This book is - in part - an introduction to research procedures that enable researchers and educators to identify and examine complex language and social practices enacted in young people's everyday lives. In the process, the actual lived experiences of four young adolescents in their final year of primary school are narrated, generating substantive content that speaks directly to the issues that lie behind this book: namely, what is the relationship between school learning and students' everyday lives, and what might an effective relationship between them look like? These questions are asked against a backdrop of national government pushes for literacy standards-setting and benchmarking in Australia and elsewhere.

Autorentext

The Author: Michele Knobel, Ph.D., is Lecturer in the School of Language and Literacy Education at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Her research interests lie chiefly in the area of young people's language and literacy practices, and in the field of electronic technologies. She has been published in a range of national and international journals, and has a number of book chapters - cowritten with Colin Lankshear - in Changing Literacies, Counternarratives, and Constructing Critical Literacies.

Zusammenfassung
"In her lucid, engaging, and insightful book, Michele Knobel deftly debunks the popular equation of literacy achievement with social empowerment. In case studies of the language and literacy practices of four very different adolescents inside - and outside - school, she uncovers glaring mismatches between students' school-based language experiences and the richly diverse, multiple discourses that engage these students in their everyday lives. Her innovative research contributes to the growing theoretical literature on literacy as a social practice and offers concrete direction for radically re-envisioning language and literacy practices in school." (Patricia Irvine, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, New York)
"Michele Knobel watches new technologies and institutionalized power transform and become transformed by the local and situated realities of lives and classrooms. In the act, she makes an outstanding contribution to sociocultural literacy studies, to educational theory and practice, and to social and critical theory." (James Paul Gee, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, Wisconsin)