The UKLA Everyday Literacies SIG will explore literacy research, pedagogy, practice and policy development within a framing of ‘everyday literacies’, as literacy is lived and experienced by diverse populations and across space, time, and varied practices.
This UKLA SIG’s membership will draw from members who conduct literacy research across an array of everyday spaces, communities, times, and contexts, and who seek to make sense of this phenomenon. The SIG will provide a space for exploration; where members can discuss the apparent presence or absence of literacy (ies) in and across the contexts in which they research.
The notion that literacy is uniform, normative, and tied exclusively with schooling has been extensively challenged (Street, 2001). A transformation and pluralisation has occurred within literacy scholarship that invites consideration using theories in adjacent fields such as affect theory, posthuman theory, AI and immersive world. These inquiries give the UKLA community an alternative way of seeing literacy that invites other fields, domains, and disciplines to enter into a dialogue with literacy researchers.
A main objective for the Everyday Literacies SIG will be to navigate and render the complexity of the diversity of literacy studies as a field and discipline, using the focus of the ‘everyday’. The lens will be expansive to include examples that can be drawn from the varied literacy practices enacted outside of formal learning contexts. Examples could include: rural literacies, urban literacies, multicultural literacies, gaming literacies, multimodal literacies, digital literacies, sociomaterial literacies, artifactual literacies, spatial aspects of literacy, participatory and community-based approaches to literacy, visualizing literacy practices, and so on…. This inclusive ‘everyday’ framing seeks to act as a ‘catch all’; providing opportunities for new departures and responsive practice to be explored by our members.
An overarching goal for the SIG will be to make Everyday Literacies a critical and a change agent – exploring the activist and civic literacies that are taking place in this contemporary moment. A key part of this goal is to move understandings of everyday activist and civic literacies into schools as well as into broader notions of schooling across lifetimes and generations.
Please email Jennifer Rowsell J.Rowsell@sheffield.ac.uk or Clare Dowdall C.Dowdall2@exeter.ac.uk if you have any further enquiries.