Being and becoming literate through intra-active collaborative play is the title of the book that I am currently co-authoring with Kerryn Dixon. She and I have been researching literacies in early childhood (years 4-9) for several decades. It is currently under review by Routledge.

Blurb

Being and becoming literate through intra-active collaborative play focuses on the importance of, and creative unfoldings within, children’s textual-play. Currently play is under siege in schools and educational policy documents across the world. This 5-year longitudinal study explores the out-of-school intra-active collaborative textual-play of Leah, who was four when this research began and nine at the completion of data collection. It traces the creative, affective entanglements between Leah, a researcher playmate, different digital media, multimodal texts, objects, materials, and embodiments, enabling an analysis of her extensive literacy-play as both a consumer and producer of texts, across an ever-expanding repertoire of genres. These playful intra-actions demonstrate multiple routes into literacy in a digital age that are not valued by normative skill-based approaches to literacy education or dominant constructions of literacy per se. The intra-actions that we call textual play show the power of texts, materials and discourses to produce affects that drive literacy becoming. Children’s energy, creativity and potentialities are unleashed when literacy is driven by the desire to communicate how they are in and of the world. This book serves as a provocation for parents, caregivers, teachers, researchers and policy makers to think differently about literacy becoming.

Below is more information on the two monographs I have written (including reviews and order information), as well as the covers of my original workbook series.

Review

• Language Arts Volume 92, 3, pp2010-2012

Reviews:

• TESOL Quarterly, 46(4), 870-872
• Literacy, 44(30)
• Reading Research Quarterly, 46(4) 394-403
• Language and Society, 41(4)
• Reading and Writing, 1(1)
• Pedagogies- An International Journal (Vol.7, No. 2, April-June 2012, 199-201

Orders on line:

• Literacy and Power
• Doing Critical Literacy 

 My Critical Language Awareness workbook series is now out of print. Although the quality of the copies leave a lot to be desired, they can be downloaded here. 

Language & Position        Language, Identity and Power       Languages in SA S

Language, Advertising and Power     Words & Pictures           Language and the News