New Literacies and Learners From Diverse Communities

The rapid spread of information and communications technology (ICT) over the past 30 years has had a profound effect on what educators consider learning and how people learn. Today people have grown accustomed to use of the Internet, computers, and mobile electronic devices as appliances to communicate with others using multimedia resources. Importantly, the use of these technologies has been coupled with an explosion of rich ways to encode information, extending beyond spoken and written language to include video and complex forms of digitized multimedia representations of people and the world around them. These multimedia formats are engaging people because they mirror, as never before, how individuals richly experience the world through their senses and actions. These formats have introduced new forms of literacy and ways of expressing social and cultural understandings about the world around and new literacies that enhance social and cultural engagement.

Simplistic notions of literacy as encompassing only reading and writing are being replaced by more complex notions, such as new literacies that include knowing how to use multimedia to communicate effectively, and—in addition—the use of genre such as wiki pages, blogs, and Internet learning community websites to organize and represent complex collections of information that allow people to communicate interactively with other learners and broad audiences to share understandings and applications of knowledge. New literacies have profound implications for families and persons from diverse ethnolinguistic and cultural backgrounds who often have found themselves marginalized in educational and other everyday institutional settings as documented and elaborated by Sonia Nieto and Patty Bode. These developments are helping community members from diverse backgrounds to position themselves as valued members, stakeholders, and participants immersed in important and critical everyday institutions responsible for maintaining society and the well-being of community members.

While the spread of ICT technologies and new literacies has implications for school-based learning, it also has deep implications for enhancing learning and action in everyday settings extending beyond schools and classrooms. Culturally and linguistically diverse community members who have been under served by the U.S. schooling system often express disenchantment with the relevance of subject matter learning in school classrooms to their everyday lives. But these same persons show high enthusiasm when learning is meaningful and has high utility outside of the classroom through the exercise of new literacies. Connecting organized bodies of learning taught in schools to everyday survival and life enhancement is an important strategy to promote completion of formal schooling among community members. This is particularly so when learners are able to participate in the construction of their learning and in the application of this learning toward solving practical problems and issues encountered in everyday life by using new literacies. It can also be argued that deep learning enhanced by new literacies—and originating outside of the regular classroom in activity settings in the community and after school—not only builds a complementary strategy for making connections between schools and community, but [Page 1613]goes beyond this. It demonstrates that learning can occur anywhere and anytime, and can be organized around learning communities that exist virtually on the Internet, as well as in everyday activity settings that are the physical venues for a learning community, recognizing that these physical venues are essential to many learning communities, including virtual communities.

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