Good computer and video games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Pikmin, Rise of Nations, Neverwinter Nights, and Xenosaga: Episode 1 are learning machines. They get themselves learned and learned well, so that they get played long and hard by a great many people. This is how they and their designers survive and perpetuate themselves. If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won't get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke. Good learning in games is a capitalist-driven Darwinian process of selection of the fittest. Of course, game designers could have solved their learning problems by making games shorter and easier, by dumbing them down, so to speak. But most gamers don't want short and easy games. Thus, designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people, often young people, to learn and master something that is long and challenging--and enjoy it, to boot.

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What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

THE NEW LONDON GROUP 1 In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overoiew of the connec­ tions between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies. " The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and lin­ guistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how ne­ gotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment. If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, one could say that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. Literacy pedagogy is expected to play a particularly important role in ful­ filling this mission. Pedagogy is a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation. Literacy pedagogy has traditionally meant teaching and learning

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A pedagogy of Multiliteracies Designing Social Futures

The Personal Interview

▪ Abstract This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power and inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA's most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, and situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideology, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language.

Critical discourse analysis

This article addresses the issue of student writing in higher education. It draws on the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council funded project which examined the contrasting expectations and interpretations of academic staff and students regarding undergraduate students' written assignments. It is suggested that the implicit models that have generally been used to understand student writing do not adequately take account of the importance of issues of identity and the institutional relationships of power and authority that surround, and are embedded within, diverse student writing practices across the university. A contrasting and therefore complementary perspective is used to present debates about ‘good˚s and ‘poor˚s student writing. The article outlines an ‘academic literacies˚s framework which can take account of the conflicting and contested nature of writing practices, and may therefore be more valuable for understanding student writing in today's higher education than tradition...

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Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach

Acknowledgements Prolegomenon Introduction Part I Literacy In Theory: 1 The 'autonomous' model: I literacy and rationality 2 The 'autonomous' model: II goody 3 Literacy and linguistics 4 The 'ideological model Part II Literacy In Theory And Practice: 5 'Maktab' literacy 6 'Commercial' literacy Part III Literacy In Practice: 7 Unesco and radical literacy campaigns 8 Adult literacy campaigns in the UK and the USA Bibliography Index

Literacy in Theory and Practice

Acknowledgements Introduction Section 1: Literacy, Politics and Social Change Introduction 1 Putting Literacies on the Political Agenda 2 Literacy and Social Change: The Significance of Social Context in the Development of Literacy Programmes Section 2: The Ethnography of Literacy Introduction 3. The Uses of Literacy and Anthropology in Iran 4. Orality and Literacy as Ideological Constructions: Some Problems in Cross-cultural Studies Section 3. Literacy in Education Introduction 5. The Schooling of Literacy 6. The Implications of the New Literacy Studies for Pedagogy Section 4: Towards a Critical Framework Introduction 7. A critical Look at Walter Ong and the `Great Divide' 8. Literacy Practices and Literacy Myths Index

Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education

What has come to be termed the "New Literacy Studies" (NLS) (Gee, 1991; Street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focusing not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1985). This entails the recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space, but also contested in relations of power. NLS, then, takes nothing for granted with respect to literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problematizing what counts as literacy at any time and place and asking "whose literacies" are dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant.

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What's 'new' in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice

Introduction: the new literacy studies Brian Street Part I. The Incorporation of Literacy Into The Communicative Repertoire: l. Conceptions and uses of literacy in a Papua New Guinean village Don Kulick and Christopher Stroud 2. Literacy and feelings: the encoding of affect in Nukulaelae letters Niko Besnier 3. The uses of schooling and literacy in a Zafimaniny village Maurice Bloch 4. Arabic literacy and enlightenment among the Mende of Sierra Leone Caroline Bledsoe and Kenneth M. Robey Part II. Local Literacies and National Politics: Ethnicity, Gender and Religion: 5. Literacy and cultural identity in the Horn of Africa: the Somali case I. M. Lewis 6. Gender, language and the politics of literacy Kathleen Rockhill 7. Literacy, development and ethnicity: an Alaskan example Stephen Reder and Karen Reed Wikelund 8. The letter and the spirit: literacy and religious authority in the history of the Aladura movement in western Nigeria Peter Probst Part III. Literacy Variation in Urban Settings: 9. Vernacular writing: varieties of literacy among Philadelphia high school students Miriam Camitta l0. Collaborative writing appropriating power or reproducing authority? Amy Shuman ll. Literacy and social process: a community in transition Gail Weinstein-Shr l2. Mediators of literacy and community interpreters Mike Baynam.

Brian Street

Papers

Literacy in Theory and Practice

Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach

Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education

What's 'new' in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice

Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy