Monday May 16th, 1:30-3:00 – Group 1b

1:30-3:00

Julian Sefton-Green (in DLC – Main Meeting Room)

Kathy Sanford
Complexities of Gaming Cultures: Adolescent Gamers Adapting and Transforming Learning

Three years ago this ethnographic research study of eleven adolescent gamers began in a response to social concern regarding adolescent (dis)engagement in school literacy practices. Since then, the ongoing research has revealed the importance of understanding and knowing more about individual gamers’ ways of knowing, and also about the overlapping and nested culture(s) they create and to which they belong. What has been observed is a culture working deep within the values of complexity science, allowing for the novelty and unpredictability of emergence to occur. The values of complex systems exhibited by these young people serve to disturb values of traditional, linear thinking about schooling and demonstrate the deep and sophisticated learning occurring out of school.

Margaret Mackey
Narrative Comprehension and Cross-Over Strategies

Much scholarship about new literacies deals with different components discretely – gaming, social media, critical information literacy. Young people move between formats all the time, and it would be helpful to know more about how they transfer understanding between one medium and another. This presentation will address issues of cross-over between three narrative formats: book, film, and videogame. To what extent do young interpreters draw upon experience in one medium to assist in their comprehension of another? This presentation will explore the holistic multimodal framework within which these young people engage with all three media, taking into account their articulated perspectives on how and why they move among different media.

Suzanne deCastell
Reading Backwards: Literacy for “21^st Century Learners”

The argument of this paper is that current exhortations about a new literacy for ‘21^st century learners might gain considerable conceptual traction less by looking ahead into a future necessarily unknowable, and more by reading backwards, to a time when literacy in the western world began its rise to ‘popular media’ status . Reconfiguring Stock’s analysis of 12^th century textual communities in terms of Latour’s actor-network theorization of communities as ‘assemblages’ of relationships that bind people, technologies, creatures, sites, and material conditions, offers a provocative re-reading of ‘21^st century literacy’ less as driven by, and more as a key driver of that future.