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In tracing community, and how art and craft can be harnessed to express and manifest communities, this book raises fundamental questions and issues about the nature of literacy in everyday lives. Threaded throughout the contributions is an abiding belief in the expansive and flexible nature of literacy, which might one moment involve photography; in the next, drama; and in the next, invite song coupled with movement. Something happens to literacy when it is seen through multiple modalities of meaning and communication: it moves from a thing to a thought and a feeling. Pedagogically, the book offers readers a carousel of places and people to witness literacy with, from young children all the way to grandparents. This opens up a sense of geography and age, proving that literacy really does reside in the centre and corners of our lives. With nine chapters by scholars in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all researching under the umbrella of the same research study, the collection provides a unique perspective on human and aesthetic communication and shows differences between social groups.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogies: An International Journal.
List of contents
Introduction - Passing through: reflecting on the journey through community arts zone
1. Expressing community through freedom market and visual connections
2. The fluid infusion of musical culture: embodied experiences in a grade one classroom
3. Seven
chilis: making visible the complexities in leveraging cultural repertories of practice in a designed teaching and learning environment
4. In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children's literacy pedagogy in a community setting
5. Moving parts in imagined spaces: community arts zone's movement project
6. Embracing the unknown in community arts zone visual arts
7. Imperfect/I'm perfect: bodies/embodiment in post-secondary and elementary settings
8.
Playlinks: a theatre-for-young audiences artist-in-the-classroom project
About the author
Jennifer Rowsell is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies at Brock University, St. Catherines, Canada. She has written, co-written, and co-edited 20 books on such wide-ranging topics as family literacy, New Literacy Studies, multimodality, youth and popular culture, digital literacies, ethnography, and multiliteracies. She is the co-editor of the Routledge
Expanding Literacies in Education book series with Cynthia Lewis, and she is the Department Editor of Digital Literacies for
The Reading Teacher. Her current research interests include applying multimodal, arts-based practices with youth across schooling and community contexts; expanding research methodologies and theories of literacy for digital, immersive, and game-based research; and longitudinal research with families examining ways of visualizing identities.
Summary
In tracing how art and craft can be harnessed to express and manifest community, this book raises fundamental questions about the nature of literacy in everyday life. It provides a unique perspective on human and aesthetic communication and shows the differences between social groups. This book was first published as a special issue of Pedago
