Product Description: A timely addition to the SAGE Swift Series, Crayons and iPads examines the use of digital technology in the early stages of child development and the way in which learning techniques have evolved in classrooms across the world. Taking the position that tablets provide an accessible learning and instructional tool, Debra Harwood explores how tablets can be used to provoke, ignite, and excite children’s interest in the world around them, arguing that it is through this engagement with technology that new discoveries are made and learning takes place...read more

Product Description: Learning and Literacy over Time addresses two gaps in literacy research―studies offering longitudinal perspectives on learners and the trajectory of their learning lives inside and outside of school, and studies revealing how past experiences with literacy and learning inform future experiences and practices...read more

The landscape of early childhood education and care is changing. Governments world-wide are assuming increasing authority in relation to child-rearing in the years before school entry, beyond the traditional role in assisting parents to do the best they can by their children. As part of a social agenda aimed at forming citizens well prepared to play an active part in a globalised knowledge economy, the idea of ‘early learning’ expresses the necessity of engaging caregivers right from the start of children’s lives. Nichols, Rowsell, Rainbird, and Nixon investigate this trend over three years, in two countries, and three contrasting regions, by setting themselves the task of tracing every service and agent offering resources under the banner of early learning. Far from a dry catalogue, the study involves in-depth ethnographic research in fascinating spaces such as a church-run centre for African refugee women and children, a state-of-the-art community library and an Australian country town. Included is an unprecedented inventory of an entire suburban mall. Richly visually documented, the study employs emerging methods such as Google-mapping to trace the travels of actual parents as they search for particular resources. Each chapter features a context investigated in this large, international study: the library, the mall, the clinic, and the church. The author team unravels new spaces and new networks at work in early childhood literacy and development.

Product Description: In today’s digital world, we have multiple modes of meaning-making: sounds, images, hypertexts. Yet, within literacy education, even ‘new’ literacies, we know relatively little about how to work with and produce modally complex texts...read more

This frontline volume contributes to the social study of education in general and literacy in particular by bringing together in a new way the traditions of language, ethnography, and education. Integrating New Literacy Studies and Bourdieusian sociology with ethnographic approaches to the study of classroom practice, it offers an original and useful reference point for scholars and students of education, language, and literacy wishing to incorporate Bourdieu’s ideas into their work. More than just a set of stand-alone chapters around social perspectives on language interactions in classrooms, this book develops and unfolds dialogically across three sections: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu – Principles; Language, Ethnography and Education - Practical Studies; Working at the Intersections – In Theory and Practice. The authors posit ‘Classroom Language Ethnography’ as a genuinely new perspective with rich and developed traditions behind it, but distinct from conventional approaches to literacy and education ― an approach that bridges those traditions to yield fresh insights on literacy in all its manifestations, thereby providing a pathway to more robust research on language in education.

Product Description: To re-engage students with literacy, teachers need an entry point that recognizes and honors students’ out-of-school identities. This book looks at how artifacts (everyday objects) access the daily, sensory world in which students live...read more

Product Description: Design Literacies: Learning and Innovation in the Digital Age explores new ways of meaning making by examining the practices, stories, and products of new and digital media producers with the goal of understanding the logic of marketplace production...read more

Product Description: This book joins two important fields, that of literacy and multimodality, with a focus on local and global literacies. Chapters include work on media, popular culture and literacy, weblogs, global and local crossings, in and out of educational settings in such locations as the US, the UK, South Africa, Australia and Canada...read more

Literacy and Education represents a comprehensive look at how to rethink, redefine, and redesign language in the classroom to meet contemporary needs.

Looks at all aspects of literacy, including the principles of literacy teaching, assessment and evaluation tools, and reading and writing programs. (view table of contents)