Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration

Introduction

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219333.c000 I n t r o duc t i o n Chasing Literacy argues that composition should renew its interest in reading pedagogy and research. Composition scholars have recognized how the proliferation of interactive and multimodal communication technologies has changed what it means to write in the twenty-first century. However, the counterpart to this phenomenon, changes in the purposes and forms of reading practices, has been largely unexamined by the field. This book moves toward relocating reading’s place in composition with research that examines the opportunities and challenges of contemporary literacy contexts: navigating various technologies , shifting among genres and media, making meaning from a wealth of information, and alternating between reading and writing positions. These reading practices require new approaches to literacy education. Twenty-first century literacy practices are given specific texture in this book, which employs case study research of students ’ reading practices to pursue the following questions: How do students read in and out of school? How do they navigate a wealth of genres and media? How do they cope with the speed of information and technological change? What do they believe about reading, about themselves as readers, and about technologies of reading? With interviews and observations of students in and out of class during their final months of high school and their first semester of college, this book provides teachers a framework for understanding the literacy challenges faced by students. At the center of that framework is the claim that speed and attention are vital components of contemporary literacy. This research is necessary because reading pedagogy has been disconnected from the teaching of writing, with few signs of its importance at major conferences or in significant scholarship . Although composition textbooks provide suggestions 2  Dani el Kell e r for how students should read, these interventions are not the same as a sustained pedagogy that creates a language and a theory for interpreting reading situations and responding to them appropriately. Indeed, this project began from my own struggles with teaching reading, realizing that my attempts to support student reading felt like a shadow compared to the robust theory, language, and practices I possessed to support student writing. The disconnect between reading pedagogy and writing pedagogy will only grow if the field pursues writing in digital environments without considering the role reading plays in those environments as well. As we ask students to write in a variety of ways, giving them sophisticated tools for reading will strengthen how they approach and understand those genres and media. This book benefits composition in at least two significant and related ways. First, it contributes to our ongoing interest in multimodal composition/new media writing, which has become a burgeoning area of research and pedagogy (Kress 2003; Selfe 2007; Yancey 2004). Students are being asked to create rhetorically effective texts using a range of semiotic resources. Scholars have produced numerous publications on writing theory/practice as it relates to new communication technologies and new forms of writing. Among the many topics examined by scholars , the use of image (George 2002), the use of sound (Selfe 2009), and the problems of copyright (Westbrook 2006) have been addressed. As this scholarship races forward, research on how people perceive and read new media has been overlooked (Strasma 2010). Reading research and pedagogy should be an essential part of teaching multimodal composition: students who are more critically and rhetorically engaged as they read new media are likely to be more thoughtful composers of it. We are giving students frameworks for perceiving the writing that occurs in new media contexts, and we are creating pedagogical tools for teachers. We need frameworks and tools for new media reading as well. With this book’s focused look at how students perceive and enact reading in different contexts with different media, it moves toward this goal. Introduction    3 Second, paying attention to reading can add to our understanding of how the rhetorical canon of delivery has changed with new media. A common problem associated with contemporary reading is information overload. Although Geoffrey Nunberg (1996) notes that “[t]here has always been too much to read” (126), he argues that the expansion of digital texts on the web has created a different situation for modern readers : the open publishing of the web makes the number of texts “genuinely unprecedented,” and the open and easy access to information only increases “the impression of overload, rather...