Bronwyn T. Williams

“Tomorrow Will Not be Like Today”: Literacy and Identity in a World of Multiliteracies

The speed with which the technologies of literacy are changing is dazzling and unsettling. Almost every year, it seems a new way of combining words, images, and video emerges and becomes a phenomenon among students. Meanwhile, teachers are left wondering how to respond to these new ways of writing and reading and the identities that students create through them. How should we teach in an age of electronic and global multiliteracies? What concepts and approaches can we identify that will be central to our teaching and important for our students no matter what the future brings?

Leading Double Lives: Literacy and Technology in and out of School

The author acknowledges that there is often a gap in how and for what ends technology is used—a gap between some students and their teachers and a gap among different groups of students. What is less obvious is the nature of these gaps in terms of literacy practices. He then asks, “Could we be missing ways to connect with our students and help reinforce and enlarge their literate identities?”

Trust, Betrayal, and Authorship: Plagiarism and How We Perceive Students

Emotional responses to plagiarism are rarely addressed in professional literature that focuses on ethics and good teaching practices. Yet, the emotions that are unleashed by cases of plagiarism, or suspicions of plagiarism, influence how we perceive our students and how we approach teaching them. Such responses have been complicated by online plagiarism-detection services that emphasize surveillance and detection. My opposition to such plagiarism software services grows from the conviction that if we use them we are not only poisoning classroom relationships, but also we are missing important opportunities for teaching.

Girl Power in a Digital World: Considering the Complexity of Gender, Literacy, and Technology

The power of culture to shape gender identities becomes particularly crucial for adolescents as they make the transition from child to adult. Yet as adults we offer little coherent, direct instruction in such matters. The author advocates supporting girls as they explore complex and empowering literacy practices, particularly online.

Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom

In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing.

Popular culture and representations of literacy

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter One: Literacy in Everyday Life, Literacy on the Screen Section I. Representations of Literacy and Identity Chapter Two. The Pragmatic and the Sentimental: Literacy and Gender Roles Chapter Three: Whos Allowed to Read and Write? Literacy and Social Class Chapter Four: Writing Others: Literacy and Race Section II. Literacy and Social Contexts Chapter Five: Control and Action: Literacy as Power Chapter Six. The Ambiguity of Texts: Literacy as Danger Section III: Literacy Myths in the Movies Chapter Seven: The Passions of the Romantic Author: Literacy as Individualism Chapter Eight: The Triumph of the Word: Literacy as Salvation and Commodity Chapter Nine: Life is Not Like the Movies (Or Is it?): Literacy on Film and in Our Lives References Filmography Index

Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: The Importance of Identity in Academic Writing

It is often believed that objective, rationalist, academic literacy leaves no room for issues of identity, and that anything remotely personal has, at best, a limited role to play in school. This belief reflects a clear and often widely accepted binary set of definitions: There is personal writing; there is academic writing. The two forms exist on their own, separate and identifiable. Issues of identity belong with personal writing but have no influence on academic writing, which is objective, detached, and analytic. The author argues that the ease with which readers often construct these categories and boundaries of writing conceals the actual permeability of them. Just as writing that is traditionally considered personal can be rigorous and analytic, academic writing is always enmeshed in issues of identity.

Taken on Faith: Religion and Identity in Writing Classes.

In exploring her uneasiness in dealing with issues of religion in her classroom, the author asks, “Should I guide students away from writing about issues that explicitly dealt with their faith? Should I impose an outright prohibition on such writing? Or should I find ways to engage with the issues and the perspectives that were so clearly important to these students?” This insightful and reflective essay highlights the connections between faith and identity and the role that literacy may play in expression of both.

Action Heroes and Literate Sidekicks: Literacy and Identity in Popular Culture

The question is not whether literacy practices are present in contemporary popular culture—it is hard not to find a movie or program without some representation of literacy in it. The more important and useful question is, How do we in the audience interpret the literacy practices we find in popular culture? What do such representations tell us about how we think of the ways that reading and writing construct our public identities? In the classroom, how do we encourage students to situate themselves in relationship to the identities they see portrayed in popular culture? Teachers need to help students think carefully about the myths and realities of literacy and consider whether their experiences and goals for reading and writing are similar to or different from the narratives about literacy that get repeated in popular culture.

Metamorphosis Hurts: Resistant Students and Myths of Transformation

In labeling students who seem unengaged or defiant in class as “resistant,” teachers may not always be imaginative or thorough enough in thinking about the reasons for this student stance. Though resistance may be a useful concept for such students because teachers see it as something that can be both active and passive, one problem with the label of “resistant student” is that it often implies a binary relationship with the teacher. Yet the roots of student resistance may not be in the teacher but in anxieties and fears that are often inherent in the literacy classroom. If teachers cannot envision what students may be resisting and why, it is impossible to move beyond a classroom tug-of-war to actually engage such students in learning.