On 6/21 #literacies: Poking at the Term “Texts”

In our first chat session, Karen LeBonte @kbl invited us to “poke” at the definition of “text.” The responses left us thinking this is fertile ground to explore:

This week’s #literacies chat will dive in the deep end!

(I’ve selfishly added links to posts I’ve written before on these topics. There’s definitely a lot to think about here. The comments on those posts are also very engaging; so feel free to join those conversations already going on my blog. See tres selfish.)

  1. If contemporary texts are participatory and at the same time mediate that participation, what habits of mind, approaches, and skills do we want to foster in the interpretation and composition of such texts? What activities, texts, and conversations are we engaging in to support this thinking?
  2. In a course on reading in the secondary English Language Arts classroom last semester, I posed the “text” to the right to grad students to push their thinking. Can this text be read? How is this similar or dissimilar to reading textual/linguistic-based texts? If we read this text to include the position of the painting in the person’s hand and in the world, what would change if the painting were positioned in a textbook alongside a traditional short story? What is the boundary of what we consider “texts” in contemporary literacies?
  3. Texts have always been multimodal (if we take into consideration such things as layout and typography), but in the digital era, we have more access to composing tools that allow for the composition of such texts. What are we teaching and learning about designing and interpreting such texts?
  4. Finally, what role do/should/could contemporary texts (in all their varieties) play in relationship to “traditional” texts?

Find the Chat Archive here…and continue the conversation below!

One comment

  1. Pingback: #literacies chat: The Reboot « developing writers

Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: