New Literacies, New Agencies? ― A Brazilian Perspective on Mindsets, Digital Practices and Tools for Social Action in and Out of School

From students as teachers’ pets to teachers as Second Life avatars, or from being ridiculed for not knowing your syntax to ridiculing others through multimodal remixing, something has changed in the way people are acting and being acted upon through literacies. From parallel text processing «under a cloud» to text-as-process enhanced by cloud computing, or from one laptop per child to several laptops left behind by children in creative spoken interaction, learners and educators’ actions through and around texts and technologies provide quite a telling example of such changes. From writing as technology to blogging as a tool for fostering critical mindsets within complexity, or from automatized knowledge acquisition routines to new forms of relating to knowledge and new perspectives on autonomy, social ordering and Self constitutional processes defy binaries such as agent/structure, global/local, social/technical, virtual/real, or even human/non-human. In this volume a team of scholars from some of the most prestigious Brazilian universities address these issues, and illustrate them with findings from research on the interplay between new literacies, digital technologies and social action in and out-of-school. The chapters introduce, or revisit, an array of theoretical constructs from education, sociology, linguistics and media studies, while presenting a new inside perspective about how research on new literacies is being carried out in Brazil. Altogether, they provide a very useful set of ideas, tools and analytical frameworks for researchers, teachers, and students of Education, Language and Arts and Communication worldwide, especially those concerned with technology-enhanced education and social inclusion.

Eduardo S. Junqueira holds a PhD in Education from Michigan State University. His advisor was Dr. Anne Haas Dyson. He is now a professor at Universidade Federal do Ceara (The Federal University of Ceara ) in Brazil, where he lectures for both graduate and undergraduate courses on new literacies, New Media Studies and ethnographic research methods.
Marcelo E. K. Buzato holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Campinas where he is also a professor of Applied Linguistics and researcher in the areas of Language, Technology and Society, Technology-enhanced Language Learning and Digital Literacies.
Both organizers have published part of their work in prestigious international journals among which are UNESCO’s International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Language and Education and the International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT).