD in Education from Michigan State University. His advisor was Dr. Anne Haas Dyson. He is now a professor at Universidade Federal do Ceará (The Federal University of Ceará ) in Brazil, where he lectures for both graduate and undergraduate courses on new literacies, New Media Studies and ethnographic research methods.
Marcelo E. K. Buzato holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Campinas where he is also a professor of Applied Linguistics and researcher in the areas of Language, Technology and Society, Technology-enhanced Language Learning and Digital Literacies.
Both organizers have published part of their work in prestigious international journals among which are UNESCO's International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Language and Education and the International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT).

Inhalt
Contents: Eduardo S. Junqueira/Marcelo El Khouri Buzato: New Literacies in the Context of Brazilian Historical Social-economic Inequality: Past, Present, and Future Trends Marcelo El Khouri Buzato: Mapping Flows of Agency in New Literacies: Self and Social Structure in a Post-social World Eduardo S. Junqueira: Peer-based Work and Agency in the School Computer Lab: Learning New Literacies as a Collective Practice Vilson J. Leffa: Distributed Agency in Avatar-based Learning Luiz Fernando Gomes: If You Can't Play, Don't Come Down to the Playground! Agency in Brazilian Humor: Parody and Verb-visual Remix Ana Elisa Ribeiro/Carla Viana Coscarelli: Agency, Collaborative Writing, and NTICs: A Brief Analysis of Three Cases of Textual Production Using Google Docs Walkyria Monte Mór: The Development of Agency in a New Literacies Proposal for Teacher Education in Brazil Edméa Oliveira dos Santos/Tatiana Stofella Sodré Rossini: Interactivity, Agency, and Mediation in 3D Virtual Worlds Marcelo El Khouri Buzato/Eduardo S. Junqueira: Afterword: Brazil Meets Brasil: Being, Communicating, and Learning in Times of Change.