Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Re-bottling?


bung
Having finished my review of this, I’ve now settled into a second edition of my own – an old chapter on early literacy development, which I’m now seeing from a new perspective. One of the things I felt uncomfortable with in Colin and Michele’s book is the re-framing (or is it appropriation?) of the term literacy. When I upload the review to this blog you’ll see what I mean – but it’s really little more than what I already have said here. But reading around for the chapter I had a second look at Hasset’s piece in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy – and in some ways this uses a similar new literacies perspective to Colin and Michele’s. What Hasset’s article does so well is to expose how literacy curricula normalize a view of literacy-as-concepts-of-print with very little reference to how it is changing. She looks at Clay’s work in ways that I explore here (although I was focusing on how writing changes when we shift technologies). I liked the way Hasset recommends we make “a start toward modifying early reading instruction toward new technologies, new texts and new literacies”: what we tend to do instead is modify new technologies to old practices – old wine in new bottles as Colin and Michele would say.

2 comments:

Colin and/or Michele said...

will be very interested to see what you make of it, Guy. Meanwhile, on another tack, was thinking of you from Newfoundland, where the internet has helped me re-locate a long lost acquaintance. It's a long story -- too long for a comment, even from me ;-)) But it concerns a thread of connections that began in conversation with Bob Hallett from Great Big Sea (we've been staying with Anne and Bob here in St John's) about Fairport Convention and Dave Swarbrick. It led me to finding that Swarbs had performed recently with Alistair Hulett in Oz. I knew Alistair well back in NZ many lives ago. Often wondered where he had got to. I thought you might even have heard or seen him playing around the traps during the past few years. I asked Bob if he knew Alistair, and it turns out he has played on several bills with him, although they hadn't met. This brought home to me the wonderful way the net can trace various kinds of connections and coherences. Small big world.

Guy Merchant said...

....it'll be up soon!! But,in short,I think it's fab. One slight slip-up on page 105, though. As a former afficianado of all things reggae I feel obliged to point out that the original concept of 'version' remix was dub and not dancehall - which is a bit different. As for Alistair, nothing - except for a fairly up-to-date site which you must have seen. And after that, I feel a post about remix coming on!