James S. Damico

Multiple Literacies, New Literacies, and Teacher Education

The authors consider the role that multiple literacies and new literacies might play in shaping preservice education. They review existing literature on multiple and new literacies in preservice education and examine in-school and out-of-school enactments of new and multiple literacies to answer the question, What can we do in preservice teacher education to take these understandings about literacy and guide future teachers to enact them in projects, practices, and pedagogies in their classrooms? The article concludes with a set of 5 recommendations for shaping teacher education programs that, taken together, provide a blueprint for ensuring that new teachers enter the classroom prepared to take advantage of the multiple literacies that students will bring to the classroom and to guide students in developing even richer portfolios of multiple literacy tools and understandings.

Examining Ways Readers Engage with Websites during Think-Aloud Sessions.

Findings from this study of how two pairs of eighth-grade students each transacted with a website during think-aloud sessions at the conclusion of a curricular unit on Mexico and migration highlight the ways the students engaged in three interrelated tasks: 1 Identifying and making sense of “new” information 2 Evaluating claims and evidence 3 Considering ways to use the site in the writing of their own narrative While these findings represent ways that these students demonstrated proficiency with literacy practices in beginning to read websites in more disciplined and disciplinary ways, they also point to two key challenges: contextualizing and corroborating sources of information and setting purposes for reading websites in a dynamic learning context.

How Do We Know?: Students Examine Issues of Credibility With a Complicated Multimodal Web‐Based Text

Abstract As reading continues to become governed by a spatial “logic of the image” rather than strictly a temporal or linear logic of written language (Kress, 2003), and readers increasingly engage with a range of Internet-based texts, a host of challenges ensue for educators and students alike. One of the most vexing of these challenges deals with discernments of credibility. Determining the credibility of multimodal texts, especially on/within the Internet with its “vast network of relations of credibility” (Burbules & Callister, 2000), is particularly challenging because these texts mix images, music, graphic arts, video, and print to make sophisticated claims supported by various forms or types of evidence. This article examines how a group of ninth-grade students grappled with issues of credibility after viewing the controversial Internet video, Loose Change, a well-documented and comprehensive multimedia account that argues the “real story” of September 11 was covered up by the U.S. government. Findings from the study highlight the range of knowledge and literacy practices students mobilized to “read” the video and the challenges they experienced reading and evaluating the video as a multimodal text. Implications of this work point to the need to consider epistemological issues and further develop tools that can support teachers and students in critically assessing multimodal texts.

Multiple Dimensions of Literacy and Conceptions of Readers: Toward a More Expansive View of Accountability

This article considers what happened when a teacher posed the following question to her fifth graders during literature discussions: “Why might we read more than one story about a topic or a person?” As the students responded to this question across several weeks, they began to develop a more comprehensive conception of themselves as readers, moving from an understanding of what they “get” from texts toward an understanding of what they “do” with texts. As the students shifted to thinking about the work they do as readers, they began to see readers as puzzle solvers, text and genre investigators, and potential authors. The voices and ideas of this group of students and their teacher show how readers can develop language and literacy skills while they engage with rich content to create, debate, and revise meanings as well as reflect critically on those meanings.

Content Literacy for the 21st Century: Excavation, Elevation, and Relational Cosmopolitanism in the Classroom.

This article makes the a case for conceptualizing content literacy, especially in social studies, as inquiry-based social practices for understanding and addressing complex, multifaceted problems. Two core practices especially needed for a Web-dominated 21st century are then described—excavation and elevation. Next, these two practices are applied to the complex, multifaceted problem of climate change to suggest ways teachers and students can use excavation and elevation with two Web texts about climate change. This leads to a model for framing, understanding, teaching, and learning content in 21st-century schools: relational cosmopolitanism in the classroom. The article concludes with attention to the ways that this model could frame a focus on climate change in middle school, secondary school, and university level classrooms.