An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced
in the everyday across varied spaces and populations.
This book approaches literacy as lived and experienced in the everyday.
A living literacies approach draws not only on such official, schooled
activities as reading, writing, speaking, and listening but also on such
routine, tacit activities as scrolling through Instagram, watching news
footage, and listening to music. It goes beyond well-worn framings of
literacy as an object of study to reimagine literacy as constantly in
motion, vital, and dynamic, filled with affective intensities.
A lived literacies approach implies a turn to activism, to hopeful
practice, and to creativity. The authors examine literacies through a
series of active verbs: seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating,
and making. Case studies--ranging from an exploration of photography as
a way to shift perspectives to a project in which adults teach young
people how to fish--show lived literacies in both theory and practice.
With these chapters, the authors position literacy differently. They
make it possible to see literacy in everyday activities, woven into the
modes of seeing and knowing. By disruption and activism, literacy can
encompass a wide array of practices--exchanging information at a school
gate or making a collage. Grounding theory in the sites and spaces of
their research, working with artists, photographers, poets, and makers,
the authors issue a call to action for literacy education.
