New literacies and writing research

Examining how two women adopted computers for their literacy practices and how historical, social, and cultural contexts influenced their adoption of new technologies as literacy tools, Hawisher and Selfe pointed out that “writing instructors face the danger of teaching in ways that ignore the considerable strengths in technological literacies that some students bring to our classes (p.676).” Even though Hawisher and Selfe kept college writing classes in mind when they discussed the writing instructor’s failure of integrating new literacies into classes, I think that their pointing out this failure is also meaningful to the educational situation in general. In other words, the writing instructors’ failure of integrating new technologies involving new literacies and recognizing students’ experiences and knowledge with new literacites is a critical issue to consider seriously only for all schools, as well as college classes.
One of Hawisher and Selfe’s suggestions was that instructors need to have “a flexible understanding of composing and composition instruction (p. 677)” by appreciating students’ literacy practices involving new technologies. They suggested that this effort include examining students’ literacy practices using multimodal elements in digital environments; the processes of organizing the elements, designing compositions, and presenting them; and the roles of the forms of communication. Another suggestion of Hawisher and Selfe’s was that educators be responsible for closely examining the literacy practices that students involved in. The demand for research on new literacies was also suggested by Lankshear and Knobel (2003). In their paper presented in AERA 2003, Lankshear and Knobel recommended three ways of researching new literacies: descriptive, analytic and critical accounts.
According to Lankshear and Knobel, descriptive accounts of new literacies includes narratives or accounts of insiders (people who are deeply engaging in new literacy practices) on how new literacy practices are practices. Analytic accounts involve the academic and scholarly work discussing on the application of new literacy practices. Finally, critical-evaluative accounts of new literacies involve two types of perspectives: one is ethical perspective, and the other is related to curriculum and pedagogy perspective. Ethical perspective is related to our judgments on whether new ltieracies have educational worth and relevance. Curriculum and pedagogy perspectives are related to considering how new literacies as efficacious ways of learning can be connected in meaningful and mature versions of related social practices.